Standing in contrast to these aesthetically and socially regulated spaces are the neglected sites of industrial ruins, places on the margin which accommodate transgressive and playful activities. Providing a different aesthetic to the over-designed spaces of the city, ruins evoke an aesthetics of disorder, surprise and sensuality, offering ghostly glimpses into the past and a tactile encounter with space and materiality. Tim Edensor highlights the danger of destroying such evocative sites in order to build new developments. It is precisely their fragmentary nature and lack of fixed meaning that render ruins deeply meaningful. They blur boundaries between rural and urban, past and present and are intimately tied to memory, desire and a sense of place. Stunningly illustrated throughout, this book celebrates industrial ruins and reveals what they can tell us about ourselves and our past.
Author(s): Tim Edensor
Year: 2005
Language: English
Pages: 288
Preliminaries......Page 1
Contents......Page 5
Acknowledgements......Page 7
1 Introduction......Page 9
2 The Contemporary Uses of Industrial Ruins......Page 29
3 Ruins and the Disordering of Space......Page 61
4 Materiality in the Ruin Waste Excess and Sensuality......Page 105
5 The Spaces of Memory and the Ghosts of Dereliction......Page 133
6 Conclusion......Page 173
Bibliography......Page 181
Index......Page 191
