Conclusion

Abstract

The conclusion of Empire of Ruins recalls the book’s examination of ruin photography as it relates to modernity—the traumas of war and climate change. But it places that narrative within a larger context by relating this theory of American ruins to a historical conjunction between ruins and revolution that has been visible in European history for centuries. Most notably, it is visible in Hubert Robert, who painted ruins during the French Revolution, and in Joseph Gandy, who depicted John Soane’s Bank of England as a future ruin, emerging from the financial crisis of the 1820s. Thomas Jefferson, during the American Revolution, had the same fear of future ruin that Thomas Cole had in his epic series, The Course of Empire, painted in the 1830s. And in the revolutionary moment of the Great Depression, Stephen Vincent Benét imagined—in a classic work of speculative fiction—a future world in which the ruins of the present world would be discovered. That same trope, recalling Doré’s New Zealander, is used by contemporary artist Ellen Harvey in her satiric sculptural installation, The Alien’s Guide to the Ruins of Washington, D.C. The book ends with a reflection on J. B. Jackson’s famous argument for the necessity of ruins and whether our present trajectory will allow us to begin again.