Allure of the Incomplete, Imperfect, and Impermanent

Rumiko Handa is Professor of Architecture at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA. She holds a Ph.D. in Architectural Theory from the University of Pennsylvania and a B.Arch. from the University of Tokyo. Her writings have appeared in: Interiors: Design, Architecture, Culture; The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians; Preservation Education & Research; The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America; Design Studies, etc. She co-edited Conjuring the Real: The Role of Architecture in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Fiction.

• Introduction Part 1: Problematic Notion of Complete, Perfect, and Permanent Architecture 1. Mutability of Architecture 2. Authorial Authority 3. Alienation from the Everyday Part 2: Allure of the Incomplete, Imperfect, and Impermanent 4. The Incomplete – Synecdoche 5. The Impermanent – Palimpsest 6. The Imperfect – Wabi Part 3: Articulating the Properties of Engagement 7. Appreciating Architecture as Nature 8. Representing Incomplete, Imperfect, and Impermanent Architecture Conclusion Bibliography Index

‘Readers of this book will be introduced to a rather rare sort of intellectual honesty together with an author’s concern for the concrete reality of architectural works. Rumiko Handa exposes and then overcomes the current tendency to view the building that exists in fact as equivalent to the one that exists in the mind: all-of-a-piece, flawless, and lasting. Examples from both Western and Asian architecture are adduced to provide persuasive revisions of concepts of authorship, longevity, and the building’s participation in the natural world. Offering a new sense of architecture’s endings, this book allows us to imagine new beginnings.’ - David Leatherbarrow, University of Pennsylvania