Some stories, sites, photographs, and articles on modern ruination:
Matt Stopera, “Completely Surreal Photos Of America’s Abandoned Malls”. Buzzfeed. April 2, 2014.
Dying shopping malls are speckled across the United States, often in middle-class suburbs wrestling with socioeconomic shifts. Some, like Rolling Acres, have already succumbed. Estimates on the share that might close or be repurposed in coming decades range from 15 to 50%. Americans are returning downtown; online shopping is taking a 6% bite out of brick-and-mortar sales; and to many iPhone-clutching, city-dwelling and frequently jobless young people, the culture that spawned satire like Mallrats seems increasingly dated, even cartoonish. (David Uberti, “The Death of the American Mall”. The Guardian. June 19, 2014.)
DEADMALLS.COM.
Jim Waterson, “19 Haunting Pictures Of The Abandoned 1984 Winter Olympics Venues”. BuzzFeed. February 19, 2014.
Vitaly Chevchenko, “The Urban Explorers of the Ex-USSR”. BBC News. February 11, 2014.
“Tall Storeys: Lucinda Grange’s Daredevil Photography”. The Guardian. February 18, 2014.
The truth is that we’ve probably got rather too many ruins in the world already, and certainly more than we can preserve as we would like to. Left exposed to the elements, ruins just get more and more ruined. That’s the iron law of ruins. And it takes superhuman effort (and vast resources) to halt that natural process. Why add to our problems by excavating more of them? (Mary Beard, “A Point of View: Is the Archaeological Dig a Thing of the Past?”. BBC News Magazine. May 2, 2014.)
The pleasure the human mind takes in ruins is not easy to explain. It has something to do with time. In JMW Turner’s sketches of decayed abbeys that come like Soane’s broodings from the Romantic age, the artist lingers over the details of each crumbly, broken stone. Looking at his studies you get a powerful sense of the time he spent on them and the escape from daily care this involved. A ruin, in other words, is a time machine that releases the mind to wander in nooks and crannies of lost ages – and ages to come. That is why John Constable finds the ruins of Hadleigh Castle so grimly consoling in his painting of this medieval heap quietly decaying, the wars and oppressions it once embodied long forgotten. (Jonathan Jones, “Ruin Lust at Tate Britain Review: ‘A Brilliant but Bonkers Exhibition'”. The Guardian March 3, 2014.)
Nikki Hatchett, “Ruin Lust: Our Obsession with Decay: In Pictures”. The Guardian. March 3, 2014.
The lure of ruins is complex. Ruins inspire the imagination, incite pleasantly melancholy thoughts, and humanise a landscape. Only in the wildest places can we walk without coming across some kind of ruin – some human trace of enigmatic predecessors on the remote pathways. Even in the highest mountains in Snowdonia, you constantly come across quarry workings, abandoned huts and tumbledown walls. The marks of human industry are everywhere. Modern ruins are the strangest of all. (Jonathan Jones, “The Ruin-Hunters who Drove a Car down Mexico’s Forgotten Railways”. The Guardian. June 11, 2014.)
La enorme ruina, a pesar de su abandono y antigüedad, resistió sin problemas el terremoto de 1985, pero aún con estas favorables referencias, no se hizo nada por retomar su construcción. Como suele suceder, motivos de índole político, de planificación social y las eternas mezquindades económicas en la precaria redistribución de los dineros fiscales complotaron en contra del proyecto. Al contrario, el lugar originalmente destinado para salvar y cuidar la vida, se transformó rápidamente en sinónimo de muerte, destrucción y abandono. Numerosos delitos, robos, violaciones y asesinatos, se arraigaron por muchos años tras sus muros derruidos, con lo que ya a fines de los años 80, el edificio era un vergonzoso foco de delincuencia e inseguridad; un “elefante blanco” que día y noche ensombrecía al vecindario y entristecía el paisaje. (Sebastián Aguilar O., “Reportaje: El olvido del Hospital Ochagavía, nuestro elefante blanco”. Neurona Musical. February 11, 2014. Publicado originalmente en Revista Evavisión Cultura 7, Septiembre 2013.)
Gastón Gordillo, “The Politics of Ruins: What’s Hidden Under Rubble?”. Conversation with Léopold Lambert. Archipelago. May 20, 2014.
Posthegemony 