Rose Macaulay’s “Pleasure of Ruins”

In Chaper VII of ‘Pleasure of Ruins’, A Note on New Ruins (London:Thames and Hudson, 1953), Macaulay talks about stairs in newly ruined terrace houses, bombed during WWII:

“…the stairway climbs up and up, undaunted, to the roofless summit where it meets the sky…”

Her description of previously inhabited, intimate, personal spaces now laid bare, stairs leading up to no-where, brought to mind the ruinous staircase of Mousa Broch. Here, the staircase ascended to an unknown space beyond, with an unclear purpose or direction. Once traversed by humans, its purpose now seems to belong to another time. At Scalloway Castle also (a few posts back), some of the stairways were left direction-less, leading nowhere, ending literally mid-air. Here the sense of upward-reaching of the staircase and the structure as a whole, which Simmels describes as embodying the human spirit, is also left direction-less by ruination.