What is architecture but the provider of safe, warm boxes in which to live and work? Modernist architects provided us with clean, simple buildings that, although they are functionally adequate, are emotionally dead. Modern architecture has no story to it. A generic, faceless construction company erected its walls to create places without places.
A crumbling castle, on the other hand, gives us little protection from the elements, but has a unique voice, built from ancient use and a long process of decay. It belongs more and more to its landscape as it rejoins the earth.
Ruinenlust is the feeling of pleasure taken from spending time amidst ruins. It is an emotional reaction against modernism and the cult of innovation, a rebellious declaration of value in the past.
Part of ruinenlust is the witnessing of something unquestionably authentic. There is no doubt, when we see a broken building falling apart, that we are in a location full of meaning.
Another side to ruinenlust is an affirmation of transience. Frances Stonor Saunders wrote that, “We do not simply stumble across ruins, we search them out in order to linger amid their tottering, mouldering forms – the great broken rhythm of collapsing vaults, truncated columns, crumbling plinths – and savour the frisson of decline and fall, of wholeness destabilised.” In this sense, ruinenlust is a European equivalent to wabi sabi, the Japanese aesthetic appreciation of things that have been broken. Ruinenlust is the aftermath of mono no aware.
Who among us is not ruined? When we enter a building that has fallen apart, we offer the wrecked portions of our personalities a mirror in which they can finally step to the fore. We acknowledge the towers that have fallen from our own fortresses, and we take reassurance in the certainty that those who now boldly announce their immortal vitality will soon stand where we stand.
Finally, we understand that the permanence of all construction is an illusion. The ironic confirmation of this realization is manifested in the construction of garden follies, purposeful ruins installed where a ruin was wanted but could not be found. Ripped away from our authentic ruined pasts, we create new tragedies to provoke ruinenlust on demand.
