The AI Journal

The concrete skeleton of an unfinished building can remain in a city for decades, acquiring a name, a history and eventually a constituency. In Sicily, unfinished public works have been sufficiently widespread to become the subject of an artistic movement, Incompiuto Siciliano. Pablo Arboleda has shown how these structures, originally evidence of failed public development, were deliberately reframed as a distinctive architectural phenomenon. The striking fact is not that failure can be aestheticised. It is that an object intended to represent completion can acquire a second social life precisely because completion never occurred.

I propose, as a provocation, a field called incompletion studies. Its subject would not be unfinished things in general. It would study objects whose unfinished condition becomes constitutive of what they subsequently are. The thesis is deliberately disputable: some cultural objects acquire greater interpretative flexibility, social durability and political usefulness from remaining incomplete than they would have possessed had their intended form been realised.

The usual vocabulary of construction makes completion sound like an object’s natural endpoint. A building is designed, built and occupied. Anything between the first and third stages is provisional; anything after the third is maintenance, alteration or decay. This sequence quietly gives priority to the designer’s intention. An unfinished building is understood through the completed building that ought to have existed.

Arboleda’s work on Italy complicates that assumption. The unfinished public works he examines were products of a modernising political culture in which construction itself signalled progress. Their incompletion therefore did not merely interrupt an architectural process. It exposed the institutional arrangements that had produced the process: inconsistent planning, malpractice, abandoned investment and broken promises. The concrete structure became evidence of a political history that the completed project would have concealed. A finished civic building says, among other things, “the project worked”. The unfinished one can say the opposite with extraordinary persistence.

This suggests a distinction between an unfinished object and an incomplete social object. The former has simply not reached its designed state. The latter continues to generate interpretations because the absence of closure has become meaningful. The difference is historical rather than material. Two identical concrete frames might begin in exactly the same condition, but one may be demolished immediately while the other becomes a landmark, a nuisance, a playground, an artistic subject or a symbol of governmental failure. Incompleteness becomes consequential only when people organise meanings around it.

There is already a substantial literature on the related problem of ruins. Tim Edensor’s account of industrial ruins is particularly useful because it argues that derelict spaces disrupt the normative ordering of material life. Objects in ruins lose some of their previous classifications and become available for unexpected combinations, reuse and reinterpretation. In a factory operating according to plan, a machine has a designated function and a worker has an assigned place. In a ruin, the same materials can be climbed, painted, photographed, scavenged or simply contemplated. The disorder is not merely visual. It weakens the authority of the original arrangement.

But incompletion is not identical to ruination. A ruin usually carries the history of something that once existed and has subsequently deteriorated. An unfinished object carries the history of something that was supposed to exist but never did. The difference is temporal. The ruin points backwards towards a lost state; the unfinished object points simultaneously backwards towards an unrealised intention and forwards towards a possible alternative. It contains an absent future.

That is why incompletion can have a peculiar political force. Daniela Sandler’s study of architectural decay in Berlin describes buildings that became incorporated into everyday life as residences, cultural spaces, workplaces and sites of leisure rather than simply being treated as urban failures awaiting correction. Her concept of “counterpreservation” is useful here because it refuses the assumption that preservation must restore a building to a stable historical condition. A building can instead remain visibly changed, provisional and open to new uses.

The same logic appears in conservation. Iida Kalakoski and Sigrun Thorgrimsdottir’s study of vernacular barns argues for approaches centred on adaptation, mending and care rather than the arrest of change. Their argument does not concern unfinished buildings in the strict sense, but it helps expose the conceptual problem: conservation often treats alteration as a threat to identity, whereas continued alteration can itself become the means by which an object remains useful and meaningful.

Incompletion studies would therefore take repair seriously. A patched wall is neither the original wall nor a new wall. A barn altered for contemporary use is neither preserved nor discarded. A ruin occupied by artists is neither restored to its previous function nor simply abandoned. Such objects occupy an awkward category because their identity is not secured by a final state.

The strongest objection is that this argument simply romanticises failure. Most unfinished buildings are unfinished because someone ran out of money, mismanaged a project, lost political support or made a disastrous investment. People living beside derelict structures do not experience them as philosophical invitations. They experience unsafe buildings, lost capital and blighted streets. To call incompletion productive risks turning material hardship into an aesthetic virtue.

That objection should be accepted as a limit. Incompletion studies cannot reasonably claim that unfinishedness is inherently valuable, liberating or socially productive. Nor should every abandoned structure be treated as a candidate for preservation. The claim is narrower: where an unfinished condition persists and becomes incorporated into social practices, its incompletion may become a causal part of the object’s identity. Arboleda’s Italian cases are instructive precisely because the unfinished structures were not inherently meaningful; their meanings were produced through later political and cultural work.

The important reversal is therefore not “failure is good”. It is “failure can change what an object is capable of becoming”. Completion closes possibilities. It fixes a programme, establishes a hierarchy of uses and supplies an authorised account of purpose. Incompletion leaves some of these matters unsettled. That unsettledness can be expensive and destructive, but under particular conditions it can also permit appropriation.

This is why an unfinished building can become a more revealing historical object than the building originally intended. The completed structure would embody a plan. The incomplete one exposes the struggle over the plan: who financed it, who abandoned it, who remembers it, who wants it demolished and who has found a use for what remains. Its physical incompletion becomes a record of competing futures.

The proposed field would consequently study a peculiar class of object: things whose most important history begins when their intended history stops. It would ask when a provisional state becomes an enduring identity, when repair becomes part of authenticity, and when an abandoned future becomes a resource for the present.

The staircase that ends in mid-air is still an incomplete staircase. But that description is inadequate once people have begun using it, naming it and arguing over what should happen to it. Its failure to reach the intended landing has ceased to be merely an absence. It has become the condition from which another object, socially and historically distinct, has emerged. Completion would have produced the staircase that was designed. Incompletion produced the staircase that exists.