Taught via Zoom by Celeste Olalquiaga, author of The Artificial Kingdom: A Treasury of the Kitsch Experience and Megalopolis
4 week online course
Thursdays 7-9 PM Eastern Time ( May 28, June 4, June 11, June 28 )
Admission: $185 ($145 for $5/a month and above Patreon members)
PLEASE NOTE: All classes will also be recorded and archived for students who cannot make that time

The 21st century was supposed to be a futuristic era of enlightened human beings. But just like the sunken empire of Atlantis, a fantastic empire brought down by its people’s greed, everywhere we look in this third millennium we find ruins: industrial and postindustrial ruins, the ruins of the neo-liberal system, even the ruins of our individual and collective bodies in the face of an ever-growing technology and also now of a devastating global virus. 

Ruins are such a part of our hypermodern sensibility that the term “ruinophilia” was coined by the Russian cultural theorist Svetlana Boym to describe the growing interest in architectural ruins of the last few decades. Yet the love of ruins goes back several centuries to the Quattrocento and the backgrounds of religious paintings. In fact, the notion of “ruin” is a modern one, and it emerges along with a new concept of time that is chronological as opposed to cyclical, where rather than repetitive, temporality is causal and continuous.

The ruins of the Greco-Roman empire, for example, were only vestiges, meaningless remnants, for their contemporaries.  During the Renaissance, these vestiges acquired a new historical and aesthetic meaning as “ruins” were used to portray past pagan empires in decay.  Landscapes with ruins became the subject of paintings called “ruins” in the 16th century and exploded into a true “ruin-craze” during the 17th and 18th centuries, when fake, allegorical and “anticipated” ruins were the vogue among the nobility and aristocracy in Europe.

Ruins gained particular momentum in the 18th and 19th centuries, with Romanticism and the archaeological discoveries of lost cities such as Pompeii as well as Pre-Columbian temples. This moment marks the popularization of ruins via photography and their association with the modern notion of catastrophe. The ensuing whirlwind of industrialization and world wars made architectural remnants no longer a question of an ancient past, but of a modern present, as the German philosopher Walter Benjamin proposed in the 1930s. 

This course will focus on artistic and architectural imagery and discuss key theoretical texts that students can read at will. The idea is for those who attend this course to gain a clear understanding of the history and complexity of the notion of ruin, develop a perception for different kinds of ruins and cultural notions like debris, residues and leftovers, and be more aware of how ruins manifest and shape modern sensibilities.

1.     The Quattrocento’s Ruined Landscapes
2.     Fake, Allegorical and Anticipated ruins 
3.     Piranesi and the dark side of the Enlightenment
4.     Industrial and Postindustrial Ruins

Celeste Olalquiaga is an independent scholar whose work focuses on modernity and the modern relationship between nature and culture. She has written Megalopolis: Contemporary Cultural Sensibilities (1992), The Artificial Kingdom: A Treasury of the Kitsch Experience (1998) and edited Downward Spiral: El Helicoide’s Descent from Mall to Prison (2018), as well as numerous articles. She teaches and curates internationally. www.celesteolalquiaga.com

Bibliography (*provided in PDF)
*Benjamin, Walter.  Paris: Capital of the Nineteenth Century. (1935)
*Boym, Svetlana. Architecture of the Off-Modern. NY: Buell Center/FORuM Project and Princeton Architectural Press, 2008.
*Edensor, Tim. Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality. London: Berg Publishers, 2005. 
Macaulay, Rose. Pleasure of Ruins. London: Wiedenfield and Nicholson, 1953.
 *Makarius, Michel. Ruins. Paris: Flammarion, 2004.
*Olalquiaga, Celeste. “Modern Ruins and the Urban Imaginary.” In Lászlo Munteán et al, eds. Materializing Memory in Art and Popular Culture. New York: Routledge, 2017.
Sebald, W. G. On the Natural History of Destruction [1999]. NY: Random House, 2003.
*Simmel, Georg. “The Ruin.” (1911)
*Smithson, Robert. “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey.” (1967)
Speer, Albert. Inside the Third Reich. New York and Toronto: Macmillan, 1970. 
*Virilio, Paul. Bunker Archaeology. NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994.