Big Ruins

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Tim Edensor - RUINS ARE EVERYWHERE

  • Writer of 'industrial ruins'
  • He made a paper last year, when he submitted it they said the reference list too long, also now this year outdated - testament to the area's popularity

Ruination is only being held at bay for now

  • Ruins are everywhere - decentering it by suggesting ruins is everywhere
  • Illusion of fixity of place - even though we think of them to be the same, even if they were constructed centuries ago. What is the state of flux keeping it seemingly ephemeral and permanent at the same time? - Maintenance: a repetative maintenance that maintains the shape of our urban world.
  • "while you are there it is actually falling down around you (but hopefully very slowly)"
  • Durability and consistency - eg the last supper is constantly restored as a painting. We know it to be da vinci's work. but probably no speck of paint is actually original anymore! (but this is not about authenticity)
  • Alan Weisman's The World Without Us - what would happen to the urban environment if we weren't there - ruination would immediately start with the stoppage of maintenance!
  • How buildings are all liable to become Ruins. They fall apart unevenly, due to the quality of various materials they are composed of.
  • Building is a process. structure to house systems. buildings as hybrid things. different physicality of different material. Building as emergent mosaic. Different temporalities of a building.

What shapes the process of ruination

  • We think that most objects in the world are discreet objects. But all objects are actually liable to lose their form. To stop being discreet. Even the most inert looking objects can split, decay, transform, break into microscopic forms. Bits of an object transfer itself to other things, becoming other things. --> DD: DUST! SOIL!
  • A thing is not a fixed essence. It could be affected by all sorts of other entities.
  • he went to a ruin. 6 months later, it changed, the ruin itself. people graffitied it. plants colonised it. the materiality of it also decayed at incredible rate. depending on what the buildling was made, obviously.
  • what are the properties of the stuff the building is made. what is the quality of material?
  • he showed images of different structures which were made of similar material but of different QUALITY. one of inferior quality but same so called "recipe" for the walls.
  • architect building manchester town hall said 'SPINKWELL sandstone' is fine as the material cos anyway later it will be covered in soot so outside material no one will see anyway. they avoided red sandstone which would have worn off quickly in manchester's acidic atmosphere. [Spinkwell is a resistant grey variety of sandstone consisting predominantly of quartz grains but with some mica grains providing a hint of sparkle]

what future ruins might look like?

  • knowing what structural qualities persist over time, we might be able to imagine what future ruins will survive
  • climatic effects compounded by pollution
  • nonhuman lifeforms are also waiting to attack a building. pigeons, birds of prey, insects, mosses, lichen, trees, saplings, the ease with which they can access a building is surprising.
  • biofilms (green stuff on walls) - porous surfaces and conditions which are largely present in abandoned buildings in manchester
  • human agents of ruination - political decisions, clean air acts, economic decisions which render places detached from networks of production - the day that the factory stops. clearing away old modes of production to allow new modes to come in. certain buildings allowed to decay or devalue, some demolished and rebuilt totally. so many decisions affect the buidling.

maintenance and repair

  • repair or ruination - who are the people fixing the city? why are the people who have to upkeep banished to the edges of society? we dont see how people are trying to clean the city.
  • once a buidling looks shabby, we assume it is devaluing.
  • surfaces. how can surfaces be touched up. can repair even be overdone like some weird patina which accelerates ruination? eg: insertion of WRONG mortar to repair broken mortar between bricks. old material was awesome but new mortar was cheap and allowed seepage of water which eroded the stone. rendering it susceptible to the elements.
  • because cities are constantly being reconstructed, also depends on what material is available to the city (geologic/urban materialities) at that moment.
  • importance of building materials? supply of materials to cities? who supplies them? have supply chains changed?

networks in ruins

  • ruin networks. ruined connections - railways that no longer run after quarry runs out. quarry is also a ruined network space. now manchester buys stone elsewhere cheaply (rumcorn?) so local quarry no longer used.
  • paths which lead to these places. now not used.

ruins are everywhere if you think of them as a process

  • singapore - totally upkept. 100% update. hawker centres that are so shiny. no old stuff left. --> is it because we are a show city? a show room?
  • THIS GIVES ME THE HEEBIEJEEBIES NOW! Singapore as a place with no ruins? or ruins everywhere (it is ruined without history now, anyway)
  • traces of cities are everywhere. beneath the pavement, the other pavement. beneath the tarmac, the cobbles.
  • efforts to replace absence (corners filled up decoratively in weird way)
  • decorative features retained when building gone.
  • bricked windows. faded adverts. concrete with metal structures sticking out. empty advertising. tech terms now obsolete. --> then what are spaces like under a bridge which do not advertise themselves?

in closing

  • he was like "no its not romantic we need to move away from being a detached romantic" (good)
  • pics of backdoors and back lanes where things we leave to decay cos they aren't on show or placed up front
  • strange homogenous items (eg industry production) they decay at different rates although they are similar
  • weird poetry of numbers, sculptures, juxtaposition
  • without ruins you have sterile characterless cities

q&a

  • someone said we shld connect ruins with story of ruined people; workers
  • human voltaire human bodies are ruins too in away?? but not resignation but some dignity

Luke Bennett - the ruins of ruins

image, utility and materiality in the fate of broken places - http://lukebennett13.wordpress.com (natural & built environment) - bunkerologist? reuse of abandoned quarries? sheffield hallam uni.

  • RUINOLOGY LITERATURE IS A WORD?
  • discursive practice embodeid engagement with materiality wub weub fub bub z at first i was

GAZING UPON THE RUIN - from ruinphilia to ruinphobia

  • (wince) (looking at MATTERING?) making sense of things. is it sublime? maybe not. a bit ruined. the warping of scale begins. edgar allan poe in the house of usher - 'the wild inconsistency in the stones'
  • academic.... ruin as process? or ruins as hey what is public policy going to respond to a ruin with? (stop staring at them and do something!)
  • ruinophelia? imperial ruin gazers?
  • RUIN as memento mori - rise and fall of roman empire
  • RUIN as opportune space - reused space. good or bad thing? not sure.
  • Taking it to RUINPHOBIA - one, occassionally is nice, but lots often everywhere is problematic

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT DERELICTION - a history of dereliction in britain

ruin as contagion

  • this requires a trip to locus horribilus
  • slums, slum clearance, public health...
  • fearing the people of the slums - social engineering?? trying to break up the slums or poor areas? large scale clearing of slum areas?
  • 1969 - urban decay, dereliction, degeneration - derelict britain - anxieties!!!!!
  • ruin as contagion - will one bad apple turn the whole block BAD? simcity anxiety!!!
  • will wright's surprisingly deleuzian quote (he's the guy who designed sim city) - "modelling processes rather than structures"
  • BROKEN WINDOW THEORY - another way to fear dereliction? the idea that to fix crime.... do you fix the environment first?
  • 1960s modernist war against wasteland - fear of desolate unkempt land

_ 1990s - urban task force recycling buildings - "letting our cities down..."

  • 2011: mary portas - fear of empty shops - empty buildings pulls down attractiveness and desirablity of land

ruin as wasted space

  • "meanwhile" uses!!! the sin of emptiness! the war against empty homes!!!
  • you spotproperty.com - rewarding you with monies to report to the council where is empty house
  • uk from 2008 abolition of permanent 100% business rate relief for empty factories and warehouses - very costly to own unoccupied but usable buildings factory buidlings
  • the ruin is dead, all hail the ruin.
  • Result? some RUINED their places totally. so as not to pay for having usable things!

ruin as wasted matter

  • the force of waste matter - eg: danger of asbestos!
  • recycling ruins. how does a city recycle itself?
  • why old stones not there? cos people took them to build barns and shit and stately home. knock down and use the stone. buy an old buiding and build your new building
  • eg Shanghai - recycing of matter. urban clearance (showing voracious recycling) - reassmbly from old stuff
  • the de-constructive gaze - lead stripped from roofs because it makes money - metal thieves - OUR RUINS
  • our wouldberuins if you dont take care of them

closing

how we think about ruination matters

q&a

  • what is emptiness then?
  • how do insurers view empty buildings - they are considered more of a hazard and cost a lot to insure if they are empty.

Michael Crang - Mired but alive, the aesthetic taming of toxicity

  • is going to avoid all mentions of buildings
  • order and excess - remainder as 'thing in itself heidegger

( acts of countnig, sorting, stacking storing, inventory - to convert things form stuff to museum object

  • objects acquire meaning thru decay - half identity links them to origial form/status (desilvey 2006, pg 320-327)
  • "If the history of things can be understood as their circulation, the commodity's social life through diverse cultural fields, then the history in things might be understood as the crystallization of the anxieties and aspirations that linger there in the material object." [How to Do Things with Things (A Toy Story) Bill Brown, from Critical Inquiry Vol. 24, No. 4 (Summer, 1998), pp. 935-964] http://www.jstor.org/stable/1344113
  • eg of Car Cemetery - a thing stranded between categories.
  • confused categories - makes it a junk? if they are dumped but ordered, does this rubbish then have potential? to be recycled? profound hope for recycling? stored! in graveyards? planes, car cemeteries.
  • commodities are made out of older commodities, we are endlessly recycling materials through.
  • us reserve fleet suisun bay - so neat! but useless even if so orderly - huge aircraft carrier sold for 1 cent due to asbestos.
  • similarly, singapore has junk ships in its seas only manned by skeleton crews. they are parked there. they are scattered in the sea. places in potentia. waiting for economic upturn and rehiring? or hopeless?
  • picturesque - of a garbage can ' for an artist, its a paradise
  • bethelehem steel. steel! heavy industry is a vocabulary of BIGNESS and control. but these are no longer running. demolished. we are taking bits and melting it into other things.
  • jeffrey higgin's images of the rust belt - east liverpool - reclamation by nature
  • garth lenz
  • byrtynsky
  • archaeology of the industrial age - sties of still present labour, sacrificed to the warring gods of capital
  • fragile figures pressed against gigantic machinery, recast in a period of decline. industrial sublime used to glorify the work, now it is an elegy for workers
  • animacies... material connections
  • industrial geology? walking on a metalline foreshore because the cliffs are slag cliffs from former steel works. southam. not terrible or toxic. just ugly. not heroic. not terrible.
  • coal coast - narratives in this blighted landscape? they cleaned up the landscape. once all former traces of industrial activity removed, it became
  • "Life, in [Bergson's] philosophy, is a continuous street, in which all divisions are artificial and unreal. Seperate things, beginnings and ends, are mere convenient fictions: there is only smooth, unbroken transition... All our thinking consists of convenient fictions, imaginary congealings of the stream: reality flows on in spite of all our fictions" (Bertrand Russell 1918, 22)

Mark Sanderson, Derelict Utopias: the ruin vanishes

  • they make a good photograph, as if all the material for it is there - regret, unease, complexity, sentimental archaeology?
  • he was writing this... he can give a summary, but then as he studied these.... these romantic abandonments... like a lover... it was like, suddenly, you were married, what now you have children? what a shock. the ruins have changed....

colonia

  • COLONIA - The term colonia in Spanish means a community or neighborhood. architecture forms the space for ideologies like fascism.
  • ideology: modelling the masses?
  • colonia mariana novarese rimini fascism italian experimental look. it fell into ruins. middle of nowhere wildspaces. distinct entitites. yes lovely metaphor. but then one day he passed it on a train, it changed. now it was a ruin that was cleaned up into a shell? a skeleton? a skeleton is not a ruin. it was painted white.
  • colonia di marina "costanzo ciano" del comune di varese. its so big. built 1937. used for one summer then by germans as hospital and then dynamited by germans and now its to big its hard to find a way to keep it going without ruination. so fabulous colosuem feel to it. ornithologists wonderng around. rare orchids. migrants. illegals. homeless. strange things going on in these places. they are like a refuge. signposts to abandoned road in architecture. suspsension of everything in it. its not exactly non-place, foucaultian heretotopia.
  • ruin = REAL? authentic? distressed form?

closing

  • the shock of the re-new
  • death of the social

q&a

  • why old fascist buidlings which were taboo still exist. do they still exist in being reused? - he said: post war u couldn't not use buildings if they were there to be used. maybe also italians were not totally against mussolini. it might have been workable besides the um bad bits. so taboo also faded over generations. not that anyone is pro-fascist. but no one is like angry and against fascism actively?
  • when you change the window space it is quite interesting. blind = change of volume? light?

Matthew Philpotts - rocket-fuelled ruin: re-territorialising the traces of german dictatorship

ruins of modernity

ruins of dictatorship

  • ambivalence of ruin in memory politics
  • multiple and contested narratives into which they are re-territorialised. what is at stake.
  • the ownerships of countersites is interesting - legitimation of post dictatorship demoracy. BUT intrusion of material and temporal traces of dictatorship and romanticised myth-building of ruin gaze.

peenemunde as big ruin

  • V2 Rocket base at peenemunde. the dark side of the space race.
  • big ruin as in scale. infrastructure for 20000 workers, s-bahn network, power station, housing barracks work camp. (different types of housing for different classes)
  • de-territorialisation: raf bombing raid in 1943 and subsequent demolition evacuation; soviet dismantling 1945, prohibited military zone 1949-89
  • re-territorialisation: gdr cold war reuse of architecture esp power station. navy and airforce instalalations. and post 1990 they set up a historial technical museum, monument landscape, conservation management plans.
  • big in scale, big in being symbolic.
  • a few phases in the historical technical museum: 1) temp 2) timeline of rocket science 3) perm exhibit with monument landscape
  • RECODING/ENCODING? 1) birthplace, peenemunde 2) end of parabola 3) built for eternity???

re-territorialisation: ruins in the museum

  • Monument Landscape - currently: trail of 25km area with 20 locations
  • a new assemblage of ruin.
  • the presence of ruins in the museum. they are everywhere. not really though! decay has been preserved? frozen in time? some ruin left but then its frozen in this weird state! different types of ruins. intentional. unintentional. ruins by time. ruins by ideology. ruins by weather.
  • ruined objects gathered over time. relics of gdr era left behind or introduced into the buidling (part of the buidling)
  • text on wall - immanuel kant - enlightening encoding!
  • like a numbered thesis - eg: 4.1.3 - academic?
  • ends of parabola. rocket leads to impact
  • final room of ruin, asking you to see the rubble installation, audience asked to reflect on the consequences of german rocket. yeah right. the room was called einschlag / IMPACT!
  • gdr ruin = embarrassing?
  • national socialist ruin = SHAMEFUL?


Carl Lavery & Lee Hassall: return to battleship island; towards ecology of ruins

  • performance, live voiceover of a film.
  • lavery's derrida quif
  • shopping list items
  • flaneur of concrete with notebook and pen
  • shit - corporeality
  • strange reference they made about a strange reference to hegel
  • it seems de rigeur for the ruin theorist to describe ruin as elusive
  • what is less discussed is that all ruins look the same, always here but elsewhere but not quite
  • the head of louis xiii as fragment, revolution
  • did we actually go to hashima or is this just found footage. who knows. the only real thing about the film we made here rid the silence between the words we speak
  • awkward silence
  • ruin the ruin
  • let it be, let it wander
  • we start w the premise that there is nothing such as ruins, only specificities, which are promiscuous and contradictory. this be future of ruin.

q&a

  • tension - one is drawn to the picturesque in one's RUINLUST. the other wants to make a dirge.
  • problem of conceptualizing past / future ruins

Camilla Mork Rostvik - Sleeping Dragons: An Exploration of ruins of CERN

(art history / history of science)

  • CERN built on old roman grounds
  • gallo roman ruins discovered at cms dig site, meyrin, switzeland
  • CERN scientist uses roman column as pc support in CERN main library
  • CERN is a 21 km circle underground
  • the idea of CERN already gives magic to the region. the higgs boson.
  • switzerland was chosen cos it was 'neutral". to be pure, international, neutral, not-for-profit
  • paradox about CERN: so isolated like dead organisms. but actually ironically what man finds isolated, nature likes to live in. pic of sheep hiding under bridge near main entrance to LHC.
  • relationship between nature and ruin. CERN: a science org which discovers nature? is science nothing more than nature which we call "discovered"? gravity exists, how can we discover what is always there?
  • Last night i went to manderley - daphne du maurier's rebecca. a grand house become ruin but pictured as fairytale.
  • science hero worship. Brian Cox. PR for stargazing. Is it blue sky thinking or commercial venture? popular science makes money.
  • awe inspiring physics - wow, worried, fearful to ask in case you look stupid, what cern calls layman
  • Cern cannot be seen as whole as it is so big and secret and locked
  • cern - may be at forefront of science on behalf of us all, but is it? only 16% of cern are female. does not represent us! as an ideological thing… how can it speak for us or do it in our interests? it is mysterious and has not done due diligence to let us all know what it is.
  • i was struck by the signs of human presence in the anonymity and impenetrability of the place. wandering about the warren-like spaces that house the sophisticated machines used for the experiment……. it always seemed empty as if everyone had mysteriously vanished (tim)
  • discoverer of nature, will be engulfed by nature eventually.

a&a

  • is tardis a ruin? (lady is not british, never watched dr who...)

William Viney - futures in ruin

  • objects of ruin of the future - upsetting temporal relations (has not yet come to past)
  • projecting ruins into future may mean the end of something. political implications. structures end?
  • projection of ruinous future also means lingering time. continuousities of human use.
  • "WASTE TIME" (subject of his book)
  • still from planet of the apes still with statue of liberty - response for some is: "OMG I AM BACK IM HOME" i recognize it
  • often the future ruin is eliding when what time did structures end, what caused its quasi termination? it is neatly sidestepped by not having to show the end, only the ruin.
  • hubert robert's design for the grand gallery in ruins. he painted both the design and ruin but didn't explain why paint a ruin.
  • why do we want to create future ruins? well some are apocalyptic ruins are used as warning systems. didactic future ruins, the foremost puzzle for the hg wells.
  • hgwells time machine and other stories page 32 - i was watching for every impression that could possibly help to explain the condition of ruinous splendor in which i found the world. he walks thru v&a and its all empty and covered in rust and lignite….
  • ruin gives terminal sense of regression
  • "the absurd impression that men of the future would certainly be infinitely ahead of ourselves in all their appliances." hg wells time machine
  • "rotting nineteenth century houses… sordid colonies of wooden dwellings" -geroge orwell, 1984 a world in which post war poverty continued instead of disappearing (another kind of ruin)
  • albert speer inside the third reich "it was hard to imagine that rusting heaps of rubble could communicate these heroic inspirations which hitler admired i nthe monuments of the past" - "after generations of neglect, overgrown… crumbling… but the outline still clearly recognizable" (THE CLUE, VISIBILITY, RECOGNITION IS IMPORTANT)
  • how to make ruinous ends meet? but very hard to reduce it, to find it, material engagement. detail is needed still.
  • the new zealander - a trope so overused…. exhausted and stale. RUINS. SKETCHING the ruins of st paula.
  • AFTER LONDON jefferies or wild england - whether the walls ahd been of bricks or stone or other material he could not tell, they were now like salt. - ruin become mere matter.
  • dust the impossibility of things going away. no going away. no real end. too diffuse. circulatory.
  • ruin theorists
  • if i get one more pun about "OH I RUINED IT HOW APPROPRIATE"….


See Also

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