The ruin has been the enemy of modernity since its foundation. From the garden ornament of a decadent ruling class to the continued trauma of forced ruination in war, the ruin is tied to the worst forms of societal excess and puts pressure on narratives of eternal progress. Similarly, post-war theory argues against the ruin as the intentional leftovers of capitalist development. In this view, the ruin marks the cyclical destruction of areas in uneven geographical development, David Harvey writes:
[Capital] has to build a fixed space necessary for its own functioning at a certain point in its history only to have to destroy that space (and devalue much of the capital invested therein) at a later point in order to make way for a new “spatial fix” (openings for fresh accumulation in new spaces and territories) at a later point in its history.1
Here, the ruin becomes the symbol of land in repose, fixed capital made obsolete and lying in wait for when Capital turns its eye back toward the area for redevelopment. In this view, the ruin is much the same as before, negative. According to this thinking, the aesthetic appreciation of post-industrial ruins naturalizes the crises of capitalism and their cyclical destruction. For me, this view is limited. It correctly details the cause of post-industrial ruins and their frequent re-subsumption into the churn of Capital, but it fails to understand the value of aesthetic experience itself and that ruins as material contain many potentials beyond their reconstitution as capital producing spaces, and often hinder that redevelopment through their obstinance.
In The Aesthetics of Decay, Dylan Trigg writes that the post-industrial ruin is the visible object that decenters Progress as the guiding force of history. For Trigg, the ruin is the reminder of the outside of capitalism; as an aesthetic experience the ruin offers respite as well as a strange form of hope. This is the case whether or not the ruin was created through the mechanisms of capital itself. Capital’s endless cycle between boom and bust seems as if it is a planned mechanism through its clockwork repetition, but the periods of decay mark the waste of vast amount of fixed capital—the literal material of the ruin–thus, at the very least, the ruin marks the temporary failure of continued, unobstructed accumulation. For Trigg, decay is the physical sign of decline which marks “the imminent fall of a narrative already aware of its limitations.”2 This reorients the aesthetic experience of the ruin from loss of progress to the appreciation of imagined lines of flight, a form of “productive” (destructive?) escapism. In a time where nearly every aesthetic movement is composed by and for capital, we should value those that aren’t, even if they are only marked by its temporary absence. To be a bit wry, following Kant, aesthetic experience only occurs in viewing scenes without economic interests, making ruin-gazing one of the few true aesthetic experiences we can have in the “global” capitalism that these arguments rely on.
Against the universality of capital, the ruin actually signifies the loosening of its control over a given place. Trigg’s Decline as the sign of faltering metanarratives is only really visible in geographically scattered areas—such as the Rust Belt or English midlands—that share only their abandonment by Capital. This quality of ruins—their geographical distribution—illustrates another key point frequently covered over in contemporary ruin critique: the existence of the ruin by its nature proves that Capital is not and never has been total. This point forms the basis of Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World, with it’s equally relevant subtitle: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Tsing recalibrates the ruin from a place of aesthetic loss to one that is brimming with life, both human and not. For Tsing, the ruin reminds us that while there is an outside to capital, there is not one to nature. This is an argument that requires the discarding of Progress for a celebration of the contingent left-behind brimming with possibility. Paired with Trigg’s aesthetics, Tsing’s mushrooms call for a recalibration of aesthetic sensibilities away from “progress” toward the decayed and contingent, from the productive to the “making-do.”
Together, these arguments structure my own attitude toward the ruin and its place in architecture. In particular, Tsing’s insistence on direct engagement with the material of the ruin forms a strong base for practice that Trigg’s distanced gaze does not. Where Trigg argues that the use/reuse of the material of the ruin destroys the possibility of aesthetic experience by revaluing objects, I would counter by suggesting that the decay present in and on that material can be reoriented from not only producing the experience of loss to becoming an almost triumphant celebration of “ways out” when it's paired with an aesthetic and economic program that operates on the edges of capital.
David Harvey, “Globalization and the Spatial Fix,” in Geographische Revue 2/2001: 25.
Dylan Trigg, The Aesthetics of Decay: Nothingness, Nostalgia, and the Absence of Reason (New York: Peter Lang Publishers, 2006), 84.