Archinect - News

Two Midwesterners on the quest to document the untapped potential of America's rural architecture

2022-06-22T13:34:00-04:00

It's fascinating to document how architectural and cultural trends are deployed across the country, but we've seen that widespread disinvestment — as well as patterns of renovation and repurposing — add to an already palpable sense of impermanence.

Chicagoans Zach Huelsing and Jon Lehman’s Rural Indexing Project was first launched during the Obama administration and has grown to an archive of more than 1,200 locations spread across 25 different states. Huelsing and Lehman both studied architecture and urban planning respectively, and their backgrounds have been useful in guiding their realization that the built environment in many cases, offers more than suburbanites and city dwellers are exposed to in the easily repeatable, clickbait-laden news cycle.

“So many of the images that are propagated from rural parts of the country focus on decay or on destruction or abandonment, and we're very interested in the ways that buildings, in particular, continue to serve and continue to be adapted in ways that meet the needs of communities," he said. "I think we can actually learn some lessons ... the stories that our photographs tell are stories of adaptive reuse."

'I knew I had to do something': A Bulgarian architect on preserving a monument to her country's ugly past

2022-05-24T12:00:00-04:00

What do you do with a building that was built to glorify an oppressive Communist system but, ravaged by rain and snow and stripped bare by thieves, is now a wreck? Should it be torn down in the spirit of reckoning with history — just as the statues of Confederate generals have been toppled in the United States and monuments to Soviet hegemony have been demolished across Ukraine, particularly since Russia invaded in February?

After receiving two rounds of funding totaling $245,000 from the Getty Foundation in back-to-back years, the ever-popular photographer’s subject is struggling to raise the millions needed to restore it to the former 'glory' seen in what its designer Georgi Stoilov called “morally and materially superior times.”

Bulgarian Architect Dora Ivanova, who is leading a new push to conserve the Buzludzha Monument, says she “does not want to glorify the past” but rather intends to use its grimy edifice as an educational tool that fills a void in her native country’s national conversation about its less-than-sterling communist history.

“We don’t want a museum freezing everything as it was,” she told the New York Times, “but a place for discussion about the past. The idea is to overcome this silence — the shame of talking about what happened.”

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Managed decline: leaving architecture to rot

2020-02-05T15:30:00-05:00

Politicians, planners and policy-makers have frequently debated the benefits of allowing architecture to decay – neither demolishing nor preserving it, but letting entropy take hold. What makes this approach to ruins equally empowering and horrifying?

Writer and artist Owen Vince penned an excellent Failed Architecture essay on the intricate interplay between managed decline and indifferent decay, architectural reverence and conscious abandonment, preservation, erasure, and deliberate ruination.

"To allow a structure to degrade — refusing to affirm it through erasure or preservation — is to look into the eyes of a thing while it suffers through its death," Vince writes. "It is to say: you have no power over me, and I will give you nothing in return."

"An exuberant bygone optimism:" dead malls become poignant architectural relics

2017-09-12T15:39:00-04:00

“I’m looking for subtle signifiers of an exuberant bygone optimism,” [Photographer Tag Christof] said. “Whether people realize it or not, the things I photograph are the direct result of a system that defines progress only in economic terms.” Christof...has spent the last five years crisscrossing the country in an effort to document architectural sites vanishing from the landscape.

Whether you spent your teenage years moodily occupying the food court or have experienced malls primarily as ruin porn, the architectural significance of these former bustling commercial centers can't be overstated. A kind of high water mark of capitalism, the shuttered and demolished malls profiled in this piece for The Outline represent a country whose narrative was mainly shaped by a robust middle class and a belief in national infallibility, two things that are noticeably weakened in the present era. While nostalgia is usually always the end result of oversimplification, it's hard to argue with the fact that in the last few decades the commercial infrastructure of the United States has undergone a dramatic shift, both physically and symbolically.

Redevelopment of Detroit's Michigan Central Station slowly gaining momentum

2017-07-24T13:54:00-04:00

Talk about redeveloping the long-vacant Michigan Central Station in Detroit's Corktown area heated up again Thursday during an announcement about this year's Detroit Homecoming, which will hold the first significant private event in the 104-year-old train station since the mid-1980s. [...] "(Redevelopment of) the depot is going to take a marathon, but we're not at the beginning of the race, we're a few miles into it," said Matthew Moroun, whose father, Matty, bought the building in 1995.

"I said, 'there's one thing: Every time I read a damn national story about Detroit, there's a picture of the train station with the holes in the windows as the international image of the city's decline,'" Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan is quoted saying, recalling his conversation with billionaire businessman — and the building's owner — Matthew Moroun. "I said, 'I want you to put windows in the train station. And if you do that, everything else will be just fine.'"

Renovation costs for the 104-year-old train station — once the tallest rail station in the world and the city's pride but sitting vacant and in an increasingly derelict state since Amtrak service ceased in 1988 — are estimated to exceed $100 million.

Take a look at the already-dilapidated facilities of the Rio Olympics

2017-02-14T12:17:00-05:00

The Olympics are a costly venture. In fact, they’re more like a high-stakes gamble. Countries pour money into the festivities, often going far over budget, with the hope that they’ll receive a return—either through tourist dollars or else through raising the city’s profile internationally. And, after the closing games, those hulking stadiums and sports venues are expensive to maintain. They also can be hard to find a use for. Domestic sports just don’t draw the same crowds as the Olympics do.

Some countries find creative reuses for their venues—from a water park in Beijing to a refugee center in Athens. But, even in the case of both these cities, the stadiums have largely fallen into disrepair due to neglect. The same goes, apparently, for Rio—eventhough the games ended less than a year ago. That’s not really a huge surprise considering the massive political turmoil gripping the country today.

Check out these pictures of the facilities for the Rio Olympics today, via the Guardian.

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Restricted Areas: abandoned Soviet structures photographed in all their eerie beauty

2016-07-25T20:24:00-04:00

Danila Tkachenko is a Russian photographer whose series Restricted Areas crystallises the tendencies of many artists working on themes of the post-Soviet space. As Calvert 22’s Power and Architecture season demonstrates, there is a healthy interest in the abandoned or neglected buildings that once served as landmarks of Soviet ambition: the rack and ruin of utopia. What sets Tkachenko apart is the unforgiving simplicity of his compositions.

All photos from Danila Tkachenko's series Restricted Areas. For far more of these beauties, head over to Calvert Journal.

A more optimistic view on China's ghost cities

2016-04-05T13:15:00-04:00

"Foreigners consider [Kangbashi] to be abandoned. Chinese consider the city to be still developing," [photographer Raphael Olivier] explains. "A lot of the early news reports focus on it being a failed, weird place -- but it's also a huge accomplishment and people there are not necessarily unhappy, there is a huge sense of hope. You have to respect that on a certain level."

Other angles on the effects of China's massive urbanization:

Creepy Photos of Russia’s Crumbling Communist Architecture

2014-08-05T12:51:00-04:00

English photographer Rebecca Litchfield braved radiation and KGB-style interrogation techniques to capture the beauty of this bygone era in a series called Soviet Ghosts. Her work took her to schools, hospitals, factories, and accidentally, a top secret radar installation. “Many of the abandoned buildings are pretty unknown to the public, they are hidden behind tall fences and gates, I think it is easy to just pass without knowing what is inside,” says Litchfield.

Timothy Allen's photographic exploration of a Bulgarian ruin

2012-11-12T11:54:00-05:00

The argument for preserving old buildings is a very strong one that I wholeheartedly support myself. However. On the rare occasions that I get to visit a forgotten building as magnificent as this one, I can’t help day dreaming about some of the incredible monumental relics I know back home and quietly wishing that a few more of them had been left to grow old and perish naturally rather than being unceremoniously hooked up to the proverbial life support machine of modern tourism...

Photographer, Timothy Allen, explores the ruins at the Buzludzha monument in Bulgaria.

How Detroit Became the World Capital of Staring at Abandoned Old Buildings

2012-11-12T11:30:00-05:00

Ruins don’t encourage you to dwell on what they were like in their heyday,before they were ruins. The Colosseum in Rome or the amphitheater at Leptis Magna have never been anything but ruins. They’re eternal ruins. It’s the same here. This building could never have looked more magnificent than it does now, surrounded by its own silence. Ruins don’t make you think of the past, they direct you toward the future. The effect is almost prophetic. This is what the future will end up like...

On Detroit and Ruin

2012-01-12T15:53:00-05:00

The truth I’m trying to present is one about site-specific forgetting. If our history is a history of forgetting how to remember the past, as I am arguing, then the city of Detroit is the engine of our conflicted deliverance. It’s the machinery we’ve used for particular acts of forgetting, each connected to the place and time where the forgetting got done.

This week on Places, two features by Detroit residents contextualize the city's ruins.

In "The Forgetting Machine: Notes Toward a History of Detroit," Jerry Herron reflects on the decline of Hudson's and the improbable hopefulness of the retrofitted car park in the Michigan theater. He critiques two recent books of ruin photography and offers an alternate reading of the city as a machine for forgetting.

In "Detroit Re-Photography," Dave Jordano presents a slideshow of Detroit buildings and landscapes photographed in the early 1970s and in 2010. Photo editor Aaron Rothman notes that Jordano's then-and-now images "implicate us in the changes they depict," and work as a kind of antidote to the cool aestheticism of ruin porn.