Current 2 - PROJECTS - Finishing as Completing
The flow of this current leads to questions of Building via: Concept, Completion and Reception.
"Finishing ends construction, weathering constructs finishes."
Mohsen Mostafavi and David Leatherbarrow, On Weathering: The Life of Buildings in Time (1991) 5.
Finishing in architecture can be the completing of a drawn design for a project, the construction of an edifice, or its later reception and ongoing life. Is finishing pertaining to an architectural project the idea of reaching an endpoint or state of completion? If a design is the final statement of the architect, including unbuilt projects that contribute to and appear in built projects, then why are architects’ design adjustments during construction providing the “finishing touches” essential to a building’s attribution?
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Even the widespread notion of finishing a project with the end of construction overlooks the life or many lives of a building through its subsequent renovations, additions, and revisions. Are buildings only finished when they are in ruins, or beyond that, demolished? Even then, what of the surviving spolia? Or, like the Ise Shrine(s), what of re-construction, re-creation? A building may be physically complete while a project still evolves in the minds of the architects, inhabitants, or historians. It may also evolve through use, through repurposing, through cultural, social, and historical change. This is especially true when considering architecture within the framework of a circular economy of a sustainable society. How are we to read later changes, perhaps unintended by the original architect, builder or patron? Are they part of an ongoing narrative? Do they represent new chapters? What is continuous among the discontinuities of edifices spawning new stories and new values with each generation, or even with each individual?
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Should a work be interpreted differently when damning information comes to light about its origins or its creators? To what degree is a finished building connected to an individual architect, especially for structures in the public domain? Can protest legitimately target a finished building or statue, even if it bears no direct connection to the perpetrators? How does graffiti or vandalism interact with a once-finished piece, and its ongoing narratives? Can “canceling” a physical construction be a just end to a narrative of oppression, or can it be reclaimed as a site for reflection, education, reparation? Is something that is finished, therefore, irretrievably judged or normalized; its sometimes dark history forgotten? How can we, and when should we, engage in processes of architectural revisionism? For what purposes, and at whose instigation?