![\"Annie-Kim](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/115_DO_Prost_Anne-Kim-Rainville_Amidesruines_101-scaled.jpg\")
Amis des ruines<\/em>, 2025.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
The motto one could read on hoardings surrounding the perimeter of the construction site for the latest Olympic Games in London, in 2012\u200a\u2014\u200a\u201cDemolish. Dig. Design.\u201d\u200a\u2014\u200aperfectly describes the conventional, dualist, and linear approach of complete demolition to reconstruction that is challenged by a third space. Bulldozers and wrecking balls are emblematic symbols of the process. The ad hoc recycling of facilities to extract materials, while laudably keeping some waste out of the landfill, often legitimizes real estate development. The complex transformation of materials is costly and time-consuming. On the other hand, dismantling the roof of Montr\u00e9al\u2019s Olympic Stadium in view of a third replacement gave rise to a competition for architectural ideas and a public art project calling for works created from the cables, membranes, and connectors. Reuse lends this proposition the advantage of generating references to the lost object while preserving traces of its existence. A macro-deteriorated infrastructure is reconfigured on a smaller scale and integrated into city life. Unlike recycling, reuse forges a symbolic bridge between memory of the object and its new life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
![\"Annie-Kim](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/115_DO_Prost_Anne-Kim-Rainville_Amidesruines_106-scaled.jpg\")
Amis des ruines<\/em> (details), 2025.
Photos: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
![\"Annie-Kim](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/115_DO_Prost_Anne-Kim-Rainville_Amidesruines_104-scaled.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nBeyond post-architecture and the reuse of existing components, other artists and researchers are inventing organic, biodegradable materials by exploring substances rarely used before, combining ruggedness and aesthetics while integrating the concept of eventual finitude. Such is the case with Mae-ling Lokko, a scientist from Ghana and the Philippines. Mingling art with design in her practice, she experiments with all kinds of forms and uses of coconut shells, sometimes presented as a living, sculptural object in the gallery,6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - Grounds for Return<\/em>, solo exhibition, Z33, Hasselt, Belgium, September 26, 2021, to January 9, 2022.<\/span> sometimes as an architectural prototype in a Ghanaian market. A hard, fibrous material that abounds in some countries (sourced by Lokko from West Africa and Southeast Asia, in particular), the envelope of the coconut is ignored by colonial developers in favour of smooth, industrial materials, even though it has rich constructive potential.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Agrocologies<\/em> (2019), Lokko is concerned with expanding food production as a flow of material resources\u200a\u2014\u200aembodied by agricultural by-products\u200a\u2014\u200athat opens several avenues for contributing, at the local level, to the emergence \u201cof generative citizenship through upcycling.\u201d7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 7 <\/a> - Mae-ling Lokko, \u201cAgrocologies,\u201d at the Housing the Human Festival, Berlin, 2019, accessible online.<\/span> Lokko\u2019s writings testify to her concern for productions that safely return to the earth, for they are not meant to last. She opposes a sensitive approach to materials to the procedures of permeation and sterilization (glues, chemical bonds) that prolong the life of the materials while asphyxiating them and complicating their decomposition. This reflection on the finitude of things clearly contrasts with the search for absolute and costly durability, particularly since the nineteenth century. For Lokko, it is crucial to rethink our relationship with materials, from conception to production, and to rehabilitate ancestral wisdom embodying a profound understanding of modes of culture and transformation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n From biodegradability to reactive living systems, this exploration slides toward materials with singular qualities: breath, interaction, the ability to heal one\u2019s environment. Azhin Nam\u2019s project Hypercontaminated Home<\/em> (2022) deals with the complex, even contradictory appearance of things, such as a smooth, white residential wall whose inner layers actually hide toxic products that we absorb every day. The home becomes a unique laboratory for studying new methods; it redefines our relationship with microbes by using mycoremediation to eliminate chemical contaminants incrusted in our walls. Paradoxically, that which is deemed noxious and threatening\u200a\u2014\u200afungi\u200a\u2014\u200ais transformed into a protective and purifying agent. As in Lokko\u2019s work, this \u201ctherapeutic dialectic\u201d interrogates our obsession with controlling the environment and our illusory attachment to standardized industrial materials. It is living and interactive substances, not mechanical systems and chemical agents, that naturally purify and heal our living environment. This approach implies a change of paradigm in which the built surroundings evolve under the influence not only of human actions but also of the system\u2019s own life and natural cycle. Autoreactive material shapes an evolving milieu in which we live and develop along with other organisms.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n It must be said that the biodegradable nature of these materials does not make them any less resistant or durable, since they are alterable and easy to \u201crepair.\u201d For the architect and professor Anna Heringer, the act of maintaining a structure designed to age naturally is also a community-empowering social gesture.8<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 8 <\/a> - Anna Heringer is known for her buildings made of mud and bamboo, including the Anandoloy Centre (2020), in Bangladesh. See Jan-Carlos Kucharek, \u201cHow Anna Heringer Draws Community Power Out of the Ground,\u201d RIBA Journal<\/em> (November 24, 2020), accessible online.<\/span> The participatory process demands observation of and care for the structure by the residents themselves\u200a\u2014\u200anot an endeavour disconnected from the locale. Heringer\u2019s approach, favouring slowness and engagement, combines habitation with maintenance to cultivate an attachment to the material world rather than to quick, illusory solutions. By embracing the imperfect nature of these creations, we prolong both their lifespan and their meaning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Japanese wabi-sabi philosophy, in which impermanence and wear are appreciated, celebrates the beauty inherent to the natural cycles of growth and decline. The notion of maintenance is integrated into the very concept of the work. Far from being a mere task, it is a daily meditative practice, a reflective ritual.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n This philosophy does not apply exclusively to built-up environments. During a residency in Tokyo, in the building\u2019s entrance, I could see a magnificent bouquet of flowers that was carefully maintained and transformed every day through subtle, sometimes imperceptible changes. This work rejected the creation\u200a-destruction dichotomy to explore a liminal space in which decay becomes regeneration. The floral composition was no longer a finished product but an evolving entity whose very decomposition generated new forms of expression. Such finesse contrasts sharply with the standardized, mechanical, and economic maintenance developed to preserve the extant, to protect the work and, especially, the investment. Despite being designed for resistance, synthetic materials paradoxically become fragile and obsolete as soon as they break, as they are unsuitable for repair. Instead of either preserving precisely as is or demolishing, creative maintenance reconfigures existing materials and structures. Out of ecological concern, it explores this between-space as a fertile terrain for experimentation and reinvention. Lokko\u2019s and Nam\u2019s emerging system-materials, invented to follow a complete generative cycle of unpredictable changes, inhabit a suspended space in which anyone may contribute to their becoming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In contrast, most of the modular, interchangeable mechanisms of the Metabolist movement remain unexplored. The Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo (created in 1972), Kisho Kurokawa\u2019s architectural icon and one of the few materializations of the movement, was destroyed in 2022.9<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 9 <\/a> - Photographer Noritaka Minami captured the building\u2019s daily adaptations, deterioration, and demolition in his 1972<\/em> project: noritakaminami.com\/project_1972#1.<\/span> The structure\u2019s advanced state of deterioration made its complete restoration impossible. Moreover, no bottom-up, participatory organization was planned for enabling residents and the public to actively contribute to its preservation. Its founding principle\u200a\u2014\u200aa lasting structure housing replaceable capsules\u200a\u2014\u200awas replaced by its opposite: the structure disappeared, although twenty-three capsules were restored and converted into creative spaces, museum pieces, or seaside cottages.10<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 10 <\/a> - Tim Hornyak, \u201cIn Tokyo, Rescuing the Residential Spaceship That Fell to Earth,\u201d New York Times<\/em> (January 15, 2024), \u00adaccessible online.<\/span> This outcome validates sociologist Richard Sennett\u2019s idea that any renewal demands open forms, with no imposed canvas, sensitive to the unexpected, and receptive to gradual changes.11<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 11 <\/a> - Richard Sennett, Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City<\/em> (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018).<\/span> Although the initial flexibility remains theoretical, its current transposition to new contexts can lead a generation to reinvent regenerative approaches that are organic, operational, and synergistic. This reflexive posture reveals its potential fulfilment in a considerate \u201carchi-puncture,\u201d sustained through attention to the built environment, such as that embraced by wabi-sabi and Heringer.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n In the same vein, Lokko emphasizes that beyond the inherent value of innovations and experimentations in material ecology, the major challenge we face is not technological but, indeed, cultural.12<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 12 <\/a> - Eva Lavranou, \u201cMae Ling Lokko: On Coconuts and Earthships,\u201d Art Papers<\/em> 47, no. 1 (Fall 2023), 17, accessible online.<\/span> The public desires metal, glass, and concrete, seen as materials of the future and symbols of colonial wealth, rather than materials that are local and abundant\u200a\u2014\u200asuch as coconut shells\u200a\u2014\u200aseen as a regression. In Lokko\u2019s view, freeing our imagination requires that we free ourselves of ingrained, normative traditions through in-depth public debate that can redefine the future of the constructed environment. The acceptability of projects calling upon mutant, changeable materials comes up against a cultural paradigm that favours perfection, uniformity, and control to the detriment of natural metamorphosis. A neglected fact: although transformable and interdisciplinary structures have been invented, norms and logistics impede their materialization. The normative and insurance-related frameworks, established to preserve real estate value, prevent the advent of translatory action. Rather than encourage exploration, they petrify space and materials with restrictive standards. This technocratic approach, which prefers the status quo to experimentation and development, keeps the built environment in financial inertia and limits the possibilities of spatial transfiguration, biomateriality, and creative maintenance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Prospective ruin and recycling that values agricultural waste, and mycoremediation are reinventing our way of perceiving, accepting, and managing the built environment (architecture, public art), but they require laws adapted to this processual aesthetic, reflecting emerging cultural values. Such an approach confronts property and inheritance with mutability and raises a fundamental question: can we found transmission on that which, by its nature, is called upon to change? This implies a critique of our attachment to material stability. The singular approaches that I have addressed\u200a\u2014\u200aand those to come\u200a\u2014\u200afavour the living and adaptability, in contrast to the rigidity, immutability, and permanence that currently prevail. Decomposition is not an object\u2019s finitude, but the start of a renewal that reflects contemporary emancipations and ecological and social preoccupations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Translated by Ron Ross<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"From the dawn of constructive thought, conceptive intelligence has aspired to develop architecture capable of adapting and evolving according to the vicissitudes of time and societal transformations. Architects in the Metabolist [NOTE count=1]movement,[\/NOTE][REF count=1]For an oral history of the movement, see Rem Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Project Japan: Metabolism Talks\u2026<\/em> (Cologne: Taschen, 2011).[\/REF] which was born in post-war Japan, conceptualized \u201corganic\u201d [NOTE count=2]megastructures[\/NOTE][REF count=2]The term \u201cmegastructure\u201d was coined by Fumihiko Maki. See Fumihiko Maki, \u201cInvestigations in Collective Form\u201d [1964], in Nuturing Dreams: Collected Essays on Architecture and the City,<\/em> ed. Mark Mulligan (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 2008), 44\u201366.[\/REF] that were meant to grow and regenerate through the ages, following a logic inspired by biological systems applied to advanced technology.<\/br>","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":269692,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[882],"tags":[],"numeros":[7549],"disciplines":[],"statuts":[],"checklist":[],"auteurs":[4602],"artistes":[7615,7625,7601,7609,7599],"thematiques":[],"type_post":[319],"class_list":["post-269697","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-post","numeros-115-decay","auteurs-jean-francois-prost-en","artistes-ahzin-nam-en","artistes-annie-kim-rainville-en","artistes-folke-kobberling-en","artistes-mae-ling-lokko-en","artistes-martin-kaltwasser-en","type_post-principal"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269697","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=269697"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269697\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":270429,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269697\/revisions\/270429"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/269692"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=269697"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=269697"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=269697"},{"taxonomy":"numeros","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/numeros?post=269697"},{"taxonomy":"disciplines","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/disciplines?post=269697"},{"taxonomy":"statuts","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/statuts?post=269697"},{"taxonomy":"checklist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/checklist?post=269697"},{"taxonomy":"auteurs","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/auteurs?post=269697"},{"taxonomy":"artistes","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artistes?post=269697"},{"taxonomy":"thematiques","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/thematiques?post=269697"},{"taxonomy":"type_post","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/type_post?post=269697"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
Experimental concepts of the stadium\u2019s decomposition and the reuse of its waste materials are merged in the polemical project The Games Are Open<\/em> (2010\u201314), by the Berlin artists Folke K\u00f6bberling and Martin Kaltwasser. After the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, the duo built a waterfront sculpture in the form of an oversized bulldozer made up of panels recovered from the sports facilities. The structure was conceived from the outset to disintegrate and transform into something unknown and unpredictable\u200a\u2014\u200aa fate that would be determined by local residents. The machine conceived for levelling sites and removing rubble wound up gradually mutating into debris and a garden, thus reversing its symbolism. The potentially divisive structure gave rise to discussions on both the nature and the condition of the work and on use of the site. The bulldozer\u2019s decomposition brought to light the erosion of public space in Vancouver, and elsewhere, as a consequence of accelerated, ultra-speculative, and elitist development. Inconvenienced by the work\u2019s appearance and public function, the city decided to level the site and reduce it to its initial state\u200a\u2014\u200aa slab of concrete.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"Folke](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/115_DO_Prost_Folke-KobberlingMartin-Kaltwasser_the-gamesareopen_5years.jpg\")
The Games Are Open<\/em>, installation views, Vancouver, 2010-14.
\u00a9 ADAGP, Paris \/ CARCC, Ottawa (2025)
Photos: other sights, courtesy of the artists<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"Mae-ling](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/115_DO_Prost_Mae-ling-Lokko_CASEUpcyclingPavillion_ChaleWote_2016-scaled.jpg\")
AMBIS Wall<\/em>, installation view, Chale Wote Street Art Festival, Accra, 2016.
Photo: Sarah Reynolds, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Ahzin](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/115_DO_Prost_Ahzin-Nam_HypercontamiantedHome_02-C-FullPage-FLAT-scaled.jpg\")
Excerpt from the manual Hypercontaminated Home<\/em>, Hypercontaminated Home<\/em>, partial creation through Midjourney, 2022.
Photo: courtesy of the artist & Cooper Union, New York<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Ahzin-Nam_HypercontamiantedHome\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/115_DO_Prost_Ahzin-Nam_HypercontamiantedHome_2.jpg\")
Excerpt from the manual Hypercontaminated Home<\/em>, Hypercontaminated Home<\/em>, partial creation through Midjourney, 2022.
Photo: courtesy of the artist & Cooper Union, New York<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n