Testing, testing... trying to figure out something about google search.
Josh has a book coming out later this year, which contains divrei Torah about parshat Hashavua. The book is called ArchitecTorah. You can find more about it here.
Preserving and Utilizing the Ruins of Rosh Ha'ayin
Testing, testing... trying to figure out something about google search.
Josh has a book coming out later this year, which contains divrei Torah about parshat Hashavua. The book is called ArchitecTorah. You can find more about it here.
"Future cities are themselves ruins. Our contemporary cities...are destined to live only a fleeting moment. Give up their energy and return to inert material. All of our proposals will be buried. And once again the incubation mechanism is reconstituted. That will be our Future."He contrasted the ruins of his childhood with those of ancient Greece and Rome; while those ruins were formed over centuries, his environs were destroyed in a moment of obliteration.
"An awful silence reigned throughout those subterraneous regions, except now and then some blasts of wind that shook the doors she had passed, and which grating on the rusty hinges were re-echoed through that long labyrinth of darkness. Every murmur struck her with new terror."
![]() |
Internal View of Tintern Abbey, in South Wales, 1801-5 |
"A building's users are also its users-up - its parasites. Think of what happens, say, to a historic cathedral, castle or palace. The visitors wear out carpets and floors, mark the walls, and bore, annoy, insult, manipulate, or otherwise wear down the staff (we will consider the staff to be the monument's auto-immune system). Yet at the same time, the very presence of these tourist-parasites is flattering. They are there to admire. They want to take something of the building's beauty with them. (Sometimes they do this quite literally.) The whole history of Ruinenlust, of ruin worship, could be rewritten as a study in parasitism." (The Monumental Impulse, 182-3)The metaphor is interesting, in that it illustrates the conflict between use and maintenance. If a building has no one to attend to it, it will become a ruin. Having lots of traffic both hastens the destruction and provides (potentially) the resources and impetus to withstand the destruction. The building's users, however, are unlike parasites in that the building only exists to serve the users, and without users the building would disintegrate nonetheless.
If only the ivy had been left to climb the ruins of the Colosseum..."Ivy usurps the laurel's place of growth
But the Gladiators' bloody Circus stands
A noble wreck in ruinous perfection!"
"Nothing, ever, anywhere, can die a natural death there anymore. Still warm from their fianl fun, old locomotives are put out to pasture according a to a schedule. Nuts and bolts are collected as if they were evidence for a murder trial and then polished to become pieces de resistance in those mausoleums known as railway museums. There the locomotives stand, as unauthentic as can be, too new to be old, yet too old to be new - sterilized, social misfits. Somewhere, beneath all those layers of varnish, is supposed to be the real locomotive, but you certainly can't see it. How can such an anomaly ever evoke anything in anyone? As readily as I can imagine the engine driver standing in such a Bolivian wreck or hear the fire roaring on the grate or smell the stokers' sweat, it is difficult for me in railway museums to envisage anything but the men restoring it. The links with the past have been polished out of existence."(28-29)Dekkers gives a history of ruins and ruin fascination, a story that does not require rehashing for readers of this blog. But he brings in a wide array of analogies that shed light on our discussion. He talks about spoiled food, old men, and bacteria. He elaborates on the forces of nature that cause ruins, in a way that is reminiscent of Simmel but with a wildly different tone. In the end he arrives at a similar plea to that which we have made for the preservation of ruins:
"Give us back our ruins! Throw a few crumbs to the fungi and the beetles - a little villa here, a little warehouse there, an abandoned waterworks site over there - something the creatures can really get their teeth into. A waste of old buildings? It doesn't have to be old buildings; nature loves new buildings too. Just make a few holes in the gutters or rain pipes and within no time they'll be the ideal mouthful, thanks to the sour urine of moisture-loving micro-organisms. As well as a Monuments List of old buildings earmarked for restoration, there should be a Ruins List of new buildings earmarked for ruin. I have a few suggestions, if anyone's interested."(p. 57)A ruins list - what a lovely idea!
"The concept of a 'ruin' was related to ruins of important monumental buildings; beautiful buildings made 'beautiful ruins'! The remains of less important houses could only be 'ruined buildings'." (Jokilehto, p.52)This is a concept we did not properly consider in our review of ruins. Diderot felt that only important, beautiful buildings could become ruins in the Picturesque sense. In our ruins criteria we did not acknowledge this idea. But I think our project must clearly reject it - we, after all, dealt with ruins of industrial buildings, ruins of mass-produced buildings, which were not 'beautiful'. Nonetheless, we found that the Rosh Ha'ayin ruins were significant and could enrich the city. Diderot's concept, while fitting with the canonical, reflexive ideas of ruins, is exactly the stance against which our project rebelled. As has already been discovered by cities that have included industrial ruins into their parks, ruins of lesser buildings can be every bit as sublime as ruins of palaces and temples.