Indispensable Eyesores : : An Anthropology of Undesired Buildings / / Mélanie van der Hoorn.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Berghahn Books Complete eBook-Package 2000-2013
• VerfasserIn: Hoorn, Mélanie van der,
• Place / Publishing House: New York ;, Oxford : : Berghahn Books, , [2009]; ©2009
• Year of Publication: 2009
• Language: English
• Series: Remapping Cultural History ; 10
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (272 p.)

Collapsing concrete colossuses, run-down overgrown skeletons, immutable architectural misfits: the outcasts from our built environment, which we are dying to dispose of — and yet cannot do without — have inspired many ghost stories, crime novels and urban legends. Such narratives reveal the significance of architectural eyesores for the people who live or work in or near them. After exploring various approaches to building lives and deaths, the author presents a rich variety of undesired edifices in Germany, Hungary, Austria and Bosnia-Herzegovina and investigates the different methods used to dispose of them: eliminating, damaging, transforming or ‘reframing’ them, abandoning them to progressive dilapidation or virtually rejecting them. Discarding an edifice, however, need not bring its social life to an end. This analysis continues with a reflection on the afterlife of unwanted buildings, and concludes with a discussion on the life expectancy of buildings, their multi-sensory materiality and ‘thingly’ agency.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Foreword -- 1. Dragons, Tunnels, Gold and Russians: Narrative Introductions into the Bowels of ‘Corrupt’ Architecture -- 2. Between Pragmatic Clearance and Pure Iconoclasm: Theoretical Perspectives on the Life and Death of Undesired Buildings -- 3. 13 May 2001, 8.01 A.M. – 1 Building, 20,000 People and 450 Kilograms of Explosives: The Elimination of the Kaiserbau in Troisdorf as a Secular Sacrifice -- 4. Witnessing Urbicide: Contested Destruction in Sarajevo -- 5. From Nuclear Waste to a Temple of Consumerism: The Recuperation and Neutralization of the Ex-would-be Nuclear Power Plant in Kalkar -- 6. Consuming the ‘Platte’ in East Berlin: The Revaluation of Former GDR Architecture -- 7. If Not Clearing, Then At Least Thinking Them Away: The Significance of Unrealized Proposals and the Viennese Flaktürme -- 8. ‘L’ like ‘Left to Its Own Devices’: The Progressive Dilapidation of the Kulturhaus in Zinnowitz -- 9. Exorcizing Remains: Architectural Fragments as Intermediaries between History and Individual Experience -- 10. In Fond Memory of a Rejected Edifice: Reaffirming Agency by Rehabilitating Vanished Eyesores -- 11. Eyesores Are Indispensable: Concluding Remarks -- Epilogue. Taboos on the Multi-Sensory Materiality of Buildings and Their Agency -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index