Ruins and Fragments: Tales of Loss and Rediscovery

(Hardback)

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Description

For many of us, ruins are alluring, puzzling and endlessly fascinating: thiselegant book seeks to explore why. What is it that makes us suspicious ofworks or histories that are too smooth, too continuous Is it that urbanexperience is inherently discontinuous and fragmented, or that the onlytruths we can believe are partial ones

Whether focusing on ancient ormodern remnants, literature or the visualarts, Ruins and Fragmentsis poetic without being sentimental. Itoffers new ways of understanding the history of modernity, while delightingin its reading of the world as a puzzle, and the ways in which we can reconstructnew forms of meaning.

Reviews

"Drawing parallels from modernist literature and art, Harbison suggests that the ruin and the fragment appeal to contemporary sensibilities precisely because of their incompleteness and their embodiment of loss and nostalgia. With the destruction of sites of antiquity by Isis, this is a timely and beautifully written study of why we are so attached to pieces of the past."

-- "Financial Times"

"Teeming study of the aesthetics and reality of ruins. . . . Harbison is well placed to explore these dilapidated cultural precincts. . . . Harbison's wide-ranging meditation on the allure of decline and decay is an erudite addition to the literature."

-- "Architecture Toay"

"There is a beauty in the symmetry between Harbison's subject matter and his style . . . those of us who love his work love precisely the way those intellectual jumbles reflect an idea about the world . . . Harbison's books . . . consistently provide brief, fragmentary glimmers of hope."

-- "New Yorker"
"An extended meditation on disruption and discontinuity in (largely) Western culture, on fractures, on remembering and forgetting what we have lost, and on the 'rough edges' of our cultural world, from architecture to literature."

"Harbison proves a keen observer of the paradoxes of reconstruction."--Mary Beard "Times Literary Supplement"

Author Bio

Until his retirement in 2011 Robert Harbison was Professor of Architecture at London Metropolitan University. He is also the author of Reflections on Baroque (Reaktion, 2000) and Travels in the History of Architecture (Reaktion, 2010).