“The ideas ruins evoke in me are grand. Everything comes to nothing, everything perishes, everything passes, only the world remains, only time endures.” Diderot
Ruin lust: our love affair with decaying buildings - great essay by Brian Dillon
Photo: The ballroom of the 15-floor art-deco Lee Plaza Hotel, Detroit, Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre (slideshow)
Ghost Signs, Highland Park, Mich.
“It’s a reminder of our own timeline and how quickly things become obsolete. One minute people had thriving businesses building buggies, and the next minute Henry Ford is pushing out automobiles on an assembly line and nobody wants horse and buggies anymore.”
Frank Jump, author Fading Ads of New York City (The History Press, 2011)
From In a City Fighting Blight, ‘Ghost Signs’ as Portals to a Bygone Era (NYT)
![Michigan Theater, Detroit, in 1927 (left) and 2005 (right).
“The old Michigan Theater is one of the most suggestive sights in the whole city of Detroit: neither an abandoned ruin nor a precious, restored fetish, but a working statement about making do with the past. The tenants of the offices adjacent to the theater threatened to move out unless they were provided with secure parking, so that’s what the landlord improvised out of the otherwise useless auditorium. And that is the genius of the place. One can only marvel at the dramatic parable being enacted by the current occupants — the returnees — who drive in and out of the vast space, past the former ticket booth, brought daily into conversation with the past, and what our desires have made of it: the desire to ride Henry Ford’s cars out of town, onward to a better life that lay, we imagined, beyond the city. But still the city is here, outmoded and abandoned but necessarily returned to, that contradictory fact of life rendered in an architectural colloquy so extraordinary it cannot help but be felt.”
Jerry Herron, The Forgetting Machine: Notes Toward a History of Detroit [via @urbanverse]](http://places.designobserver.com/media/images/herron-forgetting-8_525.jpg)
Michigan Theater, Detroit, in 1927 (left) and 2005 (right).
“The old Michigan Theater is one of the most suggestive sights in the whole city of Detroit: neither an abandoned ruin nor a precious, restored fetish, but a working statement about making do with the past. The tenants of the offices adjacent to the theater threatened to move out unless they were provided with secure parking, so that’s what the landlord improvised out of the otherwise useless auditorium. And that is the genius of the place. One can only marvel at the dramatic parable being enacted by the current occupants — the returnees — who drive in and out of the vast space, past the former ticket booth, brought daily into conversation with the past, and what our desires have made of it: the desire to ride Henry Ford’s cars out of town, onward to a better life that lay, we imagined, beyond the city. But still the city is here, outmoded and abandoned but necessarily returned to, that contradictory fact of life rendered in an architectural colloquy so extraordinary it cannot help but be felt.”
Jerry Herron, The Forgetting Machine: Notes Toward a History of Detroit [via @urbanverse]
Urban farming in Detroit (NPR)
‘The city fascinates because it is a condensed, emphatic example of the trials of so many American cities in an era of globalization, which has brought with it intensified economic instability and seemingly intractable joblessness. Detroit is also iconic, intimately familiar to generations of Americans who associate R&B music, automobiles, and the modernist skyscraper with urbanity itself, and yet the decline depicted in ruin photos is frightening and at times grotesque. While unique in its scale, however, Detroit’s entrenched infrastructural and economic problems are themselves as American as apple pie, reproduced on varying scales in Newark, Buffalo, Cleveland, and Camden. Detroit, then, isn’t an exception to a general rule of class mobility and meritocracy, the pillars of the so-called “American Dream,” as it’s often seen.’
“Detroitism” ~ John Patrick Leary
The Ruins of Detroit: Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre’s remarkable book of photographs documenting the decline of the city, from 2005 to 2009.
“Cumulatively, the photographs are a powerful and disturbing testament to the glory and the destructive cost of American capitalism: the centre of a once-thriving metropolis in the most powerful nation on earth has become a ghost town of decaying buildings and streets.”
Satellite image of Detroit
“We should dismantle, deconstruct those areas and turn them over to urban farms where we are tilling a thousand or fifteen hundred acres and we are growing fresh fruit, fresh vegetables and creating jobs in canning and shipping and packaging. We could have half a dozen of those farms spread out across the city because the city unfortunately lacks quality supermarkets. It’s really a fresh fruit desert in many ways. There’s no reason why this land when it is cleared cannot be ploughed and be an asset to the community.”
Shrinking Detroit (Guardian)
“In another universe these empty apartments would be offered to the destitute and the homeless as cheap housing. But in a city where more than half the population has left, maybe there just aren’t enough bodies to fill these things anymore.”
Detroit, David Byrne
