Reverse Ruins

Project by

Reto Geiser
Senior Fellow 2024–2025

This project examines the construction site as an ephemeral and often overlooked stage in the production of architecture—one that vanishes as buildings are completed. Archival photography of building sites serves as a lens to explore how these spaces reflect the cultural, geographic, and economic conditions of their time. They reveal technological progress and societal transformation. Reverse Ruins focuses on a type of photography that has largely been neglected in architectural histories, aiming to trace and highlight moments in the construction process through images that capture a building’s unfinished state.

While construction sites often display sophisticated building techniques and assemblies, they also mirror the state of the economy and prevailing labor conditions. They are arenas of negotiation and politics, theaters of ideology, and spaces of nation-building. With the advent of greater planning and control, construction sites can also be viewed as places where the architect’s authority is challenged, requiring improvisation and compromise—an unsettling contrast for a profession accustomed to maintaining control.