As our technologies for envisioning the buildings of the future become ever-more accurate – enabling us not only to walk through, hover over, and inhabit walls, but also to calculate exact quantities of materials, structural load capacities and costs – our fascination for ruin, a process that is governed by laws of nature and time in a manner that is spatially unpredictable and rarely uniform, has also seen a rise in popularity.īlogs such as Ruin Porn, Abandoned America and Architecture of Doom draw from a recent sub-genre of photography, identified as ‘ ruins photography’ or ‘ruin porn’. Lately, architects are sharing an increasing captivation with ruins. Image Courtesy of Flickr CC License / Joey Lax-Salinas Historic mill city ruins in downtown Minneapolis. While ruin porn is the trend at hand, decades before its arrival there was something called ‘ruin value’. The term ‘ruin porn’ is said to have been coined by blogger James Griffioen during a 2009 interview with Vice magazine in which he criticized photographers who scouted down-trodden Detroit for provocative photos. Whatever the cause for this may be, the thrill and enjoyment we get from looking ruin porn is palpable. Images of decaying architecture conjure up unsettling feelings of tragedy and loss, but somehow manage to grip us with its intangible beauty. In the hierarchy of “things the internet likes”, we’d argue that ruin porn sits wedged somewhere between Buzzfeed quizzes and cats. In this article, originally published on 6sqft as " Before There was 'Ruin Porn' There was 'Ruin Value' " Diane Pham expands on the idea of the connection between ruins and architectural value (recently discussed on ArchDaily in an article by Shayari de Silva), delving into the concept's surprising history. However, the phenomenon isn't actually as new as most people believe. The internet has been good to fans of "ruin porn," providing them with a platform for sharing images and even coining the phrase, courtesy of a well-known Detroit blogger in 2009. Through photography, Pavlovic attempts to highlight social issues through an aestheticised approach, allowing viewers to “see with fresh eyes what lies beneath those spots that we pass by on the street.”Ĭontinue reading to see a selection of photographs from the series – hover over the images to see where each villa is located. “Precariously treading along the border between life and death, decay and growth, the seen and the unseen, the past and the present, abandoned places confusingly encompass both at the same time, thus leaving the ordinary passer-by overwhelmed with both attraction and revulsion.”įor her latest series, Dulcis Domus, Pavlovic trekked over fences and past “no trespassing” signs to capture the once-glorious villas, palaces and castles of Europe that have now been left to decay, slowly returning to the Earth that existed before them. “They are never truly dead, yet never really alive,” Pavlovic explains. For her, their appeal lies in their ability to exist on a different temporal plane from the rest of reality – both impossibly ancient and frozen in the present. In his recent photobook Abandoned Asylums, Photographer Matt Van der Velde depicts this earlier period of asylum architecture, when the institutions were built in the belief that the built environment has the power to cure.Īrchitectural photographer Mirna Pavlovic has an obsession with abandoned places. Now, these closed but un-demolished asylums that dot the country are the subject of "ruin porn" that neglects an equally important piece of the buildings’ narrative: the beginning. Beginning in 1955, with the introduction of the antipsychotic drug Thorazine, these institutions were closed in large numbers, never to be reopened. These state-funded asylums were intensely overcrowded and often housed patients in nightmarish conditions in the 20th century. While intellectual interest in ruins has been recorded for centuries, the popularity and controversy of contemporary " ruin porn" can be traced back to somewhere around 2009, when photographer James Griffioen’s feral houses series sparked a conversation about the potential harm in the aesthetic appropriation of urban collapse.Ī favorite subject within this field is the American insane asylum, whose tragic remains carry echoes of the unsavory history of mental illness treatment in the United States. With cracked paint, overgrown vines, rust, and decay, abandoned buildings have carved out a photographic genre that plays to our complex fascination with the perverse remnants of our past.
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