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.”