The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories (2 page)

T
HE ARCHITECT’S
D
REAM
was dreamed by an émigré from the Old World to the New. Thomas Cole was born in Lancashire in 1801, but he spent his adult life among the crags and forests of the Hudson Valley north of New York City, where he painted pictures of an arcadia not yet buried under towers and palaces and temples. Cole could not prevent himself from thinking about the Old World he had left behind, and he knew that one day the New World would come to resemble it. His cycle of paintings titled
The Course of Empire
depicted the Hudson Valley at five different stages: in
The Savage State
,
The Arcadian or Pastoral State
, at
The Consummation of Empire
, at
The Destruction of Empire
, and in
Desolation
. In these five images, a virgin forest at dawn becomes a great city at noon. By dusk it is a broken heap of stones, whited under a watery moon.

In 1840, the architect Ithiel Town commissioned Cole to paint
The Architect’s Dream
and paid him in pattern books. Town didn’t much like the painting, but it came to be regarded as Cole’s masterpiece. Cole’s funeral eulogy extolled it among the “principal works . . . of his genius” as “an assemblage of structures, Egyptian, Gothic, Grecian, Moorish, such as might present itself to the imagination of one who had fallen asleep after reading a work on the different styles of architecture.”

Cole’s vision still haunts architects. Pick up any classic work on architecture, glance at the pictures, and you will find yourself lost in a similar panorama of “the different styles.” Crisp line drawings describe the masterworks of antiquity looking as new and fresh as the day they were born; blue skies, clean streets, and a complete absence of people lend architectural photographs the timeless quality of
The Architect’s Dream
. It’s not just the illustrations; the written history of architecture is also a litany of masterpieces, unchanging and unchanged, from the Great Pyramid of Giza to its glass descendants in Paris or Las Vegas. The great buildings of the past are described as if the last piece of scaffolding has just been taken away, the paint is still fresh on the walls, and the ribbon has not yet been cut—as if, indeed, history had never happened.

It is a timeless vision because timeless is just what we expect great architecture to be. Nearly a century ago, the Viennese architect Adolf Loos observed that architecture originates not, as one might expect, in the dwelling, but in the monument. The houses of our ancestors, which were contingent responses to their ever-shifting needs, have perished. Their tombs and temples, which were intended to endure for the eternity of death and the gods, remain, and it is they that form the canon of architectural history.

The very discourse of architecture is a discourse on perfection, a word which derives from the Latin for
finished
. The Roman theorist Vitruvius claimed that architecture was perfect when it held commodity, firmness, and delight in delicate balance. A millennium and a half later, his Renaissance interpreter Leone Battista Alberti wrote that perfect beauty is that to which nothing may be added, and from which nothing may be taken away. The modernist architect Le Corbusier described the task of his profession as “the problem of fixing standards, in order to face the problem of perfection.”

In the discourse of architecture, all buildings, in order to remain beautiful, must not change; and all buildings, in order not to change, must aspire to the funereal condition of the monument. The tomb of Christopher Wren in the crypt of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London is a simple affair for so great a man, but the inscription on the wall above the sarcophagus belies its modesty. “Si monumentum requiris, circumspice,” it reads; “If you seek a monument, look around you.” All architects hope that the buildings they have designed will memorialize their genius, and so they dare to hope that their buildings will last forever, unaltered.

B
UT
T
HE
A
RCHITECT’S
D
REAM
is just that: a dream, an illusion, a flat picture imprisoned in a frame. Imagine, for a moment, that the architect woke up from his dream, stepped out of the painting, and walked out of the museum where it is exhibited.

He might still find himself on top of a colossal column, but it wouldn’t command some monumental prospect. Instead, he would be looking into a tenement stairwell, which is just what he’d see if
he’d climbed to the summit of the surviving columns of the Temple of Augustus in Barcelona. The Gothic cathedral would not be in some dark forest but right next door, and the walls of its crypt might be made from the foundations of a shrine to Apollo, as they are in Girona. The columns of that shrine might form the cathedral porch, as they do at Syracuse; and the altar would be an upturned Roman bathtub, just as it is in the church of Santa Maria in Cosmedin in Rome. The cathedral would, like Chartres or Gloucester, have taken hundreds of years to build, and it would be a chaotic collage of different styles, overlaid with Victorian restorations of great enthusiasm and dubious accuracy. The Ionic temple, like that of Diana in Ephesus, would have been burned down by indignant Christians in the fifth century, while the Corinthian rotunda would have been turned into a fortress, just as the Pantheon was in medieval Rome. The Doric temple would have flitted away: its sculpture would be on display in London, like the Elgin marbles, and the building itself would have reappeared elsewhere, as the altar of Pergamene Zeus has been reconstructed in Berlin. The arches of the Roman aqueduct would be buried under the crowded slums of Jerusalem or Naples, its vaults now hiding places for criminals and the secret police. Only the tomb, the Great Pyramid, would have remained unaltered—marooned, monumentally useless, in the suburban sands of Giza.

The Architect’s Dream
would have become a Jazz Age Manhattan, a twenty-first-century Shanghai, an Ottoman Istanbul, a medieval Venice, a noisy, dirty entrepôt of multitudinous architectures in the process of constant change. This city would be anything but still. In the process of its perpetual and simultaneous construction and decay, buildings would appear and disappear; they would be built on top of one another, out of one another, or inside one another. They would do battle, and then they would mate and produce monstrous offspring. Not a single building would survive as its makers had intended.

And the architect, who might be excused for finding his awakening a nightmare, would realize that the real world is stranger and more dreamlike than a painted dream. Before returning to his column within the picture frame, he might cast one last glance at the stormy scene outside and recall another passage from
The Tempest
.

Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes;

Nothing of him that does fade,

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

T
HIS IS A
book of tales about the lives that buildings lead, in the course of which they all change into “something rich and strange”; and their cumulative argument is that the history of architecture is nothing like
The Architect’s Dream
. Indeed, these tales are told as the waking antidote to Cole’s vision and its hypnotic hold over architectural orthodoxy. That is why buildings have secret lives: all too often, the existence of their stories has been either overlooked or willfully ignored.

At the heart of architectural theory is a paradox: buildings are designed to last, and therefore they outlast the insubstantial pageants that made them. Then, liberated from the shackles of immediate utility and the intentions of their masters, they are free to do as they will. Buildings long outlive the purposes for which they were built, the technologies by which they were constructed, and the aesthetics that determined their form; they suffer numberless subtractions, additions, divisions, and multiplications; and soon enough their form and their function have little to do with one another. The architect Aldo Rossi, for example, observed of his own northern Italian milieu that “there are large palaces, building complexes, or agglomerations that constitute whole pieces of the city, and whose function now is no longer the original one. When one visits a monument of this type . . . one is struck by multiplicity of different functions that a building of this type can contain over time, and how these functions are completely independent of form.”

More often than not, the confident dicta of architectural theory are undermined by the secret lives of buildings, which are capricious, protean, and unpredictable; but all too often the contradiction is treated as the object of something of interest only to specialists involved in heritage conservation or interior design. We know all about
the biographies of Le Corbusier or Frank Lloyd Wright, but much less about the biographies of the buildings they designed. It is more difficult by far to find studies that talk about the evolution of buildings themselves, as the wonderful and chimeric monsters that they are, than to find gossip about the monsters who designed them.

There are a few exceptions. In the nineteenth century, Violletle-Duc in France and John Ruskin in England founded rival schools of conservation philosophy, whose twentieth-century exegesis has been undertaken by such writers as Alois Riegl and Cesare Brandi. In the modernist era, obsessed as it was with the future, only Jože Ple
nik and Carlo Scarpa seriously addressed themselves to the alteration of the buildings of the past, designing fascinating hybrids where modern architecture is collaged over the layered substrates of previous historical epochs. In more recent times, Fred Scott’s
On Altering Architecture
and Graeme Brooker and Sally Stone’s
Rereadings
have addressed the practice from the point of view of the interior architect, whose profession consists almost exclusively of the alteration of existing buildings.

Still, the fact that all great buildings mutate over time is often treated as something of a dirty secret, or at best a source of melancholic reflection. This book argues not only that buildings will change, but also that they should. It is both a history of the alteration of buildings and a manifesto for the same.