Ruinscapes in poetry and architecture

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to interrelate poetry and ruin in their multiple modalities of being together. Ruin reveals the poet's intentions, visualizes the poetic attitude as such, and functions as mirror and model for poetic constructions. On the other hand, poetry, as measure for authenticity in architecture, reveals and elucidates phenomenology of ruin-dwelling. Ruinscapes are examined in the domain of poetry, whether intentional or unintentional, integral or fragmented, and in the domain of architecture, whether intentional or unintentional, integral or fragmented. Architecture and poetry ruinscapes manifest a common aesthetics based on different configurations of the tragic, which is the conflict of man and physis, physis and creation, creation and man. Poetry ruinscapes are being considered in their physicality, in a unified word-object relation, which reflects a language-world continuum. Openness is being discussed in the context of visual grids, the fragmentary, effacement and breaking, cryptograms, elliptical transcriptions, errors, letter phanopoeias, and palimpsests. Architectural ruinscapes are seen as spatial manifestations of the conflicting dipoles which constitute the poetics of ruin-habitation: inside and outside, nearness and beyond, rootness and errance, narrow and infinite, intimacy and strangeness, appropriation and exile, etc. Ruins are classified according to earthly or cosmic Openness, reflecting the existentials of human habitation. Categories discussed are the "aethreon" and "trilithon" ruinscapes, the "passing dwelling", the Byzantine dome and column, Roman ruinscapes and the Gothic. This present investigation is inseparable from my own poetic ruin-work, as documented at the end. Theoretical research and poiesis -- as "making" -- form here a corpus of interconnected dispositions, anticipations, recollections.