Obsolescence

Definition

Obsolescence, in McClure & McClure's usage, is the built environment's designed expiry — the condition of buildings whose exclusion and efficiency make them disposable. The concept enters with an accounting figure: "The average Walmart, for example, is given an estimated useful life of seventeen years" — a number the McClures derive (note 8) not from demolition records but from Wal-Mart's own financial statements (property and equipment net of land, divided by depreciation expense). "In comparison to the 2,000-year-old Pantheon or even the 63-year-old Saynatsalo, this obsolescence speaks to a practice of exclusivity and efficiency, where the primary (and some might argue only) consideration is the corporate gain, not a continued contribution to the physical environs across shifting social, cultural, and stylistic norms."

The concept's architectural mechanism is the hermetic seal: buildings designed as self-referential objects — "the efficient metal building (Walmart), the nondescript strip mall, or the isolated object building (art museum)" — "constructed with an ambivalence for persistence." Its institutional face is the demolition that ends a building that "cannot maintain multiple complex connections": Todd Williams and Billie Tsien's American Folk Art Museum (2001–2014), whose destruction the architects framed as a loss "of secondary importance to the civic, cultural, and sustainable issues the debate surrounding the building has raised."

The concept's positive pole is persistence: "The object or space that possesses the prospect of the aspect continuously contributes and participates with its environs across shifting social, cultural, and stylistic norms… It is these spaces that will resist obsolescence; they will not be destroyed when their current program or style becomes outdated. As with similar projects before them, those that incorporate the prospect of the aspect will persist." Obsolescence is thus not aging but disconnection — a building dies not when it wears out but when its program or style changes and it has no continuous, inclusive relationship with its context to survive the change. The wiki's adaptive reuse cluster is the practical discipline of defeating exactly this condition on existing stock; the McClures' claim is that the condition can be defeated at the point of design.

Key Thinkers

• Thomas Hope — the concept's furniture-scale anticipation (1807), a century and a half before the McClures: furniture discarded "long even before… regular wear and tear" because its "inanity and tameness" have "completely tired the eye and mind" (see aesthetic-fatigue); the fashionable mode "usually broken or discarded, long ere it has had leisure fairly to serve its time"; and the designed escape — furniture "preserved in families, from generation to generation, as a valuable portion of the patrimonial estate" through "due solidity of form" and "intrinsic power to please" (see patrimonial-interior). Hope names obsolescence's two drivers — physical flimsiness and aesthetic disgrace — and designs against both.
• Ursula Emery McClure & Michael A. McClure — the concept's source: financial-disclosure evidence (the Walmart's seventeen-year estimated useful life, note 8), the exclusivity/efficiency diagnosis, and the persistence thesis.
• Ellen Lupton & J Abbott Miller — the concept's naming historians (1992/2006): the policy of 'planned obsolescence' as the economy's own body-image ("whose good health depends on a continual cycle of production and waste, ingestion and excretion") and its design instrument — "The continual stylistic update of consumer items such as refrigerators, toasters and cars shortened their life span and ensured their rapid replacement by new models" (see streamlining, creative-waste).
• (Engaged in the source, not paged: Todd Williams and Billie Tsien — architects of the demolished American Folk Art Museum, whose statement the McClures quote; see log.)
• Mark Fisher — the wiki's adjacent diagnosis: capitalist realism's "frenzied stasis" and the icon as "the built residue of a futureless present" — obsolescence as the temporal form of a system without a future (see the death-of-iconic-architecture synthesis).
• Hannah Arendt — the wiki's philosophical frame for durability: the loss of the durable work to the cycle of labor/consumption — the McClures' seventeen-year Walmart is that loss in retail form (see the everyday-life-and-phenomenology-of-place synthesis, Claim 2).

Related Concepts

• The Prospect of the Aspect — the counter-condition: inclusivity and multiple connectivity as the design basis of persistence ("those that incorporate the prospect of the aspect will persist").
• Hermetic Seal — obsolescence's mechanism: the self-referential object that ignores its context is the one "constructed with an ambivalence for persistence."
• Adaptive Reuse — the afterlife discipline: what a building needs when its program dies; the McClures' claim implies that well-connected buildings need it less because they were never program-dependent.
• Sustainability — the environmental translation: "a continued contribution to the physical environs across shifting social, cultural, and stylistic norms" — persistence as the sustainability of built matter itself (embodied carbon's vernacular).
• Consumerism — the economic motor: "the primary (and some might argue only) consideration is the corporate gain" — the throwaway building as the built form of the throwaway commodity.
• Creative Waste — the doctrine that moralized this page's condition: the housewife's rhythmic buy-and-discard as "moral obligation"; obsolescence at the object scale as household duty.
• Streamlining — obsolescence's designed instrument: the stylistic update that shortens product life; "a fetishized cleanliness with an economy that was dependent on waste."
• Post-Retail Space — the Walmart case's aftermath: what the seventeen-year building leaves behind when it expires.
• Autistic Architecture — Kaika's cognate diagnosis: buildings as "self-contained machines… their death incorporated in the design process" — the hermetic seal's corporate-icon form.
• Prefab Interior — the element-scale counter-strategy: "the fabrication of modular, transportable, or interchangeable elements allows for adaptability and reuse, increasing the life of all the elements" — durability manufactured into parts rather than designed into buildings.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Household Furniture and Interior Decoration (Hope 1807/2006) — the concept's furniture-scale anticipation and its first escape-design: the fashionable mode "is subject to experience such speedy decay, and (what is worse) through the poverty of its forms, and the unmeaningness of its embellishments, is liable to occasion such rapid disgust; and which, consequently, is usually broken or discarded, long ere it has had leisure fairly to serve its time" (pp. 154–155) — obsolescence as a designed condition, its two drivers named (insolidity of texture; disgrace of form) and its economic engine exposed ("the incessant change of fashion which it stimulates and supports… occasions a much greater expense"); against which the durable furniture, "little susceptible of experiencing premature destruction, for want of due solidity of form, and less liable… to suffer merited disgrace, while yet in all its freshness of youth, for want of intrinsic power to please, may be preserved in families, from generation to generation, as a valuable portion of the patrimonial estate" (pp. 154–155). Hope's argument — that permanence is designed twice over (solidity against decay, "intrinsic power to please" against disgust) — is the patrimonial counter-program to which the McClures' persistence thesis is the architectural-scale heir. See patrimonial-interior, aesthetic-fatigue, fashion.
• Inside Looking In: The Prospect of the Aspect (McClure & McClure 2018) — the founding source: the Walmart's seventeen-year estimated useful life (derived from corporate financials, n. 8); the Folk Art Museum demolition (2001–2014) as the isolated object's fate; the persistence thesis — spaces with the prospect of the aspect "will resist obsolescence."
• The waiting room (Hedges 2018) — the interior's native obsolescence and the station-scale aftermath: "The waiting room, like many interiors, is transient, subject to fashion and impermanent materials, to short lives with frequent renovation" — obsolescence as the interior's default condition, faster than its building's; and the Auckland Railway Station as the composite case ("the now obsolete Auckland Railway Station"): conceived as the city's convergence point — "a swirling manifold of circuitry, switching points and deterritorialized, non-grounded flows" — it was "never tested to its full capacity," abandoned by the railway, and "choked by the indifferent architecture of apartments that surround it," a "forlorn building and a melancholic interior where the fixed and mobile converged." The waiting room itself outlives its program as pure waiting: "Today, the room still waits, empty, caught singularly against a building that has changed." See adaptive-reuse, waiting-room.
• Inside the prefab house (Schneiderman 2018) — the element-scale answer: where McClure & McClure design persistence into buildings and Hedges records interiors that outlive or outdie them, Schneiderman locates longevity in interchangeability — "the fabrication of modular, transportable, or interchangeable elements allows for adaptability and reuse, increasing the life of all the elements," with off-site production's "reduced material waste and labor costs" as the environmental dividend. The Lustron House supplies the failure case from the other side: a closed system whose non-interchangeable, idiosyncratic parts ("structural elements meant for other homes could not be used for the Lustron House, nor could elements of the Lustron House be used in other homes") could not outlive their house — obsolescence at the scale of the component. See prefab-interior, add-on, sustainability.
• Toward the immaterial interior (Jacobus 2018) — obsolescence's sign-scale form: Giedion's symbol-devaluation arc, relayed through Jacobus — mechanization "succeeded in mass replicating symbols that had been historically rarified through a difficult means of production. The result was that the original symbolic meaning was lost in the panoply, a dematerialization and devaluation of the symbols themselves. Eventually, the value within these symbols was no longer meaningful to the culture they were meant to communicate with, and so after lingering through the first phases of these new modes of production, they soon disappeared, giving way to new ways of thinking about the made object." The arc repeats at the scale of thinking: "ways of thinking about space that have been bound to ideas that originated within book culture are now beginning to disappear within a culture that is being infiltrated with an immediacy, rapidity, and constant newness that books cannot offer." Where the McClures' obsolescence kills buildings (the Walmart's seventeen years), Jacobus's kills concepts — obsolescence as the medium-driven extinction of spatial ideas, with cultural registers succeeding each other faster than buildings wear. See cultural-registers, dematerialization.
• Streamlining: The Aesthetics of Waste (Lupton & Miller 1992/2006) — the concept's naming document and its economic body-image: "The policy of 'planned obsolescence' pictured the economy itself as a 'body,' whose good health depends on a continual cycle of production and waste, ingestion and excretion" (p. 206); the design mechanism — streamlining "served to accelerate a product through the cycle of purchase and disposal, stimulating sales and hastening the replacement of objects not yet worn out" and "The continual stylistic update of consumer items such as refrigerators, toasters and cars shortened their life span and ensured their rapid replacement by new models" (pp. 206, 210); the model case — food packaging's "built-in disposability… became a paradigm for consumer goods more generally in the 1920s and 30s, extending a logic of digestion to durable objects" (p. 206). Where the McClures find obsolescence in corporate buildings (the depreciation schedule), Lupton & Miller find its invention in the object economy — the body-metaphor that made replacement a sign of health, with Frederick's "creative waste" as its moral doctrine and the Walmart's seventeen years as its architectural endpoint (see creative-waste, streamlining, process-of-elimination).
• The dialectics of appropriation (Brooker 2018) — obsolescence as cycle-term rather than terminal state: "These processes of conversion ensure that the dialectic of space and place becomes constructed through changes in use as well as the processes of decay, obsoletion, and reoccupation, and then the same again" — the building passing through obsoletion into reoccupation and around again, with reuse's own destructiveness as the concept's cost ("some elements… get deprived and emptied of meaning or even destroyed"). Where the McClures' obsolescence is the building's death (the Walmart's seventeen years) and Hedges's is the interior's (the waiting room outliving its program), Brooker's is the building's turn — each obsoletion the condition of the next reoccupation. See change-of-use, dialectics-of-appropriation.
• Metropolitan hybrids: Programming for a thriving urbanity (Luna 2018) — the concept's infrastructure register: "The majority of disruptions in the urban fabric occur from infrastructure. As new technologies emerge and new infrastructure is developed, old infrastructural systems become obsolete, leaving empty voids in the urban fabric." Luna's twist is that infrastructural obsolescence is the most promising kind: "Yet, transportation infrastructure presents the biggest potential for adaptability and reuse because of their existing structures" — Tokyo's highways merged with retail and residential, the High Line, NL Architects' overpass. And the obsolescence-generators are widened to politics and industry: "real estate speculation, changes in industry, changes in political power, and urban renewal have created abandoned or unfinished structures across cities worldwide" (the stalled Torre David; the "gaps of metropolitanism" of the shrinking city). Where the McClures design against obsolescence and Brooker cycles through it, Luna treats it as the metropolis's renewable resource: obsolete systems are the urban fabric's latent supply for metropolitan hybrids. See terrain-vague, adaptive-reuse.
• source-notes/marinic-2018-internal-disconnect-portman

Open Questions

• The McClures' key evidence is an accounting depreciation figure, not an architectural lifespan. What does a "useful life" of seventeen years actually measure — the building's material duration, or capital's depreciation horizon? And can financial data serve as architectural-historical evidence without smuggling capital's horizon in as the building's?
• The Folk Art Museum was a connected, crafted building (copper-bronze facade, celebrated by its peers) — yet it was demolished for MoMA's expansion, precisely the kind of institutional neighbor it should have connected with. Does the McClures' thesis (failure "to maintain multiple complex connections") hold for the Folk Art case, or does it show that connectivity cannot save a building from the land value of its site?
• Is persistence a value in itself? The Pantheon's survival owed much to continuous religious use and consecration. Does the persistence thesis risk conflating survival with merit — and can buildings be too persistent (the obsolete industrial shell that resists adaptation because it connects too well to its context)?
• How does design-stage persistence relate to post-hoc adaptive reuse? The McClures locate persistence in designed inclusivity; the wiki's adaptive-reuse cluster locates it in later intervention. Are these two strategies for the same outcome (buildings that survive program change), and can a hermetic object be redeemed by reuse, or does the seal persist through the conversion?
• Lupton & Miller's economy-as-body ("whose good health depends on a continual cycle of production and waste," p. 206) makes obsolescence the economic system's health — decay as the sign of vitality, not failure. Does this invert the McClures' persistence thesis entirely (persistence as stagnation, replacement as life), and if so, on what shared ground can the wiki hold both — the body that heals by regenerating versus the object that persists by connecting?