Paradise Lost, Mark Campbell w/ Brett Steele, Pier Vittorio Aureli
'Poised between nostalgia and a presage of the future, this haunting [work] witnesses one of the most crucial questions of our present: the role of obsolesce in a fragile economy of things'. – Professor Anthony Vidler (Yale University)
'No matter what around us is crumbling, as long as there is a story or ethos, there is a possibility to sustain things and give them form – even if this form serves no purpose. In accepting that paradise is forever lost, Campbell affirms that the possibility of a history remains'. – Professor Pier Vittorio Aureli (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne)
This book explores the notion of architectural obsolescence through a study of the contemporary United States. While the US was the world’s greatest economic, scientific and cultural force during the twentieth century, it now appears to be obsessed with its own decline. In this obsession the changing patterns of consumption and demand often result in an architectural redundancy where buildings exist as a form of by-product or residue. While our stereotypical image of the US reflects the heroic potential of production, this book examines the opposite – of that which isn’t work. Or, more pointedly, those abandoned pleasures and lost paradises that remain when there is no longer any work left to define them.
All Photos: Mark Campbell
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