The Ruin Aesthetic: Episodes in the History of an Architectural Idea

One of the most arresting ideas in the philosopher Michel Serres’ Rome: The Book of Foundations (1983) is that history is “a knot of different times”–a knot most visibly reified by the tangible traces of past civilizations. Such a knot speaks as readily to stratigraphic accumulations in urban space as to the composite aesthetics of ruin pictures. Artifacts, fragments, vestiges, rubble, debris, detritus, wreckage: all this has prompted a venerable body of writings and objects that work the metaphor of ruin into everything from a philosophical template for the Sublime to a mechanism for iconoclastic violence.

The subject of the ruin stems from the interconnection of themes crucial to the history of architecture. These include the vexed legacy of the Classical tradition well into Modernism and Postmodernism, changing attitudes towards past and patrimony, the relationship of architecture and archaeology, the adaptability of architectural form through and despite time, and the politics of collective memory: what does it mean to be, as it were, forever “building on ruins?” The subject of the ruin also stems from a theoretical discourse on the function of decay in architecture, which was inaugurated by thinkers such as the German sociologist Georg Simmel. As he wrote in an essay published in 1911: “The ruin strikes us so often as tragic–but not as sad–because destruction here is … the realization of a tendency inherent in the deepest layer of the existence of the destroyed.”

The seminar will begin with architecture and the vision of the past in the early modern period. We will consider a range of examples such as the Renaissance rediscovery of antiquity, the plates of antiquarian treatises, and the polemical stance of architects such as Giovanni Battista Piranesi with regards to architecture’s origins. We will then consider how the cult of the ruin has come to shape notions of nostalgia and dystopia in modern and contemporary contexts. Examples might include the Heideggerian concept of Ruinanz, the adaptive reuse of industrial ruins, or the reflection of absence in such examples as the National September 11 Memorial. Our broader aim will be to gain an understanding of a multi-faceted discourse, which sets architecture into relation with time, memory, and forgetting.

The seminar is based on intensive reading, writing, and conversation, and participants should be ready to engage critically with the assigned readings on a weekly basis. Requirements include active participation, reading responses (1-2 pages), a paper proposal, a short presentation, and a final research paper (15-20 pages). Students should have background in the history and theory of architecture. Those in the doctoral and MDES programs as well as professional students exploring related thesis topics are especially welcome.

A limited number of seats are held for PhD students. Interested PhD students should contact the instructor as well as petition to cross-register.