Ruin

Ruin (pronounced roo-in)

(1) The remains of a building, city etc that has been destroyed or that is in disrepair or a state of decay.

(2) A destroyed or decayed building, town, etc.

(3) A fallen, wrecked, or decayed condition; the downfall, decay, or destruction of anything.

(4) The complete loss of health, means, position, hope, or the like.

(5) Some substance or other thing that causes a downfall or destruction; blight.

(6) The downfall of a person; undoing.

(7) A person as the wreck of his or her former self; ravaged individual.

(8) The act of causing destruction or a downfall.

(9) To reduce to ruin; devastate; to bring (a person, company etc) to financial ruin; bankrupt; to damage, spoil, or injure (a thing) irretrievably.

(10) To induce (a woman) to surrender her virginity; deflower; loss of virginity by a woman outside marriage (mostly archaic).

(11) To fall into ruins; fall to pieces; to come to ruin.

1325–1375: From the Middle English noun rueyne & ruyen, from the Middle French ruwine, from the Latin ruīna (headlong rush, fall, collapse, falling down), the construct being ruere (violently to fall) + -īna (feminine singular of suffix –īnus).  The Middle English verb was ruyn & ruine, from the Middle French ruyner & ruiner or directly from the Medieval Latin ruīnāre, again a derivative of the Latin ruīna.  In the late Old English, rueyne meant "act of giving way and falling down" (a sense which didn't descend into the Middle English), again from the Latin ruina, source also of the Old French ruine (a collapse), the Spanish ruina and the Italian rovina which is a derivative of ruere (to rush, fall violently, collapse), from the primitive Indo-European reue- (to smash, knock down, tear out, dig up).  The sense of "descent from a state of prosperity, degradation, downfall or decay of a person or society" dates from the late fourteenth century while the general meaning "violent or complete destruction" (of anything) and "a profound change so as to unfit a thing for use" (of one's principles, one's goods etc) was first noted by the 1670s, something of an extension of the sense of "that which causes destruction or downfall", from the early fifteenth century.  The special meaning "dishonor of a woman" (essentially the same as "a fallen woman") dates from the 1620s.  Ruins in the sense of "remains of a decayed building or town" was from the mid-fifteenth century; the same sense was in the Latin plural noun.

The verb ruin emerged in the 1580s, first in the military sense of "reduce (a place) to ruin," transitive, from the noun ruin or the fourteenth century French ruiner and from the 1610s it came to mean also "inflict disaster upon" (someone) which extended by the 1650s to mean "bring to ruin, damage essentially and irreparably".  The intransitive sense of "fall into ruin" dates from circa 1600 but is probably now obsolete except for poetic use or as a literary device.  The still well-known financial sense of "reduce to poverty, wreck the finances of" was first noted in the 1650s.  The late fourteenth century adjective ruinous (going to ruin, falling to ruin) was from the Old French ruinos (which endures in Modern French as ruineux) and directly from the Latin ruinosus (tumbling down, going to ruin) from ruina.  The meaning "causing ruin, tending to bring ruin" was from the mid-fifteenth century and by 1817 it was understood almost exclusively to mean "excessively expensive", hence the still popular phrase "ruinously expensive".

The noun ruination is interesting.  It meant in the 1660s the "act of bringing to ruin, state of being brought to ruin" amd was the noun of action or state from the now rare or obsolete verb ruinate (to go to ruin) which had emerged in the 1540s from the Medieval Latin ruinatus, past participle of ruinare, again from the Classical Latin ruina.  Unlike flirtation, floatation, & botheration, ruination was not a hybrid derivative, being regularly formed from ruinate, the technical point being etymologists think it has the effect of a slangy emphatic lengthening of the noun ruin and that only because the parent verb ruinate (in common use 1550-1700) is no longer heard.  For that reason Henry Fowler (1858-1933) in his authoritative Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926) suggested "ruination is better avoided except in facetious contexts".

As a noun, ruin means the remains of a destroyed or decayed place, especially a half-standing building or city.  In the latter sense, it’s used most commonly in the plural, often as “ancient ruins”.  When used as a verb, ruin usually means “to spoil or destroy” although the once use to describe “the loss of virginity by an unmarried woman” is now rare.  Related words, sometimes used a synonyms, include bankruptcy, wreckage, collapse, insolvency, wreck, extinction, demolition, destruction, wipe out, mar, impoverish, overwhelm, injure, shatter, exhaust, demolish, crush, decimate, wrack & deplete.  The synonym of ruin most often used is destruction.  Ruin and destruction both imply irrevocable and either widespread or intense damage although, the pattern of use in Modern English seems to have evolved to use destruction (on a scale large or small) to emphasize the act while ruin emphasize the consequence: the resultant state.  Through use, there’s probably also the implication that a ruin is the result of natural processes of time whereas destruction suggests a sudden violent act or event.  The ruins from Antiquity exist both in what remains from the process of decay and as they have been "restored", usually to reflect the expectations of tourists.  For those who like the idea of what the original resembled, there's the odd replica. 

Die Ruinenwerttheorie: Albert Speer and the theory of ruin value.

Ruin value is a concept from architectural theory.  It suggests the design of representational architecture should be such that when eventually the structures crumble or collapse, what remains should be aesthetically impressive ruins which will long endure without any need of maintenance.  The idea was promoted by Hitler’s (1889-1945; German head of government 1933-1945 & head of state 1934-1945) architect, Albert Speer (1905–1981; Nazi court architect 1934-1942; Nazi minister of armaments and war production 1942-1945), who first discussed it while planning for the 1936 Summer Olympics and subsequently published a paper as Die Ruinenwerttheorie (The Theory of Ruin Value).  Underling the idea was not merely the stated rationale for the theory but also the assertion such structures would tend inherently to be better built and more imposing during their period of use.  The notion was supported by Hitler, who planned for such ruins to be a symbol of the greatness of his thousand-year Reich, just as the remains from antiquity were symbolic of Hellenic and Roman civilizations.

Bank of England as a ruin (1830) by draftsman and artist Joseph Gandy (1771–1843)

In his memoirs (Inside the Third Reich, 1970) Speer laid claim to the idea, saying it was an extension of German architect Gottfried Semper's (1803-1879) views on the use of "natural" materials and the avoidance of iron girders.  Speer’s post-war writings however, although invaluable, are not wholly reliable or entirely truthful, even on technical matters such as armaments and architecture.  Ruin value was an older concept and one much-discussed in nineteenth century Europe, the romantic movement in art and architecture much drawn to, if not exactly what antiquity was, then certainly a neo-classical construct of what they imagined it to be.  This fascination even sometimes assumed a built form: a "new ruined castle" was actually built in the Landgraviate of Hesse-Kassel in the eighteenth century and the motif affected the architect commissioned to design the Bank of England building.  When Sir John Sloane (1753-1837) presented the bank's governors with three oil sketches of the planned buildings one of them depicted it as new, another when weathered after a century and a third, what the ruins would look like a thousand years hence.

Architectural ruins, a vision (1798), water color on paper by Joseph Gandy

A watercolor imagining the Rotunda at the Bank of England (designed by Soane and completed in 1798), drawn in the year of its completion but showing the structure in the style of a Roman ruin.  The small figures of men with pickaxes working around a fire amidst the ruins recall the calciatori of Rome, who pillaged marble from its ancient sites to be burned into lime. This atmospheric watercolor recalls Piranesi's views of ruin with its dramatic point of view, fallen fragments in the foreground.  This drawing was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1832, thirty-four years after it was executed, at the time of Soane’s retirement as architect to the Bank, under the romantic title of Architectural Ruins–A Vision (RA 1832, number 992) and accompanied by lines from Prospero's speech (Act IV, scene 1) in Shakespeare's The Tempest:

The cloud-capt towers, the gorgeous palaces,

the solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit shall dissolve.

The ruin that never was.  A model of Speer's Volkshalle (people’s hall), centrepiece of Germania, the new capital of the Reich to be built over Berlin.

Speer based his design on a sketch made by Hitler himself in 1925, inspired by the Pantheon in Rome which had been created for an empire that lasted centuries.  Clever use of steel and lightweight concrete behind stone cladding permitted the scale of the structure.  The Volkshalle would have risen some 950 feet (290m), the oculus in the centre of the dome 150 feet (46 metres) in diameter, so big that Michelangelo’s dome of St Peter’s could have been lowered through it.  The volume of the building was such that it would have its own micro-climate and weather patterns; clouds would have formed, and rain drops falling on the masses below.   The Volkshalle symbolized an empire planned to endure a thousand years but the Third Reich fell after barely a dozen years and neither Volkshalle nor Germania were built and at war's end, surrounding the proposed site, Berlin lay in ruins.