Beksiński’s Bone Architecture

Some more paintings of the famous Polish surrealistic artist Zdzisław Beksiński (1929–2005).



Beksiński used different techniques to achieve this characteristic mood of death and decay. One of them was the mixture of organic structures with architecture. Live is converted into dead material, bone architecture.

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.

Bone House Ruins

Because there are ruins – especially gothic ones - which remind of skeletons it seems fascinating that there are even ruins which are built from bones.

In Arctic Canada can still be seen the rest of Inuit huts built from whale bones. These white bones in the green landscape must be impressive (I know them only by photos).


But that’s not all. In Siberia they found the rests of the huts of mammoth hunters built from mammoth bones. These bones were the only material to make shelter on the barren tundra.

Gothic skeletons

One of the main reasons why gothic ruins seems in many cases the best ones, the most morbid ones, is their resemblance with a gigantic skeleton. It’s immanent in their architecture that the fragile structure, the flying buttresses and the ribbed vaults remind of a dead body.

That was already realized in older days and many said that the Gothic church symbolized the skeleton of Christ, while the Romanesque church was the flesh body of Christ. Though the idea was clear (and morbid enough) there was no way to play with it. Sure that Romantic painters used that association to show a kind of "Memento mori" when they painted gothic ruins. But it was only a kind of reminiscence.

So the idea was on the table but nobody could make use of it, because that mighty ribs could only be a symbol of the body of Christ. Probably the first who exploited it was the Swiss artist H.R. Giger who became famous for his design for the film Alien (1980 he got an Oscar for that).

Like in many of his artworks he mixed in Alien biological and mechanical elements with an architecture which is abandoned a long time a ago and reminds of bones and has a strong subliminal gothic influence. The best example is the bar in the H.R. Giger Museum in Château St. Germain, Gruyères, Switzerland.




More photos on the website