This article examines the classic definitions of ruins through reading of key authors of the theory of ruins in order to understand if their interpretation are valid for the contemporary ruins produced by the wars, by the terrorism or by natural disasters. It emerges that the model of reading of this past event which characterizes the ruin doesn’t fit to the ongoing ruins. The permanence of the destructive phenomenas of the environment or of the human that are broadcasted by the mediarecalls that the beauty, the meditation on our future and on our death, these universals of the aesthetics and the metaphysics of ruins, doesn’t make sense when confronted with economic and geostrategic stakes producing ruins and chaos.The aesthetics of ruins and their representations in the art, the literature, the photography, as well as their capacity to embody the major metaphysical questions of the human fate, or to stimulate the imagination are no more valid for the contemporary which results from violent and sudden destructions, destroying as completely as possible any living space, history and environment. To classical ruins came to be added an immediate ruin caused by destruction and an "helped" ruin included in advance into any construction.