The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories (27 page)

Malatesta’s final campaign was far from his ephemeral principality. Three years after the condemnation and the pardon of his soul, the Venetians sent him to Greece to fight against the Turks. In the hills above ancient Sparta he found someone he had not thought he would encounter again: Gemistos Plethon, the Greek scholar whose paganism had so inspired him in his youth. Plethon was dead. Malatesta had his men collect the philosopher’s bones and he shipped them back to Rimini, where they were placed in one of the side arches of the Famous Temple that Alberti had reserved for the remains of famous men.

The temple remained unfinished. All that was ever built of the dome were a few foundations. At the west end, the high tribune arch that was perhaps intended for Malatesta’s own monument was never completed. The brick facade of the old church of Saint Francis still pokes through the hole where the tomb should have been. The sarcophagi that line the sides of the building remain half empty, Malatesta having been unable to gather around him the requisite number of famous men to fill them. The stone arches that house them peter out toward the east end, revealing the brick of the medieval structure they were built to conceal.

Malatesta died in 1468 of a malaria that he had picked up in Greece. Seven years later, the bastard who succeeded him, Roberto, celebrated his wedding. The centerpiece of the table was a gigantic cake covered in sugar icing, made in the form of the Famous Temple of Rimini as his father and Alberti had imagined it. It didn’t outlive the feast.

A
LBERTI, SAFE IN
the papal circle, escaped the demise of his patron. He soon moved on to other projects in Florence, Mantua, and Rome; but none of Alberti’s buildings was ever finished. They are as incomplete today as when the builders walked away from them, as ruined as the remains of antiquity Alberti sought to emulate.

Alberti had hoped that his buildings would be perfectly beautiful. When, in his dream, he stood atop the mountain and saw the gods flitting above the River of Life, he dreamed that he was one of them. He was punished for his blasphemy. The Famous Temple of Rimini, his statement of classical perfection, is nothing more than an incomplete sentence, a non sequitur, a stutter.

In Which Nothing Happens at All

C
LASSICAL
R
UINS
View of the basin and the ruins at the top of the hill opposite
the palace of Sans Souci. Engraving by Johann Friedrich Schleuen, c. 1775.

One of the first tasks faced by the new Greek nation in 1833 was to invent its own history. The Greeks acquired a king and discussed turning the Parthenon into his residence. The design that Karl Friedrich Schinkel prepared for this palace was a collage of classical buildings clustered around their prototype, the Parthenon. The latter was left in ruins as a
memento mori
, to remind the young nation that all civilizations will fall into ruin one day. Schinkel’s design simulated a Greece that had never existed. His palace was, like
The Architect’s Dream
, a history lesson, offered to a nation that possessed no history of its own.

The Famous Temple of Rimini and the Alhambra were battlegrounds between the past and the present, the familiar and the other. There was no question in the minds of Alberti and Keiser Karel about which side to be on or, indeed, who was going to win. The course of history defeated them both, and the Famous Temple and the Alhambra are no more perfect than all those other virgin shrines and temples to wisdom whose wrecks litter the history of architecture. Any architecture that aspires to completeness will eventually fall into what is, in the terms of its creators, lamentable decay and ruin.

Any architecture, that is, other than that of gardens. There, in the bosom of
Natura Naturans
, it has always been permitted to enjoy, rather than defy, the passage of time. At no period was this truer than in the Enlightenment, when Edward Gibbon was inspired to write the
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
by gazing at the ruins of the Roman Forum and hearing the Franciscan friars sing the vespers on the site of the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. His
readers, men of taste and learning, would while away the boredom of their summer’s ease by building follies, and these whimsical belvederes and ruins displayed precisely the altered states that architecture had traditionally sought to defy. They were, like
The Architect’s Dream
, objects of speculation, miniature simulations of the processes of history, to be viewed from the summit of a colossal column, at a distance, without care.

O
NCE UPON A TIME
, when the world was without care, there was a lake in a forest. The lake was still and dark, and was guarded by tall poplar trees; and by the side of this lake, the people of that country had made a shrine to the nymph who dwelled there. It is still there: a little niche in a wall, down by the water.

One day a wandering prince came upon this lake and this
nymphaeum
, and he made a garden; and in the garden he constructed two shrines: one to his father, the king, and the other to his mother, the queen. In time, the Greeks added a temple to this garden shrine; and in time the sanctuary was surrounded by a Doric colonnade.

In time the sanctuary must have grown wealthy, for the Romans built a complex of baths there, in which pilgrims to the sacred spot could refresh themselves. In the atrium there was a bath of Russian jasper, presided over by Apollo and Bacchus. In the next room, light and rainwater poured from the sky into an
impluvium
framed by four Doric columns; and in the third, all the things necessary for the bath were laid out on bronze consoles cast in the form of dragons. The golden gates of the
calidarium
would open in the aqueous gloom, and the pilgrim would descend between white marble caryatids into radiant steam.

It must also have been the Romans who added the arched gateway to the sanctuary, perhaps in the turbulent times of their decline and fall, for it is a crude structure, clearly built for defense. It was extended in the Dark Ages with a fortified Norman tower. In time the sanctuary fell into decay, and a farmhouse was constructed under the defensive aegis of the tower. This farmhouse is one of those ageless buildings that characterize the
campagna
: little more than a barn rendered in ochre, it is pierced with round-headed windows in the manner of the Tuscan
quattrocento
. Above the house proper there is a gallery under a pantiled roof, in which the cooling airs can be taken and the crops hung up to dry. To one side, a lean-to in the same style indicates where, in prosperous times, the farmer’s family extended their dwelling.

These peasants were ignorant, no doubt, of the finer architectural points of the sanctuary whose remains they inhabited. With delightful insouciance they tethered their pigs and cattle against an ancient wall, and in order to provide themselves with a shady place to rest they made a loggia. They took the Doric columns that had once surrounded the sanctuary and placed them on top of the wall. Dispensing with the capitals and the frieze (now lost), they used their new colonnade to support a trellis for vines; and where this canopy required additional support, they propped it up with two wooden herms that they had found on the site.

And then the peasants who lived here gathered the remaining fragments of the sanctuary and used them to ornament their loggia. They took a Corinthian capital and turned it into a table; they took an ancient sarcophagus, broken as it was, and made it into a fountain, into which a bronze fish still dribbles cooling water; they set an old
basso relievo
into the wall and placed a row of architectural fragments on the seat they had made around their table. And then, in the heat of the day, they rested.

It is a placid, timeless scene; but to those who would look for them, this complex of lake, temple, bath, tower, and farm is also an encyclopedia of all the styles of architecture. And since the history of the art of building is nothing more or less than the progression of style from one generation to the next, this humble home is nothing other than a history of architecture, written in crumbling brick and cracked mortar. Here, in one spot, had been a garden, the first of human habitations; simple shrines, which in time became the opulent temples of a great empire; and the refined monuments of antiquity, which fell to barbarism and were replaced by the crude dwellings of peasants. The chronicle of civilization is always such a story, of origin, establishment, construction, elaboration, and decay; and there can be no more powerful exposition of the cycles of history than a collection of buildings of many different dates, differently advanced in their artistry and in diverse states of ruination.

In between the wandering prince, in his innocent state of nature, and the peasants, in theirs, had passed centuries; and it might be observed that both the prince and the peasants lived at times when the
fortunes of civilization were at their lowest ebb. But the peasants possessed something that the prince did not: they had, however imperfectly, a memory, and, what is more, something to remember. Nothing is ever forgotten. Each cycle of history begins in advance of its predecessor: lessons, whether historical, technological, philosophical, or artistic, are learned that cannot be unlearned or lost. Thus we can speak of progress in civilization.

K
ARL
F
RIEDRICH
S
CHINKEL
leaned back on his sunny bench beneath the vine-clad trellis, and he picked up his glass of wine from the top of the antique Corinthian capital. It was, as ever, a charming story, told by a charming storyteller. One of his friends later recalled: “There was a nobility and harmony in his movements, a smile on his lips, a clarity in his brow, a depth and a fire in his eye . . . but still greater was the power of his word, when that which moved him came unbidden and unprepared to his lips. Then the doors of beauty opened.”

But Schinkel had not had to say a word. All he had done was to gesture, for the tale was all around him. Indeed, he was in it: sitting in the very same loggia, in front of the old
basso relievo
and the other fragmentary antiquities of his story. It was a tale told in crumbling brick and stained ochre, assembled from shattered marbles, and hung with vines.

And the even more wonderful thing was Schinkel had invented it all. The lake was no more natural than the spouting fountains, and the ancient garden shrine no more primitive than the parterres of the palace gardens. The temple was no more Grecian and the baths no more Roman, the tower no more Norman and the farmhouse no more Tuscan than the barracks of Potsdam. The place was called Siam, and its ruined fragments and crumbling walls were fourteen years old at the most.