"In the ruin history has physically merged into the setting. And in this guise history does not assume the form the process of an eternal life so much as that of irresistable decay. Allegory thereby declares itself to be beyond beauty. Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things. " (Walter Benjamin, Origins, pp 178-9)
Komar - Melamid, Scenes from the Future: The Guggenheim Museum, 1974.
Proleptic views of “future ruins viewed through an intact present" have a history that extends at least as far back as Neo-Classicism, Piranesi, and the painter Hubert Robert, whose two contrasting views of the future of the Louvre illustrated both his hopes and his fears for the future. The latter possibility can be seen in his Vue imaginaire de la Grande Galerie du Louvre (1796), showing the museum in ruins, while the former is illustrated in his Projet pour la Disposition de la Grande Galerie, of the same year, showing the former palace transformed into a national museum. Joseph Gandy would make similar opposing views of the Bank of England, one pristine and the other in ruins.
Hubert Robert, Vue imaginaire de la Grande Galerie du Louvre (1796).
“Nature is no longer the backdrop to human creation; our human world has become the backdrop for things of nature. The natural world will survive humankind. Whether it will re-create the means of life necessary to our species, or to beings resembling our species, is not within our ken. .. The environmental catastrophe we think of as the ruin of nature is in fact the ruin of human nature, the end of our sustainable life on earth.” (Susan Stewart, The Ruins Lesson p.270)
In the ruins of collapsed civilizations, surviving parts tend to be simple and inert, like the scattered stone blocks that once cooperated to define a building or monument. in the ruins of collapsed, the more complex, dynamic parts of the civilization – buildings, institutions and cities –often cannot maintain their existence if the larger system they helped define ceases to exist. (Haff)