What am I looking at or for when I see a building, room or more essentially the remains of these things that hold a marked attraction for me?
My immediate answer is nostalgia, for a time in my life where the world was just starting to open up to me, a world of possibility and adventure. The lure of derelict buildings, abandoned garages, disused factories or warehouses lay in the fact that they seemed to no longer have any use to their previous owners. They now belonged to me and my friends. Somewhere where we could put our mark and make it our own, children building a world of their own.

This primal reading of my longing for such spaces was better understood in my second reading of the Cement Garden, Ian McEwan and a reviewing of the film by Andrew Birkin. I was stuck by the sparse landscape of the settings, a world abandoned. The story of suddenly orphaned siblings that are left in a large house standing alone on a derelict street, where all the other houses have been cleared for the development of new tower blocks. Like the characters in the story the landscape is caught in limbo, a landscape in transition. A view of places and objects that are at an end to any utilitarian use but in their symbolism of decay represent the possibility of regeneration. To the artist/child they become places of inspiration, a canvas on which to project an imagined world. Or as in The Cement Garden a safer world.

Now in the process of attempting to create new work, I see these spaces as an entrance into reinvestigating this aesthetic of the marginal. Redemption of things lost.

Here’s something I am reading that might be of interest.

Building and the Terror of Time: Karsten Harries
I

Building has been understood to be a Domestication of space. To domesticate space is to tame it, to construct boundaries that wrest place from space. Such construction receives its measure from our need to control the environment. Control should not be understood here too narrowly: it is not just a matter of creating an artificial environment that offers protection against an often unfriendly world; as important as physical control is psychological control. Inquiry into the origin of architecture leads thus not only to the need for shelter, but also to the need to control space through symbols. It is homelessness that lets man build; the terror of space provokes him into creation. Joseph Rykwert’s claim that the biblical description of paradise is incomplete in that it has nothing to say about a house must therefore be rejected. In paradise man was at home and knew his place; in that bounded garden there was no need for a house. Only the fall, which cast man out of paradise and forced him to toil on cursed ground, brought with it the necessity of building. Human work now had to remedy the deficiencies of nature. Only now did space require domestication. Building had to furnish Ersatz (Ersatz is a German word literally meaning substitute or replacement) for what man had lost. Every house may be considered an attempted recovery of paradise.
Talk of architecture establishing place by construction of bounderies in space suggests a quite traditional distiction between arts os space and arts of time, between formative and expressive arts. The distiction has a certain obviousness; yet our experience of space and our experience of time are too intertwined to allow us simply to accept it. Thus , if we can speak of architecture as a defence against the terror of space, we must also recognize that from the very beginning it has provided defenses against the terror of time.