Architecture – Page 9 – The Book-Butterfly

Marguerite Yourcenar: Memoirs of Hadrian

As subtle but as vital as breath, the passage of ideas and wonder surges with life through these pages and straight to the reader.

Marguerite Yourcenar carves and immortalizes the many aspects of the great Roman emperor that was Hadrian, but unlike any work of history, she resuscitates his heart and offers it to us, pulsating and bleeding, as only Marguerite Yourcenar can.

Written in the form of a letter to his successor, Marcus Aurelius, whose Meditations endure up to this day, Memoirs of Hadrian is the introspection of a man at the end of his days, stripped away of life’s pretensions and left only with his truths. I suspect that this, too, shall endure.

“I have known men infinitely nobler and more perfect than myself… There is but one thing in which I feel superior to most men: I am freer… For my part I have sought liberty more than power, and power only because it can lead to freedom.”

It is partly an ode to Hadrian the traveler, the only emperor in the empire’s history to have traveled to almost every part of its vast realm. Of traveling, he writes, “It disrupts all habit and endlessly jolts each prejudice.”

An ode to a man who could accept with calm the vicissitudes of Rome Eternal after his time (“If ever the barbarians gain possession of the world they will be forced to adopt some of our methods; they will end resembling us”) but could not understand a resignation to ignorance; and thus promoted Greek philosophy and culture and patronized the arts, literature, music, architecture.

A man who perceived that knowledge and literature were as important as food to a civilization, and libraries, dispensaries to the soul: “The founding of libraries was like constructing more public granaries, amassing reserves against a spiritual winter which by certain signs, in spite of myself, I see ahead.”

An ode to Hadrian the builder who believed in the richness of an architecture more varied than Vitruvius’ four orders would allow (“Our great stone blocks, like our tones in music, are amenable to endless regrouping”) and thus amassed inspiration even from faraway Ctesiphon, Babylon, and Egypt, drew the plans himself, and put emphasis on building from vernacular materials.

“To build is to collaborate with the earth, to put a human mark upon a landscape, modifying it forever thereby…To reconstruct is to collaborate with time gone by, penetrating or modifying its spirit, and carrying it toward a longer future… My cities were born of encounters… Each building stone was the strange concretion of a will, a memory, and sometimes a challenge. Each structure was the chart of a dream… I have wanted to live as much as possible in the midst of this music of forms.”

“In the evenings the art of building gave way to that of music, which is architecture, too, though invisible.”

And so it is also an ode to a man who applied the laws of art and governance interchangeably: “Strength was the basis, discipline without which there is no beauty, and firmness without which there is no justice. Justice was the balance of the parts, that whole so harmoniously composed which no excess should be permitted to endanger. Strength and justice together were but one instrument, well tuned… all forms of dire poverty and brutality were things to forbid as insults to the fair body of mankind, every injustice a false note to avoid in the harmony of the spheres.”

It is an ode to the man who first ventured to call Rome “eternal”; who counted desperately on the eternity of stone, as we are able to continue to witness through Hadrian’s Wall, Hadrian’s Villa, Castel Sant’Angelo, the Pantheon; a man who believed that, “Anything made by man which aspires to eternity must adapt.” And therefore it is an ode to a man who looked for and looked to eternity — and thus, he loved.

Above all, it is an ode to a man who loved. For what is eternity without it?

Victor Hugo: The Hunchback of Notre Dame

It is not for nothing that Rodin sculpted a dramatic monument of this writer; not for nothing that a statue of him with a lion stands imposingly in the gardens of Villa Borghese in Rome; and not for nothing that I chose this as my 100th book this year.

Because there are authors we outgrow, there are those we resonate with during a particular stage in life, there are those who deliver exciting information to the mind but barely leave imprints on the soul, and then there are those timeless ones like Victor Hugo who, throughout the years, endure to disclose beauty and depth commensurate with a reader’s growth.

Everyone probably knows by now that the novel is degrees darker, more tragic, and ends nothing like the Disney film. Although it tells of love that transforms, contemplations on fate, there is also lust, obsession, loss, betrayal, death — but had I known the original French title beforehand, Notre-Dame de Paris, perhaps I would have realized sooner that this is, in fact, a gigantic novel about architecture.

After its publication 190 years ago, it launched a movement to preserve French Gothic architecture. A first-time reader of the preface will focus on that fateful Greek word engraved on the wall upon which Hugo stumbled in one of Notre Dame’s towers, and which would inspire him to write the novel. But listening more keenly will reveal that even on the first page of the preface, there are lines that already set the tone for his architectural odes and intentions.

Of the structures from the Middle Ages, he writes in passing, “Mutilations come to them from every quarter, from within as well as from without… What has time, what have men done with these marvels?” But a few dozen pages deeper, he elegantly declares, “Time has bestowed upon the church perhaps more than it has taken away, for it is time which has spread over the facade that sombre hue of the centuries which makes the old age of monuments the period of their beauty. Who has brutally swept them away? It is not time… time’s share would be the least, the share of men the most.”

“On the face of this aged queen of our cathedrals, by the side of a wrinkle, one always finds a scar. Tempus edax, homo edacior (time is a devourer; man, more so); which I should be glad to translate thus: time is blind, man is stupid.”

By the time I read a quarter of the book, I was convinced that this is more about Notre Dame than it is about the Hunchback. “Each face, each stone of the venerable monument, is a page not only of the history of the country, but of the history of science and art as well.”

There are chapters and chapters devoted to detailed descriptions and beautiful thoughts on architecture. He believes architecture to be “the great handwriting of the human race” and how, throughout the ages, it is “developed in proportion to human thought”.

Of the great edifices he writes, “They make one feel to what a degree architecture is a primitive thing, by demonstrating that the greatest products of architecture are less the works of individuals than of society…the deposit left by a whole people… the residue of successive evaporations of human society… Each individual brings his stone. Thus do the beavers, thus do the bees, thus do men. The great symbol of architecture, Babel, is a hive.”

However, I have also recently learned that some architects strongly disagree with a particular chapter where Hugo holds that architecture was dethroned and ceased to be the sovereign art upon the arrival of Gutenberg and the flourishing of literature. He laments this “death”— “no longer the social art, the collective art, the dominating art.”

Perhaps it is the fact that I am not an architect that I did not react so disapprovingly towards the passage (even though the architect with whom I shared some beautiful lines the moment I read them prove the statement wrong with the work that he’s been involved in for the past several years), and perhaps it is because I considered the historical context in which Hugo wrote.

But I am absolutely certain that those who immediately oppose the disputed chapter did not finish reading this giant. On a closing note in this edition, Hugo clearly expresses that he hopes to be put in the wrong about this exact view!

This, ladies and gentlemen, is how you craft the most beautiful architectural challenge ever written.

It is not for nothing.

Austen Henry Layard: Nineveh and its Remains

The Library of Alexandria was not the first systematically organized library in the world. There was another one that was much older: The great library of Nineveh built circa 668 BCE by Assyrian King Ashurbanipal. Although it shared Alexandria’s fate through destruction by fire, it had another advantage — its clay tablets. Alexandria’s papyrus were reduced to ashes, but Nineveh’s cuneiform clay tablets that exceeded twenty thousand in number were merely baked afresh. Not only did this library preserve the Epic of Gilgamesh for future generations, the Nineveh excavation has become a prime source of information about the Assyrians and the Babylonians whose knowledge and culture they inherited.

We all know Nineveh — this wonder of the ancient world, for a time the largest city in the world — from the Old Testament account of Jonah, but for thousands of years, it could have remained a fictional city for unbelievers until its unearthing. “Without the evidence that these monuments afford, we might almost have doubted that the great city ever existed,” writes Austen Henry Layard.

“Existing ruins show that Nineveh had acquired its greatest extent in the time of the Assyrian kings mentioned in the Old Testament. It was then that Jonah visited it, and that reports of its size and magnificence were carried to the West, and gave rise to those traditions from which the Greeks mainly derived the information they have handed down to us concerning the city.” On a footnote, Layard adds, “With regard to the connection between the ornaments mentioned in the text and those of Greek architecture, it is now impossible to doubt that all that is Ionic in the arts of Greece is derived from the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates.”

Austen Henry Layard, a name no longer too familiar to our generation, was once a household name in Europe when he discovered Nineveh in the 1840s. Quoting from the introduction, his journals “took Europe by storm and became one of those books that everyone had to read.” It has never gone out of print and is still considered to be among the greatest archaeological books of all time.

Layard being an art historian, a draughtsman, a cuneiformist, and a diplomat, among other things, this book is also so many things at once! The journals have occasional sketches of details from the excavations, he ponders on art, history, religion, civilizations, and takes the reader on his expeditions while painting a vibrant portrait of the time, places, the tribes and people that he encounters on his journeys, and writes vividly of life-threatening experiences. But the best parts are those moments of discovery that lead to spine-tingling wonder! He can be quite poetic, too: “On all sides, as far as the eye could reach, rose the grass-covered heaps marking the site of ancient habitations. The great tide of civilisation had long since ebbed, leaving these scattered wrecks on the solitary shore. Are those waters to flow again, bearing back the seeds of knowledge and of wealth that they have wafted to the West? We wanderers were seeking what they had left behind, as children gather up the coloured shells on the deserted sands.”

Reading this book recalls and intensifies the question that Jason Elliot posed in his book on Iran: “What will future archaeologists think of us when they find what we’ve left for them?”

Gaston Bachelard: The Poetics of Space

April 7, 2021

Inside these pages is a realm where a poet is described as someone who speaks on the threshold of being, where poetry is a commitment of the soul, where an artist is a producer of light, where imagination is believed to augment the values of reality, where art is a phenomenon of the soul and an increase of life, a sort of competition of surprises that stimulates our consciousness and keeps it from becoming somnolent, where art’s intention is to redeem an impassioned soul, and where spaces must be loved.

It reads like a much-needed daydream; a daydream that pulled me away from distressing pandemic thoughts and spirited my mind away to an elevated plane. It addresses the musician, the reader, and the many aspects of my being. It beckons each of us to become poets, or at least, to listen more to poets. The world seemed to gleam whenever I looked up from the pages, and after making me sigh over its most elegant passages, it vivified my feelings toward words, my surroundings, light, shade, silence, and toward spaces internal and external, physical and metaphysical. It called my attention to the beautiful immensity of all these! My copy will continue to be revisited whenever the mind’s eye needs to retrieve lost sparkle.

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The Poetics of Space is usually classified as a book about architecture, but it felt like so much more to me. I initially thought that describing it as such unfairly truncates it. It was only through subsequent readings that I understood how much it truly is about architecture, and how works like these continue to exert influence on one’s sensibilities long after turning the last page!

While reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World, Mathias Enard’s Tell Them of Battles, Kings & Elephants, and Jan Morris’ Venice, I noticed that I had suddenly become instinctively aware of the architecture and how spaces are respected in the books! I even realized that my favorite writers are those who are attentive to spaces. The Poetics of Space is turning out to be a magnifying lens for architecture in the real world and in literature, giving reading and living experiences more depth.

It is, essentially, a book about architecture, and to have thought that this description was insufficient only reveals that it is actually my understanding of architecture that is limited. Wasn’t Elif Shafak hinting at this in The Architect’s Apprentice? “For the eye that could see, architecture was everywhere.”

Architecture — when vouchsafed to the right mind, heart, and soul — is music, poetry, and many things in between.