Hospital

Abstract

The former Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto was a sight in need of little description: beyond the fenced property, the building, recognizably a postwar hospital, uncaringly dismantled its red brick and regularly spaced windows. With the rare exception of few canonical cases, most modernist institutional construction, ubiquitous and undervalued, is facing a similar future. This trend however speaks more about the mindset befitting contemporary societal attitudes towards architectural modernism, than about the actual inability of the buildings to be redesigned for further use. Through artefactual construction of discursive, literary and factual texts collected in relation to the epigone structure whose taking apart I have subsequently witnessed, I set out to trace the conditions of this typical occlusion of architectural potential, and to query the framework generating the inadvertent yet constant destruction of the architecture of a period that promised much enlightenment at its inception.