The Aesthetics of Ruins

Ruins are not simply buildings that have failed. They are a distinct aesthetic category, with their own pleasures and their own moral complications. The appeal of a ruined building — its picturesque quality, the sense it gives of time made visible — is genuine, but it is also purchased at a cost that it is worth examining.

The eighteenth-century taste for ruins, which produced both a genre of painting and a fashion for building artificial follies in aristocratic gardens, located the pleasure of ruins in the emotion they evoked: the melancholy contemplation of time, impermanence, and the transience of human achievement. This is a real emotional experience and one that ruins facilitate unusually well.

But there is another kind of ruin — not the picturesque remains of the ancient world but the abandoned infrastructure of recent industrial history, the decaying housing blocks, the empty factories, the post-industrial landscapes that have become the subject of what is sometimes called "ruin porn." The aestheticisation of these places is more complicated. They represent not the distant past but failures that have living victims — communities displaced, livelihoods lost, environments poisoned.

Looking at these places with an aesthetic eye is not necessarily wrong. The formal qualities of decay — texture, colour, the interaction of industrial materials with vegetation — are genuinely interesting. But the aesthetic response can function as a distance mechanism, converting ongoing social catastrophe into a photographic subject and thereby making it comfortable to contemplate rather than uncomfortable to address.

This does not mean we should not look. It means that looking at ruins should probably be accompanied by some attention to what made them ruins, and why we find them beautiful.