Rough Around the Edges: Subliminal Taste and Decay in the Resuscitation of the Ruins of Modernity

What is it about the old that possesses the potential to inspire emotional and reflective states? Whether to do with embodiments or symbols of the past, or of our embodied reactions to the materialities born of time and use, that which evades our direct reflection empowers architecture to effect us in various dimensions of space. The dialectics of ruination have profound significance in the project of modernity where architecture has become the embodiment of the human resistance against the process of aging and the procession of time. Modernist ideologies have struggled against nature in the denial of mortality, and in this negation of time risk a discontinuity with the past, a repetitive state of newness and a perpetual present. The ruin is perhaps our most apt resource for resistance to this acceleration of the new. Our approach to their embodiments is of profound significance to the welfare of aesthetics.