Squelettes: buildings that never made it

By at 10:31 pm Tuesday, Jun 23

Bruce Sterling wants a new word to describe buildings that are abandoned part way through construction due to economic bad times:
*Another version is the abandoned, incomplete high-rise. Commonly a steel and cement framework is erected (because that's pretty easy), and then there's some legal or economic brouhaha and the builders just down tools and walk off. In Brazil a skeleton framework of this kind is called a "squelette."

*Occasionally squatters move into "squelettes" and bring in some breeze-block, corrugated tin and plastic hoses, transforming squelettes into high-rise favelas. This doesn't work very well because it's tough to manage the utilities, especially the water...

*It bothers me to use clumsy circumlocutions like "unfinished ruins" or "partially built, yet abandoned structures" or "stillborn highrises" for a phenomenon that is so common and so obvious to billions of urban people, so henceforth I am going to call them "squelettes." They don't have to be Brazilian, French, or 80 stories tall, either.

*The thing I find most intriguing and modern about the squelette is the concept of living in a structure that never made it as a structure. Since I spend some time in Belgrade and Turin, I'm quite familiar with the idea of living in ruins. The idea of living in *abandoned prototypes* or giant failed larval husks is very contemporary, very New Depression. Very "Favela Chic."

Ruins of the Present

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Cory Doctorow

Upcoming appearances

* Feb 9, 2012, DeKalb, IL: Day of Doctorow, NIU
* Feb 10-12, 2012, Chicago, IL: Capricon 32
* Feb 13, 2012, Arlington, TX: UT Arlington College of Engineering Distinguished Speaker Series
* Feb 16, 2012, Victoria, BC: 13th Annual Privacy and Security Conference

Recent books:
* Context (essays)
* With a Little Help (short stories)
* For the Win (YA novel)
* Makers (adult novel)

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