Beautiful Ruins

Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter

I read a lot of Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter while in Italy — and even had it in my backpack during our day in Cinque Terre, where a lot of the novel takes place. (Why I didn’t pull it out and take some cool meta pic with the book in the foreground is beyond me…) I think a lot about buildings and structures that endure — maybe especially when they’re perched on a tenuous-looking precipice? — and I love ruminating on the repurposing of spaces. Case in point: Giunti Odeon, a former Renaissance palace in Florence that now houses a café/bookstore/cinema.

“Built to last” doesn’t necessarily mean that things don’t change. That’s why there are so many simplistic posts about design trends. This is in, this is out…who can keep up?! (IMO, House Beautiful is the worst click-baity offender. But also: Maybe just do your own thing and not follow flimsy trends?) There’s a difference between total transformation and gradual nuance, between changing a style completely and letting a style morph into something slightly askew from the original. People finding second lives for spaces and objects hits a sweet spot for me, which is why I was drawn to this sneakily inconspicuous line in Beautiful Ruins in reference to a designer: “His general concept is that every design form has an innate maturity alongside its youthful nature, that too often we cast aside the more interesting forms just when they’re starting to grow into this older, more interesting second nature. Two old hockey sticks—who cares. But hockey sticks made into a chair? Now, that’s something.”

Cue a shelter magazine trying to be clever with this headline: Designing a Life. But it’s a legitimate sentiment that’s good to ponder. I was taken aback by how swept away (but not off a cliff into the sea) I became with this novel, which employs time-shifting, communication bumbles/difficulties, and the Hollywood lore of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton to awesome effect. We can find additional purposes for the plume-like fragments that make up our life, or we can lock in to never changing and/or blindly following nonsensical transformation like stock characters found on the screen. Sì?


originally published on instagram

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