Dossier

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Of Specters and Phantasms: an Introduction

“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

No thing besides remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

(P.B. Shelley, Ozymandias)

In many ways, ruin is deeply embedded in all architecture: it discreetly points to architecture’s potential alteration as a result of ageing, abandonment, obsolescence, destruction or any other form of violence that is imposed upon space.

As a reminder of a lost totality whose absence it summons, but also in its own material existence, ruin is fragile. Its fragmentary quality also confers it an integrity in itself, as a form of resistance to loss, a new life. This ambiguity between fragment and totality, between fragility and resilience inspired Georg Simmel to write in 1911 about the “charm” that results from this antagonism, which partly accounts for our enthusiasm with ruins.

Within the long-standing fascination with ruins (Ruinenlust) as allegories of time and destiny, as evoked by Shelley’s poem Ozymandias, the 20th century entertains an ambiguous relationship with ruin: while demolition functions as a polemical device for the Plan Voisin, the Acropolis stands as an object of aesthetic exaltation for both Le Corbusier and Auguste Perret. For Aldo Rossi and his generation, the uncanniness of the “disemboweled” houses after World War II awakened mixed feelings of nostalgia and loss, as these fragments of cities and architectures testified to “the interrupted destiny of the individual and his often sad and difficult participation in the destiny of the collective.”

Throughout the last century, modern architecture’s fate was closely intertwined with multiple violent endings and ruinations: from the blazing destruction of Pruitt Igoe in the 1970s and the catastrophic collapse of the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers in 2001, to the controversial demolition of the Palast der Republik at the end of 2000s, not to mention the many urban planning disasters that go along.

At this very moment more and more ruins are produced, making disaster and loss again the only measure of our attention. Not just architecture, cultural heritage, cities and lives are daily threatened by destruction, but ruin itself seems to be once again endangered through vandalization, displacement and looting, finally culminating with its total disappearance.

The advanced decay of landscapes and territories along with the intrinsic obsolescence of much of architectural recent production further complicates the ambiguous nature of ruins: no longer just periscopes into the past that outlive our own temporality, are ruins of the contemporary still capable to generate meaning? In the rampant development of virtual worlds today, could ruin still have an active, critical role – both conceptually and physically?

This issue of sITA reflects on topics that investigate or revisit the role of ruins in architectural theory and design, while at the same time considering the larger question of ruins and ruination as a predicament of our times.

The volume opens with a conversation with renowned art historian and archaeologist Salvatore Settis. Author of an impressive work on art history centered around Antiquity and the Renaissance, lately he has used the medium of the exhibition and the exhibition catalogue as a powerful vehicle for the transmission of (visual) ideas.

Aby Warburg has been influential to Settis’ writings, as he has been in orienting our entire issue dedicated to ruins. We owe this singular character in art history and in the cultural history of ideas an audacious and refreshing perspective on history as a perpetually actualized agent that acts as a ghost. Disrupting Winckelmann’s classical progressive model of art history (origin, progress, variations, apotheosis, decadence and fall), Warburg advances a phantom model[1] (Georges Didi-Huberman) populated by revenants, survivals, sudden returns of form. This is how antiquity survives — its afterlife is not one but multiple, a series of comebacks that act just like one imagines the surreptitious arrival of ghosts.

One of the threads of our interview with Professor Settis regards this alternation of deaths and revivals, of construction and decay as a temporal and emotional movement. Not just beautiful, antique or historical ruins but the ruins of the everyday — produced incessantly by the contemporary machines of consumption and the building industries — as well as those that remain obsolete: all these are problematic and should be addressed. Although urban history is usually regarded as a history of edification, however edification has always been accompanied by an underlying history of destruction. Learning from destruction had, during history, a moralizing effect: avoiding the hubris may have in the future a different upshot.

Hence afterlife is crucial for ruins. It is what defines their existence. The ambivalent nature of ruin as something no longer intact, fragment of a once whole and something that has not yet vanished confers them an almost indexical value, since whatever this thing called ruin is, it is always also about something else (the lost integrity of the self, a reflexion of Paradise etc.).

Paralleling Aby Warburg’s famous formula of the Nachleben der Antike as a possible way of seeing the afterlives of contemporary ruins, our volume addresses the question if ruins may still have an expressive, symbolical, functional or critical value today. 

Following the interview, the Dossier is composed of papers that function together as a kaleidoscope — an instrument made of loose, interlaced pieces that are held together by the rigor of the apparatus, but the configuration of the resulting assemblage can be remade in infinite combinations. This kaleidoscopic perspective can be reassembled — the proposed order of the papers is thus one of the possible readings but, just like our authors reiterate again and again, the conceptual threads of this thing called ruin, always a fragment of a once whole, may be regrouped and reassembled to form other constellations of meanings.

The first section of the issue begins, as it should, with a historiographical approach: ruin is seen as a critical, metaphorical or political device, a place to be inhabited, a container or screen for memories, an incentive for urban transformation, an aesthetic motif and a subject for representation, a motor for the nation-building narratives of the 19th century.

In the opening article of the dossier, The Inhabitability of Ruins: A Cultural History, Cătălin Pavel offers an extensive historical background to a cultural journey into the inhabited ruin. Reading Georg Simmel’s bewohnte Ruine with a heideggerian lens, his excursus delves into the various instances of living in ruins or the representations of inhabited ruins from the Roman antiquity, through the Renaissance, into the 18th and 19th centuries. Pavel demonstrates, through this veritable tour de force, that inhabitability (in its pragmatic, symbolic, aesthetic, moral or philosophical dimensions) is an essential characteristic of the ruin.

The first section ensues with a different perspective on the inhabited ruin, in Javier Pérez-Herreras’ Three Architectures, Three Times and Three Places in the Ruins of the Parthenon. Three extraordinary journeys — an engraver, a painter and his father, and an architect — that take place 50 or 100 years apart, cast three disparate gazes upon the ruins of the Parthenon. Architecture acts both as the stage and the secret chamber impregnated with the specters of these travels and of many others. Their (in)visible traces and distant memories share the afterlife of this ruin of ruins.

Efstathios Boukouras’ article tackles The Age of Ruinenlust: An Exploration of Tourism and Ruins in the Urban Context, in Rome, during the Grand Tour. The craze for ruins that took over the 18th century, especially linked to the Grand Tour, is examined through a quantitative mapping of the British travelers to Rome between the 16th and the mid-19th century, combined with a qualitative assessment of how the urban development and the representations of the city (maps, engravings, excavations) in the 18th century were affected by this early type of tourism.

Zeynep Aktüre’s paper Ancient Places of Performance as “Realms of Memory”: The Case of Greece analyzes the disparity between the prominent Odeion of Herodes Atticus and the void-like Theatre of Dionysus in aerial views of Athens’ Acropolis. Using Pierre Nora’s concept of lieux de mémoire, it attributes this to national heritage policy prioritizing unrestored Ancient Greek theaters as lieux de mémoire and restored Roman buildings as “second-hand” milieux de mémoire.

This reflects a desire to revive Ancient Greek civilization, together with the construction of an idea of national identity. Examples include restoration efforts on Aegean Islands under Italian control and modern Greek nation-building at the beginning of the 20th century.

The Greek modern case is further inquired by Alexandra Teodor’s Thessaloniki: The Modern Museum of an Ancient City, that looks at the essential role of historical plans as complementary sources for urban archaeology. The study focuses on the case of Thessaloniki, where a great deal of the original urban fabric has been lost — considering the city’s street network, the layout of Galerius’ palatial complex and other recent developments, it argues that Thessaloniki has lately become a static museum. This is due to an urban development that has compromised the substance of its historical center and limited its development potential. The conclusions are drawn from an integrated use of urban archaeology and urban history methods, via aerial and historical maps, a methodology that needs to be further exploited in the study of any urban heritage.

In his paper On Ruins in 19th Century Romania, Horia Moldovan wonders if we can actually speak about a genuine concern for ruins in Romania, an unexplored and compelling subject that retraces the historiography of ruin in Romania from the late 18th to the 19th century. Started among a narrow cultural elite as an interest for an unknown local history, as many of the western influences, the taste for ruins grows together with a national and historical self-conscience and a construction of a national narrative typical for the modernization of Romanian society in the second half of the 19th century. For a long period, before bespeaking a research interest in conservation and the systematic study of ruins as scientific objects, ruins act as documents (source of historical information), as aesthetic objects but especially as a means for political legitimation.

19th century is at the core of Making Built Heritage: Riegl’s Present Values in Adaptive Reuse, by Nadin Augustiniok, Bie Plevoets, Claudine Houbart, Koenraad Van Cleempoel. By comparing two adaptations of the same architectural object, they tackle the subject of adaptive reuse from a design and conservation perspective. Adaptive reuse is a concept that has been gaining a lot of attention, since it promises to turn historical structures into sustainable, ecological, economic, and socio-cultural resources. However, ruins pose unique challenges by needing to meet archaeological standards and stimulate imagination. The paper examines the reuse of ruins through a case study of Moritzburg in Halle/Saale, Germany. It contrasts Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s 1829 proposal with Nieto Sobejano Architects’ 2009 extension, comparing the evolving values of cultural heritage from the 19th to the 21st century. Using Alois Riegl’s well-known framework on the different types of values, it highlights the principles of preserving architectural integrity while incorporating contemporary elements, acknowledging the existing spatial quality in modern adaptations.

The second section of our issue tackles the question of contemporary uses of ruins, and consists of five articles that discuss the destiny of modern ruins or cases of contemporary architects that develop particular design strategies for approaching ruined structures.

In Contemporary Spolia: Afterlives of Ruins in Fragments, Hale Gönül adapts the concept of spolia to a contemporary understanding. Although it can be identified in historical practices, a modern adaptation of the spolia — reuse of fragments or materials from existing, ruined structures — can be envisaged, but it is also a form of digression from the initial meaning of the practice. The contemporary interest in spolia is an assumed detour, one that invests the concept with a renewed understanding and intent: reconnecting with the past while harmoniously adapting the building to new environments, creating a fragmented yet complex aesthetic. The paper illustrates the use of contemporary spolia through the works of Dimitris Pikionis and Carlo Scarpa in the 1950s and 1960s.

The Circular Destiny of Ruins — The Case of the Convent of San Michele in Borgo, Pisa is the focus of the next article, authored by Andrea Crudeli. We may consider Pisa, a city that has been for centuries built of its own matter, fragments and architecture, as a paradigmatic case for the reuse of antiquity and among the most spectacular examples of their kind. The paper studies the case of the medieval convent of San Michele in Borgo is a peculiar situation of both experimental restoration and a practical failure. Massimo Carmassi is a renowned contemporary italian architect involved in restoration and innovative design, starting with the 1960s. Following several stages of design and interventions, the convent that had been severly damaged during World War

II was supposed to be transformed into a social housing. Although the works were advanced and nearly completed in 2001, the project has been abruptly abandoned by the Municipality and so a new stage of ruination now involves both the medieval and the contemporary, sealing the building into a circular destiny of decay and reconstruction.

The postwar theoretical restoration debate and design strategies for a very particular dialogue with ruin and architectural palimpsest has defined some exceptional interventions into the urban fabric of Pisa in the 1960s and 1970s. Even before Carmassi, Piero Sanpaolesi (prominent figure of the school of restoration in Florence) had been among the first architects that would adopt these principles of intervention in working with ruins (the case of Palazzo Agonici da Scorno).

Katrin Holmqvist Sten’s paper The Ruin as Phantasmagoria: The Faces of Nordingrå kyrkoruin discusses the case of the Swedish medieval church ruin in Nordingrå, a World Heritage area known as The High Coast, using the concepts of restorative and reflexive nostalgia by Svetlana Boym, alongside a reinterpretation of phantasmagoria as used by Walter Benjamin. The article follows the transformation of the ruin into a tourist attraction, where artistic effects are supposed to enhance the experience of the tourist-spectator through the use of artifice, just like the 18th and 19th centuries phantasmagorias were creating entertainment by summoning the ghosts of the past.

While Martina D’Alessandro’s paper Between Visible and Imagined City. Architecture and Ruins in Oswald Mathias Ungers’ Work writes about Ungers’ position on ruins by considering a few of his projects situated in archaeological context, Miguel Borges De Araújo looks at the work of Alvaro Siza through the lens of his engagement with ruins, particularly the dialogue that he establishes with the work of one of the pioneers of the Modern Movement, Bruno Taut. “Berlin, a Housing Block by Bruno Taut Will Be Demolished”. Álvaro Siza in the “Taut City” (1975-1988) retraces Siza’s intellectual journey in the discovery of Taut’s theoretical thinking and projects and in the direct encounter with Taut’s ruinated architecture in Kreuzberg and argues that the direct experience of Taut’s architecture has been decisive for Siza.

If the first section of the issue deals with the cultural history and the historiography of ruins, the second with the modern ruin as both a particular category of ruin and as an instrument for design, the third and last grouping of four articles in the issue tackles theoretical questions about ruins.

In their article _Ruin Figures and Ruin Fields of the Contemporary: The Post-Industrial _Parc à fabriques, Cristina Purcar and Andreea Milea explore the affinities and contrasts between the industrial and the ruins, proposing an analogy between the romantic parc à fabriques and the post-industrial sites repurposed as parks. Connections are drawn not only to real-world locations but also to artistic representations, particularly in the intersection between picturesque Romantic parks and painting, but also in the work of contemporary artists from the Cluj school of painting, such as Șerban Savu.

Smaranda Todoran, in Landscaping Ecosystems or the Taste for a Nature in Ruins seeks the intellectual motivation for contemporary landscape designers such as Karl Foerster, Piet Oudolf, Alain Provost, and Gilles Clément in the theoretical writings and concepts developed by Tschumi, Ruskin, Jean Baudrillard, and Marc Augé. A certain taste and sensibility for fragile ecosystems and plants, linked to pleasure and delight, usefulness and uselessness and the temporality of the natural cycles are all reflected in the interest in landscape as an alternative deconstruction of architecture.

The question of fake ruins and its political legitimation and symbolic importance is brought forward by Ákos Zsembery and Maja Toshikj’s Authentic Ruins or Authentic Reconstructions?

Through examples of historicized reconstructions that are used as propagandistic images of an imagined past, the article discusses recent case studies in Hungary and addresses the ethical problem of such hypothetical reconstructions.

Finally, the concluding article deals with the ethical role of images in addressing the recently theorized question of ruin porn, a genre of photography that obsesses over post-industrial ruins and urban decay, in an aestheticized perspective of the abandonment and decline of cities.

Elena Radoi’s article Dirty Ruins and Their Online Afterlives considers ruin porn as a successor of 18th century Ruinenlust. Since most of the ruins that constitute the object of this type of photography are either inaccessible, too dilapidated or just preserved in museums and out of reach, they are accessible mainly in the visual media. Their mediatic presence ensures their success, since like any other staged photography, the subject does not really exist as such, but only via the mediated image. Their online accessibility and the qualities of these photographs makes them ubiquitous and at the same time objectifies them, using a grammar that derives from the aesthetic of pornography. Although this type of approach to ruins has been harshly criticized, the article argues that ruins — “either depicted as crumbling, dirty objects or captured digitally in photography or film, retain a profound meaning for both humans and non-humans.”

However, we may look at the subject of ruin porn as a metaphoric condition of the contemporaneity, through its insistence on repeating and zooming in images of catastrophe and decay that are then endlessly reproduced in a loop, attesting to a decline of the ethical or moral dimension of the attraction for ruins.

If the opening paper addresses historically and culturally the dialectic between uselessness and usefulness — ruin is useful metaphorically and practically, as an object of contemplation and as a dwelling apparatus in itself — at the other end of the volume, the concluding chapter offers a reversed perspective on the radical aestheticization of ruin and the pervasiveness of its overexposure through ruin porn. In between these provocative standpoints on ruins (exceptional use and objectified sensationalism), a whole range of interpretations consider ruin’s role in the construction of a national identity narrative in the 19th and 20th centuries, as an active agency for urban modifications and an instrument in architectural design, as a circular object in modernity, as a theoretical concept in landscape design.

Celia Ghyka

[1] Georges Didi-Huberman,_ L’image survivante. Histoire de l’art et temps des fantômes selon Aby Warburg _(Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2002). Didi-Huberman discusses the disruptive model introduced by Warburg with respect to the consolidated (yet modern) views on art history, starting with Winckelmann. His monumental work on Warburg is among the most influential re-readings and interpretations of the latter.