How artists have imagined the end of civilisations

{"text":[[{"start":null,"text":"

"}],[{"start":5.9,"text":"One of Sir John Soane’s masterstrokes was to present his designs for the Bank of England as a huge panorama of ruin. In 1830, the architect’s collaborator Joseph Gandy painted the proposed building centuries into the future, after its fall and that of the city around it. The depiction simultaneously (and brilliantly) revealed the plans, sections and spaces of the design in a manner that would not have been possible in a more conventional view, but also suggested that this would be a building to stand equal to the ruins of Rome. In an age which fetishised the antique, that was the highest compliment. Soane, of course, got the job."}],[{"start":45.55,"text":"His obsession with ruins was unusually deep. At his house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, he conjured a fake-ruined “Monk’s Yard”, a gothic pastiche of fragments and stories in which he wove a wonderful, occult myth about the site’s original inhabitant. On his walls he prominently displayed prints of Piranesi’s engravings of Rome’s ruins and on his bookshelves a copy of the artist’s Carceri d’invenzione (“Imaginary Prisons”): a dark fantasy of epic, shadowy spaces of intense complexity and awe-inspiring scale. These were spaces that bridged the classical and the gothic."}],[{"start":81.85,"text":"Now an exhibition of Michael Landy’s drawings at Soane’s house — now the Soane Museum — echoes that fascination. Landy made his reputation with “Break Down” (2001), a profoundly affecting live installation (in a closed-down branch of C&A on Oxford Street, itself a kind of ruin) in which workers systematically destroyed all of the artist’s possessions. Later that year, the atrocity of 9/11 would reintroduce the ruin into the contemporary sensibility in the most visceral and shocking way. After “Break Down”, Landy’s next show was a moving series of sketches of weeds. Weeds appear here too, growing out of the ruins of some of the most recognisable British buildings, from Chatsworth House to the Bank of England and, of course, Sir John Soane’s house."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":129.95,"text":"This is not picturesque ruin though, this is something grungier; rubbish-strewn, graffiti’d, with boarded-up and broken windows, bin bags, tyres and mattresses, the detritus of urban decay. Landy also crosses the Atlantic. The New York Stock Exchange (its front, after all, a huge Roman temple) is here, tattered flags flying. And so is Mar-a-Lago. Best of all is Donald Trump’s Triumphal Arch. The US president’s most recent architectural proposal, as yet unbuilt, is shown projected into ruination, Soane-style. I wonder if it gives it too much credence, if the sketches confer a kind of reality it lacks. The clearly sardonic representation has the opposite effect of imparting a degree of reality. Ruins create an instant cachet, suggesting a future for the often ephemeral. "}],[{"start":181.5,"text":"Intimations of its own end were prominent in postmodernism. In the early 1970s, James Wines designed a series of unforgettable buildings for retailer Best, big-box stores with their walls collapsing, or trees growing from their crumbled corners. They were witty and, in a way, a wistful paean to the collapse of urban retail, which the big boxes were strangling — these stores sat in acres of parking space. A few years earlier, Planet of the Apes had revealed the ruins of the modern metropolis, a curious, longstanding dream from William Morris and Richard Jefferies to Gustav Doré and George Orwell and hundreds of sci-fi dystopias. Often all that is left is a fragment, a piece from which it is necessary to reconstruct. But if the fragment is big enough, it suggests an almost impossible scale from a past inhabited by giants. On the Planet of the Apes it was the head, arm and torch of the Statue of Liberty, for Piranesi it was a fallen fragment of supersized Roman ruins, a past on an incomprehensible scale, Shelley’s “Ozymandias”. "}],[{"start":247.15,"text":"A current exhibition at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence explores this theme of the fragment — the remains of beauty. Soane’s house is itself a palace of fragments, its walls lined with casts and parts of classical sculpture and architecture, each a memory or a translation of something larger, something lost."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":267.85,"text":"The ruin and the fragment present a novelistic view of architecture with beginning, middle and ending all embodied simultaneously. But they are also deeply ingrained in reality. From London’s Tate Modern to the Neues Museum in Berlin, the reinhabited ruin has become a trope of contemporary cultural space, an interior to strike the visitor with awe at the scale of these temples to art or power. More subtly, architects have attempted to work inside ruins while leaving their decline intact. De Vylder Vinck Taillieu’s Caritas psychiatric facility in Ghent is a work of genius in how it weaves intimate new spaces through the remains of a grand old asylum."}],[{"start":309.1,"text":"At the same time our culture is flooded with images of more sinister remains, the ruin-porn of urban explorers. Our experience of these places has become largely vicarious, through influencers, artists, photographers and cinematographers, drone shots and satellite maps. Yet we are living through an age of urbicide. The population of Gaza is living directly in its ruins, because they are still home. Beirut is again haunted by the return of raw concrete frames and ragged twisted steel rebars. There are Kyiv and Kharkiv, war-torn European cities we did not think we would see again. How does that affect our romantic understanding of the landscape of ruins? "}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":351.05,"text":"Half a millennium ago the British landscape was suddenly haunted by the shells of monasteries and abbeys as Henry VIII nationalised the Church. Many were used as quarries for new buildings, many remained as the ruins which later inspired the gothic imagination. Our own ruins are unlikely to be as good. Data centres, exurbs and distribution hubs will not leave our descendants in awe. Though the skeletons of skyscrapers may at least leave something to ponder."}],[{"start":381.25,"text":"Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram, Bluesky and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning"}],[{"start":399.95000000000005,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1792221480_4739.mp3"}