...we contemplate the ravages of time, and in our imagination we scatter the rubble of the very buildings in which we live over the ground; in that moment solitude and silence prevail around us, we are the sole survivors of an entire nation that is no more. Such is the first tenet of the poetics of ruins.—Denis Diderot, “The Salon of 1767.  Historically, depictions of architectural ruins follow a tradition that fastens the viewer's time and place to the landscape of a bygone era. This linkage proposes an unbroken lineage between where we stand today and the time in which our predecessors constructed their soaring arcades and classical epistyles. Precarity is fundamental to ruin imagery and often achieved through a combination of crumbling balustrades against sublime skies, perhaps the winged Goddess Futura, harbinger of the changing winds of fate and fortune, or the unfortunate Icarus falling to his death. The combination of nature's glory with the strident ways of the gods and the frailty of human construction is a pointed reminder of our own impermanence.