This is a site-driven project located in my hometown of Lewiston, Maine, a point along the Androscoggin River.  Driving over the bridge as a child, I was intrigued by the waterfall, but it always seemed unattainable; the mills and abandoned buildings prevented access.  When my dad said that the last mill burned down at Great Falls in 2009, I was saddened but knew this provided a new opportunity for the community. This project is not about placing a building, but rather intervening and creating a conversation with the existing landscape by framing and experiencing its beauty. This project is an exploration of redefining entry, thresholds and pathways, as well as interlocking public and private spaces.  The design process was not linear; one question always led to another.  The program evolved over time, as I became more acquainted with the water, ruins and topography of the site.  My hope was that I would add a chapter to the site story of Great Falls and inspire future development for the community. / Master of Architecture

No description available.

No description available.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2006. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Nearly two decades after the cessation of hostilities, traces of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina (1992-1995) are still present throughout the landscape. Ruins resulting both directly and indirectly from the military actions remain scattered throughout urban and rural landscapes. Above the city of Bugojno, stands the shell of a hospital that was never completed and never opened. It is a visceral image full of unfulfilled hope and promise, and a reminder of the catastrophic events of the Bosnian Conflict. With unused and derelict infrastructure of that magnitude, loaded with symbolic meaning, it begs the question, how can it come to be used for the benefit of the local residents? The purpose of this practicum is to effectively design a redevelopment plan for the site of this former regional hospital, producing community space that promotes peace and reconciliation between the ethnic groups affected by conflict utilizing landscape processes and a program of socially based activities such as community gardening and food production. It will explore alternative uses and understanding of ruined infrastructure through investigation of traditional and contemporary landscape design theory pertaining to the picturesque, the aesthetic understanding of ruins in the landscape and the aesthetics of decay.

In the face of economic, demographic, and infrastructural decline, Detroit, Michigan has become a destination for tourists interested in viewing the city's iconic ruins. Using data collected through participant observation, interviews, and document analysis, this thesis examines these emerging practices of ruin tourism in order to understand how such tourism operates, how it is related to representations of the city in popular media, and how it contributes to economic redevelopment in Detroit. Situated in literature about ruination and liminality, tourism geography, and critical urban geography, the study contributes to understandings of urban redevelopment in the post-industrial United States.

How is it that the Roman decadence, a derogatory term during the Enlightenment, became the fundamental aesthetic reference for a nineteenth century literary movement? Focusing on the intersections of literature, politics, religion, science and art history, this dissertation adopts a diachronic approach to decadence, read against a backdrop mobilizing twentieth century philosophers Vladimir Jankelevitch and Michel Serres. Decadence (Latin cadere, to fall) first designated the fall of the Roman Empire and a falling away from its political, moral and aesthetic norms. Drawing on Petronius and Baudelaire, I crystallize three ways in which philosophers, scholars (“érudits”), and poets faced the troubling notion of the fall : they observe its occurrence, restore its ruins, or praise its beauty. With this in mind, the dissertation closely analyzes eighteenth century topoi that conceive decadence as political instability (Montesquieu, Gibbon), moral corruption (Rousseau, de Maistre), and architectural imbalance (Diderot, Seroux d’Agincourt). The principal emphasis is on the semantic and stylistic value assigned to the term “decadence”. These interdiscursive readings disclose the displacement of decadent topoi : shifting from one context to another, they narrate the fall of the Roman Empire and remain inscribed in the literary production of Decadence. Whereas the Enlightenment underlines the edifying dimension of the Roman example, nineteenth century authors, lapsing into original sin and propelled by thermodynamic loss, salute the expression of the fall. Barbey d’Aurevilly’s writings reveal consistent historical, structural and textual references to Roman topoi, caught up in the arrested completion of political and mechanical cycles. Furthermore, his dandyism and ultramontanism conjure up the Roman conflict, while recurring fragments, maculae and lacunae destabilize the architectural balance of his texts. The Literature of Decadence emerges as an artificial intervention that suspends the irreparable fall, enlightening the political, moral and technological turmoil of the Second Empire with those of the Roman Empire. In returning Decadence back to its Roman origins, and tracing their configuration in the age of Enlightenment, this dissertation unravels a formative, yet frequently overlooked component of nineteenth century literature and aesthetics.

This dissertation explores contemporary lives and dynamics of the abandoned synagogues in provincial Poland. In the foreground of this study are several prewar synagogue buildings that have not been restored and adapted by the country’s heritage and tourist industries, as my central argument revolves around the special affordances and qualities that these structures preserve and sustain in their abandoned forms and becomings. The deserted synagogue in Polish towns and villages exists as an extraordinary kind of ruin, being simultaneously connected to a pre-modern past, architecture, and tradition, and the modern history of dereliction and decay. As it finds itself in this peculiar in-between zone, the abandoned synagogue of Poland has a rare ability to invoke the perception and framing of both the pre- (classical) and postindustrial (modern) ruin. I underscore the material fluidity and aesthetic dimension of these structures, by zooming in on their posthuman life and vigorous unfolding of strange new spaces, things, meanings, and sensations. The aesthetics of the abandoned synagogues are dynamic and interactive, being inextricably attached to how we encounter and sense their reality and materiality. This thesis highlights the mercurial and affective aesthetic experience of Poland’s deserted synagogues that is being formed and transformed during these immediate encounters with material spaces and things. I suggest that a re-enchantment of the synagogue takes place in the ruin, wherein non-human actors and activities (e.g. plants, animals, the weather) continually generate the wonderment, strangeness, and sacrality of these places. Hence, the abandoned synagogue is here approached and perceived as a form that I call the ruin temple: a space whose deeply flowing past and dynamism of decay and life, create a present that allures and enchants, affording a solitary, mystical, and sensuous immersion in its profound sphere of awe and wonder.

This dissertation examines the convergence of ruins and memory. It is an inquiry into the role ruins play in indexing, impeding and enabling memories of war through literary and non-literary media. My analysis is informed by a classical Arabic literary tradition of contemplating ruins. I question the nexus between the ruins motif and contemporary Arabic literature and culture by analyzing how the motif is reworked in the contemporary Lebanese prose, poetry and memorial sites under study. At the heart of this study is an attempt to explore the multivalent nature of war memories in Lebanon--their inscription, mediation, and transformation--through the framework of ruins. Drawing on the classical Arabic literary tradition of contemplating ruins allows me to analyze the way ruins are interpreted and represented in contemporary Lebanese vernacular, literary, museological and poetic matrixes of memory. I argue that these modern works invite us to contemplate ruins in new and challenging ways that exceed the classical regard and longing for an ephemeral past. This is to suggest that the classical Arabic ruins motif in its modern guise is not an organic offshoot of its pre-Islamic predecessor. Through their evocation of the past via its ruin-traces, the modern works under examination effectively transform the poetics of nostalgia to new affective and alternative imaginary spaces. It is precisely in the creative tension between the traditional and the modern, the real and the imagined ruins, where a contemporary poetics of memory lies. Central to my analysis, then, is the issue of memorialization in its aesthetic, textual and material dimensions as it informs the critical practices of writers, artists, poets, museum curators and inhabitants of war. Ruins emerge as a major trope that ties together divergent artistic, literary and cultural and oral practices, constituting complex forms that generate public and private memories of war. Hence ruins as temporal anchor, is both the portal and the substance of my inquiry into the dialectics of war and memory in Lebanon. How are ruins, in their material and aesthetic dimensions, enfolded into the discourses of textual, vernacular and literary landscapes of memory? This question is answered by commencing a textual and ethnographic journey through museum sites, derelict spaces, narrative and poetic constructions of memory.

This dissertation focuses on the acclaimed Japanese photographer Miyamoto Ryūji (b. 1947), whose work deals with a range of structures and spaces that I describe as ruinous: demolition sites that document the incessant development of Tokyo in the 1980s; man-made shelters of the urban homeless; the ungoverned Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong; Kobe after the 1995 Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake; pinhole photographs of the late-modern Japanese urbanscape; and, most recently, the Tōhoku region after the 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster. This project intersects an architectural and urban history of postwar Japan with the close visual analysis of Miyamoto’s photographs to show how images of ruins have served as a visual trope to challenge modernist narratives of progress and late-capitalist development. Second, I argue that these images connect multiple layers of trauma in the contemporary Japanese experience, illuminating the relationship between memory and image essential for an understanding of the role of photography in narrations of history. By examining this relationship, I clarify the ways in which postwar history has been narrated in Japan and how certain images (and the memories they spark) complicate the official narrative. Miyamoto Ryūji’s work is a compelling example of the ruin as a key theme in postwar and contemporary Japanese photography because of the diverse social and historical issues that converge in his work: urban planning, the commodification of architecture, historical preservation, natural and man-made disasters, homelessness, and, uniting all of these concerns, memory and its relationship to history. Outside of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, images of ruins are an underexplored way of understanding and documenting memory in Japan. Throughout the dissertation, I unearth the ruin as a central motif of postwar and contemporary Japanese photography in spite of widespread claims that Japan is a country without ruins. In doing so, I propose new ways of understanding the ruin that are specific to modern Japanese history and culture.