SCAFFOLDING, FACADES, INTERFACES: THE MATERIAL SOCIOLOGY OF ANTI-RUIN IN THE MODERN CITY

Abstract

The classical theory of the ruin, which developed in Western culture of the Modern and Contemporary periods, interprets it as a key symbol of historical time, loss, and the transience of human endeavors. This article proposes to go beyond this established discourse, focused on the affects of melancholy and nostalgia, and to provide a systematic rationale for the concept of the “anti-ruin.” The anti-ruin is understood not as the absence of destruction, but as an active, purposeful process of its compensation, completion, and semiotic “suturing” - a gesture of prosthesis, facade, scaffolding, or interface aimed at restoring functionality and the illusion of wholeness. The central thesis is that the ruin and the anti-ruin form an inseparable dialectical pair, revealing the fundamental attitude of modernity towards the world as an unfinished project requiring constant reconstruction. The research methodology combines diachronic genealogical, structural-dialectical analysis, and ontological interpretation (based on the works of V. V. Bibikhin). As a result, the genesis of the anti-ruin is traced from the cosmogonic projects of the Baroque (R. Fludd, A. Kircher, G. W. Leibniz) and the pragmatics of effects in the Enlightenment era to its technological embodiments in architecture (E. Viollet-le-Duc, Le Corbusier) and digital reconstructions. Special attention is paid to its inhabitants (automaton, mannequin, avatar) and its quintessence - scaffolding, interpreted through the ontology of Bibikhin’s “Wood.” It is concluded that the anti-ruin is a constitutive gesture of modern culture, reflecting the anthropological condition of humans as beings doomed to eternally impose “scaffolds” of order onto the intractable “world substance.”