Haunted Houses

"Ghost buildings" - architectural shadows left by demolition - are a phenomenon that doesn't linger long in high-rent neighborhoods. These ghosts tend to get bricked or drywalled over as adaptive reuse has its way with the residue of architectural history. But ghost buildings tend to haunt rust belt cities and areas as-yet untouched by gentrification.

Cast concrete detail, Salk Institute, Flickr.

In his enthralling documentary My Architect, Nathaniel Kahn wonders whether architectural ghosts in Philadelphia may have inspired the modern rustic of his father's brutalist concrete forms. This much is clear: Louis Kahn's buildings deliberately retain the ghosts of the ephemeral materials used to construct them. They're a celebration of process as much as they are means to a sublime end.

Check out Allison Meier's article on ghost buildings and the Unconscious Art of Demolition Flickr group:

Philadelphia (photograph by Jukie Bot / Flickr)