Ruin Academy

designed by Marco Casagrande /

Location: Taipei / Taiwan / Type: Indoor / Installations / Landscape Subjective / Built: 2010 /
Published on November 21, 2010

The Ruin Academy occupies an abandoned 5-story apartment building in central Taipei. All the interior walls of the building and all the windows are removed in order to grow bamboo and vegetables inside the house. The professors and students are sleeping and working in mahogany made ad-hoc dormitories and have a public sauna in the 5th floor. All the building is penetrated with 6 inch holes in order to let “rain inside”. The Academy is viewed as an example or fragment of the Third Generation City, the organic ruin of the industrial city.

Without his ruins man is just a common ape.

The Ruin Academy locates in Taipei in an abandoned apartment block turned into a compost of the modern city. Compost as the future top-soil. The Ruin Academy does not rely or design, but hooks on to the Local Knowledge of the Taipei basin and reacts on this. Design should not replace rality. Local knowledge is pushing through the industrial surface of the modern Taipei like a positive sickness of the industrial city or like a humane sweat of the machine. Ruin Academy is looking forward to sweat. The Ruin Academy is looking at the ruining processes of Taipei that keep the city alive. Taipei is growing the Third Generation City – a real reality way beyond the industrial nonsence.

The Ruin Academy operates with Taipei as the urban case study and with various smaller projects in Taiwan in order to determine the elements of the Third Generation City. Our students/operators are not volunteers, they are called constructor-gardeners. We want to farm a city and treat it with urban acupuncture tuning the city towards the organic. Taipei is a no-man’s land being dominated by the official industrialism and the anarchy of the jungle. Ruin Academy joins the urban farmers. In Grandmothers we trust.