ABSTRACT
Sham ruins are new buildings which are purposely built to look old and decayed. This chapter looks at the architectural history of sham ruins, starting with the earliest known example, a pre-ruined staircase built for the Duke of Urbino’s Pesaro Palace in Venice around 1510. Then, the eighteenth-century heyday of the sham ruin in the shape of Victorian garden decorations takes center stage before more contemporary examples, such as broken screen phone apps and the 2011 Gwangju Biennale are featured. Yet the onus of the chapter is to use this flippant architectural embarrassment as a tool for developing strategies for change, meaning using objects in unintended ways. The main literary example is Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia (1993), and the two key theoretical viewpoints come from Graham Harman’s ruination and Nicolas Bourriaud’s the exform.
