Liminal Urban Spaces:
Addressing the Temporality of Built Form Through the Lens of Building Mortality
Issue: The perception of permanence in architecture is a deep seated mentality. In reality, architecture is temporal and what is here now will not always be here. This can be a somewhat disturbing thought; especially when there are sentimental ties to the built structures that we inhabit. A city can be thought of as a living entity made up of buildings, landscapes, and people that are in constant flux. When a component or part of that system is not used, it goes dormant and falls into a liminal state until there is a socio-economic need for it again. Buildings seem to experience mortality at different times for different reasons, however one could argue that a building’s death occurs well before it is demolished, renovated, or even vacated. When buildings and landscapes progress to a point of mortality, what can we do to influence the future use of the space when it is eventually reassimilated into the urban fabric? This thesis will look to explore the liminality between a building’s vacancy, demolition and reassimilation and what impacts building mortality has on our perception of landscape, waste, and architecture.
*The goal of this thesis is not to eliminate liminal urban spaces or wasting, but to explore the possible influence of ephemeral interventions within them to nudge these spaces into a beneficial direction depending on community needs (social, ecological, economic,etc.) as well as alter the communal perception of these spaces from deficits to assets.
Significance of Issue: The average vacancy rate among the 75 largest urban centers in the United States sits at 10.6% and has historically fluctuated between 12.5% and 15% in cities with populations above 250,000 (US Census 2012; Kremer, Hamstead 2015). There are many factors that may influence when and why properties are vacated such as disinvestment, industrial decline, and contamination of the land to name a few (Kremer, Hamstead 2015). Vacancy can have large social, ecological, and economic implications on an urban area including increased crime. Visible environmental cues that indicate a lack of investment in an area can influence the social dynamic of the neighborhood, causing feelings of fear, abandonment, and vulnerability ultimately with the possibility of compounding vacancy issues (Garvin et. al. 2012). Cities spend millions of dollar per year on demolishing derelict properties (HUD 2014). However this process creates prolific amounts of waste each year. The building sector created 530 million metric tons of construction and demolition waste in the United States in 2013, 90% of which was purely demolition related (EPA. Advancing Sustainable Materials Management. 2013). For scale, the United States produced 254 million tons of municipal solid waste (MSW consists of residential and commercial garbage and recyclables) in 2013.
Proposal of Method: When a building dies, it has many different possible fates. It can be reconditioned up to modern habitability standards and then reoccupied, or, it can be taken down via either demolition or deconstruction to make way for new stock to name two possibilities. This can be visualized as a decision tree containing the theoretical maximum number of possibilities for a particular site. This thesis would work to identify key intervention points over time that provide the maximum influence over a vacant lot’s future. How could focused ephemeral design interventions at specific stages pre and post mortality catalyze and influence the reassimilation process to achieve a particular result? How could this work to redefine the public perception of dead buildings and derelict landscapes? How could temporary urbanism in the form of low cost, low risk transient on site building utilizing recovered materials serve as a way to provoke urban reinvestment?
