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Ruins: Run-ins With a Nostalgia for the Future
Essay
| Ruins: Run-ins With a Nostalgia for the Future
Student | Charles Allen
Institution | SCI-Arc
Program | M.Arch 1
Faculty | Russell Thomsen
Course | Ruin
Most work on the subject aims at dissecting ruins as a chapter in the history of mankind. Somewhere in between the extinction or exodus of inhabitants, but before the structure they built is destroyed beyond recognition. However, only certain buildings in certain times will become ruins, as opposed to the much more likely outcome that the building will be maintained until it’s bulldozed in the name of progress. Additionally, ruins are much more likely to exist and last
outside of the urban, where nature has a degree of domain.
However far ruins are from the city, there is something incredibly seductive about ruins, which the architect would do themsleves a great service to examine very closely. What are these qualities and how may we harness them to enhance the life of the contemporary inhabitant? Rather than marginalizing the ruin to the land and to fantasy, is there a way we can bring this hybrid of fantasy and phantasmagoria to the city in the form of architecture? Is the field of architecture’s concern with maintaining its stature as a discipline inhibiting its ability to change and distort reality toward the fantastic that people really desire?
Le Corbusier was moved to tears upon seeing the Parthenon, a ruin, and allegedly decided there and then to become an architect.1 Either Le Corbusier had an emotional disposition, or this was more moving than times where he witnessed far larger, intact, pieces of ancient architecture. Ruins are different, powerful, and architecture is inextricably tied to them, whether the buildings that architects design become ruins or not.
Adolf Loos, another turn of the century modernist, defined architecture by saying, “If we find a mound six feet long and three feet wide in the forest, formed into a pyramid, shaped by a shovel, we become serious and something says, ‘someone lies buried here’... Now that is architecture.”2 What are these strange feelings we feel around ruins, are they as Adolf Loos’ description of architecture suggests, architecture?
While Loos considers a pyramid shaped mound of dirt architecture, this piece of architecture would likely never exist as a ruin, and it would likely be unfair to hold it to that standard. However, one must not underestimate the power that form and material have to produce such a visceral response in the observer. If Architecture can have this effect, why could not ruins also have this effect, potentially, even, a stronger one?
Karsten Harries, in her article “Building and the Terror of Time,” distinguishes between building and ruin by suggesting that buildings are motivated out of a desire by man to isolate his/herself from reminders of their inevitable end (death), and that conversely ruins actually serve as a reminder to their visitors of their end. 3 Applying Loos’ definition of architecture to Harries’ building/ruin dialectic, suggests that ruins are closer to architecture than buildings are. Is it possible that certain aspects of architecture are not able to be realized until they achieve a level of ruin?
The passing of time is ‘terrifying,’ but as time consumes the present, cementing it in the past, people seem to romanticize it thereafter. While on the one hand there may be an element of fear in a ruin that far outdates us and stands to continue to do so, our desire to romanticize the past produces a feeling of longing. Andreas Huyssen, in his article titled “Nostalgia as Ruin,” highlights the intense nostalgia for North Trans-Atlantic industrial ruins, their failure to produce the outcome originally proposed by modernity, and compares them to the conventional understanding of ‘authentic’ ruins of classical antiquity presented in many etchings by Piranesi.4
Huyssen suggests that, “we are nostalgic for the ruins of modernity because they still seem to hold a promise that has vanished from our own age: the promise of an alternative future.”5 He also posits that, “nostalgic longing for a past is always also a longing for another place.”6 This hardly sounds like a craving for the authentic, the true, or the real. Yet the ‘authentic’ is another key talking point for Huyssen, where he dives into the modern ruin and the extinction of the “authentic ruin” as we know it. 7 Understandably, this leads him to Piranesi, who is a bit of an enigma. Was Piranesi an architect? Huyssen certainly believes so as he follows a straight forward set of perspectival etchings of the existing Roman ruins only to witness a quick fork in the road where Piranesi ventures into drawing imaginary prisons. Huyssen tries to make sense of this bend saying,
“The height of authentic architecture for Piranesi was the monumental Roman temples, palaces, triumphal arches, and tombs of the Via Appia. In his many volumes of etchings, from the Prima Parte di Architetture, e Prospettive (1743) and the Varie Vedute di Roma (1743) to the four volumes of Le Antichita Romane (1756) and Della Magnificenza ed Architettura de’ Romani (1761), he captured their overgrown residues with archival precision and in a decidedly unique style. Even in decay, the monumentality and sublimity of these ruins of the past were more impressive than the miserable present that denied the trained architect Piranesi any real possibility to build in grand style.” 8
The ultimate romanticist, Piranesi drew the worlds he would not be commissioned to design. Additionally, he built on his training to produce drawings that become prisons for willing and nostalgic victims of a new, intangible, but no less authentic ruin. Do such willing victims still exist?
Most would suggest that ruins cannot simply be constructed, but rather come from the weathering and disrepair of buildings. Huyssen argues that Piranesi’s prisons are not just ruins, but that they are “more authentic even than the Roman ruins of the Vedute di Roma.” 9 Though Piranesi is not building these ruins, it is strange to think that ruins might be fabricated with more authenticity on paper than old established ruins in stone, especially because people almost exclusively consider ruins a product of large quantities of time.
Therein lies the problem with authenticity: questions of qualification quickly arise. There is always an authentic ‘to what?’ and ‘to whom?’ To the historian there exists a structure and desirable measure; objects get dated, and with that a sense of which people might have used them, but authenticity to the historian or archeologist is still relative to a short supply of provenance, which either exists or does not exist. Something frequently marketed as qualitative (like “Authentic Mexican Cuisine”) is actually quite quantitative (“How many of the ingredients are imported from Mexico?” or “How many years of experience does the chef have cooking in Mexico?”).
With the rare exception where Piranesi draws imaginary ruins into existence, how did ‘authentic ruins’ come to be, and can there be ruins of this ‘authentic’ variety in the future? George Simmel describes the process as one of building and inhabitance, and thereafter ruin until the ruins are indistiguishable from natural rocks. He describes this as a fight between man building up and nature breaking down. 10
Simmel’s paradigm is challenging, however, because of what qualifiers are omitted, primarily that a very small proportion of buildings are allowed to ride this line between mankind’s building up and nature’s force down to produce ruin. The Roman ruins were a product of the sudden collapse of the Roman empire and with that the skill and knowledge required to repair structures like the Baths of Caracalla, even if only to repurpose them. Castles were leveled and rebuilt by armies who quickly reassimilated after gunpowder rendered lofty castle walls obsolete. The Great Pyramids of Giza would be more work to demolish than to be left for tourists.
Buildings are in a fight against nature, and in Simmel’s time nature would have seemed the biggest issue, but ruins are the exceptions to the more likely demolition in the name of progress, the diamonds in a vein much more likely to produce graphite. Thus the ruins discussed are not a nostalgia for the past as it would have been experienced, but rather selective histories of select buildings, often the ones of a scale monumental enough to last. If these ruins offer a nostalgia for the past, it is an inherently inauthentic one, in Rome’s case, one that favors the larger Baths of Caracalla and not the smaller iterations of smaller, earlier, baths buried beneath the city. Piranesi was not exploring Rome as it was. He was collecting special moments of grandeur from a very special civilization. Do ruins exude a sort of nostalgia as Huyssen suggests they do, by virtue of the fact that they are ruins, or does it have something to do with the fact that they are specially collected ruins, even at times curated?
Herein lies the trouble with nostalgia. It is inherently selective. Just think of Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris (a piece of nostalgia in itself). 11 A famous screenwriter turned novelist finds himself the opportunity to travel back in time and meet his writer heroes of the 1920s. 12 After a merry time and a great deal of convincing that the Golden Age of Paris was all it is cracked up to be, he discovers that all his new friends (from the past) wish that they could travel back to meet the writers that preceded them. 213 Was the Golden age really golden? Not to those who currently existed there, they (like we tend to) look to the past for their inspiration and identity.
If ruins are as much a product of the architectural act of selection as they are an act of historical documentation, then what does this mean for our contemporary fetishization of ruins? Does the world today need a contemporary Piranesi, who will help us see the present the way the future generations will see it? Do architects need to dissect ruins, tearing their form, from their materiality, to their patina to determine what it really is that people like about ruins? Or do architects simply need to adjust to the fact that the fetishization stops at the superficial, and the only way to produce architecture with similarly moving gravitas is to explore the perspectival tricks that can be played in the two-dimensional medium?
Ruin is aestheticized by the Piranesi inspired Russian architect duo, Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin, who in contrast to Stalin’s belief that architecture should achieve a “future in no way distinct from the present,” embraced ruins as a generator of what the author, Andreas Schönle, has titled his essay; “The Ruin as Alternative Reality.” 14 It is in this essay that a slightly better definition of authenticity is explored as being a “traditional priority of the original over its imitations.”15 Rather than trying to find a foothold in the quantitative world of real authenticity, it is put through the lens of a world prone to decay and that while searching through the rubble people should prioritize the older over the newer. However, these architects would likely fall into a Post-Modern camp. What about the Modernists?
Piranesi clearly also had a great deal of influence on the Modernists. Modern buildings would make excellent ruins, and those of the brutalists and constructivists stand a good chance of dissuading a wrecking crew until, for Simmel, the ruination process might have already begun. No doubt Le Corbusier and Loos were greatly impacted by the power of ruins.
Were their generators of a ruinous variety? Perhaps the materiality of the concrete with the béton brut approach to texture and the ability to leave these concrete surfaces exposed to the elements helped these architects manage and curate their ruins within a functioning building. This is a fascinating cross between mankind’s working upward and allowing nature to work downward while the buildings are still inhabited, and yet there are clear instances where this takes place even in the design process. Frank Lloyd Wright and Corbusier’s perspectival renders contain many vines, as opposed to just foliage, as though they wanted their buildings to read as ruin. 16&17
If the modernist did adopt the Piranesi’s ‘ruined’ aesthetic, how did a group as optimistic and forward-thinking as they manage to integrate an aesthetic exuding so much nostalgia (ignoring the materiality similarity that both Piranesi and the modernists were rendering their forms in concrete)? Could the modernist have interpreted Piranesi’s work as Huyssen did, as an alternative future (not to be confused with the ‘alternative reality’ mentioned earlier)? Could that have been part of the brave new world they all hoped to play a part in constructing? It seems absurd to use nostalgia heavy precedents for a new architecture movement to propel a people into the future, but Albert Spear serves as contemporaneous example of just that, as he went about developing a new aesthetic for Hitler’s “Thousand Year Reich.”18 Neither Frank Lloyd Wright’s nor Corbusier’s movements lasted well into the future, though they both proved far more seductive than what preceded them.
What is a Radiant Garden City but a city where both Nature and Building can coexist with mankind as a mediator? Perhaps the ‘alternative future’ proposed by Huyssen of Piranesi really was propaganda for architectural movements that wanted to move the world, and the contrast between this and today, where architecture hardly moves anything, strikes the architect today in a peculiar way. Architecture has spun to two extremes, one a subservience to form, and the other to the past. Maybe Piranesi calls to us because we long for an age that believed in grandeur, and being human, we have conveniently forgotten the amount of bloodshed required to produce it.
Similarly, the authenticity of old ruins seems sturdy, nobody is carting in new thousand ton wall sections of fresh Caracalla façade. The Romans existed, poured their concrete, bathed a couple hundred years and their structures have been pretty much the same since. In an age where the malls we went to thirty, twenty, ten years ago are left to ruin, it is hard not to yearn for relics of ages past, a collection piling as high as those in Piranesi’s Antichita Romane.
But is the yearning people feel today a yearning for thriving shopping malls, the American Surburb, or even the very ruins we might have at our disposal? I would venture to suggest that like Piranesi, we want something more, but more, we want something different. We don’t want to slide into a Tesla and drive into a future, cleaner. Or as Stalin might put it, “a future in no way different from the past.” 19 We don’t want this future anymore than we want to resuscitate the past. As Huyssen puts it, “our longing is for another place” and “an alternative future.”20 Huyssen employs the Greek to define nostalgia as “homesickness.”21 Perhaps a nostalgia for the future is a homesickness for a home not yet built, likely not even in progress. Perhaps it is an unrealistic expectation for something within the bounds of reality.
But the feeling is real. A ruin pushed Le Corbusier over the edge, not into the deep study of the past, but instead, resolutely into the future. A nostalgia for the future is the hope of ruins that we keep close as we fight through a discipline that both designs buildings, and subsequently argues them back into rubble. Nostalgia for the future is the carrot on the end of the architect’s perfectionist shtick.
Endnotes
2 Loos , Adolf. “Adolf Loos.” Goodreads . 2020 Goodreads, INC. Accessed April 28, 2020. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9268190-if-we-find-a-mound-six-feet-long-and-three.
3 Harries, Karsten. “Building and the Terror of Time .” Perspecta 19 (1982): 58–69. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1567050.
4 Huyssen, Andreas. “Nostalgia for Ruins .” Grey Room, no. 23 (2006): 6–21. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20442718.
5 Huyssen, “Nostalgia for Ruin,” 8.
6 Huyssen, 7.
7 Huyssen, 10.
8 Huyssen, 15.
9 Huyssen, 19.
10 Simmel, Georg. Georg Simmel, 1858-1918. Edited by Kurt H Wolff, Howard Becker, Hugh D Duncan, and Lore Ferguson.Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press, 1911.
11 Midnight in Paris. Sony Pictures Classic, 2011.
12 Sony Pictures Classic, 2011.
13 Sony Pictures Classic, 2011.
14 Schönle, Andreas. “The Ruin as Alternative Reality: Paper Architects and the Vitality of Decay.” Architecture of Oblivion: Ruins and Historical Consciousness in Modern Russia , 2011, 194–218. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/sciarcebooks/detail.action?docID=3382566.
15 Schönle, 211.
16 “Frank Lloyd Wright Credited Japan for His All-American Aesthetic.” Smithsonian.com. Smithsonian Institution, June 8, 2017. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/frank-lloyd-wrights-japanese-education-180963617/.
17 “Le Corbusier.” pietmondriaan.com, December 29, 2015. http://pietmondriaan.com/2015/12/30/le-corbusier-3/.
18 Lane, Barbara Miller. Architecture and Politics in Germany, 1918-1945. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985.
19 Schönle, 194.
20 Huyssen, 7.
21 Huyssen, 7.