Currently Reading: Zucker, Paul. 1968. Fascination of Decay. The Gregg Press, New Jersey.
In the introduction Why Ruins, Zucker includes the following definitions of the ruin, it’s image and value (p.2-3):
“A ruin exists in a state of continual transition caused by natural deterioration, specific catastrophe or other circumstances.”
“The image of the ruin is always ambivalent and open to manifold interpretations.”
“Functional values which the ruin might have possessed originally are of even less value in its aesthetic interpretation.”
“Devastated by time or by wilful destruction, incomplete as they re, ruins represent a combination of created, man-made forms and organic nature.”
Zucker traces the history of the ruin in the main chapters. In The Beginning, he accounts, “Although Boccaccio, writing in the fourteenth century, described some ruins in the vicinity of Baiai a “old stones and yet new for modern souls,” the conscious awareness of ruins as such did not develop until the early renaissance. (p.11)
[During the eighteenth century] the general interest in ruins was most intense, and the motif reached its peak both in landscaping and in the applied arts. Innumerable artificial ruins appeared in parks, and even the most everyday household utensils were decorated with images of decaying buildings and monuments.” (Both ruins and parks were reactions against the formal geometric French gardens of Le Nôtre.)
At the end of the book, Zucker briefly mentions the nineteenth century kitsch of ruins and twentieth century symbolism of industrialisation, urbanisation and devastations of war.
