Travels in the History of Architecture

290 Pages·2009·5.86 MB·English

by  Robert Harbison

Tr avels in the History of
Architect ur e
ROBERT HARBISON

travels in the history of architecture
by the same author
Eccentric Spaces
Deliberate Regression
Pharaoh’s Dream
The Italian Garden
The Built, the Unbuilt and the Unbuildable
The Shell Guide to English Parish Churches
Thirteen Ways
Reflections on Baroque
Tr avels in the History of
Architecture
ROBERT HARBISON
reaktion books
For Kelly and Livia
Published by Reaktion Books Ltd
33 Great Sutton Street
London ec1v 0dx, uk
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk
First published 2009
Copyright © Robert Harbison 2009
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
Printed and bound in Great Britain
by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Harbison, Robert
Travels in the history of architecture
1. Architecture –History
I. Title
720.9
isbn: 978 1 86189 435 9
Contents
Preface 7
1 Egyptian 13
2 Greek 34
3 Roman 59
4 Byzantine 80
5 Romanesque 95
6 Gothic 112
7 Renaissance 135
8 Mannerism 159
9 Baroque 173
10 Historicism 199
11 Modernism I: Functionalism 217
12 Modernism II: Expressionism, Constructivism
and Deconstruction 236
Afterword 264
Further Reading 269
Acknowledgements 277
Photo Acknowledgements 279
Index 281

Preface
At times I have wanted to write a history with none of the expected examples
in it, containing in fact nothing recognizable at all, but feared this might
lead to something like a garden I remember from childhood, whose maker
allowed into it only plants that everyone else regarded as weeds. This
would bear the true mark of the autodidact (a title I have little right to,
but claim anyway) or the outsider who aspires to overturn every single
convention, just for the sake of the commotion it makes.
Like many others I have felt the excitement of Derrida’s destabilizing
attacks on basic intellectual certainties, but soon realized that I couldn’t
live day in and day out in the world he conjures up, and was then shocked
to find this risky heresy catching on and becoming an orthodoxy. There’s
an earlier destabilizing mode that won my allegiance the minute I heard
of it: New Criticism. I won’t try to give its history but just to sketch its
consequences for someone trying to write one. Essentially New Criticism
denied that history was important. In fact, this movement regarded history
or ‘background’ of any kind as pure obstruction that got between the
observer and the thing itself.
‘The thing itself’ was a poem to begin with, and New Criticism offered
a new way of encountering poetry. You had to forget everything you
knew or had heard about the work in question. To help you in this exercise
the poem’s title and the name of the author were often left off so that you
had just the words themselves, which you regarded as something like
inarticulate pebbles that rattled together in an order that didn’t yet have
a name.
Of course this deliberate strangening was an artificial procedure, but
based on the valid idea that it is the poem (or painting or building) that
matters, so that you should make the most direct contact with it that you
can, first as a physical object appealing to the senses, and only later as an
intellectual construct that depends on cultural conventions and takes its
place in a long line of such things. The method was presented as stringent
8
and rigorous, with a hint of the controlled scientific experiment, but as
interpreted by me it was highly romantic, based on the notion of the
innocent eye and the fresh vision of the child in oneself.
So the believer in this method is particularly unfit to write a history,
aspiring, as he does, to see ‘a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a
wild flower’. In this mode of vision all times are simultaneous, and all
works of art have their homes in the mind, not in everyday places or spaces.
Yet perhaps one can imagine a kind of history that never loses hold of
the sensuous presence of objects, but combines them in a connected
sequence that makes sense of historical change. To do this without loss
of immediacy maybe you need to believe in the iconic value of some forms
and not others, that is, in a kind of canon. Perhaps I simply hope to rewrite
the canon, not to topple it, perhaps only (some of the time at least) to give
new reasons for the inclusion of the same old monuments.
Of course, a reader will want to know how this retelling of the history
of Western architecture differs from all those that have preceded it. First
of all it is noticeably compact. I’ve made no attempt to be comprehensive
and have tried to avoid including sets of examples that all show the same
thing or nearly the same thing just because they occur in different places.
History here is not a flood of names and dates. True to the mystique of
the primacy of the object, the book should leave a reader with a vivid sense
of particular buildings and places. Hence the idea of ‘travels’, which start
in the experience of being there and keep the sense of distances crossed
on the ground, even in their most intense brushes with theory.
A contrary impulse also appears, congruent with the impatience that
pares the list of cases down to the absolutely essential – a search for non-
architectural artefacts that embody the essence of a period more starkly
than any building can. It sometimes seems that the author thinks he can
compose the poem of Egypt or the Romanesque, that would consist of
images of iconic force that preside like Wagnerian leitmotifs over whole
tracts of the subject, so the animal-headed god or the carpet page of a
manuscript could express instantaneously the same perspective on real-
ity that would require much digging to excavate from architecture. Some
such belief in the revelatory potential of certain specific cultural forms
goes part way to explain the intermittently oblique angle of approach in
this book. Non-architectural material like Egyptian hieroglyphics and
Renaissance allegories are used as shortcuts to get at the core of a style
more quickly, and sometimes as a demonstration that architecture is part
of something larger, sweeping it up into longer vistas.
Part of what makes architecture special and more physically liberat-
ing than other art forms is the fact that one actually visits it and wanders
in it, coming round corners to meet surprises that might not have hap-
pened in just that order if you had turned another way – or might never