Within the last two centuries, unprecedented changes reshaped the built environment. More and more structures were built to meet the needs of an expanding human population. Yet, with chilling efficiency, aerial warfare leveled whole blocks of them. Recent acts of iconoclasm have destroyed precious examples of our architectural heritage. And almost as suddenly as they were built, the industrial factories and warehouses constructed to advance our modern societies began to decline, and we were confronted with the detritus of the manufacturing age. The objects that were partly responsible for ushering in both modern industrialized lifestyles and our concerns about conservation were no longer actively transforming our lived environments by their means of production, but instead sat idle, inviting questions about what to do with them and what they could mean in the future. To many people’s thinking, they existed as causes of environmental ruin, or reflected the most ruinous impulses of humanity.

But they not only caused ruin or reflected ruinous tendencies. They are ruins, in the ageless sense of that term, or so this work will argue. For as quickly as they fell after their construction, they also began to invite a timeless aesthetic attention, the kind that is only invited by certain sorts of decaying architecture. As vegetation crept into these abandoned spaces, so did artists and adventurers, taking photographs, making music, leaving graffiti and art installations. The structures appeared broken and abandoned but beguiling, perhaps more so than they had been when whole and fully functioning. They prompted speculation about artistic form, the nature of humanity and the passage of time, and the curious analogies that can be drawn between human buildings and human bodies. They became the subjects of countless online photo galleries and appeared in books dedicated to modern ruins. In spite of what they had done, or the environmental destruction they represented, they came back to life as aesthetic objects, like many other, ruined, built remnants strewn throughout the history of architecture. Like those ruins, and like the fire that has caused so many of them, they occasion genuinely ambivalent contemplation: they appear ominous and inviting, destructive and regenerating, arresting, atavistic, and sublime all at the same time (Fig. 1.1).

Interest in ruins, including contemporary ruins, is not without its complications. It is a fascination that can be as ambiguous as the structures themselves. In earlier centuries, writers such as Henry James and John Ruskin wondered about our attraction to damaged architecture and what it says about us; as James writes in The Italian Hours, “To delight in the aspects of sentient ruin might appear a heartless pastime, and the pleasure, I confess, shows the note of perversity.”¹ The renewal as well as inspiration ruins can generate often follow violence, economic or other social struggle, natural disaster, and collective sorrow, and one may well wonder not only why these structures cause aesthetic interest, but whether they should. Isn’t it odd to enjoy scenes of destruction or abandonment? To photograph them? For example, as a number of Rust Belt buildings disintegrated in the last decades of the twentieth century, the residents of their neighborhoods, including many in Detroit, vehemently took issue with the attention paid to their ruined buildings, claiming it was exploitative, insensitive to real human suffering, and its photographs were pornographic—“ruin porn,” to be exact.

In fact, it might be impossible for some people to see any aesthetic interest in these structures at all. Some of them are the decaying remainders of massive machinery. They were not built to provide aesthetic gratification, but to accomplish certain functions, and as many philosophers have noted, functionality is one of the essential elements of architecture’s identity. How could buildings built to do something decidedly non-aesthetic be regarded as beautiful or aesthetically interesting? For that matter, how could they be considered the same as the ruins of much earlier centuries? And in any case, now that many of them are no longer fulfilling their functions, what should be done about them?

This book addresses these questions and serves as an invitation to further philosophical reflection about ruins in general and modern ruins in particular. It has the following principal aims. First of all, it provides an account of our centuries-long interest in ruins. It stresses that, contrary to what some aestheticians have recently argued, the ruined structures of the past two centuries belong within that tradition, and the era of ruins is not over, because more recently built structures are capable of generating the same kinds of aesthetic attention as the ruins of the much more distant past. Modern ruins are legitimate subjects of aesthetic and cultural interest, and although this interest may be paradoxical, I show that it is not unjustifiable. Drawing on recent work on function in aesthetics, especially Glenn Parsons and Allen Carlson’s Functional Beauty,² I argue that ruins’ new aesthetic uses can change, and eventually outweigh, the unpleasant associations many people have with ruins and their reasons for being ruins. The aesthetically inclined visitors to ruined places can become architects of a new order, following up on the work of disaster and the gradual return of nature. This process can be as unintentional, but powerful, in changing ruins as plants and trees, fire, and the inexorable hand of time. I provide examples of places that have made or are making this transition and exhibiting this new use and value. Finally, I claim that this new aesthetic value can help us in making decisions about what to do with modern ruined structures. For while they unquestionably fit within the ruin tradition, they are also often located in spaces that invite or require reuse or regeneration. I suggest ruins that exhibit significant aesthetic or cultural value should be retained, and, when possible, their episode of ruination should be integrated into their new lives going forward (Fig. 1.2).

Recent philosophical analysis of ruins is scant, and no work fulfills the objectives of this one—(1) outlining a philosophical account of how ruins acquire their value, as ruins; (2) thus providing a decision procedure that can assist us in mediating the conflicting positive and negative responses ruins may cause; and (3) claiming that the ruins of industry being reused in park and landscape settings are best understood as ruins, not only because that is what they resemble, but because, as ruins, they are no longer active instruments of environmental destruction. The following chapters mark a genuinely unique contribution to the philosophical literature, for while there are published works of “ruin porn” and philosophical works on the aesthetics of ruins, there are no recent texts combining research on contemporary ruins and “ruin porn” with philosophical analysis of the value of ruins as well as the history of the ruin tradition. The combination of analysis, examination of case studies, and photography one finds in this text is also unusual. The details and photos of the case studies examined in this book—some famous; some rarely discussed before—support its account of the way ruins acquire new value after their ruination. (Most of the photographs in the following chapters illuminate the case studies, though some supplement philosophical claims; almost all of them, save Fig. 7.​2, are photographs of modern transitioning sites or ruins.) This work makes an opening foray into a truly fascinating new development in environmental aesthetics, one that...