Two buildings are dying this week, on opposite sides of the world, by the same mechanism. In Los Angeles, Frank Lloyd Wright's Sturges House, his only Usonian home in the city, built in 1939 as a proof-of-concept for affordable organic architecture, is falling into disrepair at a pace that preservation advocates call deliberate. In Tbilisi, the Rike Tubes complex, a late Soviet brutalist landmark, is facing demolition with the Georgian government showing minimal interest in intervention. Different aesthetics, different politics, same outcome: a building becomes too inconvenient to maintain and too complicated to sell, so neglect becomes the de facto demolition permit.
Demolition by Neglect as Policy
Preservation law in the United States is structured around active threats: a developer with plans, a bulldozer with a date. Demolition by neglect is harder to litigate because it requires proving intent to destroy through inaction, which is philosophically and legally messy. The Sturges House sits privately owned, which means the preservation community can advocate but cannot compel. In Tbilisi, the political calculus is different but structurally parallel: the government treats the Soviet-era building as a liability of association, a monument to a history it would rather not memorialize, so the intervention cost looks higher than the loss. Wright's Usonian project was explicitly about democratizing architecture, making beautiful buildings for middle-income families at scale. That the only surviving example in LA is now a casualty of private property law and market forces is either ironic or entirely predictable.
What We Preserve and Who Decides
The Belgian exhibition covered this week in Hyperallergic is wrestling with the same question from the curatorial side: who decides what counts as worth centering, preserving, showing? The exhibition in Bruges has two contradictory briefs, to decenter Europe while also celebrating Bruges's centrality, and the contradiction is not a failure of curating but an honest map of how preservation actually works. We preserve what powerful institutions decide is worth preserving, and the list always skews toward the already legible. Frank Lloyd Wright is legible. His Usonian experiment for the middle class is not legible as real estate. The Rike Tubes are legible as Soviet architecture. In Tbilisi's current political climate, that is not a selling point. Ed Ruscha spent decades photographing LA's vernacular structures before anyone called them worth saving. By the time the word landmark appears, the building often already knows what it is about to become.