Close your eyes and picture a ruin. What do you see? The soft daubs of Turner’s Tintern Abbey, a wistful Wordsworth wandering under its broken arches and penning lines on “the life of things”? Maybe, in the eye of your mind, you’ve summoned Piranesi’s dark, copper-plate etchings of Roman ruins – a column here, a coffered dome there, garlanded with the mossy foliage of time.
Copyright Steven Seidenberg
Or perhaps its a John Piper painting of Blitz-damaged London, or else the nightmare vision of post-apocalyptic cities of the future: the Statue of Liberty shattered into pieces, grass growing up through the cracks along Fifth Avenue, the Empire State Building reduced to rubble. Whether picturesque or Gothic, real or fantastical, the ruin has a firm foothold in the cultural imaginary, sketching out not only our past and our present, but our uncertain future too.
Part of a spacious and magnificent Harbor for the use of the ancient Romans opening onto a large market square
Ancient ruins, Romantic dreams
The year 2020 marks the tricentenary of the birth of Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Italian architect, artist, archaeologist – and documenter of the ruin par excellence. In 1748, the Venetian-born artist set up studio in Rome, where he began work on his vedute, or views, of the city. Piranesi might not have been the first to depict the classical ruin – seventeenth-century painters Claude Lorraine and Niclas Poussin take that mantle – but his dark and moody visions would help define an aesthetic of the Gothic that placed ruins centre stage.
After Piranesi, the Gothic would do its own grand tour around Europe, arriving in England, where it was met with open arms. In 1749, Horace Walpole set the stage for the English Gothic, building Strawberry Hill, his mad, crenellated villa in Twickenham, under whose roof he would write The Castle of Otranto. Regarded as the “manifesto for modern Gothic romance,” Otranto was like a Piranesi etching in words: dark, labyrinthine, and laced with mystery.
Yet, the Gothic was only one side of the aesthetic coin; by the end of the eighteenth century, this fascination with the natural and the sublime had morphed into the Romantic – and it had taken the ruin with it. In poetry, the Blakes and Wordsworths; in painting, the Turners and the Severns; all would play a part in redefining the English pastoral. Through “an eye made quiet by the power / Of harmony,” Wordsworth and the others reclaimed the ruins of Medieval churches – long abandoned since the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s – that dotted the English countryside.
Strawberry Hill House in Twickenham
Ruin value
Elevated out of rubble and debris, ruins became an icon of the picturesque and, before long, they were the height of fashion amongst the landed gentry (think, Austen heroines roaming around classical gardens in empire-line dresses – even the clothes were on loan from ancient Rome!). And if you weren’t lucky enough to have a real ruin in your back garden? Never fear! You were in the capable hands of landscape gardener Capability Brown, who could whip up a fake ruin or an Italianate grotto, burying it somewhere amongst the shrubbery to give a place the air of the Romantic, the historical, the authentic.
Over time, ruins came to signify grandeur and architectural excellence. When monumental structures were erected, artists would often imagine them in their future ruined state, as in Joseph Michael Gandy’s Bird’s eye view of the bank of England (1830). For Nazi architect Albert Speer, a building was only as good as its ‘Ruin Value’ – the prediction of how it would weather over time, like the great edifices of ancient empires. Speer’s architecture of the Third Reich would never have the chance to mature and crumble – many of his buildings were destroyed by Allied bombings, along with hundreds of thousands of innocent German lives. But if the Allied bombings reduced Speer’s grand designs to dust, the retaliation would also alter the face of the English ruin forever.
Interior of the Reich Chancellery (Reichskanzlei) as designed by Nazi architect Albert Speer
The New Reich Chancellery as pictured on Voss Street in 1939
The New Reich Chancellery’s grand marble gallery in 1939
Shadows and dust
September the 7th 1940, or Black Saturday, marked the first day of the Blitz in London. Bombs from the air laid waste to swathes of cities, stealing lives as they fell. Churches blazed, facades stayed standing without buildings to front, and the rubble of homes littered the streets. The ruins that were left after the smoke of the Blitz had cleared, were a far cry from the picturesque or romantic; they didn’t even have the fantastical flavour of the Gothic. These were a raw and harsh reminder of mechanised warfare and the death that trails in its wake.
The decimation of cities had nothing at all to do with the natural or the sublime. And so, the Blitz changed the fate of the ruin once again, introducing a new typology onto the British landscape – the contemporary ruin. No longer a romanticised thing of the past, the carcasses of these urban spaces were laced with fresh tragedy and horror, and the impact on the popular imaginary was profound. Painters like John Piper, Leonard Rosoman, and Jospeh Gray developed a new aesthetic of the ruin, one that was bleak and ferocious, without even a trace of the soft Turner daub.
But perhaps the most important medium for capturing the wreckage of the Blitz was photography, which put pay to the romanticised vision of the ruin in its attempt – with all the scientific and objective faith invested in the camera – to document, rather than prettify, reality. Cecil Beaton, Herbert Mason, and Lee Miller were among the intrepid Second World War photographers to develop a visual language for the barbarity of modern warfare, and their pictures told a different story of the ruin, one far darker than even Piranesi could have imagined.
The aftermath of Blitz raid in London
Germans clearing rubble in Dresden
“Who’s stolen all the windows?”
Today, three hundred years after the birth of Piranesi, ruins are experiencing a renaissance. Over the last two decades, our notion of ‘ruin tourism’ has shifted from gentile ramblings over the Roman forum to daredevil photojournalism in dangerously decaying structures. ‘Urban exploration’ (aka Urbex) follows in the footsteps of fearless war photographers, trespassing in abandoned industrial spaces in a high-stakes game of documentation – the price of getting a good photograph can be your life.
For others, there’s been a turn back to the Romantic. British photographer Gina Soden takes pictures that look more like Renaissance paintings: rooms filled with spectral smoke; vaulted arches in faded lapis lazuli; wheezing mattresses, pocked with mildew, that offer up the last traces of humanity in an empty space. Decay has become beautiful again, rising damp resembling veined marble, and a Gothic sense of mystery has been poured back in. This is what architectural historian Paul Dobraszczyk calls “the spectacle of decay.”
In the work of poet and photographer Steven Seidenberg, the mattress isn’t even there to wheeze anymore; only its springs have survived. His recent project, Imaging Failure: Abandoned Lives of the Italian South, co-created with anthropologist Carolyn White, documents the forgotten buildings of the post-war Italian south: strange cast-concrete structures that evoke the vernacular farm-house, while also resembling some relic from a future yet unseen.
“Look there—the eaves are bearing down upon the gutters,” writes Seidenberg, in his 2020 collection of poems, plain sight. “Turn round—the walls are crouching for the ambush, then the kill. What happened to the doorways? They were eaten by the mouldings. Who’s stolen all the windows? Perhaps they took their leave…” Just as Wordsworth gazed “through some Gothic window’s open space” and onto “the far-stretching landscape,” Seidenberg’s camera lens looks out of broken windows and doorless frames onto tessellated fields that ripple in the distance. The ruin itself may be harsh, even threatening, but a sublime beauty has been let back in through this fusion with the natural world.
Copyright Steven Seidenberg
Copyright Steven Seidenberg
Dreaming the impossible dream
Soden and Seidenberg’s photographs show us how the ruin mingles horror with beauty, humanity with the inanimate, nature with culture. As viewers, we’re compelled by the controversies that surround these spaces – not only the failure to conserve works of architectural importance, but the possibility that the familiar sites and spaces of our own lives might someday look like this: that our own bed, our most intimate space, might sigh in front of someone else’s camera, when we ourselves are long since gone. And it’s a possibility that seems increasingly pressing as the background buzz of environmental disaster gets louder. To dream up urban spaces as if ruined or abandoned in the not-too-distant future has become an all-too familiar trope in literature and film (think Planet of the Apes or The Day After Tomorrow). Speer’s ‘Ruin Value’ has assumed yet another layer of dystopian horror.
The Day After Tomorrow concept art
City ruins in the original Planet of the Apes film
But if our attention to the ruin has grown increasingly apocalyptic, it has also ignited a need to confront our shared future, in the here and now – which is true to the spirit of Piranesi. The Venetian visionary did more than simply document bits of rubble; instead, as one retrospective exhibition in Rome puts it, Piranesi “dreamed the impossible dream.” Partly conserving, partly transforming these ruined spaces into utopian landscapes of the future, Piranesi showed us ways of coexisting with these vestiges of the past.
Today, this approach fuels contemporary architectural design, from practices of re-wilding, where plants are encouraged to creep across urban structures, to the repurposing of disused sites. Dusting away the cobwebs of the Gothic, and taking off the rose-tinted spectacles of the Romantic, we’re finally coming to terms with our ruined spaces. Because, as Seidenberg reminds me, every building is already a future ruin: we’re always living our apocalypse now.
Giambattista Piranesi: Dreaming the Impossible Dream will run at Palazzo Poli in Rome until 31 January.
