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Useless Speculation: 
Architectural Obsolescence 
and the micro-parcels of Gordon 
Matta-Clark’s Fake Estates 
(1973)

rick fox

“History doesn’t repeat, but it often rhymes.”  
--Mark Twain

Introduction

       More often than not, architecture is created 
to bolster the express beliefs and ambitions of 
those who sponsor it.  Individuals, groups, and 
institutions in power tend to promulgate symbols of 
their own prestige.  Architecture is thus understood 
as a tool of the powerful and by the powerful.  
Real estate speculators are undeniable agents of 
change; they possess genuine power to transform 
both natural and built landscapes.  Many aspects of 
the change they promulgate are public and highly 
visible; others much less so.  Processes such as title 
transfer, subdivision, lot merger, covenants, deed 
restrictions, dedications, and easements vary greatly 
in their degree of public visibility. While the twin 
pillars of real estate economics—market value and 
investment performance (and their shadow features 
of irrational exuberance and obsolescence)—do not 
figure prominently in most academic literature on 
architecture, these topics have become unavoidable 
for today’s practitioners.  An exploration of the 



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broader philosophical implications of an economically speculative 
architecture created, bought, and sold by a surprisingly small number 
of financial elites is highly relevant for anyone wishing to be on the side 
of fairness of opportunity in the context of today’s staggering wealth 
inequality.1  
       The work of SoHo-based American artist Gordon Matta-Clark is 
particularly instructive in this regard for two reasons. First, architecture 
is simultaneously the subject matter and the medium of much of his 
creative output.  Second, he challenges many cherished beliefs about the 
production of architecture.  My point of departure in this essay will be an 
exploration of one of his lesser known but more conceptually-oriented 
works, Reality Properties: Fake Estates (“Fake Estates”).  This work has 
been largely overlooked by critics eager to comment on his more famous 
building-cuts.  Additionally, Fake Estates was a work conceived at a time in 
the 1970’s when New York City was teetering on the verge of municipal 
bankruptcy, while at the same time promoting massive urban renewal 
schemes that clearly favored rapacious real estate speculation.  These twin 
circumstances proved fertile ground for Matta-Clark in his work generally, 
and Fake Estates in particular.  
       In this paper, I argue that this specific work offers us valuable 
architectural and philosophical lessons if we view it as a reductio argument 
that: 1) exposes several contradictory values that underpin real estate 
speculation; and, 2) highlights potential pitfalls in the architect-speculator 
relation.  

Genealogy of Reality Properties: Fake Estates 

       In late 1973 and early 1974 Gordon Matta-Clark, best known for his 
building-cuts Splitting (1974) Englewood, N.J, and Conical Intersect (1975) 
Paris, purchased fifteen surplus parcels of land sight unseen for between 
$25 and $75 each from the New York City Real Estate Department at two 
separate public auctions.  Fourteen of the parcels are located in Queens, 
and one on Staten Island.  The parcels are tiny odd-shaped fragments 
ranging in size from a 27 square foot triangular sliver to a 355-foot long 
strip.   The complete inventory of parcels is diagrammed in Figure 1.  If all 
fifteen parcels were somehow aggregated their total area would be 3,264 
square feet, not even enough to make a tiny residential lot in Queens. 
       Subsequent to their purchase, Matta-Clark collected all the relevant 
legal documents including notarized grant deeds, legal descriptions, sales 



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contracts, and parcel maps, along with numerous 
black & white photos he took during various site 
visits.  The discrete works we know today as Fake 
Estates were assembled posthumously, in 1992, by 
his widow Jane Crawford, prompted by the urging 
of Corrine Diserens, a curator from the Institut 
Valencià d’art Modern (IVAM) in Valencia Spain 
who was researching a Matta-Clark retrospective, 
using the original materials he collected. While 
Crawford named the individual works, i.e. “Little 
Alley” Block 2497, Lot 42 (1974); “Jamaica Curb” 
Block 10142, Lot 15 (1974); “Maspeth Onions” 
Block 2406, Lot 148 (1973); and “Sidewalk Grass” 
Block 1107, Lot 146 (1973), it was Diserens who, in 
her retrospective, named the full collection Reality 
Properties: Fake Estates.  The original materials 
themselves have an interesting provenance that is 
relevant here.  Matta-Clark gave the materials to 
his friend Norman Fisher who agreed to hold them 
after Fisher agreed to pay the property taxes that 
Matta-Clark was repeatedly ignoring.  When Fisher 
died in 1977, his executrix Tina Girouard became 
custodian who then returned the materials to 
Crawford sometime in 1979 or 1980.  Matta-Clark 
died in 1978, but around 1980 Crawford began 
receiving what to her were mysterious delinquency 
notices from the City that the parcels were being 
confiscated for nonpayment of taxes.  Apparently, 
at the time Crawford was unaware of her husband’s 
purchases.  The eventual foreclosures are ironic given 
that he had purchased these lots at tax-foreclosure 
auction. In the case of “Staten Island” Block 1224, 
Lot 12 (50.34 square feet) the unpaid quarterly tax 
for fiscal 1974 amounted to $1.83.  As of 2003 only 
four of the parcels had been purchased by private 
entities; the other eleven remained in administrative 
limbo.
       Curiously, Crawford elected not to include the 
tax bills in the assembled collages deeming them, 
“no longer relevant to the works”2 perhaps because 
she earnestly endeavored to present Matta-Clark’s 

it only takes 
a small 

surveyor’s 
error to 
change a 

perfect 
rectangle into 

an off-kilter 
trapezoid 

with an 
unaccounted-

for surplus 
sliver.

“

”



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work in the best possible light—in its purest form.  In hindsight, her 
decision is unfortunate for two reasons.  First, given that Fake Estates is 
a posthumously presented work, the record is incomplete (or deceptively 
oversimplified) without the follow-on story of the aftermath of Matta-
Clark’s purchases because this story tells us a great deal about his collaborative 
networking method as an artist and social activist.  Second, for our 
purposes of architecture philosophy the eventual disposition, ownership, 
and transference of the parcels is relevant as an additional object-lesson 
consistent with the overall import of his intended project.  The fact that 
eleven of the fifteen parcels appear to remain in administrative limbo is of 
no small consequence to Matta-Clark’s critique of property ownership as 
well as to my argument as to its importance.
       What we know of Matta-Clark’s intentions with respect to the fifteen 
parcels comes from numerous and fragmentary sources.  Interviews with 
his contemporaries produce incomplete and contradictory recollections 
about his intentions.  As one commenter put it, “...the story of Fake Estates 
is both mythologized and full of holes.”3 By other accounts he purchased 
the lots without a clear intent as to what he planned to do.  According 
to Manfred Hecht, his friend and building-cut collaborator, Matta-Clark 
lost interest in the properties and it was Hecht who ultimately ended up 
owning them.  One of the clearest expressions of Matta-Clark’s intentions 
comes from New York Times reporter Dan Carlinsky writing a humor piece 
about the city’s real estate auctions.  When asked by Carlinsky after the 
auction what he planned to do with the lots, an effusive 28-year old Matta-
Clark told the reporter he planned to use them in works of art he would 
soon be creating.  Making reference to one of the parcels that had no 
access to it from the public right-of-way (“Maspeth Onions”, Block 2406, 
Lot 148) he remarks, “That’s an interesting quality; something that can be 
owned but never experienced. That’s an experience itself.”4  
      What the total record of recollections, interviews and manuscripts 
reveal is that at the time the complete work he envisioned consisted of three 
parts: 1) a written documentation of the parcel including exact dimensions 
and location, and “perhaps a list of weeds growing there”5; 2) a full-scale 
photo of the property; and 3) the land itself.  He intended that parts 1 and 
2 would be included in a gallery exhibition, and that purchasers would 
acquire title to the land as part of their art purchase.  Thus, part of his 
reasoning for buying slivers becomes more obvious in that he regarded 
these parcel sizes to be “manageable” objects in a gallery setting where, for 
example, he might hang from the wall a 1-foot x 95-foot rectangular, or a 
6-foot isosceles triangle-shaped photograph. Neither the full scale photos 



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figure 1:

micro-parcel inventory



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nor the gallery exhibition ever materialized.  
      For a young SoHo artist of insufficient means struggling to find 
affordable housing and cheap gallery space the cultural mythology of a 
gentry class buying an estate in the economically devastated New York 
City of the mid-1970’s is an irony too rich to ignore. In the early 1970’s 
New York City had become a bleak, violent and dilapidated city in decline.  
The steady loss of manufacturing jobs as industry moved out of the city 
combined with a general flight to the suburbs left the city with countless 
empty buildings.  Abandoned tenement buildings and dilapidated side 
streets were commonplace throughout the City. The Bronx borough alone 
lost one-third of its population in the 1970’s. The Brooklyn neighborhood 
known as ‘DUMBO’ remained uninhabited throughout most of the 
decade.   In lower Manhattan the World Trade Center Site was being 
constructed while deteriorating neighborhoods burned. From 1970-1975 
there were 68,456 fires in the Bronx alone.6  Arson, as a percent of all city 
fires rose from 1% in the 1960’s to over 7% in the 1970’s.7  Landlords 
would occasionally burn down their own buildings to collect insurance 
money when they could no longer afford to maintain them. By mid-decade 
New York City, the global epicenter of capitalism, was sliding inexorably 
towards municipal bankruptcy.  
      The absurdity that these parcels were all undevelopable—too small, 
odd-shaped, poorly situated, literally inaccessible from the public right-
of-way—as homesteads, estates, or other meaningful forms of human 
inhabitation while they maintained their apparent exchange value is crucial 
to the ethos of Fake Estates.  Matta-Clark was fascinated by the description 
of these surplus lots as “inaccessible.”  From a 1974 interview with Liza 
Bear for Avalanche, he says:

What I basically wanted to do was to designate spaces that wouldn’t 
be seen and certainly not occupied. Buying them was my own take 
on the strangeness of existing property demarcation lines. Property 
is so all-pervasive. Everyone’s notion of ownership is determined by 
the use-factor.8  

       An example of what Matta-Clark might have meant by ‘use-factor’ is 
offered to us by a story told by one of his colleagues.  Betsy Sussler who 
accompanied him on one of his 1975 site visits to the Queens parcels, that 
included a 2.55-foot wide strip of land in a 355-foot alley that neighbors 
had to cross over to enter into their private garages (Block 3398, Lot 116), 
remarks that Matta-Clark:  

…understood quite well the psychological and political factors 
involved in walking onto a person’s property to inform them that his 



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[Matta-Clark’s] piece of forgotten land he’d 
bought was in fact part of their driveway.9  

As far as anyone knows Matta-Clark never enforced 
his property right to exclude his would-be trespasser 
neighbors.      
        Collectively, these fifteen micro-parcels are 
important reminders of how the urban world is 
dissected by an underlying system of property 
ownership, and the laws and regulations governing 
their transfer. It is tempting to blame senseless 
bureaucrats for the existence of these land slivers, 
but that would be misleading.  These parcel-
fragments are the physical and conceptual residue 
of the rational machinations of a socially-legitimate 
process.  The name of the collected works given 
to us by Diserens simultaneously highlights the 
vicissitudes of property ownership in an urban 
environment where every patch of dirt, no matter 
how small, is assumed to be a commodity, and it 
captures the juxtaposition of the real fragmented 
New York City with the unreal unified New York 
City of popular imagination.  Matta-Clark was 
fascinated by the prospect that the mistakes of 
surveyors and architects might be the genesis of 
his micro-parcels.  After all, it only takes a small 
surveyor’s error to change a perfect rectangle into 
an off-kilter trapezoid with an unaccounted-for 
surplus sliver.  While it is tantalizing to consider 
that professional errors and incompetency might 
be the source of these land fragments the truth 
is more telling.  And the “error” he points to is 
much larger than a drafting mistake, or simple 
math error.  Contemporary investigations into 
the title history reveal that these micro-parcels did 
not come about by accident but instead were the 
outcome of an intricate system of change in use and 
ownership—subdivisions and mergers, easements 
and dedications, road widenings, municipal 
projects, rural farmland conversions—both public 

  we are 
brought 

face-to-face 
with what 

are squarely 
philosophical 

questions: What 
exactly is 

the bearer of 
value? What 
is the genuine 

object we are 
buying and 

selling.

“

”



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and private.      
      Matta-Clark was equally fascinated with the North American collective 
imagination about land speculation these parcels signify.  The reasons other 
buyers offered to the New York Times reporter Carlinsky for buying surplus 
parcels included: 1) a Virginia man who purchased a few small parcels 
as investments for his children; 2) a man who purchased 20 square foot 
adjacent to the tiny parcel he already owned in the hopes of selling both 
to his next door neighbor for a garden; 3) a New York City planner who 
bought three lots just because he wanted to own a piece of the city he loved; 
and 4) another man who purchased several parcels as Christmas gifts for 
his friends.10   Given these diverse motivations, we are brought face-to-face 
with what are squarely philosophical questions: What exactly is the bearer 
of value? What is the genuine object we are buying and selling: Is it the 
actual land with weeds, trees and fences, or the legalistic paraphernalia of 
title transfer?  Or is it participation in a cultural process (verging on myth) 
that supposedly grounds our self-worth?  Or perhaps it is, as Matta-Clark 
seems to have intuited, only as art in the full 1:1 scale gallery photographs 
he conceived but never executed.  By any conventional measure of use 
the land itself has no real value; its token value is the mere residue of a 
conceptual framework of ownership to which buyers and sellers are deeply 
committed.
The three-part nature of the work Matta-Clark envisioned offers important 
guidance. The ontological distinction between a discernible piece of the 
earth’s surface and a commodified chunk of “real estate” is crucial.  Without 
physical markers such as a surveyor’s benchmark, a flagged property corner, 
a fence post, or some other naturally occurring thing, we only know that 
a discernible patch of the physical landscape exists as a “parcel” because 
of the legal-bureaucratic artifacts that record its existence and location. 
As Frances Richard so aptly puts it, “One can stand on a micro-plot and 
not know it is there.”11 In this scenario, we can own something but not 
experience it; exchange it but not inhabit it; delineate it but not occupy it; 
locate it but not enjoy it.  With Fake Estates, and Matta-Clark’s purchase 
of micro-parcels useless for any meaningful development, “the absurdity of 
real estate is laid bare as a bad pun.”12 
       By engaging in purchase and ownership of these micro-parcels Matta-
Clark sensitizes us to certain absurdities of speculation. Namely, 1) the 
process of buying and selling in the hope of continuously escalating 
exchange-value is regarded as authoritative even when it produces an 
irrational or dubious result; and, 2) the process of parcelization is a 
useful fiction about democratized economic power that helps prop up 



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cultural beliefs about value, and about self-worth. 
The supposition that a normalized process always 
produces its intended results (“everybody gets 
a piece of the action”), combined with a slavish 
adherence to an algorithmic procedure founded (in 
part) on contradictory assumptions, is the essence 
of Matta-Clark’s reductio argument.
  
Ontic Insecurity: Matta-Clark’s Exquisite Corpus

       As a work of conceptually oriented art Fake 
Estates has strong implications for architecture 
philosophy insofar as it challenges the security of our 
ontic commitments to what constitutes the ground 
of possibility whereupon works of architecture 
are situated.  A useful perspective on the theme 
of ontological insecurity in Matta-Clark’s work is 
offered by Pamela Lee.  In Object to be Destroyed, 
she argues that his work presupposes the eventuality 
of its own destruction.  Extending this idea of ontic 
insecurity to Fake Estates is an important step to 
expanding our understanding of the implications of 
his acquisition of these micro-parcels.  Lee’s overall 
line of argument that Matta-Clark’s work is best seen 
through the lens of expenditure or waste rather than 
destruction or violence is compelling. Even though 
he referred to his principle activity as ‘un-building’, 
we are not obligated to view it as inherently violent.  
He did not “destroy” for the sake of destruction, or 
because he found the world empty of value.  Matta-
Clark was no nihilist.  Through his constant striving 
to make sense of his surroundings he resisted the 
notion that we live in a purposeless present.  In this 
regard, Jeffrey A. Kroessler, in his essay “Gordon 
Matta-Clark’s Moment,” offers the useful insight 
that Matta-Clark was an artist re-imagining urban 
decay and finding the inspiration needed to be an 
agent of positive transformation.13  
      Because he was fascinated with processes of 
change, and things that embraced their own 

fake Estates 
has strong 

implications for 
architecture 

philosophy 
insofar as it 
challenges 

the security 
of our ontic 

commitments 
to what 

constitutes 
the ground 

of possibility 
whereupon 

works of 
architecture 
are situated. 

“

”



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outmodedness, it is tempting to read Matta-Clark’s creative output as 
a monument to entropy.  In his early work he explored senescence and 
decay, and recorded the process and effects of disintegration. Yet, he is not 
making a fetish of a ruinous state.  He does not valorize it for its own sake. 
On the contrary, decay, waste, and disintegration are integral to becoming.  
Contingent circumstance and shifting temporalities characterize his entire 
output—his work does not lay claim to permanence.  His creative practice 
is not about object-making, or even object-destruction, rather it is about 
process-intervention.  He transformed architectural refuse into reminders 
of the deeply contradictory impulses of urban development with its deep 
schism between use-value and exchange-value.  Seeing the long arc of 
Matta-Clark’s creative practice as an intervention into collective practices 
of waste positions us on a path of resistance that in turn points towards 
some problems of architectural obsolescence that characterize both Fake 
Estates and the building-cuts for which he is most known.  Fake Estates 
further sharpens our understanding of the difference between inhabited 
space, the space of social praxis, and abstract space (the universalized 
“zoned” commodity) at the same time it performs a wonderfully wry 
commentary on Kant’s disinterestedness thesis by taking an object of such 
intense desire as New York real estate, stripping it of use-value, repackaging 
it as useless art, and then completing the circle by seducing the gallery-goer 
for a second go-round with the offer to sell the art.  

Matta-Clark’s Animus      

       The social geography of an urban place finds its expression in the 
architecture if we look close enough.  As a result of his building-cut 
work Matta-Clark had acquired considerable skill in the manual labor of 
dismantling buildings, working with building materials, and re-capturing 
architecture-based resources; skills he came to see as relevant to the 
underserved communities of New York City.  In 1977, the year before his 
untimely death, he was awarded a Guggenheim Grant for a resource center 
and environmental youth program for ‘Loisada’, the name given to the 
Lower East Side by its Spanish speaking residents.  He used the proceeds to 
purchase a building on the Lower East Side.  The resource center functioned 
(1) as a community salvage yard where materials and equipment could be 
recycled or sold, and (2) as a neighborhood youth training program that 
taught youth how to renovate and maintain buildings for community use.  
After his death the center completely disbanded.  
         While Matta-Clark is remembered for the ethical qualities of 



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his dynamic activist persona—his sociability, 
exuberance, inclusiveness, and tireless 
engagement—the aesthetic-political qualities of his 
overt architecturally-themed projects are restive, 
impatient, stubbornly dissatisfied, vociferous, and 
uneasy.  Some of this schism may be due to the 
deep and abiding animus Matta-Clark harbored 
against the architecture profession.  Even though he 
was originally trained to be an architect, attending 
Cornell’s School of Architecture (1963-1968), 
Matta-Clark’s chief aim, according to critics such 
as Yve-Alain Bois, is to negate the cultural prestige 
of architecture.14 This view is borne out by Matta-
Clark himself.  In a 1976 interview with Donald 
Wall in Arts Magazine, when Wall asks what 
reaction Matta-Clark got from Splitting, his reply 
is unequivocal: 

I don’t think most [architects] practitioners 
are solving anything except how to make a 
living. Architecture is a lackey to big business. 
It’s an enormously costly undertaking and 
therefore, like government, comes equipped 
with its entire panoply of propaganda. I think 
Monolithic Idealist problem solving has not 
only failed to solve the problems but created 
a dehumanized condition at both a domestic 
and institutional level.15    

       One way for us to make sense of Matta-Clark’s 
animus would be to view it as his worry that the 
profession as a whole, at the time anyhow, did 
not possess a well-formed social conscience. Or 
at least not a conscience he considered relevant to 
addressing the pressing problems that surrounded 
him.  In one of his written fragments he writes, 
“empty and neglected structures were a prime 
reminder of the ongoing fallacy of renewal through 
modernization.” 16   In his view then, the derelict 
condition of New York City’s land and building-
stock is emblematic of the state of the profession 
as a whole, and like so much of capitalist cultural 

     he is not 
making a fetish 

of a ruinous 
state [...] On 

the contrary, 
decay, 

waste, and 
disintegration 

are integral to 
becoming.

“

”



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production architecture is destined to become waste.  So in this way, it is 
the means of producing architecture, rather than architecture as artifact 
(glorious, exalted, banal, or otherwise) that is the precise focus of Matta-
Clark’s critique.   Xavier Wrona offers a useful amplification.  He writes 
that for Matta-Clark, “architecture is not the building but the system that 
produces a particular kind of building—the order imposed on buildings, 
not the buildings themselves.”17
      Fake Estates explicitly raises questions about what it means to be a 
propertied person, to own property, to possess it, to occupy it, to abuse 
it, to glorify it, to transmogrify it, to transfer it, and to dispense with 
it as one sees fit.  In spite of his personal acquisition of real estate he 
nonetheless harbored a deep resistance to ideologies of private wealth.  He 
viewed private property and the human isolation he believed it engenders 
as increasingly unsustainable states, telling Donald Wall: 

What I am talking about is the very real, carefully sustained mass 
schizophrenia in which our individual perceptions are constantly 
being subverted by industrially controlled media, markets, and 
corporate interests.18  

       Matta-Clark was not enamored of American capitalism, laissez-
faire real estate developers, disengaged policy makers, or uncaring 
slum lords who stood idle while deterioration progressed inexorably to 
demolition and then to the “solution” of redevelopment.  Nonetheless, 
he viewed abandoned buildings through the political lens of liberalism 
as symptomatic of a socio-political system: (1) that doesn’t look after its 
everyday citizens by caring for those who cannot care for themselves; (2) 
that favors the elite at the expense of the general population; and (3) where 
wealth accumulation is valorized as an end in itself rather than a means 
to something more worthwhile.  Instead, to the greatest extent possible, 
he focused his own efforts on empowering marginalized citizens to take 
ownership of their neighborhoods. In his words, an urban site ought to be 
“responsive to the expressive will of its occupants.”19  
No doubt, the abstract urban grid is a tool for converting raw land into 
a commodity.  As evidenced by Fake Estates in which the earth’s surface 
is reduced to a series of complex abstract and interconnected legalistic 
property descriptors, an otherwise rational process can, with successive 
iterations, yield an irrational or dubious outcome. Yet, the occasional 
anomaly is not what obsesses Matta-Clark.  Rather, his two-fold reminder 
is that the usability of a piece of land is necessarily tied to abstract processes 
of demarcation, ownership, and transfer.  Second, the rapacious drive 



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to accumulate wealth disengages exchange value 
from the utility of a piece of land. And hence, the 
ground of architecture is rendered precarious.  As 
Lee, rightly observes, “For property is not so much 
considered a thing at all but a right: a relationship 
between object and subject structured around 
terms of personality and consumption.”20   In our 
era, property has become more than an extension 
of who we are—it now threatens to define us. This 
threat continues to deepen, and deepen unevenly 
across the wealth divide.  
 
Architectural Obsolescence: The Eye of the Speculator

       Fake Estates, far from being a curious leftover side-
project to Matta Clark’s more well-known building 
cut projects, is one tent-pole for expressing his over-
arching concerns with the related ideas of waste and 
obsolescence.  Matta-Clark’s chief concern with the 
obsolescence paradigm is that it creates its own set 
of mythic beliefs by transforming complex cultural 
processes into ones that seem self-evidently natural, 
unchangeable, and universal.  The false claim that 
“the new” naturally supersedes “the old” is a long-
standing criticism of capitalism.  The argument 
that capitalism sustains itself by promulgating 
emotional and psychological discontent is another 
familiar grievance.  Other commonplace grievances 
include: everlasting transience; endless replacement; 
continuous forced supersession; and, rapid and 
sudden fluctuations in valuation.  While the 
narrative of relentless devaluation and expendability 
eventuates in waste, it is precisely this narrative of 
perpetual change the capitalist entrepreneur needs 
in order to expand consumer demand for the “new 
now,” and the “next now.”  Joseph Schumpeter, 
the Austrian economist and ardent defender of 
capitalism, who in 1942 defined capitalism as 
“creative destruction,” unapologetically embraced 
the idea that obsolescence is fundamental to 



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capitalism.  According to Schumpeter, entrepreneurial innovation is the 
vital force behind the progress and instability of capitalism thus explaining 
boom and bust cycles.  Creative destruction is thus understood as one of 
the “iron laws” of capitalism.  While capitalist enterprise and its critics 
have moved beyond Schumpeter’s mid-century pronouncements, it seems 
clear to me that what links Matta-Clark’s Fake Estates and his building-cut 
projects is that both are caught up in this net of “iron laws.”  Thus, his 
critical perspective on capitalism remains relevant along with its impact 
on us.  
      In his recent book Obsolescence: An Architectural History Daniel 
Abramson is succinct, “Architecture and its history have lessons to teach 
about coming to terms with capitalism.”21 He cogently argues that in the 
United States the idea of architectural obsolescence was birthed by the 
real estate industry around 1910. Since its advent in 1913 when it was 
created by the 16th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the U.S. Tax 
Code tax deduction for asset depreciation has served to reify the abstract 
concept of obsolescence into dollars and cents.  In the dissociation of 
economic life-span from natural durability, economic obsolescence runs 
faster than physical decay and this is by design.  The life-span tables in the 
Tax Code are politically and economically driven to benefit capital. They 
are not obtained from empirical building science data as to durability and 
structural integrity of the underlying architectural asset.  So, the cycle of 
real estate investment, disinvestment, and reinvestment operates entirely 
independent of naturalized obsolescence. Unlike most material objects and 
consumer goods, land and works of architecture while easily neglected, 
abandoned, or de-valued are not easily discarded. The invention of 
architectural obsolescence normalized capitalism’s inclinations and offers a 
convenient tidy rationale for the chaotic changes it tends to foster. Though 
Matta-Clark is not the first artist to recognize problems with the myth of 
obsolescence and its implications for the production and consumption of 
architectural objects, he is certainly the first to attack it with crowbars and 
power saws.  
      Physical mortality is relatively predictable, whereas de-valuation arising 
from highly contingent market circumstance is not.  To be sure, the 
impermanence of the built environment is the condition of possibility for 
virtually all of Matta-Clark’s creative output including Fake Estates.  While 
he purchased these micro-parcels amidst the wholesale abandonment 
of erstwhile usable land and buildings it is precisely this conceptual 
framework—that architectural change necessarily requires wholesale or 
widespread expendability—that Matta-Clark wants to criticize in all his 



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projects.   

Waste and Obsolescence in Architecture

       While I think it is clear that Matta-Clark 
understands (if only inchoately so) the distinction 
between value-extraction and value-creation, and he 
rightly identifies many of the problems associated 
with value-extraction, he under-appreciates or 
misapprehends the potential pitfalls associated 
with value-creation as a tool for architectural 
change.  These potential pitfalls also have 
important implications for the architect-speculator 
relationship.  Since the early decades of the twentieth 
century the architectural community’s response to 
obsolescence runs the gamut from denial through 
resistance to reluctant acceptance to enthusiastic 
embrace. Throughout most of architectural history 
the temporal horizon for works of architecture 
was characterized by gradualism—the desire for 
permanence but acceptance of gradual change as 
inevitable.  The past was always present and time 
passed slowly. Beginning with the twentieth century 
fixity, permanence, and gradualism began to recede.  
Abramson puts it this way, “Only in the twentieth 
century did a place of unending ceaseless change in 
the built environment come to be understood as the 
new normal.”22  
Whether, and under what circumstances, the 
political question of whether land parcelization 
is reversible gets overlooked and remains under-
theorized in Fake Estates. Though a man of strong 
politics, Matta-Clark’s work wants to get at the 
existential assumptions concerning ownership, 
value and, use underlying the political. Similar to 
archeological data, loss of information about the 
past is one of the pitfalls of real estate speculation 
as it endeavors to create economic value.  Costs 
associated with these pitfalls are scarcely accounted 
for in development proformas or financial balance 

       Though 
Matta-Clark 

is not the 
first artist 

to recognize 
problems with 

the myth of 
obsolescence 

and its 
implications 

for the 
production and 
consumption of 
architectural 

objects, he 
is certainly 
the first to 

attack it with 
crowbars and 

power saws.

“

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sheets.  Few real estate speculators factor ‘externalities’ such as the loss of 
historical-architectural data into their economic calculations.
       From an ontological perspective, obsolescence is a species of 
impermanence whose discourse asks us to actively disengage from past-
being while encouraging us to privilege incipient, emergent-being.  Since 
their economic power is recorded temporally in architectural obsolescence, 
the speculator in essence presents us with a bogus historical narrative 
that is a false dichotomy: either passively acquiesce to the relics of an 
ossified dysfunctional past, or aggressively seek economic advantage over 
others for control of a would-be prosperous future.  Although we in the 
architectural community are loath to admit it, and at times quick to justify 
it, the profession’s incessant drive towards novelty, experimentation, and 
the pursuit of ever-more dramatic three-dimensional form helps fuel 
architectural obsolescence. Our prevalent talk of the ‘relevant’ with its 
emergent-minded focus on ‘the germane’, ‘the immediate’, ‘the topical’, 
‘the fresh’, ‘the cutting-edge’, ‘of the moment’, infuses our theory with 
enticing rhetoric, and inflects practice towards their seductions  as Matta-
Clark intimates. To the extent that we in the architectural community 
accept this false dichotomy by embracing a speculatively-driven 
obsolescence narrative, then yes, we are part of the problem.  Those of us 
in the architecture philosophy community working to foster awareness 
of social justice issues need to sharpen our attitudes about the temporal 
composition of the future, the present, and the past.  This implies the 
abiding necessity for a genuine understanding of the temporal processes 
that constitute the milieu in which we think and act.  There is of course, 
the perennial uncertainty about what future generations will deem relevant. 
We can never know with certainty just what it is that our future selves will 
value that our present selves do not.   
       Under the influence of disembodied market forces, architectural 
obsolescence would appear to transcend politics, state influence, and 
individual subjective interest. It is as if human worth is being judged 
entirely by “objective” external standards not of human construction.  
In short, under speculation human dignity is relegated to the sidelines.  
This should not be the case. It is a mistake to portray what is essentially a 
complex series of interconnected value judgments as if they are disembodied 
objective quantifiable natural laws, because this caricature wrongly masks 
the essential human agency of the ones doing the judging—we the living. 
It is of just this sort of disempowerment that Matta-Clark warns.  Fake 
Estates is simultaneously comic and tragic. Tragic because the notion of a 
propertied estate as the summative expression of human worth propels the 



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continued squandering of natural and architectural 
resources, and the splintering of the social space that 
grounds such worth.  Comic—comically absurd—
because the process of speculation continues to 
generate more of the same. 

ENDNOTES

1. Les Leopold offers an abundance of empirical 
data on the accelerating U.S. wealth gap in Runaway 
Inequality: An Activist’s Guide to Economic Justice, 
New York: Labor Institute Press, 2015.  
2. Richard, Frances. “Mythology: the Evolution 
of Fakes Estates, Part II,” In Odd Lots: Revisiting 
Gordon Matta-Clark’s Fake Estates, ed. Jeffrey 
Kastner, Sina Najafi, and Frances Richard, 51-61. 
New York: Cabinet Books, 2005., p. 53.  
3. Richard, Frances. “Space Between Places: The 
Evolution of Fake Estates, Part I,” In Odd Lots: 
Revisiting Gordon Matta-Clark’s Fake Estates, ed. 
Jeffrey Kastner, Sina Najafi, and Frances Richard, 
38-50. New York: Cabinet Books, 2005. p. 40.
4. Carlinsky, Dan. “ ‘Sliver’ Buyers Have a Field Day 
at City Sales,” New York Times. October 14, 1973. 
http:// www.nytimes.com/1973/10/14/archives/
sliver-buyers-have-a-fieldday. (accessed January 6, 
2018). 
5. ibid.
6. Bessa, Antonio Sergio and Jessamyn Fiore. 
Gordon Matta-Clark: Anarchitect. New York: The 
Bronx Museum of the Arts, 2017., p. 10.
7. See, http:// “all-that-is-interesting.com/1970s-
New York Photos”, (accessed July 5, 2018) 
and https://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/
nyregion/30books.html (accessed July 5, 2018)
8. Richard, Frances. “Remove Your House: 
Gordon Matta-Clark’s Physical Poetics,” In Odd 
Lots: Revisiting Gordon Matta-Clark’s Fake Estates, 



AP . vol 5 . No 1 . 2020

ed. Jeffrey Kastner, Sina Najafi, and Frances Richard, 62-71. New York: 
Cabinet Books, 2005. p. 65. 
9. Richard, Frances. “Space Between Place,” p. 47.  
10. Carlinsky, “ ‘Sliver’ Buyers Have a Field Day at City Sales.”
11.Richard, Frances. “Remove Your House,” p. 66.
12. Lee, Pamela M. Object to be Destroyed: The Work of Gordon Matta-
Clark.  Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000., p. 103.
13. Kroessler, Jeffrey A. “Gordon Matta-Clark’s Moment.” In Odd Lots: 
Revisiting Gordon Matta-Clark’s Fake Estates, ed. Jeffrey Kastner, Sina 
Najafi, and Frances Richard. New York: Cabinet Books, 2005. p. 37.
14. Bois, Yve-Alain and Rosalind E. Krauss.  Formless: A User’s Guide. New 
York: Zone Books, 1997,  p. 120.
15. Diserens, Corrinne. ed. Gordon Matta-Clark. New York: Phaidon 
Press, 2003., p. 188.
16. Lee, p. 94.
17. Wrona, Xavier. “Urbanism and Revolution: 2 or 3 Things about 
Gordon Matta-Clark and Georges Bataille.”  In Gordon Matta-Clark: 
Anarchitect, ed. Antonio Sergio Bessa and Jessamyn Fiore, New York: The 
Bronx Museum of the Arts, 2017, p. 96.
18. Diserens, Gordon Matta-Clark. p. 182.
19. Johnson, Cara M. “Directing Energy: Gordon Matta-Clark’s Pursuit 
of Social Sculpture.”  In Gordon Matta-Clark: Anarchitect, ed. Antonio 
Sergio Bessa and Jessamyn Fiore, New York: The Bronx Museum of the 
Arts, 2017, p. 52.   
20. Lee, p. 109.
21. Abramson, Daniel M. Obsolescence: An Architectural History.  Chicago: 
University of Chicago Press, 2016, p. 7.
22. Abramson, p. 14.  

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