The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories (30 page)

It was on the way to the Cecilienhof that Harry Truman, the president of the United States, made his decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan, and it was on the terrace of that pretty cottage that he persuaded his allies to issue an ultimatum to the Japanese: surrender or suffer the consequences. Suffer the consequences they did. The clocks stopped at the moment of detonation in Hiroshima, and the making of ruins was never the same again.

I
F THE
B
IG
Three had had the leisure to wander outside the halftimbered farmyard of the Cecilienhof, they would soon have come to Potsdam and the royal park of Sans Souci. The British foreign minister Anthony Eden jotted down: “Devastation of Potsdam terrible and all this I am told in one raid of fifty minutes. What an hour of hell it must have been.” Frederick the Great’s elaborate baroque Stadtschloss, Schinkel’s noble Nikolaikirche, and the streets of the town now recalled the shattered remains of Rome. Here and there a column or a gesturing statue protruded from piles of smoking rubble, while women dressed in rags scrabbled for food among the remnants of their beautiful town. Even Winston Churchill, who had engineered their humiliation, was moved: “My hate had died with their surrender and I was much moved by their demonstrations, and also by their haggard looks and threadbare clothes.”

Within Sans Souci, however, it seemed that the magical kingdom had only become more like itself. The gardens, which had not been tended in the last years of the war, were pleasingly overgrown, the setting for a melancholic
fête champêtre
. The palaces, whose paintings and furniture had been removed to distant bunkers for protection, had the desolate air of summer retreats shut up for the winter. The ruins that Frederick the Great had built to entertain his guests were only a little more ruined, the Norman tower having been damaged by a stray missile. A belvedere, similarly shelled, made a pleasing picture at the end of a long
allée
of trees. Only the western gate of the Neues Palais set a mournful, if picturesque, note: the great triumphal arch was pitted with bullet holes, and the Corinthian columns of the great hemicycle around it had been shattered and lay in pieces in the long grass. They are still there.

And in Siam, the vines clambered over the pergola made of stolen antique columns, and water still dribbled into a broken sarcophagus from the mouth of a bronze fish. The windows of the farmhouse were shuttered, and the Roman baths were dry and dusty. The Grecian temple was as elegant as it had always been; the garden shrine made by the prince of Siam was a little overgrown, nothing more; and the tall poplars were quietly reflected in the dark waters of the lake. Nothing had happened at all.

In Which the Temple of Reason Is Restored

A N
INETEENTH
-C
ENTURY
F
ICTION
Frontispiece of Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris, engraved
by Auguste François Garnier, 1844
.

The great buildings arrayed in
The Architect’s Dream
date from many times and places, but in Thomas Cole’s painted rapture each one of them has been made new and perfect, just as its makers intended. In 1834, Leo von Klenze stood before the Parthenon surrounded by men and women dressed as ancient Athenians, and he likewise vowed to undo centuries of history—to restore the temple to its original virginity. Over the next century interpolations were excised and excisions reversed, and in the process many Byzantine and Ottoman remains were destroyed forever. Klenze’s restoration was a selective affair, in which the temple of Athene took precedence over every other incarnation of the Parthenon.

Restoration was, in the words of its greatest exponent, the French architect Viollet-le-Duc, a modern idea and practice. While Renaissance architects studied ancient buildings as exemplars, and Enlightenment historians meditated on them as lessons, the architects of the nineteenth century were anxious to return them to their original states.

Their anxiety may perhaps be explained by the age in which they lived, which was a time of unprecedented change. The French Revolution brought the ancien régime to an end and established an entirely new world from Year One. The industrial revolution gave that world new form and altered the relationship between people and things forever. At such a time, buildings raised by previous eras must have seemed like precious relics of a way of life that was rapidly disappearing from view.

The Parthenon was only ever restored to a ruined state, but Notre
Dame de Paris, another shrine to a virgin—and also, albeit briefly, a temple of Reason and Wisdom—is the example par excellence of nineteenth-century restoration carried to completion. While Klenze stripped the Parthenon of barbarian excrescences, Viollet-le-Duc attempted to restore to Notre Dame the magnificence of which more recent barbarians had stripped it.

But Notre Dame was no Parthenon. Constructed over centuries, her design a moving target, the cathedral had never been a perfect virgin. The restored Notre Dame was an arbitrary fiction, a combination of romance and science that would have baffled the masons who had built it in the first place. Like
The Architect’s Dream
, it characterizes less the grand sweep of history than the moment of time in which it was made.

I
N
1962,
THE WOULD-BE REVOLUTIONARY
writer Guy Debord recalled a small but telling historical footnote. Writing on the Commune of 1871 in a pamphlet titled
Into the Dustbin of History
, he commented:

The story of the arsonists who during the final days of the Commune went to destroy Notre-Dame, only to find it defended by an armed battalion of Commune artists, is a richly provocative example of direct democracy . . . Were those artists right to defend a cathedral in the name of eternal aesthetic values—and, in the final analysis, in the name of museum culture—while other people wanted to express themselves then and there by making this destruction symbolize their absolute defiance of a society that, in its moment of triumph, was about to consign their entire lives to silence and oblivion?

It was only a scrap of a story, and no one really knows what happened. There are rumors that the Communards broke into the cathedral, piled up all the chairs in the nave, and set fire to them; but the building is still there, while the Commune is long gone. It’s easy to see, though, why the Communards might have attacked Notre Dame: if ever they required a symbol for all the things that stood in the way of liberty, equality, fraternity—in the way of reason and progress and all the rest of it—they only had to look around them.

N
OTRE
D
AME LOWERED
over the Paris of the Commune as it had done for many centuries. The west front of the cathedral was a tottering city of building piled upon building, a vertical labyrinth infested with all the creatures of the medieval imagination. Each of the three doors of the west front was thronged with angels—choirs and choirs of them—and saints, martyrs, and personifications of the virtues and
the seven deadly sins. Above the doors sat Saint Anne and her daughter Our Lady herself, with Christ presiding over the Last Judgment in the center. Above these portals were arrayed all the kings of Israel, and above the Gallery of the Kings stood the Queen of Heaven flanked by two guardian angels. Behind her, like a halo, there was a rose window. Higher still, above the rose window, another gallery ran across the west front: a delicate forest of colonnettes and pointed arches, the eyrie of brooding gargoyles, misshapen, ugly, and hauntingly sad. Above this stone menagerie rose two towers, pierced by tall lancet windows so that the bells that hung within them could sound out over all of Paris; as if in response to the music, tendrils, leaves, and strange beasts seemed to sprout from the architecture. On top of everything else, a spire dissolved into Parisian skies as gray as stone and lead.

The chief characteristic of the interior of Notre Dame was gloom. Against an architecture rendered almost inky black by contrast, tall stained-glass windows lined the nave of the church like colorful banners hung out for a procession. Beneath them opened two rows of aisles and countless chapels—richly painted, elaborately furnished stalls dedicated to the worship of multitudinous saints and cults. Halfway to the altar, the processional way of the nave was interrupted by a crossing. The south transept ended in a large rose window, a kaleidoscope of colored glass and stone; the glowing colors of this miraculous wall told the stories of the New Testament, radiating in chapter and verse from the figure of Christ at the center. The northern transept was also illuminated by a rose window, in the middle of which sat the Virgin in majesty with the Christ child on her knee. In concentric circles around this image of the new dispensation were arranged the representatives of the old: the prophets, kings, and high priests of Israel.

After the transepts, the nave terminated in a semicircular apse, and here was placed the high altar dedicated to Our Lady of Paris. Behind the altar rose high windows that glowed in the light of the morning sun. The apse was the head of the church, and the whole building took the form of Our Lord with his arms spread out on the Cross: the stone ribs of the vault made his skeleton, and the painted walls and colored glass stretched between them his living body.

This divine body contained within it images of all the things that
could be known in Christendom. To the east, the rising sun shed its rays on the altar of the Resurrection. To the west, the setting sun cast its dying glow on visions of the Last Judgment. The prophets and patriarchs of the Old Testament were relegated to the gloomy north, while the apostles and saints of the New were bathed in southern light. The improving lessons of scripture were depicted close to the ground, where pilgrims might study them closely; while outside, perched atop the crags and bluffs of the building, were all the monsters of ancient lore, with their billy goat horns and beards, their bats’ wings, and their faces on their arses. No wonder the Communards wanted to destroy it.