on ruination

It is worth it to say that ruination is not the mere dysfunction of things. It is not ‘broken society’ in such terms. Rather, it is the greater arena for such conceptions of ‘brokenness’ in which communities and societies find outlet and dispossession in the physical environment for forces that act in other means. That is to say, all things meet the ground at some point and require an entropic expending of resources that affect the physical environment. This is at the heart of Harvey’s notion, invoked previously, of the “spatio-temporal fix,” which is a moment in time and a place on the earth, where economic forces and the constitutive forces that influence it (such as consumer habit or trade policy) require a physical outlet of appropriation.

My interests in defining the terms of ruination lie in a few key areas. They are: abandoning place, transfiguration, the iterative collection of artifacts, re-appropriation of content and meaning, and the hypothetical architecture of emptiness. To be more concise, I have broken down these areas below:

Abandoning place: ruination is a process of dis-inhabitation, the emptying-out of inhabitants and the items of inhabitation that describe inhabitation on social, cultural, and emotional grounds. Ruination in this description may be illustrated by cases such as the leaving-behind of all manner of items in the rapid dis-inhabitation of Pripyat; the art removed from the museum walls as it no longer becomes viable due to either extreme circumstances (flight) or more those more subtle (depopulation).

Transfiguration: ruination lends way to possibilities of transfiguration, for instance in change over time in which decay and trespass set in. Also, squatters and alternative populations (animals and sometimes entire ecosystems) neutralize the programming of space, pay it no heed, re-appropriate its edges, or make it the subject of artistic interpretation as in the case of the Heidelberg Project in Detroit. Even more compelling to me is transfiguration in the sense described by the modern urge of exhalation. Thus Kafka, Shoenberg, and Strauss articulated worldviews of transfiguration in a post-Nietzschean conception of death and potential. Anxieties of despair and hope in the modern mind run profoundly deep through ideas of ruination. Thus Strauss lamented the ruination of German cities laid bare following World War II—a sensitively cautious invocation of Germanic mythologies of death—in his Eroica-quoting and revealingly named Metamorphosen.

Iterative collection of artifacts: ruination often describes the planned or unplanned collection of documentary objects. Battlefields are left littered with abandoned war equipment and items of value or witness are deposited into safekeeping or hidden for future recovery. The spaces from which these items are harvested, and the intentions or deliberation by which such harvesting and depositing occur, point to those of ruination. The genocide museum of Murambi, Rwanda is a chilling example of the collection of artifacts within a place of ruination. The exposed laying-out of corpses from the massacres blurs the limits of cultural, physical, and emotional ruination.

Re-appropriation of content and meaning: again, the Heidelberg Project in Detroit comes to mind. Natural reclamation, architectural or artistic intervention (to use a common example, Gordon Matta Clark), preservation of ruination, and memorialization are all ways in which content and meaning are re-appropriated to areas of ruination. This is one category that certainly merits more research at this point.

And finally, the architecture of emptiness: mold. What would an architecture which spawns from the tectonic, environmental, or otherwise physical circumstance of ruination look like? On the other hand, what about the cultural, social, or political circumstance of ruination? That is to say, is the architecture of emptiness poietic or technesic—in which the former represents an Aristotelian and mold-like self-manifestation whereas the latter represents a self-conscious and creative intervention.