Investment ruin

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The Castrop-Rauxel Soda Bridge

An investment ruin is a building that, after completion or premature termination of the project, either never served its originally planned purpose or did not bring the expected income or benefits. Based on the English white elephant, one also encounters the term white elephant . In the case of unfinished structures in particular, one also speaks of building ruins .

description

The name clearly shows the fact that investments have been made to finance a ruin . The causes for such a failure of a project can be insufficient funding or economic , political and even military circumstances. Technical reasons can also arise if, for example, a new technology is not yet fully developed and it turns out during the construction of a system that uses it (example: nuclear power plant THTR-300 ) that it does not work as intended.

In the course of history there have always been the appearance of investment ruins, for example the baroque fortress Mont Royal on the Moselle was never completed and immediately razed after the construction work was completed . However, investment ruins from the last two centuries in the field of transport, such as those found in the so-called soda bridges , are prominent .

There are many investment ruins in the area of local public transport . In Berlin, among other places, there are several underground and suburban railway stations or fragments of those that were never connected to the rail network as so-called ghost stations .

There can be various reasons why a useless investment ruin, the completion of which is no longer expected, will be preserved over a longer period of time. Often the financial means to eliminate them are missing or the person responsible for this cannot be legally determined. Sometimes, however, it is not technically possible to remove it (e.g. in the case of massive concrete structures near other buildings, which make it impossible to detonate).

In rare cases, however, investment ruins are still being completed after decades: One example is the motorway bridge near Pirk , construction of which began in 1938 but was discontinued in 1940 due to the war. After the war, due to the division of Germany, further construction was out of the question, so the bridge was not completed until 1990, even using the building material that had been stored nearby for decades.

Some investment ruins are now also considered to be historically significant and are therefore under monument protection , e. B. Parts of the strategic embankment .

Examples

  • channels
The Masurian Canal ( Russian Канал Мазурский , Kanal Masurski , Polish Kanał Mazurski ) is a 50.4 kilometer long, unfinished man-made waterway , which in historical East Prussia is a navigable connection between the Masurian Lake District and the Baltic Sea near Königsberg (Russian Калининград , Kaliningrad ) should produce.
  • Railways
The Strategische Bahndamm is a never completed railway line between the Ruhr area and the southwest border of Germany .
  • Streets
Route 46 describes an almost 70 km long unfinished motorway section that runs parallel to today's A 7 between Fulda and Würzburg . The construction of this planned Reichsautobahn began in 1937 and stopped in 1939. The Reichsautobahn Vienna – Breslau (route 88) was never completed either.
  • Skyscrapers and towers
As Yekaterinburg TV Tower was the world's highest boondoggle, an unfinished TV Tower in Russian Yekaterinburg , respectively. At the Ryugyŏng Hot'el in North Korea , which was previously considered the highest investment ruin, completion and use are still not foreseeable.
  • Industrial building
The most famous investment ruin in Austria is the Zwentendorf nuclear power plant , which, although completed, never went into operation due to a negative referendum .
  • Other structures
The McCaig's Tower above the Scottish town of Oban is the unfinished replica of the Colosseum in Rome. Local banker John Stuart McCaig had the monument built in 1897 to keep local workers busy during the poor winter months and to commemorate his family. Neither the planned tower inside the structure nor the statues of the McCaig family were ever completed, as all members of the family died or became impoverished by 1904.

See also

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Web links

Wiktionary: Bauruine  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Investment ruin . Duden , accessed on June 11, 2015 .
  2. ^ 'White elephant' as a monster of modernity - spectrum of science. In: Spektrum.de. Retrieved June 5, 2018 .
  3. ↑ China is building mysterious streets and houses on Pacific islands - there is a sophisticated plan behind it - Business Insider Germany. In: businessinsider.de. Retrieved June 5, 2018 .
  4. ↑ ruins. Duden , accessed on June 11, 2015 .
  5. ↑ Hotel Ryugyong in Pyongyang: Kim has the most ostentatious ruins in the world. In: blick.ch , February 16, 2016