Ruined Landscapes and Residual Architecture

Abstract

In this essay, I consider the contradictions that emerge when ruins are used to commemorate societal traumas in preserved concentration camps, decommissioned prisons, excavated torture centers, derelict cemeteries, residual bomb sites, abandoned slave trading castles, and blighted neighborhoods.

Ruins work affectively to invoke the milieu or situation of the trauma, deploying the visible residue of that trauma on the landscape. While ruins appear to be the perfect vehicle for commemoration, seeming to invoke an “appropriate” melancholic response, ruins are not reliable signifiers of pain. Rather, our ease with ruins reflects a historically complex engagement with a multiplicity of satisfactions alongside our grief and condemnation. Moreover, memorial ruins are palimpsests, layered texts with contradictory histories. As a result, these “lieux de memoire” often invoke feelings and meanings that complicate their commemorative functions.

All of this draws our attention to the ways in which any discussion of ruins at trauma memorials necessarily invites a discussion of site-specificity. What is the value of siting the horror exactly where we are standing? Are site-specific memorials morally superior or more socially efficacious than their off-site counterparts? What compels us to build memorials at (or to make pilgrimages to) trauma ruins? What do we mean when we say that a landscape is haunted by the events that have transpired on that site?

The essay concludes with a discussion of the ways that space and place are differentially deployed by Pierre Nora, Michel de Certeau, and Yi-Fu Tuan to emphasize the interplay between aesthetic, geographical and cultural forces at work in our understanding of the ways that ruins are used within memory culture.