"A Study in Decay", the term paper

I guess you could call this the first real formal expression of my fascination with ruins.

This term paper was done for an art history class when I was an undergraduate at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, MA in the early 1970's. It was in that class that I was first exposed to the concept of "constructed ruins", and I found that idea extremely intriguing -- so much so that I used it as the basis for this paper (which, if memory serves, garnered me an "A"… probably the only one I got in that class).

I don't really remember doing the research, or writing the paper, but I do recall doing the drawings. I don't know what inspired me to render the entire text part of the paper in hand lettering (something I've never been that good at), but it did go well, I think, with the illustrations. The entire thing was created on plate-finish Bristol board illustration paper, and I used some kind of dipping pen -- possibly with a crow quill, though it could have been a larger nib -- to draw the ruins and do the lettering.

It was the only time in my life that I endeavored to do a term paper this way, and that's probably because doing that much hand lettering and trying to keep it neat, even and legible was an enormous pain in the neck (literally).


Here's the entire paper, with cover page and bibliography. You'll note the graphic on the cover page is the one I am using for the heading of this blog. I'm not really sure where the phrase "a study in decay" came from -- I may have made it up myself -- but I suspect I may have run across it in my research for the paper.



(Note: Because pages 4 and 5 are a two-page spread, I am using a smaller image of both pages together to show how they were meant to be seen, and then two separate images for both pages for easier reading.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Of all the ruins mentioned in the paper, I think my favorite was the house in the "Désert de Retz" park in France, made to appear like the base of a huge, shattered classic column. There is something bizarrely whimsical about the notion of a house built to look like that. -- PL

Odiorne

New Hampshire's Odiorne State Park lies on the seacoast not more than a mile or two south, I think, from the center of Portsmouth, NH. It is also known as Fort Dearborn, and once hosted large artillery pieces installed during World War II to help protect the US from the threat of an invasion from across the Atlantic, one which never came. The guns and ordnance have long since been removed, and when I first encountered this place with my wife when we lived for two years in Dover, NH, I was impressed -- first, with the beauty of the ocean which lay just a few hundred feet from the parking lot off Route 1A…

… and then a short time later -- as we walked around the grounds of the park -- by the massive concrete bunkers which once housed the weapons and ammunition and personnel intended for coastal defense.

My brother Bruce poses with the largest of the bunkers at Odiorne. 

Trees grew on top of these bunkers -- some fairly large, others small and wrapped in tangled vines and tall weeds. Paths wandered through the woods, allowing for quiet walks among the various concrete structures. The vegetation seemed, for the most part, to have been left to grow unchecked, though I know from visits in later years that some effort is regularly made to keep it from getting too unruly. 

Another view of that large bunker, from a day when I rode a Segway through the park -- big fun!

The walking paths follow the ocean for some distance, then dip back into the woods. It's intriguing to think that servicemen posted here during the tense days of war may have walked the same paths, taking a break from staring out to sea through binoculars, waiting for the enemy ships that never appeared.

I've visited this place at least a dozen times, and I know I will go there again. Ruins by the ocean -- I mean, what more can you ask for? One of my favorite memories is of gathering small shells from one of the rocky beaches there, shells which all had convenient holes in them.

I later strung hundreds of these shells together on monofilament, and my wife and I hung these shell garlands on the tree during what was, I think, our second Christmas together, in 1983. We still have them, though they have not decorated our Christmas tree in recent years. Maybe for Christmas of 2011, they will festoon the tree once more. -- PL

Weeds

Many times, when I think of ruins, I think of summer. Warm summer days, with the smell of plants, the sounds of insects, the feel of sweat on my forehead and arms. Is that goldenrod I smell? Queen Anne's lace? Or some other tall, wild weed, growing like the inexorable force of nature that it is? The smell of weeds is, I think, distinctly different from the smell of grass lawns and flower gardens. It has a feral apsect.

Weeds and ruins go together. They share one key quality -- they are, for the most part, unwanted. And so the weeds grow in the ruins, wild and untrammeled. Left untouched long enough, they become a blanket which covers and hides the ruins from our eyes. Think of the jungles of Central America, where centuries of unchecked plant growth have turned the ruins of ancient pyramids into green hills. 

There is nothing quite like that around here, but, if humans disappeared and nature were left to its own devices, there would be. Probably most of the structures we have built would collapse, unlike the sturdy stone pyramids of the Aztecs and Maya, and the green hills would be more like gentle green mounds.

But I don't expect to see that in my lifetime. In any event, I am happy to experience a small fraction of it, when I come across the old foundation of a house, out in the woods, or in a field… and I smell the weeds, warmed by the summer sun. -- PL 

A ruin in our backyard

I have realized that there is a ruin less than a few hundred feet from where I type this in our house.

It's not fabulous and extensive, and doesn't hold much if any historic importance. But it is a ruin, just the same.

Before we built this house in which I sit and write, we lived in an old house which occupied a spot just down the hill. It was the house which was here when we bought the property. It had charm, as an old colonial-style structure often will, but that was about it as far as its appeal went. Bad insulation, inefficient plumbing, a dark and gloomy kitchen, and various design oddities and structural quirks made it clear to us that this was not a house in which we could live for long and be comfortable.

During the three or four years we lived there, we had almost completely rebuilt the large barn which stood next to it, mostly for my use as an art studio and a place to store and service my motorcycles, and have the wood shop that I had always dreamed of. During that process, we saw what could be done with new construction, and started thinking that we would either do something similar with the house, or tear it down and build from scratch.

We chose the latter option, and ended up clearing a house-sized area on the heavily-wooded knoll behind the old house. When the new house was completed and we moved in, that old house was subsequently torn down -- albeit torn down CAREFULLY, as there were original beams and such which were valuable enough for the company that did the demolition to keep and reuse as the framework for a new house on another lot in another town.

Within months, there was virtually no sign that a house had stood there… except for one thing.

While we lived in that house, we thought it would be nice to expand the tiny preexisting patio area off of the kitchen. We had a nice, two-tiered stone wall built around two sides of it, as well as a circular stone planter for a small tree in the middle. And when the house was taken down, we saw no reason to destroy the patio -- in fact, we thought it might turn out to be a nice place to sit in the sun and enjoy the various plantings, even though we had the new house up on the hill.

Well, that was the idea, and we did spend some time on the old patio, but it quickly became apparent that we wouldn't be using it very often. So it has sat there, for almost twenty years, with very little in the way of upkeep. The plantings are overgrown, the bench weathered and rusting, and tall weeds grow between the slate paving stones, which are slowly being covered with lichens. Occasionally, in the summer, I run the mower over the patio to keep the tallest of the weeds down.

It is, in essence, a ruin.

And while not as elaborate as some ruins, this one affects me in similar fashion -- perhaps even more so in some ways, because when I go down there and sit on the old bench, I contemplate the passing of time, and even of a way of life for us which is no longer. Most of the time we spent out there, when the old house still stood, was with our daughter when she was little. We had her small wading pool there, and played with her dolls and other toys either on that patio or nearby, on the lawn or in the shade of the lilac bushes. I remember my mother chasing our little daughter around there, grandmother laughing and granddaughter shrieking happily.

Now my mother doesn't run, but moves slowly with a walker… and my daughter is about to turn twenty-two and lives three thousand miles away, on the other side of the country.

There is more than a slight hint of melancholy here. -- PL

Why do I love ruins?

There is something compelling about ruins -- not just the famous ones known around the world and studied endlessly, but the small, almost insignificant ones -- the ones you see on a daily walk along a river path, for example. What is that crumbling concrete abutment? Why is it here, in this spot? Was it once part of a dam, part of a factory long ago washed away in a flood?

There are answers to these questions, perhaps... but perhaps not. Maybe these bits and pieces of lives once lived will always hold a certain amount of mystery. Some of them hold virtually no importance to current times and the lives of people in the present... but at one point, they DID mean something.

This blog will be dedicated to an exploration of the fascination with ruins… or perhaps I should say, MY fascination with ruins. I don't intend to make a study of the attitudes of others.

There are ruins everywhere. As I said in a comment to one of my wife's writer/blogger friends:

"When we really stop and look around with an eye for picking out ruins, it seems they are all around us, in one form or another. In our area of the rural Northeast, there are hundreds, probably thousands of old stone walls, some out in the middle of heavily wooded forests… and they were once boundary markers, dividing different fields of farms now long vanished.

It's also not uncommon around here to see ruins on rivers -- old mills mostly washed away, leaving behind bits of themselves -- crumbling stone walls, dams and spillways, the occasional stairs to nowhere.

When Jeannine and I lived in New Hampshire, we would occasionally drive back to the Northampton/Amherst area to visit friends and family, and I often wondered about the more modern "ruins" we would see along the back roads -- the abandoned businesses, shuttered and weed-grown, the paving in their empty parking lots split by the relentless growth of grass and saplings. I would imagine the people who once worked in these places, or who owned them, or who patronized them, for whom these now-empty shells were once a vibrant and perhaps necessary part of life. These types of ruminations provoke a certain delicious melancholy.

One of my favorite ruins in this area was the concrete dinosaur, a Tyrannosaurus or Allosaurus, I think, which stood on the edge of Route 5, in the shadow of Interstate 91, heading south from Northampton. It was a promotional sculpture for a place called "Nash's Dinoland", a roadside attraction my parents took my dino-loving young self to at least once. For years that thing stood there, bits and pieces of it falling away as the winters ravaged it, the paint flaking furiously under the baking sun and pelting rain. Then it was gone."

That was the beginning of an exchange which proved to be the impetus for the creation of this blog. I would like to thank Amy Greenfield for her help in pushing me down this path. -- PL

(Note: The "A Study in Decay" header graphic is something I drew and it comes from a paper I wrote in an art history class while I was an undergraduate at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, MA in the early 1970's. I hand-lettered the entire paper and created several illustrations of ruins for it. I'll probably post all or part of it on this blog. -- PL)