we think of the
centre as a place in which force and energy converges, but whether or not this need be the case is another matter. On the other hand, I want to argue that in our cultureof anxiety and nostalgia, the ruin occupies a privileged role. Far from the discards of society, what I would like to suggest is that ruins crystallise what is essential to ourown time.First, a disclaimer. My concern is only with urban ruins, not classical ruins, such asthose one might find on the tourist trail in Rome, Italy, or indeed in Athens, Greece.For the present purposes, classical ruins lack the close proximity to the present todislodge, disrupt, and disarm our experiences. Instead, through being colonised by the heritage industry, the ruins of antiquity remain sedimented within amythologized time; namely, ancient history. In doing so, they become not only inaccessible to our everyday experience, but also outside of time.Modern ruins, by contrast, such as those we find beneath the underbelly of the city and on the fringes of suburbia, maintain the ability to startle us. The reason for this is because these ruins, with their acrid smells and still rotting wallpaper, remain in andof time. In a word, they
decay
, and they do so in an animated and vibrant way. Theresult of this active decay is that modern ruins viscerally engage with our senses. In afundamental sense, our experience of being in the world is altered through ourencounter with such places. Let me, then, develop this idea through a broaderdiscussion of my first question: what is peculiar to the experience of being in a ruin.
A Phenomenology of the Modern Ruin
Confronted with a new place, our immediate response is generally to seek orientation. Whether it is an atrium or a bedroom, in the face of a new environment,space appears for us as something to be experienced in a directional and qualitative way. This may sound obvious, but it is certainly not a given. After all, understandingspatiality need not rely on the notion of experience but might instead privilegeobjective or quantitative factors. Moreover, what is central in this act of orientation issomething so familiar to us that it is often overlooked:
the lived body
.Far from a homogenous expanse of raw matter, our experience of place andarchitecture is subject to mediation via our own bodies. What does this rather denseclaim mean? Well, two things are clear. First, “place” is not something that existsout-there, in the world, as though it was waiting to be discovered. Rather, without our bodies to define and give it form, the very notion of place would cease to exist. AsMerleau-Ponty would have it, place is the “means whereby the position of things become possible” (Merleau-Ponty, 2006, p. 284). And the position of things only becomes possible through the involvement of an embodied perspective. Second,thanks to the perspective of the body, terms such as “up,” “down,” “left,” and “right”are possible. What this shows is that being “here” in place is largely a question of thecentrality of the body. Things in the world exist within relation to my body, and my body as a focal point for those things. All of this, then, is a rather abstract way of getting us into place. More specifically, of getting us into a place that challenges a familiar set of notions that we carry with us.For it is precisely this challenge, I would suggest, that the ruin unleashes. Here, twodistinct challenges can be mention, both of which place the body central.The first challenge concerns the experience of being inside and outside. In thelanguage of humanistic architecture and geography, inside and outside refer to amode of inclusion and exclusion. Being on the inside means, above all, feelingprotected, affirmed, and secured. In his seminal book,
The Poetics of Space
,Bachelard talks freely of inside and out as being central to dwelling in place. For him,the relationship between inside and outside is fundamentally dialectic in structure,meaning that “it has the sharpness of the dialectics of
yes
and
no
, which decideseverything” (Ibid., p. 211). More than this, however, there is a conceptual scheme at work alongside the positive and negative. Recognising that inside and outside isunderstood philosophically as a division between “being and non-being,” Bachelardproceeds to align these two aspects with “here” and “there” respectively (Ibid., p.212). With this motif of inside and out as a guide, we can begin to plot the essentialcharacter of being in the ruin. Unlike the domestic enclosure, in which the boundary line between inside and out is more or less fixed, in the ruin porousness of bordersprevails. This is manifest in a number of ways, but primarily in a structural manner.Instead of seeking retreat in a set of alcoves, nooks, and corners, massive andfragmented space contests the possibility of “finding a corner of one’s own.” Rather,corners of the ruin give way, not to intimacy, but to the exposure of unpredictableand uneven surfaces. To be clear, where Bachelard would speak of place as “protecting” the dweller, in theruin, all accounts of protection are damaged by the fact that surfaces are not only fragmented, but also in the very process of
decaying
. Thus, unlike the carefully preserved artifice of the domestic home, in the ruin, edges, borders, and boundariesare forever shifting through being persistently exposed to the elements. At no onepoint are we truly in a space, in which things are motionless. Rather, thanks to thefact that the ruin has been left to its own devices, then the very idea we usually valuein architectural experience—above all, endurance of matter—are not only visually contested, but experientially ruined, too.Thanks to this contingency, the ruin emerges as having multiple configurations. And because of this flux, regulating the ruin becomes thwarted as the temporal velocity of decay intensifies. The decay quickens the more the ruin becomes exposed to theelements. Thus, while the erosion of the structure appears slow at first, emitting theimpression of durability, before long it succumbs to a radical and swift alteration. As we return to the ruin to find our previous navigation shattered, we are forced to becreative with our interaction.This exposure to the elements leads to another mode of inside and out becomingunbound: the natural and the synthetic loses its distinction, and in the process formsa mutant hybrid. Strikingly, in the ruin, all concepts of nature as being “out there”are torn asunder as machinery and huge remnants left to waste are reclaimed by flora and fauna. Visually, this is alarming. However, alongside the visual dimension, this insertion of outside into the inside affects not only the eyes, but the totality of the senses as a whole. In the home, side effects of nature such as rancid odours and decay anddiscolouration are driven into exile. The ruin contests this attempt at sanitisationthrough unmasking a deeper sensual encounter with space. Now, streams of wildlifedrive into broken windows and puncture the floors, creating an uneven and sharpsurface. In the ruined factory, old machines, rusty and fragmented, indiscriminately mingle with patches of fungus and moss. Doors that have come loose from theirhinges allow trees to plunge inwards. Paradoxically, the close allegiance between barrenness and desolation is contested in the ruin as vegetation resounds throughthe cessation of previous function.
So, I have given two ways in which a ruin differs from a non-ruin. First, the ruindismantles the division between inside and out, obligating us to consider how feelings of protection and intimacy exist in the nature of a radical contingency.Second, the ruin asks that we attend to our relation to nature. With its porousstructure, human attempts at rendering the natural world synthetic are no longertenable. In both cases, what we are witnessing is a freeing of human desire. What I would like to do now is consider this act of freeing human desire from the perspectiveof time and memory.