Ruins and Fragments: Tales of Loss and Rediscovery - Hardcover

Harbison, Robert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1780234473 ISBN 13: 9781780234472

Publisher: Reaktion Books, 2015

Synopsis

What is it about ruins that are so alluring, so puzzling, that they can hold some of us in endless wonder over the half-erased story they tell? In this elegant book, Robert Harbison explores the captivating hold these remains and broken pieces—from architecture, art, and literature—have on us. Why are we, he asks, so suspicious of things that are too smooth, too continuous? What makes us feel, when we look upon a fragment, that its very incompletion has a kind of meaning in itself? Is it that our experience on earth is inherently discontinuous, or that we are simply unable to believe in anything whole?
           
Harbison guides us through ruins and fragments, both ancient and modern, visual and textual, showing us how they are crucial to understanding our current mindset and how we arrived here. First looking at ancient fragments, he examines the ways we have recovered, restored, and exhibited them as artworks. Then he moves on to modernist architecture and the ways that it seeks a fragmentary form, examining modern projects that have been designed into existing ruins, such as the Castelvecchio in Verona, Italy and the reconstruction of the Neues Museum in Berlin. From there he explores literature and the works of T. S. Eliot, Montaigne, Coleridge, Joyce, and Sterne, and how they have used fragments as the foundation for creating new work. Likewise he examines the visual arts, from Schwitters’ collages to Ruskin’s drawings, as well as cinematic works from Sergei Eisenstein to Julien Temple, never shying from more deliberate creators of ruin, from Gordon Matta-Clark to countless graffiti artists.
           
From ancient to modern times and across every imaginable form of art, Harbison takes a poetic look at how ruins have offered us a way of understanding history and how they have enabled us to create the new. 

About this title

About the Author:

Robert Harbison is former professor of architecture at London Metropolitan University. He is the author of many books, including Reflections on Baroque, Travels in the History of Architecture, and Ruins and Fragments.
 

Review:

“Ruins and Fragments is a wonderfully alluring poem of absence: it weaves together such diverse strands as the language of Finnigan’s Wake, the montage of Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, the aggressions of analytical Cubism and the reconstruction of the Warsaw Market Square into an enticing panorama of our perplexing times.”

(Joseph Rykwert, author of The Judicious Eye, The Seduction of Place and The Idea of a Town)

“A marvelous story-teller and shorer of fragments, Robert Harbison surveys the destiny of ruins from Oxyrynchus to the films of Ozu, to Phimai and beyond. Yet his underlying concern remains the aftermath of ‘war, cruelty, suffering’—the perpetual assault of human folly upon human constructions—and the history of our often poorly conceived attempts to rebuild. Harbison has composed a spell-binding meditation on the inevitability of fragmentation and dispersal.”

(Susan Stewart, Avalon Foundation University Professor of the Humanities and Director, Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts)

About this edition

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1780234473
• ISBN 13: 9781780234472
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208