“So what exactly made you want to get into architecture?”

 

A question I have answered a thousand times. A question to which I had a thousand answers.

 

It was not until a moment two years ago when I began to understand the truth. The Pittsburgh leaves were turning to their yellows, reds, and oranges; and as they began their abscission, they left the pale bark of the locust and maple to hold up only the low bleak skies so common that time of year. It was in this moment that I understood Entropy. Not in the Newtonian sense, but the Smithson-ian sense. Before me, time was slowing, and life was unmoving. The fractious web of branches was not suitable to the tastes of the modernists, transcendentalists, or even romantics, but instead belonged to the minimalists. Those who believe that time is simply a place minus its motion.

 

It was not long before that I had read for the first time Robert Smithson’s Monuments of the Passaic. While my understanding still only skimmed the surface, I could feel at once the final paragraphs unfolding before my eyes. They have been included below.

 

“I should now like to prove the irreversibility of eternity by using a jejune experiment for proving entropy. Picture in your mind’s eye the sand box divided in half with black sand on one side and white sand on the other. We take a child and have him run hundreds of times clockwise in the box until the sand gets mixed and begins to turn grey; after that we have him run anti-clockwise, but the result will not be a restoration of the original division but a greater degree of greyness and an increase of entropy.

 

Of course, if we filmed such an experiment we could prove the reversibility of eternity by showing the film backwards, but then sooner or later the film itself would crumble or get lost and enter the state of irreversibility. Somehow this suggests that the cinema offers an illusive or temporary escape from physical dissolution. The false immortality of the film gives the viewer an illusion of control over eternity—but “the superstars” are fading.”

 

The trees, like the film, will tell the story of falling leaves and regrowth tens or hundreds of times, but they too, like spools of 35mm, will eventually fall victim to the heavy hand of entropy, toppling at once towards the dirt from which they came. But, trees and sand and films are not the sole victims of entropy. Our built environment too will someday cease to move, cease to exist altogether. Because of this, the legacy of architecture, whether one believes in Laugier’s or Semper’s or whoever’s origin story matters not. What does matter is that the slow, eternal march of time has moved for thousands of years towards an unknown end, but has only been able to get us as far as Levittown. A place where it entered its moment of stasis, its state of irreversibility.

 

Since time’s pause, there has been a well measured and enthusiastic fight to resume its movement, often coming from those who died as martyrs, spilling endless rivers of ink in their battles to create better communities and happier residents. Despite their efforts, the suburban condition, like a blight may one day spread through those urban Pittsburgh forests, infested the city and countryside.

 

Where am I in all this then? Why exactly have I droned on about such silly things as trees and leaves and time and motion?

 

Because I am one of the next generation to die fighting in their belief that time may one day move again. That someday, somebody, somewhere will come along and make things right. It will not be me, that much is sure, but I can only do my best to pave the way towards a better future. 

 

That moment when a savior comes down from the sky and brings along with them the negentropic answer to all of those questions which have remained unanswerable since the last true second ticked, when the last nail pierced the last piece of lumber in the development that stopped time. 

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- C 

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11/04/2022