Bleak Houses: Disappointment and Failure in Architecture - Hardcover

Brittain-Catlin, Timothy J.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0262026694 ISBN 13: 9780262026697

Publisher: The MIT Press, 2014

Synopsis

Why some architects fail to realize their ideal buildings, and what architecture critics can learn from novelists.

The usual history of architecture is a grand narrative of soaring monuments and heroic makers. But it is also a false narrative in many ways, rarely acknowledging the personal failures and disappointments of architects. In Bleak Houses, Timothy Brittain-Catlin investigates the underside of architecture, the stories of losers and unfulfillment often ignored by an architectural criticism that values novelty, fame, and virility over fallibility and rejection.

As architectural criticism promotes increasingly narrow values, dismissing certain styles wholesale and subjecting buildings to a Victorian litmus test of “real” versus “fake,” Brittain-Catlin explains the effect this superficial criticality has had not only on architectural discourse but on the quality of buildings. The fact that most buildings receive no critical scrutiny at all has resulted in vast stretches of ugly modern housing and a pervasive public illiteracy about architecture.

About this title

About the Author

Timothy Brittain-Catlin is a Reader at Kent School of Architecture, University of Kent. His writing has appeared in The World of Interiors, Architectural Review, and many other publications.

Review

Bleak Houses is a unique guide through architecture's own disconsolate circles of hell, from the hopelessness of revivalism to the curse of the mutilating extension. At once comic and bitter, wry and lachrymose, Brittain-Catlin's Virgil inducts the reader in architecture's vast lacunae of the mediocre, the disappointed and the sad. In speaking to and for the many buildings for which there is no discourse because they merit none, he skillfully reveals how failure can be a whole lot more illuminating than success. This book will make a lot of architects, myself included, feel very uncomfortable indeed.

―Francesca Hughes

At least half the architects mentioned in this catalog of failure are names you've never heard of. Remarkably, Timothy Brittain-Catlin turns the story of these people he calls losers into one of the most compelling books about architecture I've read in a long time.

―Robert Harbison, author of Eccentric Spaces

Timothy Brittain-Catlin's Bleak Houses is unique for being the first history of architects who, by conventional standards, have been considered losers or failures. By telling the story of those who just fell outside the canon, or outside the circle of fame traced by a triumphalist history, Brittain-Catlin maps out an alternative architectural history without teleological narratives about style, change, and influence and thus offers a quieter and more modest way of looking at buildings that can relate much more closely to our own experiences. Witty and captivating, with an interesting touch of melancholy, it makes you think and see the world differently.

―Martin Bressani, McGill University

Edition details

• Publisher: The MIT Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0262026694
• ISBN 13: 9780262026697
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 182