Architecture & Design

Architecture & Design | 25 E mbarking on a recent visit to the now derelict 1979 White Rocks Holiday Complex, I pondered why ruined buildings evoke deeper emotions than when pristine and intact. As architect of the building, on my way to the ruined edifice, I wondered whether the experience would provoke sadness or nostalgia. However, during the visit more of a sense of solace prevailed as I came to realize that the building in its process of decay had reacted against its time-inflicted wounds and violations and undergone a new and renascent life. Overlaid by an existential reflection that the ravages of time over the building reflected human transience and ephemerality; the mortality of architecture mirroring that of humanity. Roaming through its abandoned spaces and ghostly remnants I remembered and recalled how I had originally envisaged it, pondering if the residues still standing also remembered me. No longer living architecture yet not lifeless corpse, nature's destruction and untamed decay have strangely donated it with not only a new aesthetic and metaphysical overlay, but also multiple new and novel uses. No longer restricted by function and structure, the building now celebrates a newfound freedom and autonomy. In its winter days its fossilized bones and skeletal remnants speak louder, if perhaps in mournful tones, than when in original state. Where the sun once shone now only shadows reign. In the marrow of its osseous stones secrets untold loiter and linger. The ghost of its original blueprint has dawned a new life; scarred walls transcended to art canvases for street art and graffiti and interiors revitalized as reverberating recording chambers for rap- rock music, now shaping sound in lieu of space. These novel visual aural functions have awakened the building from a long and dormant dreamless sleep. Spray and play have revitalized it as if to remind us of the regenerative and reanimating force of art. Though tourists no longer energize the building, artists, musicians and photographers have mantled it with a new animation. At eventide, under a velvet curtain of lengthening shadows and diminishing luminosity the ruins assume a monastic-like silence stirred only by the twilight vespers of birdsong and murmur of lapping sea waves. In these moments of quietude, the edifice slumbers and in its reverie recalls its yesteryears, when its spaces thrummed with the reverie of sun kissed tourist rackety holiday crowds. In its dream it contemplates Janus-like what once it was and what it still might be, melancholically reaching backwards recalling a past which will never return and apprehensively anticipating a future unchartered and unknown. Now space breathes music and walls bleed art. As still it murmurs a life- preserving heartbeat, the building remembers what was, contemplates what is and anticipates what will be. Lapis meminit. THEN THEN THE WHITE THE WHITE ROCKS HOLIDAY ROCKS HOLIDAY COMPLEX COMPLEX W o r d s b y R i c h a r d E n g l a n d

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