Dina Shenhav's "Tarchish"

Today is international museum day, and a number of Israeli papers had coverage of various exhibits going on in Israel. One of these exhibits, Tarchish (scenario) by Dina Shenhav, has a decidedly ruinous feel to it. The exhibit is being staged at the Nachum Gutman Museum in Neveh Tzedek.

According to Achbar Ha'ir,

"Shinhav's work deals with the human fear of apocalypse. This fear, she believes, is based on events from the dawn of history and up to modern time - places that were destroyed, destruction caused by man and civilization or by nature. The stories of Noah and Sodom in the Bible, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, the bombing of the World Trade Center, destruction of forests, earthquakes and tsunamis - all these are natural components of the human genome."

Here is a video of her work. It's worth watching, and an interesting way to capture the feeling of ruins and destruction. She apparently has done other ruinous work before. Here are pictures from her series, "The End of the City", "And the Wind Returneth," and from some of her earlier work.

Irresistible Decay

In 1997, The Getty Center held an exhibition entitled "Irresistible Decay: Ruins Reclaimed." Along with the exhibit, an accompanying volume was published, with a few essays about ruins. The exhibit was divided into three parts, with the second part titled "Recycling, Reconstruction and Preservation." Michael Roth writes that

"Some commentators have perceived it as necessary, for example, that an ancient building be separated in some way from daily use so that its pastness could be more dramatically made manifest. Seen from this vantage, it becomes important that the ruin appear as an anachronism: as a message from the past more than as an active site of life in the present."

However, Roth goes on to explain the manifest contradiction in reusing a ruin while at the same time trying to preserve it as a thing of the past.

Later in the essay, Roth mentions an interesting case study: a semi-fallen gateway in Baalbek, Lebanon. In a 1799 painting, the keystone is in the process of falling, but by 1870 the British had propped it up with a brick column, "preserving the keystone by making it impossible for nature to continue its work, in effect, stalling time." Finally, the Germans returned the keystone to its original location. This, Roth writes, is an example of what John Ruskin meant when he claimed that restoration equals destruction.

A second essay by Charles Merewether discusses some more points about ruins, including the way in which Daniel Libeskind and Lebbeus Woods use ruins in their work. The book's third essay, "Archives in Ruins: The Collections of the Getty Research Institute" by Claire Lyons, explains how ruins are used as historical sources. This touches on our work, and how we hope to preserve ruins as historical witnesses.

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).
  

American Ruins: Photographs by Arthur Drooker

While in the States recently, I picked up a copy of American Ruins. The book centers on infrared photographs taken by Arthur Drooker.

"Infrared light conjures up ethereal landscapes where shadows hover like apparitions, leaves and grass glow in downy white, clouds float in their own dreamy dimension, and ruins appear as fragments of an unsolvable mystery."

The use of this technology to capture the essence of ruins is both inspiring, and a reminder that one must consider multiple perspectives and try different techniques to capture those aspects we find fascinating in ruins.

The photographs are accompanied by an essay by Christopher Woodward, author of In Ruin. However, this essay introduces little new material to the discussion. One thing Woodward mentions, which he left out of his previous book, is a thought by Charles Dickens regarding the Colosseum.

"Dickens wrote that the structure should continue to crumble one inch per year, so that it demonstrated the destruction of paganism."(p13)

The ruin is preserved by allowing it to continue to crumble. It's unclear how the ruin can be maintained so that only one inch decays each year, and in any case, the idea is mostly a symbolic way to mark the defeat of paganism. It's kind of a bygone, insecure way of thinking. Should Rosh Haayin ruins be allowed to stay ruins in order to emphasize that the British Mandate is over? It would be kind of silly.

Artificial Underwater Ruins

Continuing the theme of the previous post, I read an interesting article in the February 2011 issue of National Geographic, called Relics to Reefs. The article discusses the practice of using obsolete objects like subway cars, ships or tanks to create artificial reefs along the coasts of various places. It states that

"pretty much anything you can sink has the potential to become an artificial reef. Even officially sanctioned ones are often created from distinctly odd materials, including decommissioned subway cards, vintage battle tanks, armored personnel carriers, oil drilling rigs, and specially designed beehive-like modules called Reef Balls."

Once sunk, these objects begin to attract marine life and may develop into coral. Plankton attracts small fish, the walls create shelters that draw other animals, predators come to prey on these dwellers, and soon a new habitat exists. Still, many variables determine which will succeed: "depth, water temperature, currents, and the composition of the sea bottom."

This practice is similar to our ideas about reusing ruins to create new functions. Just as new growths form on the husk of the old, sunken objects, so too we hope to create new functions around and upon our ruins, and in doing so, to create a vibrant new living area.

One of the most amazing things the article describes is how a small number of people are choosing to be cremated and to have their ashes mixed with cement and cast as part of an underwater garden, called Neptune Reef.

"The people laid to rest here must have been familiar enough with the processes of the ocean to know that these placements would soon be engulfed by invertebrate life, that damselfish would one day be laying eggs and cultivating patches of algae on their bones, so to speak."

Underwater Ruins

The MSRA - Michigan Shipwreck Research Associates - is an organization that researches shipwrecks in the Great Lakes. I grew up (mostly) in Michigan, the state which is in the middle of the Great Lakes, so the subject is literally closer to home for me than ocean shipwrecks. They estimate that hundreds of major ships have sunk in these waters, with a page that links to the story of many of the ruins that they have located, complete with GPS coordinates and pictures of the ships pre-disaster.

Other similar organizations exist as well. Neighboring state Wisconsin boasts something called "The Ghost Ship Festival", devoted to scuba diving and Great Lakes Maritime History. NUMA - the National Underwater and Marine Agency - is a "volunteer foundation dedicated to preserving our maritime heritage through the discovery, archaeological survey and conservation of shipwreck artifacts." Most of us saw the movie Titanic (and perhaps "Ghosts of the Abyss) which partially showed an expedition to find the famed ship, which sank in the Atlantic Ocean.

I came across the subject when I read a recent newspaper article about the discovery of a shipwreck in Lake Michigan.

Underwater, or marine archaeology is a recognized sub-field of archaeology. For example, in Israel underwater archaeologists have surveyed the ruins of Herod's harbor in Caesaria. While it used to be done by divers, today miniature submarines are often used, as well as sonar for surveying. This can include not only shipwrecks, but also underwater buildings resulting from changes in coastlines, rivers etc. One example is the so-called Seahenge.
Ship ruins are not commonly addressed in philosophical literature, and rarely appear in art. Symbolically, I image they are less poignant than land ruins, simply because while a building seems like something stable, strong, and long-lasting, a ship is far more fleeting. One doesn't think of a ship on the sea as something stable or tenable - it can't retain its position for long. Therefore, it is not so mind-boggling to think about a shipwreck. In addition, sea ruins are by far less accessible to the average person, so they are not in the public conscience in the same way. Nonetheless, they do play on our fears, and the ruins themselves are quite beautiful.

Ruins in Contemporary Design

We've been looking for examples of ruins used as architectural elements. Although this isn't something that one would called common, there are certain circumstances where ruins are less uncommon. We found a number of examples of ruins within parks. Seattle's Gas Works Park, designed by Richard Haag, makes use of indstrials ruins as a feature on the landscape, and even used some of the ruins a children's "play barn." In Sydney, the Paddington Reservoir Gardens by Tonkin Zulaikha Greer is a sunken garden in the ruins of an old waterworks plant. The Landscape Park in Duisburg-Nord, Germany by Peter Latz and Partners reuses a steelworks plant. Colored lights illuminate the structure, and new functions such as a climbing wall have been introduced onto the ruins. Latz also designed Harbour Island at a destroyed harbour in Saarbrucken. Mill Ruins Park in Minnesota features - you guessed it - the ruins of an old mill. France boasts the Parc du Haut Fourneau from this century and the Parc des Buttes Chaumont from the 19th century. Fundidora Park in Mexico uses the ruins of an old steel mill. Another example is the Altes Huttenareal in Neunkirchen.

We also tried to find examples of reuse of military architecture from World War II, as this is particularly pertinent to our work in Rosh Ha'ayin. At the Charles Darwin National Park in Australia, concrete bunkers are reused. Quonset Point in Rhode Island used to be a WWII naval station, and there are attempts to redesign it for new use as well. It's interesting to note that most WWII base ruins are in the middle of nowhere. In a sense, the situation in Rosh Ha'ayin, where the ruins are inside a city, is quite rare.

Other projects have used ruins for public community functions. Foster+Partners designed the Essen Design Center in the 1990s, reusing "the site as a cultural centre and to transform the old powerhouse - a masterpiece of industrial archaeology - into the home of a design centre for the promotion of contemporary design in Germany and abroad." The Bethlehem Steel Plant in Pennsylvania has been redesigned as a casino. Although I'm not certain if I consider it ruins, the High Line by Diller Scofidio + Renfro with James Corner also enter the conversation.

Edmund Burke

Several books and articleſ that I've read about ruinſ have mentioned a particular work of Edmund Burke, the 18th century English philosopher, entitled A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideaſ of the ſublime and Beautiful. I therefore came to the concluſion that it was worth my trouble to read it. I downloaded the fifth edition and plunged right in, long ſ be damned.

It was a disappointment. The book was an attempt to argue scientifically what it means to be beautiful or sublime. Living in a Postmodern world, these arguments come across as archaic. Even worse, there was hardly anything about ruins in the entire 350 page essay! All there was fit in one small section: Part 1, section 15, entitled "On the Effects of Tragedy." Burke argues that ruins are exciting because they are authentic, and because we like seeing things that cause us outrage. He writes that if London were to be destroyed, it would get more tourists as a ruin than it does as a major European city.

The Quonset Hut - Military Huts + Sheds Cont'd...

Quonset Hut, converted into a house post-war, U.S.

Recently Josh found a wonderful quote from one of the designers of the American Army's Quonset Hut (or its British equivalent the Nissen Hut), which goes as follows. When asked if he ever anticipated the long post-war life the quonset hut has enjoyed, McDonnel said that the members of his team never gave it a thought; "It was an ugly thing, and its purpose was not to grace the landscape."

Although, in my eyes it is a wonderful snug-looking hut, and has since been converted/recycled to serve a variety of uses and programs.

Nissen Huts in Australia, below top, in the Northern Territory left to ruin, below bottom, in South Australia, converted to a Church.

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.