What has led the building upwards is human will; what gives it its present appearance is the brute, downward-dragging, corroding, crumbling power of nature. Still, so long as we can speak of a ruin at all and not a mere heap of stones, this power does not sink the work of man into the formlessness of mere matter. There rises a new form which, from the standpoint of nature is entirely meaningful, comprehensible, differentiated. Nature has transformed the work of art into material for her own expression, as she had previously served as material for art. -Georg Simmel, The Ruin
As a designer, there is a special relationship between nature and the ruin that we become envious of. Nature is both aggressive and passive in the ruins existence. Nature crafts the ruin, through time, the elements, and the destructive nature of humans themselves (i.e., war). While winds may crumble exposed walls, the wind also buries walls into the depths of the earth; A ruin is a product of loss and addition. The ruin persists both in spite of and thanks to nature.
Along Chaco Canyon the lines between ruins and the landscape become blurred. There are several exposed sites and so many so, that they become as common place as sage brush. Mounds in the distance are the ruins waiting to be discovered. At Chaco Canyon, the exposed ruins are threatened and shaped by eroding winds and the extreme diurnal temperatures of the desert climate. However the arid climate has also preserved much of the ruins, including the remaining fragments of timber that formed the ceiling and floor structures. It seems that nature does a better job of preserving ruins than mankind. The National Parks system's current strategy to preserve the Chacoan ruins is to leave sites unexcavated. Any new explorations of the remains are primarily conducted through geophysical surveys that reveals structures underground through radar, without disturbing the sites physically. In this way, nature becomes the protector of the ruin rather than the destroyer.
My independent study has turned into exploring this duality of ruin: loss and addition; decay and persistence. The product is a series of photographic manipulations including aggregation, addition, and subtraction. The full series can be found here, but below is an early investigation of multiplication.
Ruin Study #3, Chaco Canyon, NM