The sentiment of future ruins.
Marcos Anton (11037890) London Metropolitan University
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What is the function of Nostalgia in the architectural object?
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nostalgia noun nos·tal·gia \nä-ˈstal-jə, nə- also nȯ-, nō-; nə-ˈstäl-\ Pleasure and sadness that is caused by remembering something from the past and wishing that you could experience it again
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TABLE OF CONTENT
Cover…………………………………………… I Title page………………………………………. II Concept………………………………………. III Table of Content……………………………………IV Illustration List…………………………………. V
Introduction Thesis of the essay………………………….. VI Introduction to the concept of Nostalgia in Architecture I) Nostalgia through different eras History of Nostalgia…………………….. VII The industrial era…………………….... VIII Perception of remains………………….. IX Experience of ruins…………….………… X II) Emphasising with Architecture Wöllflin theory………………. XI Kierkegaard……………... XII Reuse of contemporary ruins…………… XIII-XIV Conclusion Summary of the evolution of Nostalgia and The concept of space……………. XV Bibliographie……………………………………. XVI
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ILLUSTRATION LIST
Figure 1: “All Giza pyramids in one shot”, 2006, El Cairo, Egypt, www.flickr.com/photos/51035655291@N01/171610084/. Figure 2: “Leptis Magna, Libya”, 2010, Libya, http://www.bootsnall.com/articles/1003/10-best-roman-ruins-outside-of-rome.html Figure 3: “Millennium Mills of Dockland walk”, 2013, Dockland, United Kingdom, http://benbansal.me/?p=1059 Figure 4: “Ruins of Guatemala”, 2006, city of Guatemala, Guatemala, http://efdreams.com/data_images/dreams/ruins/ruins-08.jpg Figure 5: “Turning torso by Santiago Calatrava”, Malmö, Sweden, http://www.planoyescala.com/2014/10/terminado-en-que-se-inspiran-losarquitectos.html Figure 6: “Hochöfen der Völklinger Hütte”, 2012, Völklingen, Germany, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:VH_zwischen_HO.jpg#/media/File:VH_zwi schen_HO.jpg
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"Architecture can appear as free and beautiful art only insofar as it becomes the expression of ideas, an image of the universe and of the absolute. Yet a real image of the absolute and accordingly an immediate expression of the ideas is, according to ยง62, everywhere only the organic form in its perfection." - F.W. Schelling. The Philosophy of Art. Pg. 53 History is definitively change, movement. Nothing remains, everything is a flow, a transition from one state to another. And even in what apparently does not change one can still find a transformation. Architecture certainly is not saved from this principle. Some works are destined to have a long life. One thinks of the Sphinx of Gizeh, which has seen in front of its eyes a millennium after another and keeps its enigmatic smile; others do not enjoy such luck and a few years later get transformed significantly or they are even destroyed. Architecture becomes more valuable when it exceeds the simple construction and achieves an indissoluble fusion with the place it grows roots. The architect's work becomes more delicate and intense when referring both to the work as the invisible complementary space of the architectural object. However, the notion of context and place, thus understood, has not had the same consideration or the history of architecture or modernity itself. Much of the architecture of the twentieth century has behaved strange ambiguity about where it stands, either by violence or by reverential compliance. Today the nostalgia of place manifests itself as one of the few redoubts of architecture to achieve some measure of signification and avoid irrelevance. It is impossible to understand entirely the architecture works of a distant past. We have lost almost all possibility of truthful interpretation about their original uses. Knowledge of culture and society that produced them is inaccessible to us and yet we can still find meaning in the legacy of architecture thanks to the strength of the link between it and the place that remains locked. On a grassy plain, one can see erected a megalithic monument like Stonehenge which is a statement of the artificiality and curiosity of man against nature. We are not able to trace more than a vague hypothesis about its mode of construction, about its past as an astronomical calendar, as a tomb or monument, however, the assembly between those huge stones and territory is still alive and updates the work. Stonehenge is now richer and more complex than it was for the people who erected it. A building beyond its form, is a drawer of voices and lives. Architecture, the art of constructing buildings and memories, can be a bridge for people to recognize their history and the paths they want to undertake. What is then the function of nostalgia in the architectural object?
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"Ours is a nostalgic era, and photographs actively promote nostalgia. Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Almost everything that photography is steeped in pathos by the mere fact of being photographed. Something ugly, grotesque, can be poignant because the photographer's attention has dignified it. Something beautiful can arouse bitterness that has aged or decayed or no longer exists ". - SONTAG, S. It is true that ours is a nostalgic era, but although traditionally criticism has judged the most romantic contemplation of ruins from a certain taste for anachronism, or as a morbid melancholy, this interpretation is superficial. Long analyzed from the philosophy field, ruins highlight the expiration of human desire, represent the victory of nature over man's work who wanted to establish itself as creator. Through contemplation, the man faces himself, his human condition, its limits, its smallness before nature, and at a time like the present, where the pace set by society leaves little time to stop and think, industrial ruin provides, at last, a reason for reflection. This view, this new look, opens another way of addressing this legacy, which moves away from the most economic proposals or approaches to reuse based on an objective achievement: why not keep that world of feelings which generates the contemplation of industrial ruins? I would defend the idea of dead space. For example, no one would think now of converting the pyramids of Egypt in living spaces (figure 1), aside that they never were. Or, for example, the ruins of the Greek cities or Roman cities (figure 2), which are beautiful dead spaces, and are part of geography. They always say "this must be reused, you have to fill it with life, you have to fill it with content," Well, and why not leave it as a testimony of something that was and that basically belongs even to geography? Ruins have a value, even a positive value against the excess of spaces "filled" with content.
Figure 1
Figure 2
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It is the "non-functional" claim of industrial remains, which offers an alternative to demolition, the restoration or the conventional reuse through other services. Therefore, in the contemplation of abandonment, the now silent interior large voids, nature invades and covers the modern dream, the European spirit revives the notions related to the idea of a ruin. Nostalgia, evocation, loneliness, beauty. Industrial remains reflect melancholy, arouse in the observer feelings that join in a quiet nostalgia, or face the loneliness that is produced when contemplating the future by ignoring the past. Filling them with content or representing their history with learning objectives leaves out that experience that can only occur through incomplete traces, by which man can imagine as well as evoking echoes of the past. Now there is no activity, no movement, no exploitation, no glare against the sky. Nevertheless, contemplation of industrial residues continues to produce sensations in the observer that move frequently between love and hate. Therefore, in a century of industrial landscape, men have gone from fascination based on formal beauty linked to efficiency, to mixing nostalgia with historical discomfort and admiration when contemplating these remains in the state of ruins (Figure 3). Simmel said that the ruins were the result of the great struggle waged between man and nature. Architecture admirably solved the balance between soul, tending upwards, and gravity, which pulls down.
And this unique and singular balance between inert matter, subject to mechanical laws and passively resist the pressure exerted on it, and the creative spirituality of man, which tends to go high, is broken at the time the building degrades and crumbles. The balance between nature and spirit which represented architecture gives way to nature.
Figure 3
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And this rupture of balance causes a cosmic tragedy engulfing ruin all the shadows of melancholy. The effect is tragic but not sad because the destruction has not come from outside, it's just nature taking it back, and so the ruins exude a sense of peace. We could trace this more objective perception of the industrial remains to those early "readymades" of Duchamp. In the first decades of the twentieth century, while architects and engineers were seeking for the solution of the union of art and technique based on functionality and aesthetic quality, other authors such as Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and Frances Picabia, took the opposite approach and denied any functional value of the machine, opening to reality as a focus for inspiration. Breaking the limits of the artistic, Duchamp gave new meaning to any decontextualized from its original site. "The ready-made of Duchamp has acquired after having been considered for several years as a sympathetic craziness, a considerable scope: the deliberate choice of the artist modifies the first destination of the object, assigns a totally unexpected expressive vocation." -6 CABANNE, Pg.: Conversations with Marcel Duchamp From this perspective, once its meaning is lost with the loss of its function, the large set of industrial remains scattered throughout the territory can find another sense based on their formal values. It is true that, unlike Duchamp's ready-mades, this set of elements built physically occupy the same position they had at the time of its creation. However, now it is the whole context which has changed. With the deindustrialization, all the entire industrial landscape has changed. Activity has ceased, nature has been gaining back its land, and the same forces look postmodern thought differently. Thus, there are not only industrial buildings but the landscape itself built which has lost its original meaning. And so, equipped with new meanings, far from thinking in which they were created, these architectures become art, art in the landscape. Industrial residues find their own identity and set other landscapes, which are no longer romantic or bucolic or pastoral. They are the new contemporary landscapes. We have seen that the first approach to these post-industrial landscapes comes through photography. Following the path opened by Duchamp, which values the city and its contents as an "object trouvĂŠ" in recent years they have multiplied this kind of artistic expressions that take the postindustrial reality as a working basis. Without any political or ecological claim, and even sentimental, urban photographers and filmmakers show some scenarios in which things are at the periphery or proceed to make an inventory of a set suggestive buildings from the formal point of view. If I place myself in a phenomenological perspective, the aim of my consciousness (which is always consciousness of something) establishes an asymmetry in its favor compared to most surrounding objects, much like the table that is in my view. Ruins have always been the image of our history, an easy way of understanding our ancient times of living. This broken city is for many of us, an image of our souls. Kant calls "intensive magnitude" the degree of reality of a phenomenon, limiting it to the negation. For example, any pure intuition would be an intensive magnitude of 0. But what degree of intuition do ruins hold? In other words, what is the "intensive magnitude" of ruins?
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This brief fragment of Diderot will guide us: "O beautiful, sublime ruins! [...] What effect! what greatness! What nobility! [...] With what astonishment, what a surprise I look at this broken roof, the masses superimposed on the vault! the people who raised this monument, where are they? what have they become? how huge dark and silent deep, my eye will he go astray? [...] We never tire of looking. Time stops for who admires. I just lived! my youth did not last long!" Which in contrast interests us is that Diderot did admire ruins, he noticed with surprise, their effect, their greatness. The vision of Diderot is so overwhelmed by the appearance of the ruins, and all that his vision is not an attachment point but, rather, an "error." Can someone consider ruins are grotesque? For instance, let us imagine a wander around some ruins; what would we feel? Anticipation is key and will be from the beginning until the end of our journey (Figure 4). How many secrets can ruins keep? While walking through the ruins our bodies start to empathize with these broken pieces of history; our souls share the same feeling as the leftovers of this structure. Ruins are as unpredictable as history can be. How far is this controlled chaos limited by its walls? Light, height, shadows, even materials can change our feeling for these ruins. How broken can a ruin be? Once we keep wandering around these ruins, they start to embrace us, one starts to feel several reactions; our bodies begin to connect with the walls and initiate a certain empathy which makes us sense we are also broken. Why can people see more than just a few stones on the ground? People must relate this ruins to some broken memories of their past; nostalgia takes a substantial part in this emphasis. Nostalgia is then a bodily sensation, such as Wolfing's sense of unease in the presence of an asymmetric. Is nostalgia not a construct of the imagining mind, a thought process, more than an emotion at first? This distinction plays a great role in the (romantic) ironist appreciation of ruins: reflection that leads to emotions. Figure 4
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"Forms become meaningful to us only because we recognize in them the expression of a sentient soul. Instinctively we animate each object. This is a primeval instinct of man. It is the source of the mythological imagination; and even today, is not a long educational process necessary to rid ourselves of the impression that an unbalanced figure must itself feel uneasy? Indeed, will this instinct ever die out? I believe not. It would be the death of art. " (Wölfflin. Prolegomena to a psychology of Architecture. Pg. 38) Wölfflin summarises to others that he refutes, like Volkelt; He stands to contemporaries that also thought that Movement is the principal way of understanding Art. Wölfflin theory is that humans empathize with objects by associating them with their bodies, so it's like a direct experience of Art. Moreover, he focuses on empathy specific to Architecture. Wölfflin argues that proportions in architecture were perceived by beholders in relation to proportions in their own physiques (Figure 5). One assertion in "Prolegomena to a psychology of Architecture" is that the façades of buildings correspond to human faces, as well as empathetic correspondences that he claims viewers felt between windows and human eyes and between architectural cornices and eyebrows. This subject is then to some extent a subjective psychological experience. Wolfflin suggests that "Forms become meaningful to us only because we recognize in them the expression of a soul. Instinctively we animate each object. This is a primal instinct of man". Indeterminately he says in essence that people can understand architecture because they can emphasise with it, they can find something similar to them, something they relate to. Wölfflin declares, "Why is no one surprised that the stone falls toward the earth? Why does that seem so very natural to us? We cannot account for it rationally: the explanation lies in our personal experience alone." Indefinitely Wofflin is describing the concept of form in a different way that it mimics the human bodies, suggesting that we are like the buildings; therefore, we understand them.
Figure 5
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Architecture if it has symmetry, it is like the human body, in the text Wöfflin compares an asymmetric building to a body with a missing lung; If we see a building bearing load, it is something that we can understand because we know gravity in our own bodies. It is then something that it is incredibly influential. How the body relates to empathy, we have bodies and buildings as well so we can feel what a building can feel. "Repetition and recollection are the same movement, except in opposite directions, for what is recollected has been, is repeated backwards, whereas genuine repetition is recollected forward. . . Hope is a new garment, stiff and starched and lustrous, but it has never been tried on, and therefore one does not know how becoming it will be or how it will fit. Recollection is a discarded garment that does not fit, however beautiful it is, for one has outgrown it." (Søren Kierkegaard. Repetition. Pg. 131-132) Kierkegaard sees it as arresting state. But its power to captivate can be traced to late Romanic ‘bastard’ children, such as the aesthetic of fascism, generally in Germany. Moreover, The Nazi government was planning to erect ready-made ruins-like mausoleum to mark battle filled with the future, with the emotive effect that they assert on a captivated audience in mind. Faced with the nothingness of the finite, the immeasurable eternity of the sublime rises, and what remains is nostalgia, which arouses longing for the ungraspable. When reality and ideality are separated, it becomes possible craving love: that intermediary capable of maintaining the bond of unity in the distinction of terms. Nostalgia knows the impending tragedy, the inevitable fall of finitude, and yet, it attracts and fascinates because there eying him access to a new purely spiritual reality. So it is determined as a "godly sorrow" as the pathos of the absolute spirit dissolving in the deep bosom of God. In short, nostalgia is the "Stimmung" of the other radical. Free action of romantic subjectivity must then be a negative action, that is, the death of finitude and infinitude promise of an ungraspable. Landscapes throughout Europe ravaged by industrial extraction are crossed and subject of recovery projects through art. Large bunkers submarines World War II are being drilled and open to an audience that includes those vast spaces where light going through diverse gaps and water cause different feelings. People are trying to get back the old phosphate mines of Nahal Zin in Israel, maritime quarries of Marés in Menorca, and Dionyssos’ ones in Greece, and Santa Lucia in Caserta, Italy. There are several tourist routes established linking different projects of industrial reuse across the European landscape. Thus, the European landscape has evolved to become a clear vehicle of postmodern expression. It can no longer be defined from a single perspective, or from outdated approaches. In 1998, UNESCO included the The Völklingen Ironworks (Völklinger Hütte) of Germany, in the list of UNESCO World Heritage (Figure 6). The cultural organisation does not propose any restoration or reuse project, but finances its conservation in a state of ruin, empty of content, huge and silent. Perhaps slower and less known way, this other group of performances that put aside leisure, consumption and tourism, and try to extract its full potential to ruin and the loss of meaning of some buildings that are no longer architecture and have therefore become a piece of art, they are definitely the projects which make another life for them. A look at the past from a present that thinks about the future.
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Figure 6
There is hardly enough room for planned interventions and the least polluted areas remain intact. There is a distribution of the recreational areas within the tall ovens, with viewing platforms, walkways and other recreational spaces that are connected through a green path that recovers the railroad tracks with walkways and footbridges for pedestrian. The walls of the vessels become climbing walls. The old sewer and refrigerators buckets are transformed into a water park with an ecological system of water supply from rain. The remains of metallic material are reused as pavement work, creating the great Metallic Piazza where children play or several representations are made. The wind turbine and the water tanks are integrated into the ancient sites, creating a large recreational space in which, among other activities, one can even practice diving. "This resurgent ability of man to create a second nature in the form of art and culture that link with the world will be what allows the machine redeem making a symbol of the creative and transforming human condition itself. The old hollow shells of old outdated industries now stand as totems in the middle of the new common jungle of public space. These huge skeletons linked to the man with the rest of the planet, and remind you that you must share the world with their own creative and destructive urges. Where once throbbed shredders timing mechanisms, now gravitates space of cultural and civilizing potential of man. Redeemed from hell, extension of parks and gardens no longer speak over the death of the original factory, but life remains among the ruins. " (Quim Rosell, op. cit., pg. 136-137).
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Among the melancholiest vision which cries for a frustrated past and the most objective, looking curiously forms and landscapes, this interpretation of industrial heritage as a ruin in the landscape can reveal a hidden nature in that great set of remains, erasing its previous function and discovering new possibilities. Thus, it is postmodern ordering memory, sometimes wistfully, true, but without play step by step the past in an attempt to return to the present. Man has the chance to think, to confront himself, to imagine, to dream their future through incomplete strokes that left their past. In the middle of an increasingly globalised world, where the past literally comes alive as identity, this "non-functional" industrial remains fills the gap between the past and the future through imagination.
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After all these changes in sensitivity to the place we are today more than ever inpatients of the irreversibility of Architecture. Even if the architecture is destroyed it is not possible to annihilate the memory left on the ground where it stood. All demolition can only mostly destroy its physical presence and appearance but not its permanent imprint on the place left printed. The Architecture helps to the place be transformed and that this footprint will be enduring. The power of the place or the site is present in the work of the architects of half of the World, notwithstanding in a vague way. The result of new hundreds of thousands of proposals of technologies express their indefiniteness on the context in resource blur and twilight mists. Millions of photomontages are symptomatic of that nostalgia relationship with architecture occupied by physical space. Every era builds its idea of place. The contemporary place tries to include a certain terminology itself for its redefinition: the thermodynamic terminology aims to overcome all the ornament of sustainability used in the last decade of the last century. Nowadays one seems aware that the work of Architecture in each place involves the creation of a climate. As if each site would recognised the right to breathe a specific air rather than clean air. Today, one looks at energy consumption and waste, also the architecture but still not produced the place and the context when handling. One will soon have to imagine how to recycle the context and its waste. On the other hand, the place and the project is far from maintaining that relationship purely deductive as imagined in the late twentieth century through diagrams and sophisticated graphic processes. Nowadays a place, a site, is a raw material awaiting the effects of architecture, but also, conversely, the architecture is a fragile material that will be tested when naturally interact in context. For more than mere architectural project it is necessary to project the place itself.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Cabanne, Pierre, and Marcel Duchamp. Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp. New York: Viking, 1971. Print. Denslagen, W. F. Romantic Modernism: Nostalgia in the World of Conservation. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2009. Print. Edwards, M. B. Romantic Ruins: Dissolution, Nostalgia, Synthesis: Later Eighteenth Century and Earlier Nineteenth Century Interpretations of the Ruin. N.p.: n.p., 1987. Print. Kierkegaard, Søren, A. B. Drachmann, J. L. Heiberg, H. O. Lange, and Peter P. Rohde. Samlede Værker. N.p.: n.p., 1964. Print. Klotz, Heinrich. The History of Postmodern Architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1988. Print. Mateo, José Luis., and Quim Rosell. Natur Und Abstraktion. Barcelona: Actar, 1995. Print. Nostalgia of Culture: Contemporary Soviet Visionary Architecture. London: Architectural Association, 1988. Print. Pal, Pratapaditya. Sindh, past Glory, Present Nostalgia. Mumbai: Marg Publications on Behalf of the National Centre for the Performing Arts, 2008. Print. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Von, and Douglas W. Stott. The Philosophy of Art. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 1989. Print. Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation, and Other Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966. Print. Williams, Richard J. The Anxious City: English Urbanism in the Late Twentieth Century. London: Routledge, 2004. Print. Wölfflin, Heinrich. Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture. Cambridge, MA: Dept. of Architecture, M.I.T., 1976. Print.
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