Modern Ruins

May 12, 2004 12:37 PM

Modern Ruinsare a window into human histories, they tell the stories of the past through the stark presence of objects and architectures. Perhaps the most powerful aspect of ruins is the subject that is missing in the photographs; the people who once worked, lived, walked, talked, slept and dreamed in these spaces.
posted by papercake (5 comments total)

I'm surprised that this site never had a post of it's own,
there have been a few other good urban exploration threads.

New England Ruins
Abandoned places
Urban Exploration, Japanese-style

At first I thought this was same-named site from someone here, but I guess it's sort of a generic term.
posted by milovoo at 1:01 PM on May 12, 2004

I like to post such sites on my blog (those who know don't tell; those who don't know ask)--but my interest is WHY so many people find such things so compelling...any answers?
posted by Postroad at 1:08 PM on May 12, 2004

A good book I read a while back on this topic was Christopher Woodward's "In Ruins". Not modern ruins, per se, but he discusses our relationship with and our "lust" for ruins.
posted by tpl1212 at 1:15 PM on May 12, 2004

I took a quick look at the In Ruins book, noted by tpl, but think--if my memory is right--that he meant not Shelley's Prometheous Unbound but rather this [oem by Shelley:
Ozymandias
By Percy Bysshe Shelley


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I met a traveller from an antique land,






Who said--"Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desart....Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
5 And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
10 My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."
posted by Postroad at 2:00 PM on May 12, 2004

Postroad, photos like these, but with more of a feeling of natural reclaimation, are very popular among my friends and I. We like to see that it's possible for nature to move back in, as my friend said yesterday: "that no matter what we do, in 100 years nature can come back and erase the damage."

I concur.
posted by crazy finger at 2:04 PM on May 12, 2004