THE AESTHETICS OF RUINS, by Robert Ginsberg. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi Press, 2004, xx+ 538 pp., $144.00 cloth.


The recent resurgence in the trend toward architectural restoration has meant that the subject of ruins has undergone something of a revival. Against the vaguely postmodern inclination to render the past kitsch, the term heritage has had the effect of conferring value upon place. If the antihistoric rhetoric of modernity (and to some extent postmodernity) has lost favor, then there is no smaller danger than that buildings are restored merely by dint of their age despite their aesthetic attributes. What is at stake in this restorative trend is the loss of a ruin's original vitality, thereby reducing the artifact to an artifice.