Ruins /

Includes bibliographical references (pages 228-231) and index.

Modernity in ruins -- The military-industrial sublime -- Drosscape -- The future now.

Modernity in ruins. -- The salon of 1767 / Denis Diderot (1767) -- The ruin / Georg Simmel (1911) -- The pleasures of limestone / Adrian Stokes (1934) -- A note on new ruins / Rose Macaulay (1953) -- The Arcades Project / Walter Benjamin (1927-40) -- Dust / Georges Bataille (1929) -- Dust / Celeste Olalquiaga (1998) -- Separation and restoration / Susan Stewart (1996) -- Theses on the philosophy of history / Walter Benjamin (1940) -- Memoirs of the blind / Jacques Derrida (1990) -- Towards a new architecture / Le Corbusier (1923) -- A tour of the monuments of Passaic, New Jersey / Robert Smithson (1967) -- Authentic ruins / Andreas Huyssen (2006) -- Architecture dismembered / Anthony Vidler (1992) -- The anorexic ruins / Jean Baudrillard (1989) -- Obscene homes / Svetlana Boym (2001) -- Leptis magna / Geoff Dyer (2004) -- Modernist ruins, filmic archaeologies / Giuliana Bruno (2003) -- Dorit Margreiter / Barbara Clausen (2008) -- Is modernity our antiquity? / Mark Lewis (2006) -- Sifting defunct modernity in search of something useful / Martin Herbert (2009) -- It was what it was : modern ruins / Gilda Williams (2010) -- The military-industrial sublime. -- A handful of dust / J.G. Ballard (2006) -- Bunker archaeology / Paul Virilio (1975) -- The weight of time / James Lingwood (2002) -- Sound mirrors / Tacita Dean (1999) -- The architecture of life / Darian Leader (2006) -- The light gleams an instant / Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith (2008) -- Susan Hiller : The J. Street Project / Jörg Heiser (2005) -- Walid Raad/The Atlas Group / Mark Beasley (2006) -- Drosscape. -- The crystal land / Robert Smithson (1966) -- Invisible cities / Italo Calvino (1972) -- Stumped / Eric Schwab and Walead Beshty (2005) -- Imaging / Patrick Keiller (2010) -- The ruins of memory / Rebecca Solnit (2007) -- Circling the centre / Ralph Rugoff (2006) -- Lights out for the territory / Iain Sinclair (1997) -- Mike Nelson : 24A Orwell Street / Richard Grayson (2006) -- Hinterland / Jeremy Millar (2002) -- Vera Lutter : spectres of negation / Jonathan Crary (2004) -- A victim and a viewer : some thoughts on anticipated ruins / Magali Arriola (2005) -- The archivist of urban waste : Zoe Leonard, photographer as rag-picker / Tom McDonough (2010) -- The future now. -- Fernsehturm / Tacita Dean (2001) -- The dead town / Martin Herbert (2005) -- The utopian past / Lytle Shaw (2007) -- Signs of life / J.J. Charlesworth (2008) -- An archaeology of the air / Brian Dillion (2009) -- Modernologies / Brian Dillion (2010) -- Waiting for the future / Nina Power (2010).

Ruins is one of a series documenting major themes and ideas in contemporary art.