There was a Japanese architect, Arata Isozaki, who wrote about this idea. Specifically about the Ise shrine, which is famously rebuilt every 20 years. It had be

There was a Japanese architect, Arata Isozaki, who wrote about this idea. Specifically about the Ise shrine, which is famously rebuilt every 20 years. It had been popularised as a piece of architecture on par with the Parthenon. He rejected the comparison with western monuments as the Ise exists as a project of continual renewal. Not just in practice, but socially, religiously, and also in style and detail. It is a ship of Theseus, but where the whole ship is replaced, it is not even necessarily the same ship, and besides, the ship is just the tangible form of the communities of teachers and craftsmen and fisherman which exist around it. It is the lost wax part of the cast. (Isozaki was interestingly also a metabolist along with Tange and Kurokawa, which I guess I think is, in a tangential sense, related.) https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262516051/japan-ness-in-architecture/ https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262516051/japan-ness-in-archite... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ise_Shrine https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ise_Shrine