Joel Robinson

Life in Ruins: Architectural Culture and the Question of Death in the Twentieth Century Joel Robinson

Among the most lasting works of architecture are the tomb and the monument. The fact that these have outlasted other kinds of edifice would suggest that the question of death was historically of paramount importance to architecture - at least in the West. But what about more recently? Scholarship in twentieth-century architectural history seems to have neglected the question of death, being more concerned with the heroic or utopian side of modernism. Taking issue with the story of twentieth-century architecture as it is often told, this book seeks to address a lacuna in scholarship. It examines the work of three major architects of the last century, who evinced a strong concern with the funerary genre throughout their lives. Of greater importance, it argues that certain of the more reflexive or progressive approaches to funerary design at this time were marked by a rejection of the traditional language of the monument, which denied the temporal nature of this world, and colored instead by the Romantic tropes of ruin and decay - tropes evocative of the transience of things and the cycles of life.