Lost Places

Essay ·  Ruin & Won­der

The Pull of the Abandoned

On lost places, and why we can­not quite leave them alone

There is a par­tic­u­lar qual­i­ty of light inside a build­ing that has been left to itself for decades. It comes in at wrong angles, through win­dows half-blocked by ivy or cracked into frost­ed obscu­ri­ty, and it falls on things — a child’s shoe, a cal­en­dar frozen in 1987, a grand piano dis­solv­ing slow­ly into the floor­boards — with a kind of indif­fer­ent grace. No one arranged this. No one is main­tain­ing the effect. And yet it stops you where you stand.

This is, per­haps, the begin­ning of an answer to why lost places exert the pull they do. We are sur­round­ed, most of our lives, by spaces that are meant — designed, curat­ed, explained. The aban­doned resists all that. It sim­ply is, in a state that was nev­er intend­ed, accu­mu­lat­ing atmos­phere the way old wood accu­mu­lates rings. Whether there is some­thing stranger at work — some residue of the lives once lived inside these walls, some­thing that has not entire­ly dis­persed — is a ques­tion prob­a­bly best left open. Not every­thing that feels like a pres­ence needs to be ratio­nalised away.

Urban explor­ers, the self-styled urbex com­mu­ni­ty, have built an entire sub­cul­ture around the chase. They research obses­sive­ly — cross-ref­er­enc­ing satel­lite imagery, old munic­i­pal records, the mur­mured tips of oth­er explor­ers — and then they go, often ille­gal­ly, always care­ful­ly, into places that have been locked up or writ­ten off. Some trav­el inter­na­tion­al­ly for a sin­gle build­ing. A decom­mis­sioned Sovi­et radar instal­la­tion in Latvia. A tuber­cu­lo­sis sana­to­ri­um in the Japan­ese moun­tains, its cor­ri­dors still lined with patient records. A hotel in the Con­golese jun­gle, where the ball­room ceil­ing has become a hang­ing gar­den. The lengths peo­ple go to are, by any ordi­nary mea­sure, unrea­son­able. But then, ordi­nary mea­sures were not real­ly designed with won­der in mind.

  • Won­der­land, Bei­jing —  a half-built theme park aban­doned mid-con­struc­tion in the 1990s, its cas­tle emerg­ing from corn­fields like a half-remem­bered dream
  • Kol­man­skop, Namib­ia —  a dia­mond-rush town swal­lowed to the win­dowsills by the advanc­ing Namib desert; rooms drift­ed with sand up to the ceil­ing cor­nices
  • Hashima Island, Japan —  a con­crete off­shore city, once the most dense­ly pop­u­lat­ed place on earth, sealed and left in 1974; the sea wind does the rest
  • Buzludzha, Bul­gar­ia —  a vast com­mu­nist mon­u­ment on a moun­tain­top, its mosaics peel­ing from the dome inte­ri­or, marooned in cloud for much of the year
  • The Salto Hotel, Colom­bia —  a belle époque resort beside a water­fall, con­vert­ed briefly to a psy­chi­atric facil­i­ty, then sim­ply closed; the water­fall con­tin­ues regard­less

What these places share is not ruin for its own sake, but a kind of sus­pend­ed time — the sense that some­thing was inter­rupt­ed rather than con­clud­ed. We are drawn, it seems, not to end­ings but to ellipses. To the ques­tion mark at the end of a cor­ri­dor. To the stair­case that leads up to a door that no longer opens onto any­thing you can name.

Per­haps we vis­it lost places because the rest of the world is too thor­ough­ly explained. Or per­haps we half-believe, with­out quite admit­ting it, that some­thing is still there — wait­ing, indif­fer­ent to whether we find it or not.