Impermanence

For those of you who haven’t been through my lazy Sunday blog last week (read that here), as the weekend comes closer I basically transform into a sloth. I take my Sundays as an excuse to be as unproductive as physically possible and also to unwind and let go of the stresses that come with the work week. I have found that reading poetry is an extremely effective stress-buster for me. Today I was reading and re-reading some of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poems. One of his works that I find myself constantly drawn to is the poem ‘Ozymandias’. It is a poem about a statue among ruins. This is the statue of Ozymandias, a vainglorious ruler who gloated over all that he had built in his life, but eventually everything was ravaged by the effects of time.

Every time that I go over the piece, it reminds me of the impermanence of architecture. The built form is ever transforming. It is constantly evolving, adapting and reinventing itself. Often, it is built, unbuilt and then built again. It is lasting yet impermanent. A thousand deliberate decisions go into taking a drawing from paper and transforming it into a house. From structure to material to finishes, we put thought and effort into it all, we make it lasting. And yet somehow or the other time catches up with everything. The decay of time may not be something that we would witness in this lifetime, but it is eventual.

-Mannat