A Belated Pesach Post

This is a bit late, but I wanted to add two points about ruins and Pesach.

1. If I were the one striking the Egyptians with ten plagues, I'm pretty sure that at least one of them would target their pagan temples, the storage cities they forced the Israelites to build, the palace, the pyramids, etc. Yet for some reason, not one of the plagues is reported to be aimed at the architecture. Why not? Why wouldn't it be good symbolism to leave the Egyptian buildings in ruin, the same way the economy, monarchy, army and ecosystem were left in ruin? I have no convincing answers to this question, and have never seen any commentators address this issue. If anyone has an idea, I'd love to hear. If not, maybe you can pose this question at next year's seder.

2. During the course of the Pesach seder, we do two things which can loosely be classified as ruinous.

• We spill out some wine from our cups to show sorrow over the loss of Egyptian life.
• We break the middle matza in half. This commemorates our ancestors enslavement (as with the matza itself, it mimics the way poor people eat).
  

Lebbeus Woods

Lebbeus Woods is an American architect and engineer (b. 1940 in Michigan). He studied architecture at the University of Illinois and engineering at Purdue University. He first started working in the offices of Eero Saarinen, but soon after decided to dedicate himself and his skills to purely theoretical and experimental 'paper architecture'. He is currently a professor of architecture at the Cooper Union in NYC.

His theory and architecture can be seen and read in his books, 'Radical Reconstruction' and 'War and Architecture'. Wherein one can begin to understand his connection to ruins. He proposes an architecture springing from the ruins of war-torn cities (Sarajevo) and cities struck by earthquakes (San Francisco). He talks of ruined buildings having scars once they have been reconstructed by him. He suggests a less materialistic world through the utilisation of 'poor' and 'found' materials, a recycling from and of the ruins, to reconstruct them. His magnificent, haunting drawings reflect visions of a great and deep architecture of ruins.