Margot's Dilemma: Exit Through the Back Door

Abstract

What happens when a building ceases to exist? What happens when the reality of an edifice or a work of art becomes subject to reconstruction? This essay makes the argument that architecture can continue surviving not as an object –a building– but rather as a document, a story. Told through the dilemma uncovered in a letter from Margot Wellington to Gordon Matta-Clark, this essay examines the relationship between the archive, architecture and the arts. In this sense, the temporality of architecture is put into question, for its history can be reproduced and recreated through the documents and papers held in the archive, making us wonder: which came first, the building or the document?