During the Enlightenment ruins became aesthetic objects – objects of contemplation in the perpetual struggle with contradictory human emotions evoked by overwhelming (and potentially life-threatening) natural phenomena: the implacable and fearful mountains, destruction through storms, eruptions etc. and decay. These occurrences could no longer be satisfactorily explained away by divine agency and thus human relationships to them had to be renegotiated. Ruins, therefore, not only provided an opportunity to meditate on space but also to consider change through time, over and above their obvious role as architectural mementos mori. So it is probably not just a coincidence that, in an era when no noble garden was complete without a specially constructed ruin and scientific method was developing apace (taking time out of divine hands), Louis-Sebastien Mercier (1740–1814) wrote his pre-revolutionary, pre-science-fiction book Memoirs of the Year 2500, in which the utopian construct takes place elsewhen instead of elsewhere, amidst the ruins of Versailles:
I arrived at Versailles, and looked round for that superb palace, from whence issued the destiny of many nations. What a surprise! I could perceive nothing but ruins, gaping walls, and mutilated statues; some porticoes, half-demolished, afforded a confused idea of its ancient magnificence. As I walked over these ruins, I saw an old man sitting upon the capital of a column. Alas! I said to him, what is become of this vast palace? — ‘It is fallen.’ — How? — ‘It was crushed by its own weight. A man in his impatient pride would have here forced nature. He hastily heaped buildings upon buildings; greedy of gratifying his capricious will, he harassed his subjects; all the wealth of the nation was here swallowed up…

Here, the notion of future ruins as a setting for current political commentary (in this case with its prophetic dimension) is used for the first time in literature.

The European 19th century saw the increasingly rapid growth of the concept of national heritage and the expansion of museums which, like the British Museum, had been founded in the mid-18th century. Local ruin fragments were collected and integrated into these public collections and the colonial enterprise, with its concomitant development of more widespread access to individual travel, resulted in pieces of ruins being appropriated in foreign lands for private as well as public purposes (legally or otherwise). Simultaneously industrialisation was gathering momentum, disrupting the rural, agricultural society with its relatively strict social stratification, and slowly replacing it. During this period the impulse that developed to preserve or restore old church buildings and those (once) owned by the aristocracy might also be interpreted as an attempt to create a focus of apparent stability in a widespread social and economic state of flux, a public demonstration of ‘time-honoured’ continuity.

The 19th and 20th centuries have also seen escalating commercial exploitation and musealisation of ruins, not only in the form of visits but also in the souvenir sales of, for example, scaled-down, industrially-replicated fragments in artificial stone, which are a major component of the tourist industry world-wide, from Athens to Angkor Wat.

Though I’ve mainly been considering major architectural works here, our trip (and the one last year) has produced a number of counterparts in the private, communal and industrial sphere. The disused swimming pool, like the one we visited in Mineralni Bani, for example, is an image to be found in many of the works of J.G. Ballard. Usually—as in News from the Sun (1982); Myths of the Near Future (1982), Highrise (1975) or the partly autobiographical Empire of the Sun (1984)—he uses it in contexts where empty or partially empty pools convey abandonment, the decay of  ‘normality’, or they dramatise the process of social structures imploding.