Built, the unbuilt and the unbuildable: in pursuit of architectural meaning

by Robert Harbison

The Pristine, ruined, ephemeral, and even notional are the subject of Robert Harbison's highly original and admittedly romantic contribution to the literature of architecture. His fresh perceptions open this practical art to new interpretations a he explores the means by which buildings --real-or imagined--evade or surpass functional necessities while some times satisfying them.

Genres: Architecture, Nonfiction, Art, Reference

192 pages, Hardcover

First published April 22, 1991

About the author

Robert Harbison taught architectural history for more than 30 years, mainly at the Architectural Association and London Metropolitan University. He became a legendary figure for generations of students and his books earned him an international reputation as a historian and critic. Born in Baltimore, Bob first studied English literature and completed his doctoral thesis on the 19th century English industrial novel at Cornell University in 1969. After moving to London in 1974 he published his first architecture book, Eccentric Spaces, which applied a poetic sensibility to topics as diverse as gardens, maps, machines and ideal cities. It was Bernard Tschumi who, having read the book, invited Bob to lecture at the AA and thereby launched his teaching career.

Eccentric Spaces has become a classic but more architecture books followed, including Ruins and Fragments, Reflections on Baroque and The Built, the Unbuilt and the Unbuildable. Bob’s early books benefited from the fact that his wife Esther was an editor. Thirteen Ways, first published in 1997, is typically unconventional. It borrows its title from a Wallace Stevens poem but refuses the obvious implication, consisting of only ten chapters. Bob was a voracious reader and his learning was profound but it was always the direct encounter with works of art and architecture that ignited his passion. He very rarely wrote about buildings he had not seen. His 2009 book Travels in the History of Architecture is in one sense a traditional ‘survey’ with conventional chapter headings: Roman, Byzantine, Romanesque, Gothic, and so on. But it is also, as its title suggests, a travelogue, the written record of a purposeful exploration of the world’s architecture over several decades.

Reviews

[d · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Uselessness is the most sublime of all human constructs, and art fulfills itself in floating miles above every desperate human involvement."


I did not love this as much as I thought I would. I enjoy theory, history, and the more abstract properties of architecture; unfortunately this leaned too far into the trap of overly esoteric, lost-in-jargony archispeak, and navel-gazing lens of Western architecture theory. This was less a proposition of ideas and more of a criticism of specific examples of typologies chosen, which I did not expect but appreciated nonetheless. I liked the preface best as I felt that it had original ideas and sharp criticism. I also liked the Monuments chapter a lot. The Gardens, Ideal Cities, and Paintings chapters got really lost in themselves and I was struggling to find a solid synthesis at the end of each. Either the text is too dense or I'm stupid; either way, I did not find value in it. The paintings chapter also get really subjective without substance the way art criticism usually is (I do not like the fine arts world, evidently). Overall though I really appreciated the writing when it got sharp and Harbinson had some fantastic and astute lines in here. As always, I do not regret reading this for I am grateful to have learned from it.

Quotes, lines, and phrases I liked:


"The belief that the edges of a field are the best guide to a centre."

"Naiveté will occasionally stumble on truths hidden from more expert eyes"

The hubris of gardens

The question of ruin

The most sublime landscapes - mountain ranges - are worlds in slow disintegration.

Moves towards heartless clarity

Nature and art chase each other towards the same decay

Authoritarian imposition or oceanic wholeness

A house of worship like a boudoir

Halycon longings

Calculated naturalness

The sacrament of the circle

Though both are largely freed from function, monuments and gardens represent opposite ends of the whole range of architecture. Monuments are more or less monstrous exaggerations of the requirement that architecture be permanent, and gardens are the furthest reach of man’s constructive energies evading this necessity.

learn truth or falsehood of society through its monuments

Snarky funny commentary on Lutyens’ Cenotaph: the casket in its strained aspiring had created an elongated version of its own self

On death structures: vividest graphs of death always look like theyre going to crush us

As these buildings present columns in an ideal crowd, military cemeteries realize an ideal form of the cemetery in which the dead are really a crowd all killed at the same time in the same way.

Monte Grappa memorial: giant hill made by collecting nullities, large presence of vivid bsences

MVDR’s Communist monument as multilevel structure to give opportunity for communism to spread through speakers, so effective it was dismantled a mere 7 yrs later

Richard Long’s A Thousand Stones Added to the Foothpath Cairn -> Adrienne Rich’s cairn of intentions

Opinions on Christo being a hoax: so much time and manpower invested to illustrate that time is fleeting, sort of anti-monument

In reference to building w concrete: hypothesis-grey

Benjamin Franklin’s house by venturi: acknowledging its existence even when it no longer does

Prisoner-nuns

It is again piety which defaces its object

One can’t always cordon off the aesthetic component of one’s response

On monumental statues: But the point is to survive in bronze, not to be understood or appreciated, Colleoni would reply

On statue of liberty’s metaphor: moored in ocean with her back towards those displaced as of yet, as she is facing the land. She is not for the displaced.

We must suffer our monuments, which will mean more if they are inconvenient and engage thus with the rest of life rather than standing apart from it.

On postcards: lame boasts of which the city is the object

On mt rushmore: Planting the flag of civilization in another spot where it does not really need to be

On the washington triangle reflecting america’s characte: Strength, blank stupidity or moniomaniacal obsession

On the eiffel tower: how does it embody paris? “Like a mountain it is a symbol just because it is there”

Monuments as useless architectural elements: columns that hold nothing, arches that arent entrances to anything

Dantean nature of the Vietnam memorial

On castle drogo: an imaginary past not a true future

Pure pomp without real weight

Astonishing scale, devilish intricacy, and final simple-mindedness in this stage of human self-outwitting

The best practical excuse for such perfection was defence or fortification

On ideal cities: life indistinguishable from life pure and simple, not ideal

CHAPTER ON FORTIFICATION, IDEAL CITIES

On fortification: threat has converted the simple idea of entry into a complex one, full of hesitations and second thoughts

Tresham’s Triangular Lodge

Dead sea fruit

potemkin village

poitou’s failure

The core is already symbolic and a depiction of infinitude

On a great half-circle of emyy space along whose edges all the town’s buildings take up their places. It is the emptiness of sublime thoughts or sublime vacancy of mind.

The hoopmaker’s house by Ledoux

The house of sexual instruction/the temple of love

On shakers: life is an unending prayer of everything in its place, not occassional flurries of devotion to order

Intelligent artlessness

Gardens conceal their bounds

ON RUINS

On ruins: We affirm our belief in decadence, our half-voluntary imprisonment in it

Most prized forms of freedom require a certain insulation from reality

on the best stores: And so the consumer is subliminally assured that death can be held at bay while he makes another purchase. Why not play the game, it says to him, since that is all it is? An entirely secular view of last realities suits the tourist whose foreign lands are merchandise

Ruination made of up an infinitude of tiny gradations

One can transcend the human, simply by following art over the edge into dissolution.

Maybe the name for alterations is the clean opposite of ruin. How can one sit down and mope, contemplating the grandeur of one’s vanished past, beside or propped against what isn’t there?

on richard rogers skyscrapers: soulless, robotized super-modernity

Clovio’s adoration of the sheperds: limitations of a page, suggesting architectural framework beneath the surface of the paper

Adam Elsheimer’s Minerva

El Greco’s gethsemane

CHAPTER ON UNBUILT ARCHITECTURE

only art that deals with human scale

A metamorphic sense of the life in forms, or an idiosyncratic idea of history which usually arrives stillborn when it travels from his sketches to his buildings

Excrescences not sane wholes

Mendelsohn’s einstein tower: how laborious and costly it was to obtain such glyphs of spontaneity, homage to instability of matter and convertability to energy

Words: heraldic, sylvan