The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories by Edward Hollis Read Free Book Online
Authors: Edward Hollis
ancient site and heard arguments for encasingthe whole building in a gigantic bubble. They debated doing nothing and letting the Parthenon dissolve into the air. They argued over the possibility of rebuilding it from scratch.
But after eleven years of deliberation, they decided to ruin the Parthenon—at least temporarily, and very, very carefully. Work is expected to be complete in 2010, twenty-four years after it began, and 2,443 years after the Parthenon had first been brought into being. Each and every block of marble is being removed from its location. The iron clamps are being extracted from each one, and they are being replaced, appropriately for a virgin temple, with titanium, a metal known for its incorruptibility. Then each and every block is being measured and analyzed, in order to uncover, if possible, the secret of its original location. Very slowly this puzzle is being resolved, and where it is possible these stones are being returned to the places intended for them by their creators.
But at the same time, all the sculptures that remain on the Parthenon have been removed to a new purpose-built museum at the foot of the Acropolis, a tomb where age and air shall not wither them. At the heart of the museum, the celebrated French architect Bernard Tschumi has designed a great glass atrium whose size and proportions exactly match those of the virgin temple. This phantom Parthenon remains empty, for it has been designed to receive all those sculptures in foreign captivity—in London, Paris, Palermo, Würzburg, Vienna—should they ever return to the city that made them. Then, perhaps, Holy Wisdom will herself return to her house.
Every time the Parthenon is ruined, it takes a little longer to rebuild it, and the task becomes a little more difficult. This time it will have taken twice as long to ruin and rebuild the Parthenon as it did to build it in the first place. One day, all that will be left of the Parthenon will be fragments imprisoned in museums; copies by the banks of the Mississippi, the Kelaniya, the Thames, the Spree, the Forth, or the Danube; the drawings of Stuart and Revett; millions of fading photographs; and hundreds of written eulogies, from Thucydides’ to this one.
Then, liberated from physical being, the Parthenon will have become nothing but an idea, and at last it will be perfect.
The Basilica of San Marco, Venice
In Which a Prince Steals Four Horses and an Empire
A S TAGING P OST FOR F OUR H ORSES
The Hippodrome in Constantinople, from Onofrio Panvinio,
De Ludis Circensibus
(1600)
.
T HEFT
The Parthenon is a ruin because pieces of it were removed, leaving nothing behind them but a fading dream of perfection. Liberated from the building for which they had been made, these fragments were set to purposes for which they had never been designed. They became building materials for peasants, booty for soldiers, and art for dilettanti; but at the same time, they still carried something of the aura of their sacred origin. That was why they had been stolen in the first place.
The “Dark Ages”—the centuries between the end of antiquity and the resurgence of western Europe in the Renaissance—have often been imagined as an era of ignorance and vandalism. Their darkness is depicted in the silhouette of cathedral and forest that separate the architect from his vision of classical perfection in
The Architect’s Dream
.
But the Dark Ages form our only link with classical antiquity. What their inhabitants chose to preserve (and what to destroy) of their own inheritance has determined ours, centuries later. The “barbarians” of the Dark Ages were the capricious curators of a museum whose meaning we shall never fully understand.
The theft and reuse of antique fragments was a common practice in an age littered with the remains of a culture that it lacked the capability to imitate or surpass. The people of the Dark Ages imagined that the buildings of
But after eleven years of deliberation, they decided to ruin the Parthenon—at least temporarily, and very, very carefully. Work is expected to be complete in 2010, twenty-four years after it began, and 2,443 years after the Parthenon had first been brought into being. Each and every block of marble is being removed from its location. The iron clamps are being extracted from each one, and they are being replaced, appropriately for a virgin temple, with titanium, a metal known for its incorruptibility. Then each and every block is being measured and analyzed, in order to uncover, if possible, the secret of its original location. Very slowly this puzzle is being resolved, and where it is possible these stones are being returned to the places intended for them by their creators.
But at the same time, all the sculptures that remain on the Parthenon have been removed to a new purpose-built museum at the foot of the Acropolis, a tomb where age and air shall not wither them. At the heart of the museum, the celebrated French architect Bernard Tschumi has designed a great glass atrium whose size and proportions exactly match those of the virgin temple. This phantom Parthenon remains empty, for it has been designed to receive all those sculptures in foreign captivity—in London, Paris, Palermo, Würzburg, Vienna—should they ever return to the city that made them. Then, perhaps, Holy Wisdom will herself return to her house.
Every time the Parthenon is ruined, it takes a little longer to rebuild it, and the task becomes a little more difficult. This time it will have taken twice as long to ruin and rebuild the Parthenon as it did to build it in the first place. One day, all that will be left of the Parthenon will be fragments imprisoned in museums; copies by the banks of the Mississippi, the Kelaniya, the Thames, the Spree, the Forth, or the Danube; the drawings of Stuart and Revett; millions of fading photographs; and hundreds of written eulogies, from Thucydides’ to this one.
Then, liberated from physical being, the Parthenon will have become nothing but an idea, and at last it will be perfect.
The Basilica of San Marco, Venice
In Which a Prince Steals Four Horses and an Empire
A S TAGING P OST FOR F OUR H ORSES
The Hippodrome in Constantinople, from Onofrio Panvinio,
De Ludis Circensibus
(1600)
.
T HEFT
The Parthenon is a ruin because pieces of it were removed, leaving nothing behind them but a fading dream of perfection. Liberated from the building for which they had been made, these fragments were set to purposes for which they had never been designed. They became building materials for peasants, booty for soldiers, and art for dilettanti; but at the same time, they still carried something of the aura of their sacred origin. That was why they had been stolen in the first place.
The “Dark Ages”—the centuries between the end of antiquity and the resurgence of western Europe in the Renaissance—have often been imagined as an era of ignorance and vandalism. Their darkness is depicted in the silhouette of cathedral and forest that separate the architect from his vision of classical perfection in
The Architect’s Dream
.
But the Dark Ages form our only link with classical antiquity. What their inhabitants chose to preserve (and what to destroy) of their own inheritance has determined ours, centuries later. The “barbarians” of the Dark Ages were the capricious curators of a museum whose meaning we shall never fully understand.
The theft and reuse of antique fragments was a common practice in an age littered with the remains of a culture that it lacked the capability to imitate or surpass. The people of the Dark Ages imagined that the buildings of
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