When is a building finished? Is a building ever finished or is it just a product of constant transformation? Transformed by its users, by time, by society and nature? When is a building a building? The moment the foundation is created? The moment the first wall is created? When it is airtight? When the workers leave the construction site? Currently I am constructing a building which functions as an artist studio, a greenhouse, an energy accumulator and an architectural test site. The building is part of my PhD in artistic research at Konstfack University in Stockholm. My PhD and the building’s current state is “half finished”. What does that mean? Is there something to be learned from Romanticism and its obsession with ruins? Is there such a thing as an “active ruin” – a planned ruin? A ruin exposed to the weathering agents of nature but also not forgotten and still in the control grip of its creator. Can a half-finished building feedback and inform theory, which feeds back and informs the rest of a building? Architectural production is different from working with clay on a sculpture.