“No one will ever know for sure what precipitated this exodus from this once hallowed city, but overnight, once prestigious office blocks and gleaming restaurants were left vacant, haunted by their quick fall from glory. Parking spaces that had once been reserved for shiny chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royces were left to rot and decay as the offices were abandoned. The rush to flee the city led to a plethora of suburban office and residential developments in places like Sandton and Fourways.”
“The ideas ruins evoke in me are grand. Everything comes to nothing, everything perishes, everything passes, only the world remains, only time endures.” Diderot
Ruin lust: our love affair with decaying buildings - great essay by Brian Dillon
Photo: The ballroom of the 15-floor art-deco Lee Plaza Hotel, Detroit, Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre (slideshow)
![Michigan Theater, Detroit, in 1927 (left) and 2005 (right).
“The old Michigan Theater is one of the most suggestive sights in the whole city of Detroit: neither an abandoned ruin nor a precious, restored fetish, but a working statement about making do with the past. The tenants of the offices adjacent to the theater threatened to move out unless they were provided with secure parking, so that’s what the landlord improvised out of the otherwise useless auditorium. And that is the genius of the place. One can only marvel at the dramatic parable being enacted by the current occupants — the returnees — who drive in and out of the vast space, past the former ticket booth, brought daily into conversation with the past, and what our desires have made of it: the desire to ride Henry Ford’s cars out of town, onward to a better life that lay, we imagined, beyond the city. But still the city is here, outmoded and abandoned but necessarily returned to, that contradictory fact of life rendered in an architectural colloquy so extraordinary it cannot help but be felt.”
Jerry Herron, The Forgetting Machine: Notes Toward a History of Detroit [via @urbanverse]](http://places.designobserver.com/media/images/herron-forgetting-8_525.jpg)
Michigan Theater, Detroit, in 1927 (left) and 2005 (right).
“The old Michigan Theater is one of the most suggestive sights in the whole city of Detroit: neither an abandoned ruin nor a precious, restored fetish, but a working statement about making do with the past. The tenants of the offices adjacent to the theater threatened to move out unless they were provided with secure parking, so that’s what the landlord improvised out of the otherwise useless auditorium. And that is the genius of the place. One can only marvel at the dramatic parable being enacted by the current occupants — the returnees — who drive in and out of the vast space, past the former ticket booth, brought daily into conversation with the past, and what our desires have made of it: the desire to ride Henry Ford’s cars out of town, onward to a better life that lay, we imagined, beyond the city. But still the city is here, outmoded and abandoned but necessarily returned to, that contradictory fact of life rendered in an architectural colloquy so extraordinary it cannot help but be felt.”
Jerry Herron, The Forgetting Machine: Notes Toward a History of Detroit [via @urbanverse]
Terry Farrell proposal, December 2011, for Battersea Power Station as ‘industrial ruin’ and park.
The sad story of Battersea Power Station: a graveyard of architectural visions.
Pripyat, in 2000: full set (Flickr) via Urban Atrophy
Mayfair Theatre, Baltimore. http://www.urbanatrophy.com/ (via Flavorwire)
![Villa Epucuen, Argentina, which was submerged beneath the waters of a salt lake in 1985. The water began to recede in 2009.
Amazing set of photos at The Atlantic [via @cunabula]](http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/infocus/epecuen072011/s_e01_14473443.jpg)
Villa Epucuen, Argentina, which was submerged beneath the waters of a salt lake in 1985. The water began to recede in 2009.
Amazing set of photos at The Atlantic [via @cunabula]
The former Great Northern Railway warehouse, Friar Gate, Derby. Photo by Alison White, part of a new exhibition of her work. Slideshow.
![Milk Street, Boston, after the fire of 1872 (Boston Public Library) [HT http://builtblocks.tumblr.com/]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lek4uu27Tv1qd3zcao1_500.jpg)
Milk Street, Boston, after the fire of 1872 (Boston Public Library) [HT http://builtblocks.tumblr.com/]
“We are used to imagining our cities as permanent and definitive, but it’s amazing how little time it takes for nature to reclaim its spaces.”
City of Ruins
“Camden is where those discarded as human refuse are dumped, along with the physical refuse of postindustrial America. A sprawling sewage treatment plant on forty acres of riverfront land processes 58 million gallons of wastewater a day for Camden County. The stench of sewage lingers in the streets. There is a huge trash-burning plant that releases noxious clouds, a prison, a massive cement plant and mountains of scrap metal feeding into a giant shredder. The city is scarred with several thousand decaying abandoned row houses; the skeletal remains of windowless brick factories and gutted gas stations; overgrown vacant lots filled with garbage and old tires; neglected, weed-filled cemeteries; and boarded-up store fronts.
Camden is the poster child of postindustrial decay. It stands as a warning of what huge pockets of the United States could turn into as we cement into place a permanent underclass of the unemployed, slash state and federal services in a desperate bid to cut massive deficits, watch cities and states go bankrupt and struggle to adjust to a stark neofeudalism in which the working and middle classes are decimated.”
Chris Hedges, ‘City of Ruins’, in The Nation
“In another universe these empty apartments would be offered to the destitute and the homeless as cheap housing. But in a city where more than half the population has left, maybe there just aren’t enough bodies to fill these things anymore.”
Detroit, David Byrne
