The act of creating new objects from scratch is often no longer possible for the professional architect given the social and economic contexts of our contemporary world.
In some societies, building booms during periods of high economic growth have resulted in a collection of contemporary ruins that are now neglected due to a lack of resources or lack of need for their use. In other contexts, architecture emerges as a result of decision-making processes that allocate minimal resources to the basic human need of habitation.
A contradiction thus exists between the architecture commonly presented by the media as finished forms frozen in time, and architecture that has the capacity to evolve, adapt, and transform. This latter type of architecture, which is perpetually “unfinished,” allows for a different understanding of time. The speed with which we commonly evaluate society’s developments and the urge to constantly reinvent things affect our perceptions of architecture’s horizons of time.