The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories (3 page)

T
HE BUILDINGS WHOSE
secret lives are related here are a familiar cast, some of whom are more or less directly recognizable from
The Architect’s Dream
. The book begins, as all European architectural narratives must, with the Parthenon, which is followed, in orthodox fashion, by a textboook parade of masterpieces, from San Marco in Venice to a version of Le Corbusier’s
Ville Radieuse
. All of these are firmly situated in the orbit of European culture, whose ultima Thules in this context are the Strip in Las Vegas to the west and the Western Wall in Jerusalem to the east. (The architecture of the rest of the world is less afflicted than that of the West by an obsession with permanence—the ancient buildings of Japan, for instance, are made of paper—and has less need, therefore, of an antidote.)

But the orthodox frame of this study is an ironic one, for these masterpieces, so called, are too capricious to answer to any one master. They are ruined, stolen, or appropriated. They flit away and reproduce themselves, evolve and are translated into foreign languages. They are simulated, prophesied, and restored, transformed into sacred relics, empty spectacles, and casus belli. It is the contention of this book that their beauty has not been made by any one artist but has been generated by their long and unpredictable lives. As the American theorist Christopher Alexander has argued, “When a place is lifeless or unreal, there is almost always a mastermind behind it. It is so filled with the will of its maker that there is no room for its own nature.” Timeless beauty “cannot be made, but only generated indirectly, by the ordinary actions of the people, just as a flower cannot be made, only generated from a seed.”

The buildings described in this book shapeshift from century to century, so the traditional chronologies of style that order architectural history are useless here. Instead, if there is an overarching structure to the sequence of stories, it derives from the ways in which attitudes toward architectural alteration have changed over time. The Visigoth, the medieval monk, and the modern archaeologist have all stood in front of the same classical building with wildly divergent proposals for its future, ranging from a good sacking to iconoclastic exorcism to careful excavation; each one of these approaches represents a commentary, if not necessarily an improvement, upon the attitude it has inherited.

All histories are in some sense commentaries on their predecessors, and acts of architectural alteration—those sackings, exorcisms, and excavations—can be seen as critiques, in built form, of the buildings they alter. “Anyone can be creative,” Bertolt Brecht once said; “it’s rewriting other people that’s a challenge.” Every performance of every play or piece of music is a reinterpretation, a rereading and rewriting of a script or score, and these performances take place without any of the anxiety we associate with the alteration of existing buildings. Musicians and actors are regarded as creative heroes without ever having had to produce a new work from scratch. It is accepted that their interpretations of Bach or Brecht are as valid a contribution to our culture as any original composition.

There are analogies here to the alteration of existing buildings.
The problems that face early music ensembles or “period” performances of Shakespeare, for example, are very similar to those that faced the preservationists of the nineteenth century. Meanwhile, “modern” performances, from Karajan’s renditions of Beethoven to Hollywood reinterpretations of Jane Austen, may be compared to the operations of a Renaissance architect trying to translate a Gothic church into the classical idiom.

It might be objected that the difference between architecture and literature or music is that while scripts and scores exist independently of performances, buildings are not independent of the alterations wrought upon them. These are always irreversible and can therefore destroy their “hosts” in a way that dramatic or musical productions of a classic work cannot. But there is one field in which the performance and the thing performed are inseparable: the oral tradition. If a story is not written down, the only script that exists for the next performance is the previous telling. This means that the development of every tale is iterative; each retelling sets the conditions for the next, and stories from
The Iliad
to “Little Red Riding Hood” were both preserved and altered by countless narrators until they arrived on the written page. The classic case is the story of Cinderella, which first appears in the European written record in the Middle Ages. The glass slipper on which much of the plot turns is made of gold in German and is a rubber galosh in Russian. In the German telling of the tale, the ugly sisters even cut off their toes to fit their feet into the slipper and spatter it with their blood. There is a ninth-century Chinese telling of the tale in which the fairy godmother is a fish and the palace ball a village fete; but Cinderella is still Cinderella all the same.

Buildings are less portable than stories, but there are significant parallels between their modes of transmission. As Christopher Alexander observed, “No building is ever perfect. Each building, when it is first built, is an attempt to make a self-maintaining whole configuration. But the predictions are invariably wrong. People use buildings differently from the way they thought they would.” Accordingly, people have to make changes in order to maintain the fit between a structure and the events that take place in it. Each time this happens to a building “we assume we are going to transform it, that new wholes will be born, that, indeed, the entire whole which is being repaired
will become a different whole as a result.” Each alteration is a “retelling” of the building as it exists at a particular time—and when the changes are complete it becomes the existing building for the next retelling. In this way the life of the building is both perpetuated and transformed by the repeated act of alteration and reuse.

This is exactly how stories are transmitted from generation to generation. Preserved and remade again and again, the buildings whose secret lives are recounted here have undergone metamorphoses that have the character of fairy tales or myths. The story of the transformation of the Berlin Wall into precious relics always makes me think of Rumpelstiltskin’s captive, trying to spin straw into gold, while the tale of the Wondrous Flitting of the Holy House of Loreto always provokes the question: “but what
actually
happened?”

I do not know what actually happened, and to answer such a question would be as useful as identifying the real Little Red Riding Hood. It is not the purpose of this book to deconstruct the stories (or the buildings) we have inherited from our forebears, but to narrate them, so that others can do the same in the future. Stories are like gifts; they must be accepted without skepticism and shared with others.

For stories and for buildings alike, incremental change has been the paradoxical mechanism of their preservation. Not one of the buildings whose secret lives are recounted here has lost anything by having been transformed. Instead, they have endured in a way that they would never have done if no one had ever altered them. Architecture is all too often imagined as if buildings do not—and should not—change. But change they do, and have always done. Buildings are gifts, and because they are, we must pass them on.

In Which a Virgin Is Ruined

T
HE
D
ESTRUCTION OF THE
G
RAND
M
OSQUE OF
A
THENS
Drawing by Giacomo Verneda, in Francesco Fanelli, Atina Attica (1707).

The Parthenon is
the architect’s dream
. It is perfect. It is what architecture was, is, and should be.

Or so they say. To Pericles, under whose aegis it was built, the Parthenon symbolized an Athens that was “the school of Hellas,” while Thucydides, who opposed its construction, commented that the Parthenon would cause future ages to imagine that Athens was a far greater civilization than it had ever been. Thucydides was closer to the mark, for Athens became the school not only of Hellas but of the whole Western world, and the Parthenon has been the model of architecture ever since.

Just as Vitruvius prescribed, the Parthenon holds commodity, firmness, and delight in perfect balance. The Parthenon is beautiful in the Renaissance sense: nothing may be added to it, or taken away, but for the worse. For the dilettanti who visited it in the eighteenth century, the Parthenon was the model for all civilized art; for the citizens of the new nation who stood before it in 1837, the Parthenon was the symbol of Grecian liberty. The French architect Viollet-le-Duc described it as the perfect expression of its own construction, and Le Corbusier compared its refinements to the exhilarating styling of sports cars, calling it “architecture, pure creation of the mind.”

There are Parthenons everywhere. There is one in Nashville, Tennessee, constructed for an exposition of the arts and industry in 1897, and another one by the banks of the Danube, near Regensburg. The High Court of Sri Lanka is lent an air of gravitas by the expedient of attaching a Parthenon to it as a porch, while Edinburgh College of Art in Scotland was designed to house casts of the sculptures that
once adorned the Greek temple. Everywhere it appears, the Parthenon is used to symbolize art and civilization, liberty and eternal fame.

The Parthenon is what architecture is, and should be; but the perfect Parthenons of architecture have been conjured from a heap of broken stones that are anything but perfect. The Platonic philosophers of ancient Athens would have argued that the Acropolis was crowned by a maimed relic from the very beginning: that the physical Parthenon could never be more than a dim shadow of an ideal temple, which exists only in the mind’s eye. Today, then, this model of architecture is but a phantom of a shadow of an idea: a ruin.

C
IRCA
460

O
NCE UPON A TIME
, a philosopher of Athens had a dream. As Proclus slept in his little house below the Acropolis, a goddess armed with a shield and spear appeared to him. “Make your house ready,” she said. “They have turned me out of my temple.”

Proclus knew exactly who she was, for he had spent his life waiting for her. Every day he would take his students up to the hill above his house, where he would show them the goddess and her temple, and he would tell them stories about the marble figures that were carved across the building.

He would point up at the figures in the eastern gable of the temple. These figures showed the birth of the goddess Athene, he would say, for Athene was not conceived of a womb but sprang from her father’s head, fully armed, when the god Hephaestus split it open with an ax. Because Athene was not born of a sexual union, she vowed to abstain from such congress, and for this reason she was called
Parthenos
, which means “virgin.” But Hephaestus, who had given her being with his ax, attempted to ravish Athene. He was so excited that his seed made it no farther than her thigh. Disgusted, she wiped it off and threw it on the ground of the Acropolis, from which sprang a monster, half man and half snake. Athene raised this creature as her son, and he became Erichthonius, the first king of Athens.

Then Proclus would take his students to the western pediment, where a man and a woman stood in opposition, their antagonism frozen in marble. Once upon a time, he would say, Athene was in dispute with her uncle Poseidon, the god of the sea, since both of them claimed the Acropolis for their own. The wise people who lived there suggested to the gods that the dispute could be settled quite simply. “Give us gifts,” they said, “and the one whose gift we accept shall be our god.”

Poseidon roared his assent, and he plunged his trident into the Acropolis. The earth shook, and a spring of seawater issued forth from the rock. Athene was quiet. She bent over the ground and planted a seedling. “Wait,” she said. And from that seedling, which was the
first olive tree, issued forth oil, and food, and timber, and tinder, and all manner of useful things.

And the people of the Acropolis, being wise, chose the gift of Athene and dedicated their city to her. Under Athene, the Athenians developed a passion for wisdom. Philosophers disputed and taught in an unbroken chain from Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Zeno all the way down to Proclus himself; and the grove of the Academy and the stoas of the marketplace gave their very names to concepts of learning and conduct. Sophocles, Euripides, and Aeschylus wrote their sublime tragedies for the theater of Athens, while Aristides and Demosthenes perfected the art of rhetoric in its assembly, and Thucydides recorded their acts in his immortal history of the Peloponnesian wars. In the bright morning of civilization, the Athenians both invented and perfected all the arts: rhetoric, politics, philosophy, drama, history, sculpture, painting, and architecture, and in doing so made their city “the school of all Hellas.”