23 Ozymandias 3.0 Afterlives of the Architectural Ruin e Inhabitability of Ruins: A Cultural History Cătălin Pavel Associate Professor, PhD habil., Ovidius University, Constanța, Romania catalin.pavel@univ-ovidius.ro Keywords: Simmel, Casa dei Crescenzi, Désert de Retz, Piranesi, Hubert Robert In the present paper I collect some material for a cultural history of the inhabited ruin, still missing in the otherwise vast scientic literature on ruins. I argue that inhabitability needs to be acknowledged as a key characteristic of ruins, and that art historical and archaeological evidence substantiates the claim that there is no actual hiatus between the non-ruined and the ruined. Whether the rationale for dwelling in the ruins is pragmatical, symbolic, aesthetic, moral, sociopolitical or philosophical, the phenomenon needs to be mapped in detail. I take my cue from Georg Simmel’s bewohnte Ruine, and complement it with Heidegger’s insights. I then discuss specic instances of inhabitable ruins from the Casa dei Crescenzi to Piranesi and Hubert Robert. Among the case studies are Giulio Romano’s Palazzo del Te, Clérisseau’s Stanza delle Rovine, and particularly François de Monville’s residential Broken column in the Désert de Retz. Ultimately, in this brief investigation I will address why and how ruins have been, since the Trecento, construed as inhabitable by trees, by people, and by other buildings. e philosophical text most often discussed by scholars of ruins has probably been Georg Simmel’s short essay from 1911, “Die Ruine.” 1 Simmel’s phenomenology of ruins, articulated around the dialectic nature vs. culture, matter vs. spirit, and past vs. present, amounts to stating that the ruin is the only possible reconciliation of nature and culture. 2 Locating ruins “between the not-yet and the no-longer,” 3 he construes them as owing from what can no longer be called cultural towards what has not already become entirely natural, and in fact stops short of dening ruins as culture returning home to nature. Such a transformation would be, to him, “tragic, but not sad,” 4 because the destruction operated by nature “is not something senselessly coming from the outside, but rather the realization of a tendency inherent in the deepest layer of existence of the destroyed.” 5 is transformative destruction continues until “the work of man appears to us entirely as a product of nature,” and in this resides the “fascination of the ruin.” 6 It can be argued that Simmel postulates a material and metaphysical continuum between building, dwelling, and falling into disrepair. is makes it all the more salient that, in one hermetic phrase, generally overlooked by commentators, Simmel briey toys with the notion of the “inhabited ruin” (die 1 Georg Simmel, “Die Ruine. Ein ästhetischer Versuch,” Philosophische Kultur. Gesammelte Essays (1919, 1 st ed. 1911), Leipzig, Alfred Kröner, 125-133. Quoted here in the translation of David Kettler, Georg Simmel, “Two Essays,” The Hudson Review 11, 3 (1958): 379-385. Note the changes in view from Simmel’s much earlier essay, “Rome.” 2 For Simmel, Nick Yablon, Untimely Ruins. An Archaeology of American Urban Modernity, 1819–1919 (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2009), 1-17 and Alain Schnapp, Une histoire universelle des ruines. Des origines aux Lumières (Paris: Le Seuil, 2020), 16-19; also B. H. Hancock and Roberta Garner, “Reflections on the ruins of Athens and Rome: Derrida and Simmel on temporality, life and death,” History of the Human Sciences 27, 4 (2014): 77-97 and Gavin Lucas, ”Modern ruins,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of the Contemporary World, eds. P. Graves-Brown, R. Harrison and A. Piccini (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 193-196. 3 Simmel, Two Essays, 382, “zwischen dem Nochnicht und dem Nichtmehr.” 4 Ibid., “tragisch – aber nicht traurig.” 5 Ibid., “die Realisierung einer in der tiefsten Existenzschicht des Zerstörten angelegten Richtung.” 6 Ibid., 381, ”Reiz der Ruine.”