Architecture at the End of the World

How to start thinking about the use of modern spaces in the near future

The headlines are clear: the world is ending and we’re all going to die. The latter isn’t true, and with humanity at the point we’re at now, it may never be true. The first, however, on the simple basis of considering a long-enough timescale, is inevitably true, and considering the way things have been going these last few years, it may be imminent. Every world order ends. Every political system governing a huge number of people has, as a rule of history, eventually failed, and it is hubris to think that ours won’t end eventually too.

There are a lot of factors — most obviously, war, shifting global alliances, diseases, extremism, inequality, supply chain instability, resource depletion and climate collapse — which threaten the global neoliberal world order standing tall (if shaky) today. The time and date of collapse is anybody’s guess. Perhaps there won’t even be a “collapse” in that classic dramatic sense as much as there’ll just be a gradual decline in quality of life that might last our (being anybody old enough to read this now) entire lives. However, considering the combination of compounding factors and the refusal of world leaders to meaningfully deal with the problems they personally benefit from, that something happens looks all but certain.

Supposing, then, that global franchise capitalism as it exists today falls to the wayside sometime in the next few decades. What…