Louis's project

A Suburban Ruin

A little ways off of Rollingwood Drive, there’s a building that’s been left to decay into the landscape. Right between two suburban residences is the remnant of an old stone house, falling apart and abandoned. Here is a perfect place to observe the interactions between the hills and forests of West Lake Hills and the suburbs, where the two distinct worlds come close together. It looks as if the building is melting into the ground at the same time as plants send their roots and stalks up to consume it. The floor is completely stripped away, revealing the foundation supports and the bare dirt underneath. Nearby, there’s a pool filled with dirt and garbage that serves as the centerpiece to an old patio.

The relationship between humanity and nature is not at its most beautiful here. To any average person, the building is an unsightly blemish in an otherwise orderly and relatively well-groomed neighborhood. Even when I get up close to this suburban ruin, there’s nothing that most people would call beautiful. Rusty pipes, crumbling walls, and twisted supports were what caught my eye as the theme of the place. Every now and then, a stretch of green grass or a blooming flower brought some visual flair, but it was always the beauty of nature, not that of the coexistence of nature and society. Rather, the spots that lie in between the two extremes of natural beauty and man-made organization are the spots that are the ugliest. Neither the green plants nor the order of the stone bricks can really flourish there. There’s something about this visual struggle that makes the scene quite distasteful to look at.

In stark contrast to the ruin is the surrounding suburb. Here, there’s no clash of worlds and no decay. There are only medium sized, low-profile houses that are well-maintained and that seem to be trying to stay out of the way. The border between these houses and the surrounding hills is much clearer, and is often staked out by a resolute metal fence. There’s none of the ugly, rusty, in-between area that makes up most of the ruin. Aesthetically, the neighborhood is much easier on the eye. It’s much more comforting when the world of humans is kept behind the fence where it belongs and when vines and bushes don’t start creeping up beyond their boundaries.

But really, what can we learn from the aesthetics of a place? Why does Thoreau, for example, spend the entire chapter “Sounds” describing the sights and sounds around him? What does he hope to tell us with this? Thoreau seems to say that we cannot truly learn about the nature of reality if we don’t look and observe the world around us. I agree; seeing our surroundings in a new objective light, outside of classes or books, is essential to understanding them. But perhaps more important is what the mere act of observation can tell us about ourselves. By noticing how we see things and react to them, we can explore our basic prejudices and our way of interacting with the world. In the case of this ruin, it’s important that the “in-between areas” are the ugliest. There is no harmonious coexistence of nature and man-made structure, no cooperation between the two; there is only an ugly conflict of swimming pools filled with dirt and bare dirt on the ground and rust consuming everything. Perhaps we have a hard time seeing the beauty in such a place because we do not truly believe in a peaceful coexistence between humans and what we refer to as “the natural world.” We prefer the neatly defined borders of the suburbs, with nature on one side of the fence and people on the other. Maybe if we are to learn to live with our environment rather than try to conquer it, we have to learn also to see the beauty in these in-between places of rust and dirt. And so I, who am no photographer, took a camera to the ruin and tried to take pictures of some of the eye-catching decay.

Notes:

- Any music that I’ve added to my presentation is from Woodland Sketches, composed by Edward MacDowell. MacDowell was an American romantic composer who lived only shortly after Thoreau (he was born two years before Thoreau died). His work was heavily inspired by nature. The pieces in my presentation are At an Old Trysting-Place and To a Wild Rose.

- I used a computerized voice and added various types of distortion to try to give the same atmosphere as my landscape: that of something mechanical and man-made decaying and wasting away in a more organic way.