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Abandoned

AbandonedArchitecture
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STATISTA: TOWARDS A STATECRAFT OF THE FUTURE

IMMEDIATELY UPON ITS completion in 1970, Berlin’s Haus der Statistik (which stood north of Alexanderplatz in the shadow of the just-built Fernsehturm) took its place as one of the central organs of the GDR state apparatus. With the collection of data and statistics for all of East Germany as its goal, the eleven-story complex housed numerous bureaucratic units, including several floors of Stasi offices. Its street-level businesses were the ultimate in urbane GDR style, hosting two lounges (Jagdklause and the fabulously named Mocca-Eck), a hunting/fishing shop, and Natascha, a boutique offering the latest Soviet imports.

John Peck
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AbandonedArchitecture
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INTERVIEW: CIARÁN FAHEY OF ABANDONED BERLIN

FOR THE PAST decade, journalist Ciarán Fahey has been documenting Berlin’s abandoned places: factories, train stations, hospitals, power stations, shuttered embassies, decaying villas, and everything in between. On his website Abandoned Berlin he documents these disappearing places in photos and words, focusing on the stories hidden behind crumbling walls and boarded-up windows. The human side of these modern ruins lies at the heart of his project: as the site’s welcome message says, “every crumbling building, creaking floorboard, fluttering curtain and flaking piece of paint has a tale begging to be told.”

John Peck
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ArchitectureBerlin
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PHOTO GALLERY: SIEMENSSTADT ABANDONED STATION

THE SIEMENSBAHN WAS a short, “spur”-style urban railroad that served Berlin’s northwestern district of Siemsstadt from 1929 until 1980. Consisting of only three stations, it originated at Jungfernheide (a still-active station on the present-day Ringbahn), crossing the Spree and passing through the Wernerwerk and Siemensstadt stations before ending at Gartenfeld.

John Peck
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AbandonedArchitecture
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RUMMU ASH HILLS AND SUNKEN QUARRY

THE VILLAGE OF Rummu, in northern Estonia, is home to a geographical oddity: a lake with several offshore buildings that are partially or completely submerged, skirted by pale white hills that taper down to a gentle, beach-like incline. The lake is in fact a former limestone and marble quarry, now shut down and flooded. The site teems with plant and animal life, particularly in the summer, making it a striking blend of the idyllic and creepy – particularly given that one of the sunken buildings is a former prison that once housed the quarry’s involuntary labor source.

John Peck
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AbandonedArchitecture
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BRUTALIST ARCHITECTURE OF TALLINN

THE COMMUNIST GOVERNMENTS in both the Baltics and Yugoslavia went on a spree of monument-building in the decades after WWII, which, when the ruling paradigms collapsed in the early 1990s, became fraught symbols of a tangled past in the power vacuum of the present. While some of the monuments in these regions were destroyed and others were moved or built around, most have been simply left to age themselves into obsolescence. When the material is concrete, however, the aging-out game can be a long one.

John Peck
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AbandonedArchitecture
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PHANTOM ARCHITECTURE OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA: GHOSTS OF THE NATIONAL TRAIL

THE STRETCH OF road between Goffs and Amboy, California, has been around for over a hundred years, and in that time it has been known by many names. It initially formed a part of the National Old Trails Road, a primitive, mostly unpaved cross-country route that predated the establishment of the US highway system. In the late 1920s it was incorporated into Route 66 and under this designation it served for decades as the main thoroughfare through the Mojave desert.

Jesse Simon
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AbandonedArchitecture
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PHOTO GALLERY: SCHLOSS DAMMSMÜHLE

EVEN IN A city strewn with such a wealth of abandoned architectural oddities, Schloß Dammsmühle stands out as remarkable—both for its age (the main building is nearly 250 years old) and the remarkable (and infamous) pedigrees of some of its 20th-century owners. Built in 1768, it was alternately improved and abandoned through the Weimar era before being commandeered by the Nazis, and in 1940, Himmler made it his base of operations.

John Peck
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