Untold acres of [Romanian] land are now deserts of crumbling ferro-concrete towers, surrounded by polluted land of evil coloration, with pools of water that could almost serve as national repositories for toxic chemicals. Steel rods emerge from much of the concrete, twisted like the antennae of insects in their death agony. Even in the ruination you can detect from the quality of the construction that there was no human pride in the work in the first place; it was all slapdash folly from the beginning, with inevitable collapse built into it.

Fields of rubble; forests of abandoned chimneys; enormous skeletons of concrete girders; vast vertical plains of corrugated iron and smashed windows; processions of square concrete columns leading nowhere except to churned-up wasteland; rusting iron staircases rising or falling to or from a void; immense trellises of ironwork, supporting nothing; crumbling concrete tanks, silos, and water towers. It is as if a gray-brown organism that solidified into immovable detritus had invaded the earth and spread malignantly, eating up the landscape for miles around. Only occasionally is a village to be seen in the background, in the midst of which there is a church—anything not of ferro-concrete now appears like a masterpiece by Brunelleschi. But the vast industrial complex of ruins dominates all: the horizon, the eye, one’s very thoughts. There is no escaping it; as there was never any intention that you should be able to escape it.

Daniels, Anthony (a.k.a. "Theodore Dalrymple"). "Always in the wrong place: On the relics of oppression." The New Criterion, June 2009.