Ruins and Fragments

Robert Harbison is former Professor of Architecture at London Metropolitan University. He is the author of many books including Eccentric Spaces (1977), The Built, the Unbuilt and the Unbuildable (1991), Reflections on Baroque (Reaktion, 2000), Travels in the History of Architecture (Reaktion, 2010) and Ruins and Fragments: Tales of Loss and Rediscovery (Reaktion, 2015).

"This is a splendid book . . . Ruins and Fragments is a thoughtful, stimulating and contemplative study of the fragmentary nature of our environment . . . Its informed and opinionated text challenges the established dogmas of approaching a ruin and is dismissive of the sanctimonious certitude of self-righteous interferers . . . This is an essential text for all those responsible for ruins and fragments. Let us hope it saves some architects from ruining a ruin." - RIBA Journal"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, Books of the Year"[a] teeming study of the aesthetics and reality of ruins . . . Harbison is well placed to explore these dilapidated cultural precincts . . . Robert Harbison&#39s wide-ranging meditation on the allure of decline and decay is an erudite addition to the literature." - Architecture Today"there is a beauty in the symmetry between Harbisons 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 . . . Harbisons books . . . consistently provide brief, fragmentary glimmers of hope." - The New Yorker"Harbison has been chipping meticulously away at the intersection between architecture and performance, between style and intention, and potential and ruin, for his entire career. Ruins is not an easy book but its a rewarding one. The reader who sees the point of what hes trying to do will find it a finely turned spur to thought, whether its about Parisian galleries, Finnegans Wake, Montaigne, the Iliad, Detroit and the many other fragments we shore, not against our ruin, but as the very foundations of the postmodern world." - The Spectator"Harbison has a sharp eye for the neglected. He produces his own modernist ruin, almost to match Pruitt-Igoe (St. Peters Seminary, Cardross, in Scotland, designed in the late 1950s for a Catholic community, abandoned, then restored in the 1980s, now crumbling, covered in graffiti and desolate) and he brings to life the left-over bits of marble that went into the making of the crazy-paving paths that were laid on the Athenian Acropolis in the 1950s which every tourist walks over but few notice. There is rich store of beguiling prose too, including wonderfully lyrical celebration of the industrial wasteland of Deptford Creek (main landmark: abandoned supermarket trolleys). Cities thrive, he reflects, when remembering their unbeautiful roots in dirty industry and pungent compost of past lives." - TLS"The 20th Century is commonly thought of as a period obsessed with novelty and committed to destroying the past, but this book presents a history of modernity constructed in the light of ruins and fragments. It looks at architecture but also at art and literature, all interwoven in a composition of parts, visions, and also anecdotes alike only in that they belong to the same time and context: entropy, that is, disorder and annihilation. The author pulls on several guiding threads (the modern ruin, interrupted texts, destruction), stitching together a selection of authors and works he subjects to a discourse both alluring and poetic" - Arquitectura Viva"Ruins and Fragments is a wonderfully alluring poem of absence: it weaves together such diverse strands as the language of Finnigans Wake, the montage of Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, the aggressions of analytical Cubism and the reconstruction of the Warsaw Market Square into an enticing panorama of our perplexing times." - Joseph Rykwert, author of The Judicious Eye, The Seduction of Place and The Idea of a Town"A marvelous story-teller and shorer of fragments, Robert Harbison surveys the destiny of ruins from Oxyrynchus to the films of Ozu, to Phimai and beyond. Yet his underlying concern remains the aftermath of war, cruelty, suffering the perpetual assault of human folly upon human constructions and the history of our often poorly conceived attempts to rebuild. Harbison has composed a spell-binding meditation on the inevitability of fragmentation and dispersal." - Susan Stewart, Avalon Foundation University Professor of the Humanities and Director, Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts"An extended meditation on human incompleteness, and, like true meditation, transcending its subject." - Paul Lyons, author of The Eden Man