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The Secret Lives of Buildings
From the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories
- Author: Ed Hollis
- Category: Non-fiction Humanities Narrative
- Publisher: Portobello (UK) / Metropolitan Books (US)
- Pub date: 7 September 2009
- Length: 448 pages
About The Secret Lives of Buildings
A beautifully wrought book: a kind of illuminated manuscript with words taking the place of pictures … Hollis revels in buildings steeped in gloriously rich, even improbable histories
- GUARDIAN
Architecture appears as the most adaptable of the arts, shifting as it is reused, reinterpreted and restored … Hollis is magical on the layers of myth and history in the classical world
- Edwin Heathcote, FINANCIAL TIMES
It’s unusual for a non-fiction book to match a neat conceit with elegant execution, but Hollis has achieved it
- SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY
Here, buildings come into being at the hands of angels; and they are built as spells or blasphemies. Buildings invade or infect one other. Here, a building is destroyed by a magician falling from the sky; a building is stolen from the beginning of the World; and a building is the End of the World. In one story, nothing happens at all.
Original, unusual and beautifully written, THE SECRET LIVES OF BUILDINGS uses thirteen different buildings to trace an architectural zeitgeist which runs from Ancient Greece to the present, by way of the Dark Ages, the High Middle Ages, and the Modern Era.
This is a book of stories about buildings, however, in each of which a building is followed from its conception and on through its eventful life until the present. Each of these picaresque narratives has therefore been chosen and arranged to contribute to a larger story: the History of Western architecture as a whole, but one told from the perspective of the buildings themselves, and which looks at the tactics each has adopted in order to survive…
The heroes and heroines here are therefore the buildings themselves.
Ultimately, THE SECRET LIVES OF BUILDINGS examines both the gulf and the connection between the power-pointing archaeologist of today, the mediaeval monk, and the Visigoth, all standing in different centuries before the same classical temple, yet each with wildly differing proposals for its future, ranging from careful conservation, to casual conversion, to a good old-fashioned burning….
About the Author
Ed Hollis is an architect who now lectures at The Edinburgh College of Art. As an architect, he worked with Geoffrey Bawa in Sri Lanka before spending five years with the Richard Murphy Practice in Edinburgh. An academic for the past five years, he has a blend of experience ranging from designing and building to teaching and writing.