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Gore Design, Erosion Sink.

(Courtesy the Governess)

This sink is eco friendly and handsome . . . but wouldn't it be perfect if it were made of something other than erosion-resistant concrete? I want to see it fall apart very slowly. Ideally a sink with this design would have a lifespan of 12 years before it completely eroded—long enough to measure out a span of time, not so long that a buyer will complain about (um) washing his money down the drain, but still a sink that would need replacing once or twice or maybe three times during the life of a home. This design, or my idea about this design, brought to mind Félix González-Torres's paper stacks, from which viewers are encouraged to draw pages even as the stack is continually replenished. Also, a conversation I had recently about Christian Boltanski while walking around the National Mall; the latest issue of Art on Paper reprints a conversation in which Boltanski discusses his concept for a Holocaust memorial, a fragile monument that would require a community to periodically repair and replace the thing. I haven't read what Boltanski has to say about it, but to my mind 12 years would again be an appropriate interval for that cycle.

This site favors things that fall apart, centers that cannot hold, memories without referents.

UPDATE: Here's the snippet from that Art on Paper article:

Leslie Camhi: Have you ever been asked to design a public monument?

Christian Boltanski: I was asked twice to design Holocaust monuments in Germany. I didn't want to do them, though I liked my idea. If you make a monument in stone, everyone will soon forget what you have commemorated. The city will pay for the monument in order to forget it. What I wanted to do was to make a monument that would have to be remade each month, using very fragile materials, like the little prayer houses that observant Jews construct for Sukkoth. Of course, the monument would fall down and have to be continually reconstructed. If at any time it disappeared, it would mean that times had changed, and the reasons for its existence were forgotten. The only possible monuments are those that must be continually re-made, that require a continuous engagement, so that people will remember.