Death Cult

Some photos of the sensational Sedlec Ossuary in Kutná Hora (Czech Republic). An impressive example how death was celebrated in the Baroque.

Jurassic Park Ruins

MosaTrajectum is a Golf Resort with villas and apartments near the Spanish city of Murcia. The whole village is walled in by some pseudo ruins. It looks like the architect took his inspirations mainly from Jurassic Park.

Lovely Ruin Elements

Chelsea Market in Manhattan. A shopping mall and fruit market in Manhattan constructed 2006 in an old factory. There are a lot of elements quoting ruin and decay.

Decorative Elements

Recently I stumbled about this nice piece of postmodern decoration. Some doors to a public park were produced with great efforts that they look like they were half broken by rust.
But it’s all a typical romantic pretension of decay.

Best is the contrast if you see these pieces in their real modern environment.

Embedded in Nature

These fascinating buildings belong to the Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Center in Noumea, New Caledonia. It was designed by the famous Italian architect Renzo Piano, known for the Centre Pompidou.


Even though the buildings are a reference to the traditional huts of the Kanak tribes living in New Caledonia, there is also a strong impression of decay. The buildings seem to fall apart, to be covered by the vegetation, becoming once again part of nature.

Disaster Architecture

The Cahill Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics in Pasadena, California was designed by the Californian firm of architects Morphosis and finished in 2009.

The terra cotta facade is fragmented and reminds of buildings after earthquakes. To me it looks like the quotation of disasters like that in Chile 2010 – in this case more a kind of anticipation.

Kinda Atlantikwall Bunkers

On the Costa Brava in Spain I discovered this strange piece of modern architecture. Half a dozen cubical beach cabins are hosting a sailing school.



What I found really interesting – besides the neglected condition – was the inclined construction, which gives the illusion that the cabins where half sunken in the sand.

It reminded me immediately of the well known pictures of the old German bunkers of the Atlantikwall in France.

Anticipating Disasters

The Historic Museum in Ningbo (China) by Wang Shu of Amateur Architecture looks like an earthquake or a tornado have passed by. The walls are asymmetric, inclined and composed of different materials.



The architect Wang Shu explained, that fragments of demolished buildings from all over the region were used to construct the walls of the museum. This is part of local traditional building techniques called "wa pan", developed by local farmers to cope with frequent natural disasters.

Bone Architecture

Santiago Calatrava Valls is an internationally famous Spanish star architect and designer. In his native Valencia he designed the "Ciutat de les Arts i les Ciències" (constructed 1996-2009).

Despite the gigantic museum is far from being something like a ruin, the whole construction resembles the skeleton of a whale and uses therefore the old romantic connection between ruins, skeletons, death and decay. Though Calatrava’s construction is of a clean, fresh washed white death and decay are omnipresent.

One small stone, one giant leap in ruin history

Probably it’s neither a nice photo nor an impressive ruin, nevertheless it is one of the most important buildings in the history of ruins.

It is the so called Ponte Ruinante (the ruined bridge) part of the Palazzo Barberini in Rome and probably designed by the Italian artist and architect Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680). The currently derelict bridge was already by Bernini constructed as a ruin with one of the vault stones looking as it was coming down. Bernini tried to imitate the ancient Roman ruins. As far as I know the Ponte Ruinante is maybe the first artificial ruin, the first folly ruin.

Colosseum Ruins for Dallas

Not long ago I stumbled upon this interesting project called CO-OP CANYON by the architecture firm Standard. It was planned as a sustainable, zero carbon, no waste water community of modern, terraced urban dwelling house in Dallas.



This architects claimed that they draw their inspirations from the villages of the Anasazi Indians. But I recognize only the Roman Colosseum. Even better as the original this quotation of a ruin is covered with plants.

Nazi Architecture – Ruin Value

Probably every modern interpretation of ruins is connected with some kind of fascination with death and decay. But the necrophilic climax reached that perspective with Nazi architecture. Nearly everybody knows some photos of these monstrous gigantic buildings, which were and should be constructed to glorify Hitler's 'Thousand Year Reich.

So far, so good, we are used to the gigantomania of totalitarian dictators and societies.

But Hitler and his favorite architect Albert Speer went much further. They envisioned their buildings as ruins even before they were built. The buildings were intended to serve as monuments of the greatness of Nazi Germany. It’s clear that this didn’t refer to the Germans but only to the Nazi leaders. Hitler and Speer saw themselves as the new Pharaohs or the Roman Emperors. The people, the praised "Volk" had only to build the monuments, so that they later could stare at them with open mouth.

To achieve these effects Speer developed the so called "Theory of Ruin Value". In his memoirs he wrote that he wanted "to build structures which even in a state of decay after hundreds or thousands of years would more or less resemble Roman models. To illustrate my idea I had a romantic drawing prepared. It showed what the reviewing stand of the Zeppelin Field would look like after generations of neglect, overgrown with ivy, its columns fallen, the walls crumbling here and there, but the outlines still clearly recognizable."

With that drawing he convinced Hitler, who was exited while many of the other Nazi leaders were scandalized because of that obvious necrophilia.

When Hitler’s dreams had transformed Germany into a landscape of ruins, he said that the Germans deserve to vanish because "those who remain alive after the battles are over are in any case inferior persons, since the best have fallen."

Skyscrapers coming down

In modern architecture there is a kind of trend – at least it seems so to me – to construct buildings which look like ruins or remind of destruction. I don’t know if that is a reaction to the destruction of the World Trade Center or if it is only a kind of postmodern joke playing with its own hubris.




One of the best examples is the MahaNakhon tower, which shall be build in Bangkok. The project is headed by Ole Scheeren, one of the leading architects of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) and also the lead architect on Beijing’s CCTV headquarters.