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Learning is nothing but remembering. The ruin is the veiled memory of the past reality, its essence. Buildings tend to lose their shape due to ongoing wear as textures finishes lead to a new plastic expression, in an uncontrolled and random process that introduces new esthetic vision and interpretation. All the unfinished or incomplete stimulates our imagination mentally insinuating the presence of the fragmented object in its origin. This paper takes the form of a dissertation on the concept of "ruin" and its evolution in the Western thinking, being a reflection on the representation of the architectural remains of the past and their changes from an esthetic point of view: from their representation as a symbolic object, to their transformation as an element of scientific research; from the actual ruin to the invented one; from the harmony-creating ruin in nature to the one generating unease and distress.; from the ruin that shows us the capacity for analysis and study, to the current one, which faces us to our own capacity for destruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]