Faculty members Sirota, Roddier and Herscher present at Association of American Geographers on representation of ruins 

Architecture Assistant Profesor Anya Sirota and Associate Professors Andrew Herscher and Mireille Roddier delivered papers at the session “1539 Ruinations: Violence, Snafus, Porn” at the Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting on February 24, 2012, in New York, New York. The papers reflected upon the relationship between the representation of ruins and the violence they symbolize or deny. Sirota’s paper, “Aestheticized Ruins, Scenographic Abstractions, and Other Deployable Cultural Infrastructures,” discussed how decay assumes a dialectical function, one that frustrates the prominence of form, continuity and monumentality as it tangibly registers architecture’s authoritative failures. Herscher’s paper, “The Society of the Counter-Spectacle: On the Ruins of Detroit,” posed Detroit’s ruins as counter-spectacles; capital extracted to the point where it becomes image. In her paper “Sculpture in the Dilapidated Field: Constructed Images of Urban Collapse,” Roddier examines the popularization of ruin imagery through the lens of both local and international representations of Detroit, in order to contextualize current forms of architectural and artistic engagement with its remains.

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