Product Description

Why are we so fascinated by ruins? Do we see them as jig-saws and riddles or romantic evocations of the damage of Time, complete with crumbling stone and ivy? Do they stir us to remember past glory or warn against future arrogance? In this elegant, provocative book , the brilliant young art-historian Christopher Woodward looks back to the start of the cult in the eighteenth century, when follies were built in English landscape gardens, artists and writers thrilled to Rome's poetry of decay, and in Paris the great chef Careme even served blancmanges shaped like classical ruins. He takes us from Troy and Pompei to Sicilian palaces and Nazi fantasies, and whirls us forward to modern times - to the shattered Statue of Liberty in Planet of the Apes, to Florida's Museum of Natural Phenomena, designed as a court-house dumped upside-down by a hurricane and to Chelsea Flower Show's 'Millennium Ruin'. Even the decay of an ordinary house can be as moving as the collapse of a temple - with its fascinating stories and characters, and its telling illustrations, In Ruins is full of strange delights and startling surprises, exploring the mysterious, melancholy charm of eternal fragments.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #508275 in Books
• Published on: 2001-08-30
• Format: Illustrated
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 224 pages

Review
"Marvellous proof that the prospect of ruins can elicit the finest cadences of the language... A rich and absorbing volume." -- Peter Ackroyd, "The Times

"From the Trade Paperback edition.

Customer Reviews

A Classic for the Ages
The erudite Woodward has written an enormously entertaining and illuminating book whose rich, flowing prose is a pleasure to read. History is blended with the starkness of the modern world and transmitted to the reader redolent with imagery. Woodward's broad, firm grasp of history, and effective weaving of desperate elements, produces a satisfying read for those intrigued by the forgotten corners of the world and the mystery of the past. "In Ruins" is destined to become a classic. The residue of a romantic, misty past lingers long after the last page is turned

A beautifully evocative meditation!
As a child I read Shelley's poem "Ozymandias" and I was gripped by the vivid picture of ruins of power and wealth - a picture that has never left me. The poem spoke of long-gone living beings, of their aspirations and achievements, and of the tenuous nature of what we create in the physical realm. Yet these ruins remain to teach us the very things that Christopher Woodward so beautifully describes in his book. It has been a joy to read, to sit and think of all the ruins one can recall, and those which one should have recalled, and then to continue reading. It helps to have lived through three quarters of the twentieth century, as I have, to really appreciate this book. Highly recommended.

The love of collapse
I finished reading this piece while eating lunch at work in an office overlooking a church - roofless and leaning, a victim of the second Great War. The ruins of the building are fenced off from the public, and while you can linger in gardens outside the chapel, its grounds are closed to the possibility of soporific loiterers.
As Woodward acknowledges, this is less a work of architectural history than a overview of the Romantic possibilities of collapse. The author intersperses his own love-affair with the mystery of the untouched ruin with that of poets, eccentrics and fallen Princes through the ages. At once personal and engaging, the book is a captivating history of man's relationship with the physical remains of rise and fall of civilisations.
My only complaint would be with the publisher's emission of a glossy photo section. The black and white digital pictures within do not capture the intensity of some of the artworks they reproduce.