Current 3 - TIMES - Finishing as Ending
The flow of this current leads to questions of Architecture via: Performance, Teleology and Oeuvre.
"God alone can finish."
John Ruskin, Modern Painters (1856) III. 117.
Finishing an architectural project is one sort of ending – a conclusion of designing and building; a conclusion of all that has preceded it. On the project level, architectural correctness is evaluated by rules and data – codes, regulations, standards, legal contracts, and statistics. However, endings also define a time-based aspect of architecture: the notion of a final scene provides a performative framework for the interpretation of buildings and their legacies, their afterlives. Tim Ingold (2021) explores continuity as inherent to life itself, a continuous flow, “a movement of opening, not of closure.”
Viewing a building as a performance thus describes not only the objective material conditions of finishing, but also the theatricality of finishes and flourishes at the final curtain call. However, unlike an ephemeral theatrical production, finished buildings often continue in time well beyond their creators, their zeitgeists. With this in mind, to what degree should one evaluate architecture in a teleological manner; are we to determine its ending by the degree to which it succeeded in performing the intentions (or ends) of its original creators? Where does this leave us when buildings are repurposed, renovated, reoccupied? Does a building have a denouement? An epilogue, an after-story, a sequel … a re-boot? Or should the performance be read (narrowly or otherwise) as the ongoing work of the architect, in different spaces and locales, with each finish merely an interlude, an entr'acte, a pause for breath?
More broadly, to what degree is time in architecture relevant to the notion of its finishing, or completion? Are buildings finished when they receive acknowledged classical status, or only when they lie in ruins (or even post-ruin dust, legend, oblivion)? What is the role of the restorer, even the archaeologist, in revivifying and “un-finishing” a building? Is each encounter with a structure a unique and discrete performance with its own narrative, its own beginning, middle, and end? With parallel narratives, and coterminous architectural experiences, have endings been commoditized and reproduced, as in other artforms?
​
Such considerations, therefore, beg the question: what are the ends of architecture? Are architectural ethics adequately ensured merely by codes and regulations? How do the ends, purposes or destinations of a building exist separately from the conditions and biases of its designers? Moreover, how do architectural drawings explicitly and implicitly suggest their criteria for evaluation? What are the greater social, cultural and aesthetic purposes toward which architecture directs itself? In light of movements around social justice, representation and sustainability, it is perhaps useful to consider who finishes buildings, how such narratives are accepted, denied, reimagined and reinforced, and of course, to what ends. With changing social ethics and narratives, how can different ends be served by contemporary architectural performances; even when buildings are bloodied by their histories, how does everyday life, social and environmental justice, occupy and maintain a lived and joyful presence in edifices?
​
​