The work deals with ruin discourse and its meaning for architecture. It overrules the common held belief of the ruin as a primarily romantic fascination. It links the birth of fascination with ruins with the birth of modernity in the 18th century. The nature of modernity is the key to understanding ruins. Fascination with ruins starts as a favorite motif of the aristocratic picturesque gardens and slowly evolves into one of the main signs of progress, being both a symbol of hope and an allegory of the dark side of the modernity, which culminates in the nazi theory of ruin value and mass bombings of the Second World War. After the war the ruin becomes one of the centers of attention in fields of art and philosophy. Not so in architecture - one of the main reasons might be the unwillingness of architecture to acknowledge main problems of modernity that are so apparent in ruins. That is why the end of the work is dedicated to some of the properties of the ruin as an independent source of fascination. The analysis ends with an attempt of critique of the contemporary state of architecture, especially with regards to the problem of the total planning in modernity. The book was published by Praznine in Ljubljana, Slovenia.