Elisabeth Clemence Chan's "What Roles for Ruins?"

Elisabeth Clemence Chan's essay, "What Roles for Ruins? Meaning and Narrative of Industrial Ruins in Contemporary Parks" (Journal of Landscape Architecture/Autumn 2009) is an essay that directly pertains to our project. Chan writes about industrial ruins in parks, such as the Gas Works Park in Seattle and Landschaftspark Duisburgh-North in Germany, noting that most often the ruins in these parks are used just as aesthetic objects, akin to follies in English gardens of the 18th century. This, she feels, is a lost opportunity to use the ruins as a way of remembering the past and considering both the positive legacy of various industries and the negative ones.

"The ruins are not typically used in ways that project the environmental consequences, production practices, economics, or legacies of the industry. Instead, it is my view that parks containing industrial ruins are designed and built because people enjoy ruins, especially in parks."

The ruins end up serving as the type of limitless, vague monument described by JB Jackson that celebrates a vernacular past, just beyond memory, that never really existed. Chan also references Tim Edensor's book on Industrial ruins and points out that a park with industrial ruins can

"also cultivate a certain social cohesion - or at least a perceived cohesion through a broad sense of nostalgia and pride in a community's history and melancholy at its decline."

Rather than beautifying the ruins and turning them into objects, she writes that some ruins should be left untouched, which will help people view them realistically and think more critically of what these ruins denote, where they came from, and what they tell us about the past. She asks what would happen if we

"Let the crumbling ruins of industry stand, in this eroding state, as monuments? What if we simply left industrial ruins alone in all their ambiguity, with the broken glass, the graffiti and corroding structures? Parks could be built around them and among them (with many fences), but the structures and artifacts could continue to tell the fragmented stories of history. Ruins provide an opportunity for memory that is totally different from written history. The structures of industry left in their gloomy eroding state eschew "preferred memoreies" (Edensor 2005:172) and offer the uncertainties, vagueness and confusion of history that is impossible to articulate, other than through the artifacts in ruin...It is this set of meanings that is lost when industrial ruins are polished, painted and planted."

Although Chan is dealing entirely with industrial ruins, we can easily ask the same questions about the military ruins which we are dealing with in Rosh Ha'ayin. We do not want these ruins to become simple aesthetic objects in the landscape. Rather, we want to use them to remember Rosh Ha'ayin's past. Just as Chan comes to the conclusion that to achieve this effect ruins should not be cleansed and beautified, we also have concluded that we must strive to keep our ruins authentic, and that only by doing so will they be true witnesses to history.

Chan recognizes that leaving industrial ruins untouched is "an impractical position" for a number of reasons: Communities want improvements and do not necessarily want to be shown symbols of the past that they regret. Recreational space is viewed as more important that monuments, so any open land for redevelopment will probably need to be prepared for public use. And finally, there is a need to protect people and the environment from unsafe conditions. These, of course, are the same problems we face with preserving ruins in Rosh Ha'ayin. Nonetheless, she presents a series of guidelines for the purpose of making this more palatable, at least in order to achieve a middle ground.

1. Ruins should be treated as historical evidence first, and as aesthetic objects second.
2. Designers should recognize that their designs will influence how people read the history of the site.
3. The historical context makes a big difference and should be preserved as well.
4. Interventions should be minimal.
5. At least park of the site should be left in ruins.
6. Park of the design should allow for a process of discovery.

We independently have arrived at similar conclusions as guidelines for our work, and it is exciting to find someone who carried out a similar study and came to the same conclusions.

Rosh Ha'ayin Network of British Buildings

It seems that the majority of our posts deal with broad ruin issues. Some deal with Rosh Ha'ayin. But not that many deal with the combination of the two, which is actually what our project is all about. So here is a post about our project and how it is proceeding. I think there will probably be a few posts in this series of updates, including one about our current theories.

At the end of last semester, we had decided that we wanted to create additional branches of the Yemenite museum in Rosh Ha'ayin, located in various British buildings throughout the city. We talked about connecting these as part of a path, and assigned which functions would take place in each building. However, we neither justified the path well, nor did we come up with a good explanation for why each function was placed in each building. Finally, we did not convincingly explain why it was okay, according to our ruin theories, to redevelop some of the buildings and pass them off as "ruins." There was a big contradiction between the theory of ruin preservation and what we actually planned to do with some of the buildings.

Since then, we have been working to tighten our ideas and make the project stronger, hopefully solving these problems. Firstly, we decided that the idea of a path is not relevant. While we continue to think that the program of various other cultural centers / museum wings in the city is strong, we looked for different ways to model how they are interconnected. In addition, we wanted to strengthen the way that we assigned various functions to each building.

Most importantly, we recognize that not all the buildings are fitting to be left to decay. Some of the buildings have importance and deserve conventional preservation. We needed a way to rank the buildings and decide which should be preserved regularly, which could be partially left as ruins, and which buildings could be left as ruins entirely, with programming taking place around the perimeter. (More will follow about this final option.)

Continuing our past investigations, we have identified about 20 buildings originally built as part of the Ras el Ain base that are now part of Rosh Haayin. Some of these buildings are significant part of the city's history, while others have not. Some are in good shape or have been renovated, while others are falling apart. We settled on 4 main criteria for ranking these buildings and deciding which should be preserved whole, and which should be preserved ruined. The criteria were:
1) Uses - how important were/are these buildings in the history of Rosh Ha'ayin? Are they part of the city's culture? Were they public buildings? Do people think of them with nostalgia?
2) % Remaining - In what shape is the building? Is it whole, or mostly destroyed?
3) Vegetation - How much vegetation has invaded the buildings?
4) Location - How close is the building to the main museum? Is it on a main street? Is it surrounded by open area or tightly hemmed in?

Using these criteria, we ranked the buildings and made a list of three types of buildings:
A. Buildings that ranked high on uses, % remaining, had little vegetation and were located in the thick of the city were slated for conventional preservation. These buildings include the cinema, the central museum, one of the schools, and a few others.
B. Buildings that ranked medium were open for half-and-half treatment. Partial redevelopment, partial ruination.
C. Buildings that ranked low - that didn't serve important functions, are in poor to terrible shape, have been invaded by vegetation and are located in open fields or at a great distance were slated for ruin preservation.
Armed with this information, the next step was to map the various ruins and try to develop a new paradigm to replace the trail idea. Each map shows a different way at understanding how the various buildings relate to one another. 1. Trail; 2. Central Museum with radiating spokes; 3. Series of active spaces around each individual location; 4. Interconnection of each of the three types of buildings into independent networks that connect at the central museum; 5. three "perimeter zones" within which various activities take place; 6. One large ring path that encompasses all the various sites.

Ruin Preservation and the Etzel Museum

When we first presented our idea to study ruins, our advisers immediately warned us not to try something like the Etzel Museum in Tel Aviv. So what is this "infamous" building, which appears on the cover of White City, Black City as a metaphor for all that is wrong with Tel Aviv's hidden agenda?

The museum is designed within the ruins of a building that once was part of the Menashia neighborhood outside of Jaffa. It was designed by Niv, Schwartz & Schwartz, and completed in 1983. The only other remains from Menashia is a mosque. The neighborhood was conquered in 1948 by Etzel, a right-wing Jewish militant group from before the State of Israel. The ruins were primarily cleared, leaving only these two buildings.

The idea to turn this ruin into a museum arose in 1976, as a monument to Etzel members who died in the conquest of Jaffa. In a 1984 edition of Architecture in Israel, the architects explain that while visiting the site, they found a lone building which drew their attention.

"On the spot we suggested that it would be the site for the monument, to be used as a living museum that would explain to future generations both the story of the battle for Jaffa and the story of the Menashiya neighborhood, which was alive but is now gone, as it has made room for Tel Aviv.
...The uniqueness of the building is not its architecture but rather its power of survival, which allows it to be used for preserving the memory of the place. "(p.3)

In describing the design principles, the architects explain that they wished to freeze the ruins in time, and they wax poetically about the ruins and how they have been ravaged over time by the sea winds. However, they then epxlain that they want to introduce a glass box into the ruins to form the new museum. They felt this would not be intrusive and would allow the ruin to remain a ruin, and that the old and new would melt together.

In White City, Black City, Rotbard writes that this is the ultimate expression of his thesis. A Miesian glass box, set in the ruins of an Arab neighborhood, illustrates his point that Tel Aviv's pure white persona is a fraud. (p. 235) It should be noted that Rotbard follows this up immediately with an anecdote about Hitler's architect, Albert Speer, which is interesting but unrelated, and seems only to have been included to insidiously draw a parallel between the museum and fascism. (p. 237) Still, Rotbard sums up the oddity well, writing:

"In a strange way, the building makes use of ruins and ruin aesthetics in order to cover up the destruction and hide it. The building says the truth about the killing of Jaffa but in the same breath it also lies, when it uses the drama as "architecture" and "environmental art."

From my standpoint as a ruins researcher, I can understand why the architects thought this would work and would be nice symbolism, but I also understand why it falls flat. As in so many cases, the ruins here have been ruined. Had they been left alone, they truly would have been powerful. If a memorial had been built nearby, it could have been a tremendous space. I even feel like if the glass box had been built outside the stone walls, it would have been better. But instead what happened is that they stone walls have been robbed of their ruin-beauty and left sterile. This is particularly true on the back-side of the museum. In the front, the ration is perhaps 75% stone and 25% glass, and this proportion is at least palatable. Furthermore, the stone has enough detail to distract the eye and make the glass fall into the background. But in the back, we simply see too much of the glass - it is too dominant, too jarring. From a preservation point of view, there is a clear distinction between the ruins and the new museum. But from a ruins-preservation point of view, different rules apply. The intrusion of new, blatant walls to the ruins take away from the aesthetic and make the symbolism collapse. The ruins become a veneer, rather than the essence of the place.