"Ruins do not merely evoke the past. They contain a still and seemingly quiescent present, and they also suggest forebodings, pointing to future erasure and subsequently, the reproduction of space, thus conveying a sense of the transience of all spaces"
- - Tim Edensor Industrial Ruins: Spaces, Aesthetics, Materiality
- - Tim Edensor Industrial Ruins: Spaces, Aesthetics, Materiality
INTRODUCTION
As made obvious by Kurt Iveson, "Enacting our right to the city is a matter of building 'cities within cities'" [original article]. But how does the urban ruin fit into this idea? If the definition of decay is to rot and deteriorate, is it possible to build a new arena out of decomposing space? Perhaps the rebuilding and co-option of blown-apart and abandoned places falls under a separate category of space-making altogether. This is a study of the role the urban ruin plays in an individual or subculture's ability to perform identity in the city.
As made obvious by Kurt Iveson, "Enacting our right to the city is a matter of building 'cities within cities'" [original article]. But how does the urban ruin fit into this idea? If the definition of decay is to rot and deteriorate, is it possible to build a new arena out of decomposing space? Perhaps the rebuilding and co-option of blown-apart and abandoned places falls under a separate category of space-making altogether. This is a study of the role the urban ruin plays in an individual or subculture's ability to perform identity in the city.
Aesthetic disarray At
sutro baths, san francisco
This is what the Baths once was. And after a fire in 1966, it became (and has remained) a ruin.
But the Sutro Baths are far from abandoned...particularly the caves. Although the land is governed by the National Park Service, a lot of unsanctioned activity goes on there. In 2014, doom metal bands held a concert in honor of the Supermoon. According to the Heathen Harvest Periodical, after each set, the concert-goers exited the cave in a candle-lit procession toward the water.
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This is an example of how a marginal subculture (doom-metal) performs their art (or identity) in a space that is not intended for them. They co-opt this terrain vague as a space of their own.
TERRAIN VAGUE: INDETERMINATE ZONES IN THE LANDSCAPE THAT ARE OFTEN PERCEIVED AS INDICATORS OF DECAY AND ABANDONMENT. HOWEVER, THESE SITES ARE ALSO APPROPRIATED FOR SPONTANEOUS, IMPROVISATIONAL, AND CREATIVE USES. -- Michael Rios "Claiming Latino Space: Cultural Insurgency in the Public Realm"
And the respect that the concert-goers had for the space was remarkable, writes our Heathen Harvest friend. He noted that people stayed after the show to pick up trash, which was, in his opinion, a great testament to the strength of the Bay Area punk scene. The sea cave is able to act as a concert venue because of its abandoned/destroyed status. There are no prescriptions. Therefore, the people at this concert are able to be entirely themselves.
"For absent in their disordered realms are the usual sheen of aesthetic order, the surveillance of people and non-human life, the placing for things and humans in specific spaces, and the self-conscious awareness that limits corporeal expression in the midst of others"
- - Tim Edensor Industrial Ruins: Spaces, Aesthetics, Materiality
- - Tim Edensor Industrial Ruins: Spaces, Aesthetics, Materiality
And this is what The Daily Beast has to say about BROKEN BEAUTY.
UNRUINING SPACE AT
BURNSIDE SKATEPARK IN PORTLANd, OR
When Jay Meer and his friends couldn't find a place to build a half-pipe in their neighborhood in North Portland, they had to look elsewhere. The area underneath the Burnside Bridge was perfect
#1 It rains a lot in Portland, and it's dry under the bridge.
#2 No one else wanted to go there. It was gross.
#3 There was extra cement left by the I-84 on-ramp construction crew.
This is how Jay described it on the Burnside Skatepark Blog: “It was nasty. Nasty as in old syringes, dirty mattresses, crapped in clothes, thick dust on the wall, and sketchy people wandering around….The crime rate in the area was very high due to the fact that the area was basically a no-mans land with empty lots and easy access to the passing freight trains.”
But that did not deter Jay and his friends. Beginning in 1990, they and the Portland skating community dedicated themselves to constructing this.
#1 It rains a lot in Portland, and it's dry under the bridge.
#2 No one else wanted to go there. It was gross.
#3 There was extra cement left by the I-84 on-ramp construction crew.
This is how Jay described it on the Burnside Skatepark Blog: “It was nasty. Nasty as in old syringes, dirty mattresses, crapped in clothes, thick dust on the wall, and sketchy people wandering around….The crime rate in the area was very high due to the fact that the area was basically a no-mans land with empty lots and easy access to the passing freight trains.”
But that did not deter Jay and his friends. Beginning in 1990, they and the Portland skating community dedicated themselves to constructing this.
Now, 25 years later, it's uncertain what the future of the skatepark will be. Multnomah County is planning to retrofit many of Portland's bridges, including Burnside. But this state of uncertainty is not new to the skating community. Technically, the park is unsanctioned, which means that from it's conception, the city could destroy it at any time. It says so here. And now it's a real possibility.
Is it possible that the Burnside Skatepark represents something more than just a simple act of repurposing a supposedly useless space? Perhaps an arena like the Skatepark is more representative of how the city is in constant flux as opposed to a fixed entity that is easily controlled by top-down forces.
CURATED MEMORY AT
THE MASONIC TEMPLE IN PROVIDENCE, RI
The Renaissance Hotel in downtown Providence was originally intended to be a meeting hall for the Freemasons. But they ran out of money during the depression and construction stopped in 1929. By 2004, it was in ruins.
NOW IT'S THE MARRIOTT RENAISSANCE HOTEL... and its architect and designers decided to honor the history of the building by incorporating pieces of the graffiti into the new interior.
Can you spot the graffiti on the wall?
COMMODIFIED RUIN AS PALIMPSEST:
A palimpsest is something reused or altered but the traces of what was there before are still apparent.
A palimpsest is something reused or altered but the traces of what was there before are still apparent.
Here at the Renaissance, the developer has taken it upon him/herself to remember the ruin for the city. It seems like a top-down memorialization that eliminates the people who made the site what it was in the first place.
"Because of imperatives to bury the past too swiftly in search of the new, modernity is haunted in a particularly urgent fashion by that which has been consigned to irrelevance but which demands recognition of its historical impact"
-- Tim Edensor "The Ghost of Industrial Ruins"
-- Tim Edensor "The Ghost of Industrial Ruins"