A special subset of disaster porn is what we might call infrastructural tragedy: bridge collapses, oil spills, toxic waste dumps, nuclear meltdowns, industrial accidents of all stripes, and, on a slower timescale, the left-behind, dystopian landscapes of post-industrial decay and blight. From William Blake’s “dark Satanic Mills” to Koyaanisqatsi, from the photography of Margaret Bourke-White, Richard Misrach, and David T. Hanson to Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier’s fascination with grain elevators, the impact on the arts made by the horrors of production and the landscapes they’ve left behind—arguably necessary evils that make our contemporary way of life possible—spans disciplines and centuries.
What makes industrial landscapes unique is that they fascinate regardless of whether they’re operating. The hellish Moloch of a petrochemical refinery is as captivating as one of the many abandoned factories one passes by train, and vice versa. That doesn’t mean, though, that all industrial landscapes are created equal. Urban manufacturing factories are considered beautiful—tastefully articulated on the outside, their large windows flooding their vast internal volumes with light; they are frequently rehabilitated into spaces for living and retail or otherwise colonized by local universities. The dilapidated factory, crumbling and overgrown by vegetation, now inhabits that strange space between natural and man-made, historical and contemporary, lovely and sad. The power plant, mine, or refinery invokes strong feelings of awe and fear. And then there are some, such as the Superfund site—remediated or not—whose parklike appearance and sinister ambience remains aesthetically elusive.
Humans, in other words, are enamored with ruin porn. And though our contemporary predilection includes new media developments such as YouTube videos and Instagram posts, the discourse of preoccupation with ruins and what they say about conceptions of beauty and nature (human or otherwise) can be traced back to the eighteenth century, long before the crumbing of automobile factories. The core of this debate first took place at the Royal Academy of Architecture in France in the 1670s and 1680s, when the Academy’s first director, François Blondel, penned his Cours d’Architecture. Basing his text on the three principles of architecture—firmness (structural soundness), commodity (usefulness to its client), and delight (beauty) laid out by the Roman architect Vitruvius—Blondel claimed that beauty was universal and absolute, defined by perfect harmonic proportions achieved by the architects of Greek and Roman antiquity. In a lecture he gave in 1671, Blondel proclaimed: “Through our study, work, and manner of noble, generous, and unselfish devotion, let us restore the name of architecture to its ancient luster. And let us make known by our works that this beautiful art was with justice honored among the ancients, where it was held in a scarcely imaginable esteem as far back in time as the Sacred Books.”