In our culture today, the life span of program, or how a building is used, is getting shorter and shorter in comparison to the life span of architecture. This tension often leads to vacant buildings which are demolished prematurely. Without a viable use, the eroding, empty shells become a burden of upkeep and expense. The mis-fit between form and function which leads to redundant architecture could be addressed through architectural design. Currently, design often involves tailoring a building to a single, specific use.
An alternative approach could be to focus on more fundamental architectural qualities and facilitate strong physical relationships between buildings and inhabitants, independent from a specific program. This could lead to buildings with more possibilities for varied uses. There are two possible routes for this more quality-driven architectural design approach which could address the temporal conflict between the life span of buildings and their uses: 1. Durable, long-term buildings could be designed, which relate to people in immediate ways, independent from a singular program. 2. Instant, fast architecture could be
designed, which simply disappears after a predictable, short-term use and reappears for unrelated future uses at different sites. In the following text, as illustrated by a recent case study, I want to focus on the idea of an instant architecture, one that avoids the physical inertia of buildings and the efforts of typical building construction. Since a short lifespan has become a predictable part of the character of current business models, why doesn’t architecture react with a typology of structures that leave no imprint, structures that could be taken away in an extremely short time? This architecture, rather than leaving itself prone to redundancy,could be deleted,