Skrevet af BRITTAIN-CATLIN
The usual history of architecture is a grand narrative of soaring
monuments and heroic makers. But it is also a false narrative in many
ways, rarely acknowledging the personal failures and disappointments of
architects. In Bleak Houses, Timothy Brittain-Catlin investigates
the underside of architecture, the stories of losers and unfulfillment
often ignored by an architectural criticism that values novelty, fame,
and virility over fallibility and rejection. Brittain-Catlin tells us
about Cecil Corwin, for example, Frank Lloyd Wright's friend and
professional partner, who was so overwhelmed by Wright's genius that he
had to stop designing; about architects whose surviving buildings are
marooned and mutilated; and about others who suffered variously from bad
temper, exile, lack of talent, lack of documentation, the wrong
friends, or being out of fashion. As architectural criticism promotes
increasingly narrow values, dismissing certain styles wholesale and
subjecting buildings to a Victorian litmus test of "real" versus "fake,"
Brittain-Catlin explains the effect that this superficial criticality
has had not only on architectural discourse but on the quality of
buildings. The fact that most buildings receive no critical scrutiny at
all has resulted in vast stretches of ugly modern housing and a
pervasive public illiteracy about architecture.
