The Architecture of Ruins: Designs on the Past, Present and Future
identifies an alternative and significant history of architecture from
the sixteenth century to the twenty-first century, in which a building
is designed, occupied and imagined as a ruin. This design practice
conceives a monument and a ruin as creative, interdependent and
simultaneous themes within a single building dialectic, addressing
temporal and environmental questions in poetic, psychological and
practical terms, and stimulating questions of personal and national
identity, nature and culture, weather and climate, permanence and
impermanence and life and death. Conceiving a building as a dialogue
between a monument and a ruin intensifies the already blurred relations
between the unfinished and the ruined and envisages the past, the
present and the future in a single architecture.
Structured around a collection of biographies, this book conceives a
monument and a ruin as metaphors for a life and means to negotiate
between a self and a society. Emphasising the interconnections between
designers and the particular ways in which later architects learned from
earlier ones, the chapters investigate an evolving, interdisciplinary
design practice to show the relevance of historical understanding to
design. Like a history, a design is a reinterpretation of the past that
is meaningful to the present. Equally, a design is equivalent to a
fiction, convincing users to suspend disbelief. We expect a history or a
novel to be written in words, but they can also be delineated in
drawing, cast in concrete or seeded in soil. The architect is a
'physical novelist' as well as a 'physical historian'.
Like building sites, ruins are full of potential. In revealing not only
what is lost, but also what is incomplete, a ruin suggests the future as
well as the past. As a stimulus to the imagination, a ruin's incomplete
and broken forms expand architecture's allegorical and metaphorical
capacity, indicating that a building can remain unfinished, literally
and in the imagination, focusing attention on the creativity of users as
well as architects. Emphasising the symbiotic relations between nature
and culture, a building designed, occupied and imagined as a ruin
acknowledges the coproduction of multiple authors, whether human,
non-human or atmospheric, and is an appropriate model for architecture
in an era of increasing climate change.
