An architect's signature ends with the ribbon-cutting; the building's actual life, adapting to new occupants, absorbing repairs, resisting or yielding to climate and use, continues for decades afterward under nobody's formal authorship. Infrastructural performance names this long tail directly, insisting that a building's real behaviour — how it ages, what maintenance regimes keep it functional, what unplanned uses its occupants invent for it — matters at least as much as the design intent that produced its initial form. VectorAfterlife, carried over from archive theory, applies with unusual precision here: a building persists as a vector of ongoing decisions rather than as a fixed monument, its afterlife shaped continuously by whoever now maintains, adapts or neglects it, largely disconnected from whatever the original architect imagined. Architectural criticism obsessed with opening day is criticising a fraction of the object's actual duration.
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