The Built, the Unbuilt, and the Unbuildable: In Pursuit of Architectural Meaning

Harbison, Robert

ISBN 10: 0262082047 / ISBN 13: 9780262082044

Published by MIT Press, 1991

About this Item

Light corner wear, with a few tiny spots to top edge and front endpaper. Otherwise, very clean and sound. 192 pgs. The MIT Press. Cambridge, Ma. 1991. NEW clear mylar sleeve covers jacket. Seller Inventory # 4940built

Bibliographic Details

Title: The Built, the Unbuilt, and the Unbuildable:...

Publisher: MIT Press

Publication Date: 1991

Binding: Hardcover

Condition: Very Good

Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good

Edition: 1st Edition

About this title

Synopsis:

The pristine, the ruined, the ephemeral, and even the 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 as he explores the means by which buildings, real or imagined, evade or surpass functional necessities while sometimes satisfying them.

What fascinates Harbison in these discussions are the paradoxes and ironies of function that give rise to meaning, to a psychological impact that may or may not have been intended. He chooses examples from an architectural borderland—of gardens, monuments, ideal cities and fortification, ruins, paintings, and unbuildable buildings—where use and symbolism overlap; he examines the exceptions at the edges of a field that will illuminate its center.

Harbison's pursuit of man's efforts to "fashion art from nonhuman life" begins with a consideration of gardens and the organic architecture of the English Arts and Crafts movement and of Gaudi, then turns to monuments (Claes Oldenburg, Christo, the Vietnam Memorial) that are "either the nearest or the furthest thing from gardens." Harbison's discussion of fortification and urban planning leads to metaphorical themes (fort-features in churches or prisons or Fascist municipal buildings) and mocked-up worlds (Williamsburg, Disneyland), and to the subject of fictional space as expressed in ruins, in painting, in the unbuildable, and finally in the inconceivable as revealed in Kafka's sketches.

About the Author:

Robert Harbison has lectured widely on architecture at the Museum of Modem Art in New York, the University of Toronto, Stanford University, Cornell University, and the Architectural Association, London. His previous books include Eccentric Spaces, Deliberate Regression, and Pharaoh's Dream.