Lotus 170 (2020)

"The life expectancy of architecture has a span that stretches from the construction site to the ruin. If we exend that span even farther we have, before its construction, the whole space of its conception and, after the ruin, that of its disappearance"(Jean-Christophe Bailly). For example, analysis of Gropiu's Bauhaus in Dessau today reveals how the entire span of these passages in the end leaves behind fragments, shreds, that when laid out on an operating table do not reach the stage of the ruin. In the face of the adventures of the project observed over the span extending from the construction site to the ruin, we present an interesting survey (with cases ranging from the cathedral of Notre-Dame to new modes of recomposition of the landscape) that helps us to see the difficulty, if not the complete impossibility, of an architectural object returning to nature. As a consequence Ruskin's aspiration for the return of the work of architecture to the womb of nature at the end of its life cycle remains problematic.

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