Since I remember this having come up, I'm posting it. Seems that in designing ruins as art we ran across an idea that had already come up. Funny, in'it? I wonder how long it will take the next person to come up with it independently?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruin_value
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I read an article recently in The Believer about the Yucca mountain facility and a seed repository in Norway, the Svalbard International Seed Vault (SISV). They focused on exactly this problem: how do you get an idea across to beings so far removed from you that symbols in general, much less language, are not an option?
I think an excellent example of structures which have withstood the test of time and been able to continue to convey their meaning have been the different pyramid structures which have cropped up throughout the world. Though without investigation one wouldn't know the specific purpose of the great pyramid of giza was as a tomb, the structure itself conveys the idea of a monument very well. Likewise, the great wall of china fulfills it's purpuse that even after collapse, it will definitely be hard not to know that the purpose of the structure was once to keep people out.
Still, neither of those has to do with aesthetics, unless we start considering aesthetics in a more universal sense. The aesthetics of what's most likely to remain pleasing long after the culture which build it stands, in which I think simple structures will fulfill that sort of idea more soundly than others, just because they rely on fewer assumptions regarding what is pleasing.
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