Ruinas modernas y arte contemporáneo: El caso de El Helicoide de la Roca Tarpeya

In light of recent discussions on modern ruins, this article suggests that contemporary art offers ways of looking at and describing these truncated monuments without neutralizing them as nostalgic heritage or reducing them to simple images devoid of their heterogeneous histories. Taking ‘El Helicoide’, an audacious shopping mall turned into a police station, as a case study, we analyzed three facilities that capture the productive potential of ruins as to show the “ideological scaffold” of architecture (Boym) and test new monumental forms (Rancière).