There is something about a ruin that sets the pulse racing. It doesn’t matter if it’s the megalithic remains of a bronze-age burial chamber, a grandiose fragment of Greek Classicism or the spooky cracked shell of a crumbling Victorian villa; the spectacle and narrative of these broken forms intrigue us. Perhaps I’ve watched too many Planet of the Apes films but, for me, it is the landscape of modern catastrophe that holds a particularly potent force. Visions of our contemporary lives and society swept away, the trapping of civilization vanished beneath an earth hungry to reassert itself. Alan Weissman’s 2007 book The World Without Us, imagining what would happen if humans disappeared from the world, examined the practical details of this ruin: the sewerage systems of cities failing and the contents rising to the surface; the trees and creatures knocking down walls and inhabiting our spaces; weather and natural disasters levelling this unmaintained built environment. It seems that some of the longest-lasting signs of our modern world would be public art: those bronze statues donated to housing estates by benevolent organizations.

In their short lives, some 20th-century buildings have got there already. They’ve fallen into disrepair or have been utterly abandoned. It’s hard to think of a more spectacular example than St Peter’s Seminary in Cardross, Scotland (1961–66), designed by renowned Glaswegian practice Gillespie, Kidd & Coia. There are elements reminiscent of Le Corbusier’s last major work in Europe, his fearlessly rough La Tourette Monastery in Lyon (1953–57). Both seek to rework the medieval idea of a closed, inward-looking, multifunctional monastery. St Peter’s remained a Roman Catholic seminary only briefly, before the falling number of students meant it was suddenly surplus to requirements. Its subsequent use as a rehab unit for drug addicts also ceased decades ago. Now it remains as a baffling monument in the forest, like something left behind by a lost civilization – perhaps a good metaphor for brutalism itself. ‘Who was it for?’ explorers in this post-apocalyptic landscape might ask, ‘and what did they do here?’

Since the late 1980s, when the Church ceased using it, and its abandonment in the 1990s, the beauty of the expensive finishes and the artistry of the architects at St Peter’s has been subverted by new types of decoration. Some are the result of graffiti artists, spraying the rough concrete with designs that range from the most basic of tags to extravagant murals, bringing dark and abandoned spaces back to dazzling life. And then there’s the imprint of nature, as water, trees, weeds and sun have worked away on the great concrete limbs and ribs. Natural forces are forming a work of land art, somewhere between an Andy Goldsworthy, built from local stone, and a Rachel Whiteread, with the imprint of human habitation, long since departed. And everywhere there’s the smell of damp, like a graveyard or underpass.

And it has itself become an art piece. In the summer of 2016 public arts practitioner NVA brought an audio-visual work, Hinterland, to the Seminary. This work explored the place as it was when it was built, what it has become and what it might be again. Through music, lights and images echoing around this now curiously organic structure, thousands of people experienced the spaces left abandoned for so long, and took away some concrete memories.

Another spectacular ruin is Miami Marine Stadium, completed in 1963. Designed by Cuban architect Hilario Candela as a venue for sports from boxing to powerboat racing, it was originally notable for its 100 metre (326-foot) long cantilevered roof built from poured concrete. It closed in 1992 in the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew, at which point it took on another life: as a canvas for the city’s graffiti artists. It’s estimated that 200 layers of paint now decorate the structure, and even the architect loves what the artists have done to it.

But there are smaller ruins too. The remains of Giuseppe Perugini’s mind-expanding Casa Sperimentale, or Experimental House (1968–71) can be found in the coastal town of Fregene, in Italy. The exposed concrete frame is meant to resemble the creeping branches and trunks of the trees that surround it. Red accents, in window frames and railings, are like the autumnal show of Virginia creeper or the seeping oxide from ironstone. Deep recesses and extravagant protrusions give it the most sculptural of forms, a wilfully awkward design that incorporates a series of great, grey concrete circles and dishes on the external walls, sitting in the frame like that most modern of symbols, an egg in a carton. It even has its own drawbridge to isolate the futuristic inhabitants from the outside world, confirming this place as much playground as house. But this Cubist masterpiece is long abandoned. The experiment has seemingly gone awry, the insides bare and weathered, and perhaps the captive aliens escaped. It now has more in common with an artistic folly like Victor Pasmore’s Apollo Pavilion in Peterlee.

These structures exist as part of extreme landscapes, and seem on the verge of disintegrating into them. Will Miami Marine Stadium resist the pressure to redevelop this prime site? Might the woods around St Peter’s Seminary refuse to relinquish their hold when the developers come to do it up? Has Perugini’s tree house ‘gone native’ and become an organic structure, rather than one we can recognize as a building? Will fragments of all these be dug up by future archaeologists, or their structures re-emerge in the aerial photographs of dogged geophysicists? Or will their ruins become the set of folk horror movies or the place of neopagan rites, whose customs can be traced back to the operation of long defunct smart phone cameras and spray cans? Who knows? The unlit corners, water-penetrated walls, rusting services, weeds and lichen are not going to let on.