Modern Ruins - The British RAF Base Remains - Rosh.Ozymandias and Ruins in Lord of the Rings.Rosh Ha'Ayin, The Immigrant Camp, Home: A Song.Beyond this border, there are far less limitations on ruin materials.Ĭhippewa Lake Park - Wooden ruins of a roller coaster.īrick ruins in Detroit (from Ghostly Ruins by Harry Skrdla, p. So material does matter, but only until a certain threshold of durability. Ruins are supposed to be 'fragments of an earlier age,' and 10 hours ago doesn't quite qualify. Perhaps it is because part of a ruin is its 'continual transition caused by natural deterioration' (Paul Zucker, Fascination of Decay, p.2) and there is no continual transition in something that moves so quickly. Why does time matter? Perhaps because ruins symbolize a significant loss, and something that comes and goes in a day hardly seems significant. While elements of the revenge of nature do enter into the equation, the lack of time simply precludes this from being considered a ruin. Or, to think about it in terms of an igloo, it will become a ruin in five hours and have disappeared by ten. Author Harry Skrdla gives a guided tour of these marvelous structures at their peak of popularity juxtaposed with their current state of haunted decrepitude. A material that is not durable enough to remain in existence for twenty plus years is therefore not going to turn into a ruin. Ghostly Ruins shows the life and death of thirty such structures, from transportation depots, factories, and jails to amusement parks, mansions, hotels, and entire towns. Depending on the harshness of the climate, twenty years is probably the bare minimum for anything remotely ruin-like. While the example is silly, it illustrates my point about duration: ruins take time to develop. Surprisingly enough, I'm not the first one to mention igloo ruins. Perhaps partly due to our conditioning and partly because of an actual aesthetic superiority, stone ruins also seem to be particularly appealing.ĭespite this predisposition to stone, ruins can actually result from just about any building material that can last long enough. Stone construction has been around for a long, long time, and stones tend to last, whereas wooden buildings decay and disappear more quickly, as do adobe brick structures and igloos. Most likely this is because stone ruins are the most common type.

We tend to think of ruins as the remains of stone structures.