Abandonment and the Aesthetics of Decay

Abandonment and the Aesthetics of Decay PDF Author: Sarah Bosworth
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Glazes
Languages : en
Pages : 30

Get Book Here

Book Description

The Aesthetics of Decay

The Aesthetics of Decay PDF Author: Dylan Trigg
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9780820486468
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 308

Get Book Here

Book Description
In The Aesthetics of Decay, Dylan Trigg confronts the remnants from the fallout of post-industrialism and postmodernism. Through a considered analysis of memory, place, and nostalgia, Trigg argues that the decline of reason enables a critique of progress to emerge. In this ambitious work, Trigg aims to reassess the direction of progress by situating it in a spatial context. In doing so, he applies his critique of rationality to modern ruins. The derelict factory, abandoned asylum, and urban alleyway all become allies in Trigg's attack on a fixed image of temporality and progress. The Aesthetics of Decay offers a model of post-rational aesthetics in which spatial order is challenged by an affirmative ethics of ruin.

Abandonment and the Aesthetics of Decay

Abandonment and the Aesthetics of Decay PDF Author: Sarah Bosworth
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Glazes
Languages : en
Pages : 30

Get Book Here

Book Description


Aesthetics of Abandonment

Aesthetics of Abandonment PDF Author: Christopher W. Luhar-Trice
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 0615260330
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 126

Get Book Here

Book Description
Dixie Square Mall opened in 1966...closed in 1979...and remains standing in 2008. The local shopping mall - not too far from home - a place to shop, eat, work, and socialize. For the people of Harvey, Illinois Dixie Square Mall was this and more. Since it's closing in 1979, Dixie Square has become something else: a crumbling eyesore and a haven for crime and gang activity. Christopher W. Luhar-Trice's photographs from The Dixie Square Project beautifully document this curious artifact of American consumerism. This full-color book includes historical information about Dixie Square, maps, and over 50 color photographs by the artist telling the visual story of America's most famous dead mall, best known for it's appearance in the 1980 film The Blues Brothers. For updates and more information please visit the companion website: www.dixiesquareproject.com

Beauty in Decay

Beauty in Decay PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780955912146
Category : Abandoned buildings
Languages : en
Pages : 192

Get Book Here

Book Description
Through dilapidated tunnels, spectral crypts and bizarre futuristic settlements, imaginative photographers create images that allow you to surrender to your imagination, and throw new light on the boundaries you've been forced to accept.

The Dead City

The Dead City PDF Author: Paul Dobraszczyk
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1786732408
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Dead City unearths meanings from such depictions of ruination and decay, looking at representations of both thriving cities and ones which are struggling, abandoned or simply in transition. It reveals that ruination presents a complex opportunity to envision new futures for a city, whether that is by rewriting its past or throwing off old assumptions and proposing radical change. Seen in a certain light, for example, urban ruin and decay are a challenge to capitalist narratives of unbounded progress. They can equally imply that power structures thought to be deeply ingrained are temporary, contingent and even fragile. Examining ruins in Chernobyl, Detroit, London, Manchester and Varosha, this book demonstrates that how we discuss and depict urban decline is intimately connected to the histories, economic forces, power structures and communities of a given city, as well as to conflicting visions for its future.

Counterpreservation

Counterpreservation PDF Author: Daniela Sandler
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501706802
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Berlin, decrepit structures do not always denote urban blight. Decayed buildings are incorporated into everyday life as residences, exhibition spaces, shops, offices, and as leisure space. As nodes of public dialogue, they serve as platforms for dissenting views about the future and past of Berlin. In this book, Daniela Sandler introduces the concept of counterpreservation as a way to understand this intentional appropriation of decrepitude. The embrace of decay is a sign of Berlin's iconoclastic rebelliousness, but it has also been incorporated into the mainstream economy of tourism and development as part of the city's countercultural cachet. Sandler presents the possibilities and shortcomings of counterpreservation as a dynamic force in Berlin and as a potential concept for other cities. Counterpreservation is part of Berlin's fabric: in the city's famed Hausprojekte (living projects) such as the Køpi, Tuntenhaus, and KA 86; in cultural centers such as the Haus Schwarzenberg, the Schokoladen, and the legendary, now defunct Tacheles; in memorials and museums; and even in commerce and residences. The appropriation of ruins is a way of carving out affordable spaces for housing, work, and cultural activities. It is also a visual statement against gentrification, and a complex representation of history, with the marks of different periods—the nineteenth century, World War II, postwar division, unification—on display for all to see. Counterpreservation exemplifies an everyday urbanism in which citizens shape private and public spaces with their own hands, but it also influences more formal designs, such as the Topography of Terror, the Berlin Wall Memorial, and Daniel Libeskind's unbuilt redevelopment proposal for a site peppered with ruins of Nazi barracks. By featuring these examples, Sandler questions conventional notions of architectural authorship and points toward the value of participatory environments.

Perennial Decay

Perennial Decay PDF Author: Liz Constable
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812216784
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 327

Get Book Here

Book Description
When Oscar Wilde was convicted of gross indecency in 1895, a reporter for the National Observer wrote that there was "not a man or a woman in the English-speaking world possessed of the treasure of a wholesome mind who is not under a deep debt of gratitude to the marquis of Queensberry for destroying the high Priest of the Decadents." But reports of the death of decadence were greatly exaggerated, and today, more than one hundred years after the famous trial and at the beginning of a new millennium, the phenomenon of decadence continues to be a significant cultural force. Indeed, "decadence" in the nineteenth century, and in our own period, has been a concept whose analysis yields a broad set of associations. In Perennial Decay, Emily Apter, Charles Bernheimer, Sylvia Molloy, Michael Riffaterre, Barbara Spackman, Marc Weiner, and others extend the critical field of decadence beyond the traditional themes of morbidity, the cult of artificiality, exoticism, and sexual nonconformism. They approach the question of decadence afresh, reevaluating the continuing importance of late nineteenth-century decadence for contemporary literary and cultural studies.

Ruin Memories

Ruin Memories PDF Author: Bjørnar Olsen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317695801
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 511

Get Book Here

Book Description
Since the nineteenth century, mass-production, consumerism and cycles of material replacement have accelerated; increasingly larger amounts of things are increasingly victimized rapidly and made redundant. At the same time, processes of destruction have immensely intensified, although largely overlooked when compared to the research and social significance devoted to consumption and production. The outcome is a ruin landscape of derelict factories, closed shopping malls, overgrown bunkers and redundant mining towns; a ghostly world of decaying modern debris normally omitted from academic concerns and conventional histories. The archaeology of the recent or contemporary past has grown fast during the last decade. This development has been concurrent with a broader popular, artistic and scholarly interest in modern ruins in general. Ruin Memories explores how the ruins of modernity are conceived and assigned cultural value in contemporary academic and public discourses, reassesses the cultural and historical value of modern ruins and suggests possible means for reaffirming their cultural and historic significance. Crucial for this reassessment is a concern with decay and ruination, and with the role things play in expressing the neglected, unsuccessful and ineffable. Abandonment and ruination is usually understood negatively through the tropes of loss and deprivation; things are degraded and humiliated while the information, knowledge and memory embedded in them become lost along the way. Without even ignoring its many negative and traumatizing aspects, a main question addressed in this book is whether ruination also can be seen as an act of disclosure. If ruination disturbs the routinized and ready-to-hand, to what extent can it also be seen as a recovery of memory as exposing meanings and presences that perhaps are only possible to grasp at second hand when no longer immersed in their withdrawn and useful reality? Anybody interested in the archaeology of the contemporary past will find Ruin Memories an essential guide to the very latest theoretical research in this emerging field of archaeological thought.

Reviewing the Past

Reviewing the Past PDF Author: Zoltán Somhegyi
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 178660762X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Get Book Here

Book Description
Though constantly in decay, ruins continue to fascinate the observer. Their still-standing survival is a loud affirmation of their presence, in which we can admire the struggle against the power of Nature aesthetically manifested during the decay. This volume takes a thematic approach to examining the aesthetics of ruins. It looks at the general aspects of architectural decay and its classical forms of admiration and then turns towards ruins from both classical and contemporary periods, from both Western and non-Western areas, and with examples from “high art” as well as popular culture. Combining the methodologies of art history, aesthetics and cultural history, this book opens up new ways of looking at the phenomenon of ruins.

Beautiful Terrible Ruins

Beautiful Terrible Ruins PDF Author: Dora Apel
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813574099
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 229

Get Book Here

Book Description
Once the manufacturing powerhouse of the nation, Detroit has become emblematic of failing cities everywhere—the paradigmatic city of ruins—and the epicenter of an explosive growth in images of urban decay. In Beautiful Terrible Ruins, art historian Dora Apel explores a wide array of these images, ranging from photography, advertising, and television, to documentaries, video games, and zombie and disaster films. Apel shows how Detroit has become pivotal to an expanding network of ruin imagery, imagery ultimately driven by a pervasive and growing cultural pessimism, a loss of faith in progress, and a deepening fear that worse times are coming. The images of Detroit’s decay speak to the overarching anxieties of our era: increasing poverty, declining wages and social services, inadequate health care, unemployment, homelessness, and ecological disaster—in short, the failure of capitalism. Apel reveals how, through the aesthetic distancing of representation, the haunted beauty and fascination of ruin imagery, embodied by Detroit’s abandoned downtown skyscrapers, empty urban spaces, decaying factories, and derelict neighborhoods help us to cope with our fears. But Apel warns that these images, while pleasurable, have little explanatory power, lulling us into seeing Detroit’s deterioration as either inevitable or the city’s own fault, and absolving the real agents of decline—corporate disinvestment and globalization. Beautiful Terrible Ruins helps us understand the ways that the pleasure and the horror of urban decay hold us in thrall.