Denial and Dissolution – Architecture’s Futile Battle Against Entropy

Architecture’s fate has been sealed, and our continued resistance to its destiny of demise has led designers and engineers onto a path of forging local order at the price of global disorder. This disorder does not remain constrained to new corners of space, however. It haunts us from afar, promising to creep back and reclaim the places we’ve thought to made our own. Lessons from Native People, avant-garde Japanese modernists, and even Burning Man artists show us how we can embrace ephemerality and plan for a more cyclical architecture that’s better attuned to the planet’s energy flows. A high-level trajectory is proposed to help steer us away from the cliff of irreversible climate collapse, but it requires us to relinquish contemporary conceptions of how architecture ought to be built.