Ruin in Reverse - City Reach/The Skyline: A Timeline of Events

Description

Through this talk I presented a timeline of events that maps the development of a mixed use apartment building on the outskirts of a post industrial town in England. The building - City Reach/The Skyline - is a really existing building which was commissioned and started in 2007 until the work was halted in late 2008, a victim of the financial crash. This structure became the sole focus of an artwork in the form of Facebook page called Ruin in Reverse. Taken from Robert Smithton's experimental essay A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic,New Jersey (1967) the phrase ‘ruins in reverse’ denotes ruins of the future, buildings that haven't fallen into ruin, but instead are built into ruin. Through a sequence of 11 images the talk takes anecdotes, press reports, marketing materials, quotes by thinkers and my own poetic observations and weaves them together to realise, following Aleksi Gan, a tectonic and, following Jencks and Silver, an adhocist version of events that unpicks the crisis, the subsequent age of austerity and its entropic implications.

Period	3 Nov 2017
Event title	Hard Engineering: Propositions for Future Ruins
Event type	Exhibition
Location	Lisbon, Portugal
Degree of Recognition	International