Ruins Bibliography

The following is a list of articles and books that relate to the concept of ruins. Following the entries are quotations that summarize the emphasis of each work. We will continue to update the list as our research continues.

Borys, Stephen D. “Documenting and Collecting Ruins in European Landscape Painting.” In The Splendor of Ruins in French Landscape Painting, 1630-1800, edited by Stephen D. Borys, 31-48. Ohio: Oberlin College, 2005.

(Essay describes how ruins became a popular motif in the Renaissance and spread to France.)

"For artists and patrons, these monuments evoked the triumphs and mysteries of ancient worlds, the glories of mythology and biblical narratives, archaeological discoveries, as well as the familiar images of the Grand Tour."

"Virtually all of the antique structures depicted in this exhibition were subject to various physical modifications, both destructive and restorative, that significantly altered their appearance and function over the centuries...By [the 18th and 19th centuries] the cult of dismantling and appropriation had been almost completely arrested, and ruins were actually being restored as ruins. In their depictions of these ruins, artists responded in a variety of ways. Examining the structures in person or using images from other paintings or illustrations, they could decide in what state of preservation the ruin would be presented in their paintings."

Edensor, Tim. Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality, London, Berg, 2005.

Efrat, Zvi. "Horavot" 483-512 in Haproject HaIsraeli: Beniya v'Adrichalut 1948>1973. Tel Aviv University, 2004.

Ginsberg, Robert. The Aesthetics of Ruins. New York: Rodophi B.V., 2004.

Glancey, Jonathan. Lost Buildings: Demolished, Destroyed, Imagined, Reborn. New York: The Overlook Press, 2008.

Hetzler, Florence M. “The Aesthetics of Ruins: A New Category of Being.” Journal of Aesthetic Education 16:2 (Summer, 1982): 105-108.

"We must free ourselves from history to be sure that we are looking at the ruin as a ruin. It may be massive; it may show human power; it may show the interplay with nature. We do no have here only natural beauty or only artistic beauty, but we have a third kind of beauty: a ruin beauty, which is a new category of being.In it we come closer to the sublime, the ineffable, and the indescribable than we do in natural beauty or in artistic beauty only."

Hetzler, Florence M. “Causality: Ruin Time and Ruins.” Leonardo 21:1 (1988): 51-55.

"A ruin, however, is a special work of art. It includes the human-made and the nature-made and has its own time, place, space, life and lives."

"Time is the intrinsic cause of a ruin as a ruin...The 'ruining' may be started by human or natural causes but the maturation process must be done by nature in ruin time. Otherwise there is only devastation and there is no unity forming the ruins."

"A ruin must initially be a work of architecture...Ruins cannot be moved;..Ruins must also be semiotically different from what they were before they became ruins."

Laurence, Ray. “Ritual, Landscape, and the Destruction of Place in the Roman Imagination.” In Approaches to the Study of Ritual: Italy and the Ancient Mediterranean, edited by John B. Wilkins, Vol. 2. London: Accordia Research Center, 1996.

(Roman understanding of ruins. The author writes that Romans preferred to offer clemency and avoid disrupting the city fabric by creating ruins.)

"Seneca stresses that tyrants wipe out gentes, set fire to houses and drive the plough over ancient cities and consider it a sign of power."

"The total destruction of a city can express concepts of impiety on the part of the conqueror, in complete contrast to all the notions of clementia that sprang from the sparing of the enemy city."

Lesnikowski, Wojciech. “On Symbolism of Memories and Ruins.” Reflections (Spring, 1989): 68-79.

Lyons, Claire L. Antiquity and Photography: Early Views of Ancient Mediterranean Sites, J. Paul Getty Museum, 2005.

Macaulay, Rose. Pleasure of Ruins. New York: Barnes & Nobles Books, 1996.

McCormick, Thomas J. Ruins as Architecture: Architecture as Ruins. Dublin, NH: William L. Bauhan Publisher, 1999.

Orlando, Francesco. Obsolete Objects in the Literary Imagination: Ruins, Relics, Rarities, Rubbish, Uninhabited Places and Hidden Treasures. Translation by Gabriel Pihas and Daniel Seidel. New Have: Yale University Press, 2006.

Riegl, Alois. "The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Essence and Its Development" in Gesammelte Aufsatze (Augsberg, Vienna: Dr.Benno Filser Verlag, 1928): 144-93. Translated by Karin Brucker with Karen Williams.

Saradi-Mendelovici, Helen. “Christian Attitudes Toward Pagan Monuments in Late Antiquity and Their Legacy in Later Byzantine Centuries.” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 44 (1990): 47-61.

(Essay argues that early Christianity did not actively seek to destroy pagan temples. It also explains how Pagan temples decayed due to abandonment, and how these sites were then treated.)

"According to Eusebius, pagan statues thus exposed were subject to public ridicule...John Chrysostom, later in the same century, offers another "Christian" explanation why the pagan statue of the sanctuary at Daphne in Antioch had no been destroyed earlier by the Christain emperor: he wanted to demonstrate that only a victory won against an enemy when he is powerful and glorious is worthwhile...Theodoret, in his Graecarum Affectionum Curatio, states that pagans tried to hide pagan cult objects, while Christians exposed them in the agoras so that women and children would laugh at the so-called gods."

Sidoriuc, Marius. “The Concept of Ruin and the Ruin of Concept.” Cultura: International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology. 6:1 (2009) 169-189.

"By definition, a ruin is the irreparable remains of a human construction, by a destructive act or process, no longer dwells in the unity of the original, but may have its own unitis that we can enjoy."

"The ruins as an object is the effect of that building's ruining. The building does not exist anymore. Now , there is only the ruin. We cannot deny in any way the causal link between building and ruin (as objects). But this does not show anything about the characteristics of the ruin even if technically, and not just conceptually, historically, we would find forms of that which used to be a building."

Simmel, Georg. “The Ruin.”In Georg Simmel, 1858-1918: A Collection of Essays, with Translations and a Bibliography, edited by Kurt H. Wolff, 259-266. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 1959.

Skrdla, Harry. Ghostly Ruins: America’s Forgotten Architecture. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006.

Taylor, William M. “Urban Disasters: Visualising the Fall of Cities and the Forming of Human Values” in The Journal of Architecture 11:5 (2006), 603-611.

"This article emphasises the significance of biblical and classical, literary and allegorical sources for moralising about fallen cities. These begin to account for the narratives of disaster films today by engendering expectations that cities have failed and will continue to fail - sometimes spectacularly so."

Trigg, Dylan. The Aesthetics of Decay: Nothingness, Nostalgia and the Absence of Reason, New York, Peter Lang, 2006.

Woodward, Christopher. In Ruins. New York: Pantheon Books, 2001.

Zucker, Paul. Fascination of Decay: Ruins: Relic-Symbol-Ornament. Ridgewood, NJ: The Gregg Press, 1968.

This landmark book goes period by period, starting with the Renaissance, showing how ruins were treated by artists.

"A ruin exists in a state of continual transition caused by natural deterioration, specific catastrophes, or other circumstances. But the changing concept of the ruin is based not only on its objective appearance, but is equally dependent on the individuality of the beholder. His reaction will reflect his emotional attitudes, his cultural and intellectual level; but, even more, the prevalent concepts of his time: the "Zeitgeist.""

"Whether we perceive a ruin primarily as a palpable documentation of a period in the past or as something which recalls a specific concept of architectural space and proportion, the ruin evokes in us a feeling of th impact of history on the living."