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About|ruins in architecture|other uses of Ruin and RuinsRedirect|Ruined|the 2009 Pulitzer Prize-winning play|Ruined (play) Ruins are the remains of human-made architecture: structures that were once complete, as time went by, have fallen into a state of partial or complete disrepair, due to lack of Maintenance, repair and operations|maintenance or deliberate acts of destruction. Natural disaster , war and depopulation are the most common root causes, with many structures becoming progressively derelict over time due to long-term weathering and scavenging.
There are famous ruins all over the world, from ancient sites in Yinxu|China , the Indus valley and Judea to Zimbabwe in Africa, Ancient Greece|ancient Greek , Ancient Egypt|Egyptian and Ancient Rome|Roman sites in the Mediterranean basin , and Inca Empire|Incan and Maya civilization|Mayan sites in the Americas . Ruins are of great importance to historians, archaeology|archaeologists and anthropology|anthropologists , whether they were once individual fortification s, Place of worship|places of worship , houses and utility buildings, or entire villages, towns and cities. Many ruins have become UNESCO World Heritage Site s in recent years, to identify and preserve them as areas of outstanding value to humanity. http://whc.unesco.org/en/about/ World Heritage Centre - World Heritage
Cities
Ancient cities were often highly militarized and fortified defensive Human settlement|settlement s. In times of war they were the central focus of armed conflict and would be looting|sack ed and ruined in defeat.Max weber, The city , 1958 Although less central to modern conflict, vast areas of 20th century cities such as Warsaw , Dresden , Coventry , London and Berlin were left in ruins following World War II, and a number of major cities around the world – such as Beirut , Kabul , Sarajevo , Grozny and Baghdad – have been partially or completely ruined in recent years as a result of more localised warfare. http://urban.cccb.org/urbanLibrary/htmlDbDocs/A036-C.html Stephen Graham, Postmortem City: Towards an Urban Geopolitics
Entire cities have also been ruined, and some occasionally lost completely, to natural disasters. The ancient city of Pompeii was completely lost during a volcanic eruption in the 1st century Common Era|CE , its uncovered ruins now preserved as a World Heritage Site. The city of Lisbon was totally 1755 Lisbon earthquake|destroyed in 1755 by a massive earthquake and tsunami , and the 1906 San Francisco earthquake left the city in almost complete ruin.
Deliberate destruction
Following World War II, a number of European historic buildings fell into ruin as a result of taxation policies, which required all structures with roofs to pay substantial property tax . The owners of these buildings, like Fetteresso Castle (now restored) and Slains Castle in Scotland , deliberately destroyed their roofs in protest at, and defiance of, the new taxes. Other decrees of government have had a more direct result, such as the case of Beverston Castle , in which the English parliament ordered significant destruction of the castle to prevent it being used by opposition Cavalier|Royalist s. Post-colonial Ireland has encouraged the ruin of grand Georgian houses, symbols of British imperialism.A selection chosen for their picturesque value, appear in Simon Marsden (photos), Duncan McLaren (text), In Ruins: The Once Great Houses of Ireland? , 1980, expanded ed. 1997.
Relics of steel and wooden towers
As a rule, towers built of steel are dismantled, when not used any more, because their construction can be either rebuilt on a new site or if state of construction does not allow a direct reuse, the metal can be recycled economically. However sometimes tower basements remain, because their removal can sometimes be expensive. One example of such a basement is the basement of the former radio mast of Deutschlandsender Herzberg/Elster .
The basements of large wooden towers such as Transmitter Ismaning may also be left behind, because removing them would be difficult.
The contemplation of " rust belt " post-industrial ruins is in its infancy.But see Tim Edensor, Industrial ruins: spaces, aesthetics and materiality , 2005.
Aesthetics
In the Middle Ages Roman ruins were inconvenient impediments to modern life, quarries for pre-shaped blocks for building projects, or of marble to be burnt for agricultural lime, and subjects for satisfying commentaries on the triumph of Christianity and the general sense of the world's decay, in what was assumed to be its last age, before the Second Coming . With the Renaissance , ruins took on new roles among a cultural elite, as examples for a consciously revived and purified architecture ''all' antica , and for a new aesthetic appreciation of their innate beauty as objects of venerable decay.The European career of the pleasure and pathos absorbed from the European contemplation of ruins has been explored by Christopher Woodward, In Ruins'' (Chatto & Windus), 2001. The chance discovery of Nero's Domus Aurea at the turn of the sixteenth century, and the early excavations at Herculaneum and Pompeii had marked effects on current architectural styles, in Raphael's Rooms at the Vatican and in Neoclassical architecture|neoclassical interiors , respectively. The new sense of historicism that accompanied neoclassicism led some artists and designers to conceive of the modern classicising monuments of their own day as they would one day appear as ruins.
Ruin value (lang-de|Ruinenwert) is the concept that a building be designed such that if it eventually collapsed, it would leave behind aesthetically pleasing ruins that would last far longer without any maintenance at all. Joseph Michael Gandy completed for Sir John Soane in 1832 an atmospheric watercolor of the architect's vast Bank of England rotunda as a picturesquely overgrown ruin, that is an icon of Romanticism .Widely illustrated in this context, includingin David Watkin, The English Vision: the picturesque in architecture, landscape, and garden design , 1982:62. Ruinenwert was popularized in the 20th century by Albert Speer while planning for the 1936 Summer Olympics and published as Die Ruinenwerttheorie ("The Theory of Ruin Value").
Ruins remain a popular subject for painting and creative photographySimon O'Corra: France in Ruins, Buildings in Decay , London 2011 ISBN 978-1-906137-23-6 and are often romanticized in film and literature, providing scenic backdrops or used as metaphor s for other forms of decline or decay. For example, the ruins of Dunstanburgh Castle in England inspired J. M. W. Turner|Turner to create several paintings; in 1989 the ruined Dunnottar Castle in Scotland was used for filming of Hamlet (1990 film)|Hamlet . The Civilization (series)|Civilization series of turn-based strategy computer games features ruins as special tiles which may provide the player with a bonus when explored.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1400030862/ Christopher Woodward, In Ruins (London: Vintage, 2002)
http://www.bergpublishers.com/uk/book_page.asp? BKTitle=Industrial%20Ruins Tim Edensor, Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality (London: Berg, 2005)
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0820486469 Dylan Trigg, The Aesthetics of Decay: Nothingness, Nostalgia, and the Absence of Reason(New York: Peter Lang, 2006)
http://www.rodopi.nl/functions/search.asp? BookId=VIBS+159 Robert Ginsberg, The Aesthetics of Ruins (New York/Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004)
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~janzb/place/lossplace.htm Bibliography: Loss, Decay, Ending of Place
Rose Macaulay|Macaulay, Rose , The Pleasure of Ruins
