Architectural Historian Dr. Matthew Gin At Charlotte Oct 30
Wed, Oct 30, 2024 | 1:15pm to 2:15pm
9115 Mary Alexander Road, Charlotte, NC 28223
In this colloquium, architectural historian Dr. Matthew Gin will trace out a history of temporary festival architecture from 18th-century France to the 2024 Paris Olympics that invites designers to reconsider the material (after)lives of buildings.
Buildings are often thought of as permanent objects. Our cities are filled with structures that date back decades, centuries, and even millennia. The reality, though, is that buildings are not permanent: they decay, depreciate, and disappear. For the toll it takes on buildings, time has been a source of anxiety for architects, who have long prized permanence. But architecture’s preoccupation with the enduring is unsustainable as the production of new, ostensibly permanent, structures now accounts for nearly 40% of energy-related carbon emissions. In this moment of building-driven ecological crisis, how might we unlearn permanence and instead approach architecture at different temporal scales?