Rejecting Diderot, or the comeupance of 'Ruined Buildings'

In a previous post Rebecca quoted Denis Diderot as food for thought. Diderot raises an interesting point in his writing when he discussed which buildings are eligible to become ruins. Jukka Jokilehto describes Diderot's approach in his "History of Architectural Conservation":

"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.

Grossinger's Resort Ruins

Yahoo! recently ran a story about Grossinger's, a nice resort in New York that has been abandoned and fallen into ruin. My wife told me that her grandparents went there on occasion, and I believe that my grandfather once took my parents there for a vacation over Passover. In any case, the pictures show the ruins of the resort. One can imagine how the building will continue to deteriorate over the years.
See here for the link.

Ruins of the War of Independence

I ran a search on "ruins" on the website of the Israeli Government Photo Archives and came up with a number of images, mostly from the War of Independence.

Most of these images were taken by Zoltan Kluger, who also photographed Antipatris during this period. One is from Yamit.

Building Life Cycle in Ghostly Ruins

As research has slackened due to the requirements of producing our final presentation, the number of posts on the blog have fallen off dramatically. I assume that in the coming years there may be posts from time to time, although for the most part the blog will become less active.

I was rereading the introduction to one of my ruin books this afternoon, Harry Skrdla's Ghostly Ruins: America's Forgotten Architecture, and I realized that it captured one of the basic principles we have understood about ruins. Ruins are not a natural or final state of a building. Most ruins are in an in-between stage: they haven't been destroyed yet, they haven't been renovated, but presumably one of those two things will eventually happen. Either a ruin will be demolished or disappear on it's own, or else it will be recycled and reused. A ruin is only a stop in the natural life cycle of a building.

Skrdla writes:
"In America few buildings are really abandoned. Someone owns every square foot of real estate, and if you don't believe it, just try claiming an "abandoned" building as your own. Perhaps "unused" is a better word for what we're interested in. Certainly "ruined" describes many of them fairly well,although some are remarkably sound and could be made serviceable again without too much effort.
"Whatever we choose to call them, they are ephemeral. Transitory. These structures exist in a limbo between utility and complete collapse. We encounter them during the relatively brief time before they are no longer recognizable and lose all meaning for us.
"This period lasts much longer for, say, the pyramids than for our structures - we building much less robustly - but the end result is the same. Either mankind of the elements will eventually destroy them.
"Occasionally some lucky few man win a reprieve and, with the help of the preservation-minded, be restored to some version of their former greatness. But these are the minority, and even after "restoration," they are never quite the same.
"In even the best-intended and executed restorations, something is lost - some reality is replaced by our version of reality. The new paint is ours, not theirs. Wood floors, sanded fresh and smooth and shiny again, are like an erased blackboard, robbed of the scratches and depressions earned by years of footfalls. Brass doorknobs, their decorative surfaces smoothed by the touch of a thousand turning hands; wood paneling, darkened with age and the cigar smoke of vanished industrialists - these are part of a building's personality. The imprint of humanity. A permanent record of the people who came and the events that occurred these. Restoration, in its striving for a "perfect" version of a building, often removes these imperfections, and in so doing sterilizes it; negating the part of humans in the building's life.
"Oddly, this only seems to be the case in structures that experience complete restoration. If a building is always occupied to some degree, the occupants gradually contribute their own imprint to the environment. They may repaint when the walls become too soiled, but it is their paint, no ours. A worn lock mechanism may need replacement, but only as part of regular maintenance. Continuity is maintained. Life goes on - and the building retains its soul.
"Part of the charm of abandoned structures is that they are honest. They have reached the end of their lives, no matter what the cause, in their own way, and we respect them for it. They are the revered elders of their race, wearing their wrinkles without regrets. There are no facelifts here. No fountain of youth. We witness their decline and passing as that of aged loved ones, with sorrow, but because of what they mean to us, not their decrepit appearance."
(P. 18-19)

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.