American Ruins

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Summary: How can a book on ruins give you hope? Read on...
Review: Camilo Vergara's latest effort will appeal to those interested in both architectural and landscape photography, as well as urban activists, artists, writers, and even musicians. Vergara has the ability to draw on a variety of inspirations in his thoughtful analyses of forgotten urban America. Nominally about decaying buildings in Detroit, Newark, Chicago, and elsewhere; American Ruins goes deeper--exploring connections between buildings, art, sociology, psychology, and the natural environment.

The book is divided into sections based on ruins typology. This is a good approach, as it allows Vergara to show connections between cities and their related phenomena which might not otherwise have been apparent. His accounts of conversations with wary local residents and (usually) thoughtless politicians and developers invest the book with a jarring realism that juxtaposes effectively with the often dreamy and strangely beautiful photographs.

Another excellent attribute of this substantial book is its readability. In comparison with The New American Ghetto (Vergara's previous book), here Vergara separates his narrative into shorter separate, site-specific analyses, which makes it easy to ingest a few pages at a time and return for more later. It also makes it easy to move through the book in a non-linear fashion, based on your own visual interests.

This evocative work will be required reading for architects, preservationists, and artists. However, the sublime beauty of Vergara's photography should win him fans from many other persuasions. Perhaps in the end Vergara will succeed in his effort to, at least, bring appreciation for not just our sanitized and restored "landmarks," but for our most humble and neglected buildings--those which tell the story of this tumultous century in ways only this book reveals.

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Summary: Unclaimed Money
Review: The book is like unclaimed money waiting for its owners to come and find the value they left behind. There is a world of opportunity out there for the brave of heart in the real estate game. These old buidlings are just begging for a new owner with some cash and creativity......can I get some money from any one to renovate? This is a shopping spree book for the lazy real estate investor.

Rating:
Summary: Unclaimed Money
Review: The book is like unclaimed money waiting for its owners to come and find the value they left behind. There is a world of opportunity out there for the brave of heart in the real estate game. These old buidlings are just begging for a new owner with some cash and creativity......can I get some money from any one to renovate? This is a shopping spree book for the lazy real estate investor.

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Summary: Brilliant and captivating photography
Review: This book was perhaps the most fascinating picture book I have ever seen. If you are a lover of nostalgia, and the concept of old buildings and factories sitting idle in a modern world, then this book is for you. There are loads and loads of pictures depicting weathered buildings, theaters, automobile factories, abandoned cars, houses, townhomes, and businesses. The subjects are mostly within the 20th century, and others are not much older, so it keeps things in a specific era, and shows you how the past is never erased; there are always traces of yesterday that will remain. A+A+A+A+A+

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Summary: Derelict Buildings: Nostalgia or Nuisance
Review: This is a fascinating book of documentary photography. The author is entranced by abandoned structures. His viewpoint of these tragic, yet often eerily beautiful buildings is made clear by a quotation he provides from a play by Fernando Pessoa, i.e. he fantasizes about the life that went on in them when they were alive. These are pictures from a graveyard, and we, as readers, are attending a memorial service, with Mr.Vergara providing a well-written eulogy.

When first leafing through the book I immediately thought of Jacob Riis, the turn of the century photographer who photographed the New York slums. This thought also occurred to someone providing a review on the dust jacket of the book. I ended up revoking this comparison, however. Mr. Vergara's task here is not to provide social commentary. For the most part he simply loves these buildings. I feel that he would not even care to see many of them restored, but envisions leaving them in a state of arrested decay, like the large ghost town of Bodie in California. Recently, in a series of articles on corporate welfare, Time magazine remarked on the fact that wealthy corporations often easily abandoned obsolete sites, showing no concern over the blight they caused in the community. So here we see derelicts owned by RCA, a company that could afford to tear them down or restore them for community use. My point is that this book may raise many thoughts regarding American community problems, but Mr. Vergara is not here to deal with these issues. And that is really OK, too, as the book is wonderful just as sort of an archaeological document.

My one disappointment is that the book covers only a few cities: New York, Detroit, Chicago, Gary, Camden, and the South Bronx. For a sequel I would suggest that Mr. Vergara tour more cities to find some of the other classics that exist. He could photograph the Winecoff hotel, site of the country's most disastrous hotel fire that killed 119 people in 1946. This 16-story structure still stands abandoned in downtown Atlanta. Or he could document the huge Kelso depot that stands empty in the middle of the Mojave Desert. I am certainly looking forward to that book.

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Summary: More personal than its predecessor..
Review: Vegara's prior work on this subject, The New American Ghetto, is a landmark photo essay on buildings that have been abandoned. His title of this work is fitting for his passion and belief in what 'ruins' represent. They do not represent the end but moments frozen in time. He goes so far as to envision the ruins in his photos as a modern day Parthenon. This is not vanity on his part but a deep understanding and vision.

There is a chronology to many of his photos, showing buildings in various stages, some not decomposing but being restored. It is the power of his vision that notes that these restorations are a bit too perfect.

He dives a bit deeper into his subjects. This book, to me, has more of his person involved and is less objective than his prior work (which is also outstanding). It is not as sociologically in depth (i.e. does not spend as much time detailing the buildings, its occupants and/or its history) but gives more personal narrative and insight.

It's a unique perspective and an amazing collection of photographs of buildings and landmarks that once were, no longer are or will soon cease to be.

Rating:
Summary: More personal than its predecessor..
Review: Vegara's prior work on this subject, The New American Ghetto, is a landmark photo essay on buildings that have been abandoned. His title of this work is fitting for his passion and belief in what 'ruins' represent. They do not represent the end but moments frozen in time. He goes so far as to envision the ruins in his photos as a modern day Parthenon. This is not vanity on his part but a deep understanding and vision.

There is a chronology to many of his photos, showing buildings in various stages, some not decomposing but being restored. It is the power of his vision that notes that these restorations are a bit too perfect.

He dives a bit deeper into his subjects. This book, to me, has more of his person involved and is less objective than his prior work (which is also outstanding). It is not as sociologically in depth (i.e. does not spend as much time detailing the buildings, its occupants and/or its history) but gives more personal narrative and insight.

It's a unique perspective and an amazing collection of photographs of buildings and landmarks that once were, no longer are or will soon cease to be.

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Summary: Pictorial essay on the death of America's industrial cities
Review: Vergara is certainly not like your typical civic booster who is touting the gentrification of former slums and the real estate boom that has overrun most US cities in the past two decades. Vergara doesn't directly argue that yuppies and Gen X-ers are good for today's cities. From reading this book, I am assuming that he doesn't like them too much. He likes grimy, but stable, industrial America that earlier generations knew.

However, Vergara is not an urban planner or a civic leader (although I'd like to see him try his hand at each). Vergara's skill is chronicling through pictures the wholesale abandonment of America's great cities. In his introduction, the author realizes that in many cities with a shrunken tax base, it is simply too expensive to rehabilitate architecturally-significant structures, so landlords (usually with the city's blessing), juts demolish or abandon the property. For each renovated brownstone downtown, I'm sure that the author can document a dozen abandoned rowhouses or factories on the "wrong side" of the town.

Call me insensitive, but I was most acutely drawn to Vergara's treatment of abandoned or near-abandoned buildings that were once important to America: the Firemen's Insurance Building in downtown Newark and the Michigan Central RR terminal in Detroit (rather than his examination of the residents of the ghetto as was evidenced in "The New American Ghetto"). The photo of the modern people mover in Detroit gliding by boarded-up buildings says a lot about urban mismanagement and is hauntingly fully of despair. If the "can do" spirit of modern American technology can't save Detroit, what can?

What I found quite unique was that Vergara proposes leaving these buildings to rot, like was done in Rome and Greece. Visitors taken through these ruins would be told that an empty shell of a building once housed an insurance company, a vaudeville theater, or some wealthy merchant and his family. However, as a public employee who has to deal with these structures for a living, there are some health and safety issues that I feel the author seems to forget (abandoned buildings tend to attract junkies, rats and disease and worse, fall down on people after a while). Maybe he is strictly speaking as an artist, but his ideas are very intriguing.

Vergara is a great photographer who thrives in urban areas. I've worked and/or visited many cities in this book, and what I like best about "American Ruins" is how he documents the death of the building over a five or ten-year period, mentioning what the building held in its heyday.

"American Ruins" is a great antidote to those who indiscriminately work to "improve" cities, either through gentrification or through ugly aesthetic improvements to historical buildings (brickface comes to mind). It's a depressing book, but it stirs the mind and challenges the soul.

As I mentioned, this book is a natural progression from his earlier book, "The New American Ghetto," and "American Ruins" complements his work as a photographer and social critic. I've loved all of his stuff eagerly await more books by this guy every time they are released.

If you liked this book, you would also like "A Town Without Steel: Envisioning Homestead," by Judith Schachter Modell & Charlee Brodsky; "Homestead: The Glory and Tragedy of an American Steel Town," by William Serrin; and "The Destruction of Penn Station," by Peter & Barbara Moore. They all chronicle how this nation has abandoned its industrial cities for a less connected, less public, less community-minded, less responsible, less reliable and more uncertain future.

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Summary: A photographic essay of abandoned urban buildings
Review: Vergara's photographic essay takes the unusual approach of studying abandoned buildings in Detroit, Gary, Harlem, South Bronx, Newark, and Philadelphia/Camden. Detroit is the most interesting of all, where there are so many abandoned skyscrapers that Vergara suggests they be converted into a sort of museum-of-urban-ruins. He has a point, since Detroit has many buildings that are too expensive to rehabilitate and too expensive to tear down. Understandably, this is not how Detroit's community leaders envision gaining fame for their downtown.

If one were to find fault, it would be that too many buildings are covered in too shallow a manner. Some of these abandoned Detroit buildings are fascinating, and it's a shame Vergara gives so little detail about them. Many pages are devoted to trivial, minor buildings, and there are photos showing such things as rotting dog carcasses in the street, which are interesting in their own right but not directly relevant to the title.

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Summary: Places of Disaffection
Review: Within Camillo's book his idea of the "Smithsonian of Decline" is most peircing for me, especially the preservationist part of me. Terms such as authenticity, integrity and significance are frequently tossed around the preservation profession. These concepts are the foundation of 'why' we preserve. Nonetheless, they are shadowy terms that elude us. We believe that patinas and well-worn architecture are more authentic then saran-wrapped structures. we believe that not only use, but uses of a building endow the structure with significance and meaning. Changes upon the structure adds layers of significance. the 'aged' look becomes an authentic look.

Vergara's "Smithsonian of Decline" begs us to allow the building to speak its whole story from start to finish - from the architects drawing to the vacuous halls of uselessness. Now what could be more authentic? Authenticity manifests itself fully only when nobody is looking. Patinas are authentic, but as preservationists where do we stop? Rust, rot and peeling paint are patinas. Our idea of significnace - as we have discovered - changes as each generation looks back upon the past. Vergara's "Smithsonian of Decline" emphatically suggests that graffiti as well as changes wrought by ungainly uses are part of the story. Where do we draw the line? In many ways we restore buildings to a condition that never was. Rust on the car, broken windows, and peeling paint illustrate the past more fully than a shiny restored building. Graffiti, weeds, plastered on signs and T-111 plywood underneath 70's style Mansard storefronts are part of the authenticity - the change. The "American Ruins" emphatically and unconditionally states that DETERIORATION always has been and always will be oozing through the cracks of our world. Deterioration is the tangible evidence of time.

Moreso Vergara's book touches a deeper core. Ruins are cracks in the temporal illusion of the physical world. They are rough reminders that deterioration is the true reminder of permanence... For IT IS PERMANENT. I believe that part three of Burnt Norton of T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets describes my experience reading the American Ruins: Here is a place of disaffection Time before and time after In a dim light: neither daylight Investing form with lucid stillness Turning shadow into transient beauty With slow rotation suggesting permanence Nor darkness to purify the soul Emptying the sensual with deprivation Cleansing affection from the temporal Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker Over the strained time-ridden faces Distraction from distraction by distraction Filled with fancies and empty of meaning...

It is a book pointing towards new directions not only in urban scholarship, but also in social understanding. Deterioration manifest in "Places of Disaffection" in which we are drawn towards only to begin an altogether nonwordly journey towards freedom