АRCHITECTURAL RUINS PHENOMENON
Pages 7-13
Modern academic research has a large area of behaviorist and environmental studies focusing on the spatial factor employed to explain the reality. The concept of understanding ruins as monuments of the past dates back to the days of the Renaissance. Exposed to destruction in the past ages, they have acquired numerous meanings, thus, becoming a source of ideas about the past. It is appropriate to speak about “historic” and “modern” ruins. In the first case, the time distance between the moments of construction and perception of ruins is quite large. In the second case, ruins comprise the outcome of inaccurate design, construction or maintenance of buildings, natural disasters or wars. They also have a symbolic and semantic content. The interest in the phenomenon of ruins has brought forth the notion of«false ruins» (in landscape parks) and «future ruins» (paintings and fiction). The spatial and time scale of the urban environment (including ruins) generates a powerful symbolic content. Ruins often symbolize a pathological state of the society that strives to minimize the presence of such objects in the everyday life. Developing culture prefers creative motives and tends to replace destructive ones. Since the 1980s, the phenomenon of architectural ruins has been rapidly expanding its presence in the virtual space due to:1) the complexity of visual assessments because of the lack of familiar structural elements to be employed to estimate the size of buildings; 2) the violation of the balance of space, mass, shape, typical of architectural creations; 3) the dominance of the deaf mass (remains of columns, walls, etc.); 4) the lack of spatial reference, volume, symmetry, reinforcing irrationality in perception of ruins (the loss of the original image destroys the unity of form and content); 5) the loss of opinions on the functional purpose of buildings; 6) exclusive picturesque ruins; 7) background lighting, colour and texture of surfaces.The complexity of experiences related to the perception of ruins is determined by many circumstances. Special attention should be paid to: a) the presentation of ruins as a particular case of the architectural sphere; 2) the development of typology of ruins, important for the understanding of the phenomenon as a whole; 3) the study of particular architectural ruins in the virtual reality; 4) the objective of identifying the potential impact that the phenomenon of architectural ruins may produce on the mankind.
DOI: 10.22227/1997-0935.2013.8.7-13
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