Maturing Buildings (07-26-10)

Hollis, an architect and designer who teaches at the Edinburgh College of Art, traces the life courses of classic examples of Western architecture.  He focuses on specific structures (the Parthenon, Notre Dame de Paris, the Alhambra, for example), unlike Stewart Brand who tool a more general approach in How Buildings Learn.  As Hollis describes, “This is a book of tales about the lives that buildings lead, in the course of which they all change into ‘something rich and strange’ . . . 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 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. . . 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.. . 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.”.

Edward Hollis.  2009.  The Secret Lives of Buildings.  New York:  Metropolitan Books.