a philosophy of ruins

soupablog asks: What is to be our philosophy of ruins?

Now that America is getting old enough to have them. This question ties into previous throughts about 'relocation to the abandoned spaces of Empire' as well. I'd like to point you to an excellent photoessay from slate  [heavily excerpted and emphasized by me]:

Abandoned places—ghost towns and gutted factories, derelict dwellings and vacant lots—litter the American landscape. No longer needed, buildings slowly decay into battered husks. Molds and microbes break structures down into organic matter; animals and plants move in as people move out. Americans generally accept this kind of decay only in certain contexts: What is picturesque in a deserted mining camp can be deeply disturbing on a residential city street. And even in the ghost settlements of the West, the impulse to hold on to the material past is strong. But what happens when we let these places go? What lessons can we glean from their gradual disintegration? Decay erases certain histories. But it can release other stories about place and ecology that would otherwise go untold. ... Ghost town workers take great pains to "arrest" decay at some indefinite point of maximum ghostliness; never mind that these places owe their wracked and weathered charm to rot and ruination. ....When structures are left to their own devices, they melt instead of remaining frozen. ....In their unrestored state, the buildings recall the foolhardy capital that built the mine and the ultimate failure of the venture. The transience of human ambition is etched out in lichen on the iron of the former shaft works and in the moss that covers the rotten roofs. Letting man-made structures decay to the point of disappearance is not an idea with a lot of popular or professional support, at least in America. In the mid-1990s, however, sociologist and photographer Camilo José Vergara proposed a "ruins park" for the mostly empty urban core of Detroit. In his "American Acropolis," the vacant buildings would become habitat for peregrine falcons and intrepid plants. The prairie would reseed the city streets. People would gather to witness a "memorial to a disappearing urban civilization." Detroit citizens did not welcome the proposal. It mattered little to them that Vergara found redemption and beauty, as well as regret, in their husk of a city. In this slide, Vergara's photo of the derelict reading room of the Camden Free Library in New Jersey, a thicket of saplings reaches toward a tattered ceiling's filtered light. Historian Elizabeth Blackmar detects in Vergara's photos an "aesthetic pause," which leads us to wonder how we could have avoided the wasting away of these 20th-century landmarks—and to reflect on what we are to learn from their demise.

Photograph by Camilo José Vergara. Via invinciblecities.com

Comments

[pamela]

this is such an interesting piece. while there is something to be said for allowing some ruins to persist to remind us that anything we build is temporary, for the most part i believe in restoring the old or finding new uses for it rather than tearing it down or abandoning, say, the inner city, in favor of brighter, cleaner, newer homes and buildings to the north.

this is a bit of a tangent, perhaps, but i think our society has an obsession with youth and beauty...which translates into a disdain for anything old or outdated. what is out of sight becomes out of mind, out of heart, out of [ ]...until the older things and ideas and people in our world are just forgotten and no longer appreciated. this perhaps leads to a poor understanding of history and a lack of wisdom in our world today.

okay, i guess that's enough rambling for now.

[barry]

hm -- i thought i'd commented on this.

but my comment -- the one that i thought i'd left was that the interesting thing is that edmund burke was writing all about this in the 1770s, just as our nation was starting out. his "philosophical enquiry into the nature of the sublime and the beautiful" is impressive. he explains why "titanic" is such a popular movie.

[paul]

thanks for the reference. do you have a copy i could borrow?

[barry]

voila!!

...although i now see that i have to go back in and change the footnote refs. ah well.

http://barryland.com/burke.html