One Three Nine

~1

Abandoned cities and buildings reveal the enormity of our capacity for ruination.

+3

The increasing rates at which ruins have been produced across the urban landscape disclose a narrative of society that has become overly concerned with time and movement, rather than place and permanence. Building today has surrendered itself to the circumstances of accelerated markets, technologies and developments. As a result, building has grown into something that has become more global, generic and market driven.

+9

These abandoned sites do not provide the results we expect from architecture, but instead act as spaces of disorder that serve as a critique of regulated urban space. Spaces in which the interpretation of the city becomes liberated from constraints which determine what should be done and where, indoctrinating the city with meaning. Instead, the aesthetics of abandoned sites offer a unique perspective that stand in contrast to commodified social ways of being. They create an alternative world in which we as spectators, with our assumptions and expectations, are strangers. Thus, there is no connection between the barren structures and their communities, since they have never fulfilled their intended function. And in the case of abandoned cities, the connection has been lost altogether. Nature has claimed them instead. By challenging and deconstructing the imprint of power on the city, the social life and connections of undesired buildings and cities can live on. Spaces of disorder can critique the highly regulated urban spaces which surround them. They are indispensable eyesores.