Lars Lerup (1940–2025), Swedish architect, theorist and long-time academic presence at UC Berkeley and later dean at Rice University, cultivated a distinctive body of thought that fused architectural speculation with philosophical inquiry, consistently questioning the boundaries between nature and culture, object and subject, form and formlessness; his most influential work, After the City (2001), proposed the notion of the "megalopolitan condition", where urban expansion detaches from the historical city and becomes a loose, discontinuous field shaped by infrastructure, consumption, and ecological violence, a view of suburbia not as failure but as contemporary wilderness — fertile ground for new typologies and hybrid lives; his writing, deeply influenced by phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and systems theory, rejects nostalgic formalism in favor of a raw, often uncomfortable engagement with entropy, banality, and toxicity, themes he continued to explore in The Life and Death of Objects (2022), a dense meditation on the material agency and symbolic fate of designed things in an age of planetary exhaustion; Lerup's unfinished project, tentatively titled Toxic, was reportedly a synthesis of his lifetime concerns: environmental collapse, spatial injustice, and the aesthetics of ruin; as an educator, he pushed generations of students to embrace the speculative and the monstrous, to think of architecture as a cultural medium entangled with waste, myth, and infrastructure, rather than a collection of ideal forms; his intellectual legacy persists not in stylistic schools but in the restless desire to think architecture beyond buildings, as a tool for reading and rewriting the contaminated realities we inhabit.
