Eleventh International Conference on The Constructed Environment

Abstract

In the celebrated second part of the 1923 novel “To the Lighthouse” by Virginia Woolf, which bears the title “Time Passes”, the author commits herself to a long description of an abandoned building to nature and to the constructed environment. The cause in those days was First World War. This paper explores this literary piece that shows how human-built endeavors transform themselves into fossils of a time, an epoch and an era, creating nature-like artifacts, ruined by human inaction. This text of a high modernistic taste, entails a series of images that worth a recalling, since they predict an anthropocene is set is to begin. As the sheer incipit reads: “Well, we must wait for the future to show”.