ON SATYRS AND BITTERNS

Of all the screwball architectural passions—gingerbread-house fetishes, say, or the mania, in the suburbs, for crenellated and turreted tilt-wall chateaux—surely none are more feral than the hankering for heaps of broken stone. For ruined structures have spurred lusty encomiums since at least the age of Babylon, roiling the staid literature of buildings with “this orgiastic conjuring of the past, this upsurging of furious fancies,” as old Rose Macaulay put it so nicely. “Out come the screech-owls, the dragons, the satyrs, the bitterns, the serpents, the jackals, the bats, even the moles, all the familiar creatures of ruin that haunt demolished cities and glooming fancy,” she added, winking at the hothouse realm of rubble.

Today our wrecked, junked, and brambled buildings are more often barricaded by the curators of antiquity (Rome), recycled as shopping malls (Ephesus: Step right up, get yer vanitas vanitatum, folks!), or bulldozed as liabilites to urban self-esteem (Detroit). But as Gothamites circa 2001 were forcibly reminded, ruins rear up where we least expect them, as shockingly sumptuous rebuttals to Progress. Especially so (as we shall see) are the tumbled stones that stub the sojourner’s toe in our inner, psychic landscapes—the moss-strewn pillars of consciousness past.

Ruins are dangerous, in short; that’s why we need them. A good, rotting ruin gets the juices flowing.