Robert Harbison’s wide-ranging meditation on the allure of decline and decay is an erudite addition to the literature, says Brian Dillon
“What is it in the air of the present that makes us suspicious of works or histories that are too smooth, too continuous?” Thus Robert Harbison in his teeming study of the aesthetics and reality of ruins. The question could have been asked any time in the past three centuries, such are the abiding attractions of discontinuity and decay.
‘Ruins and Fragments’ seems to prove the point, essaying a digressive journey among historical landmarks: the sublime and picturesque of the eighteenth century, the archaeological imagination of the nineteenth, the way Modernist art and architecture embraced the vacant form of the ruin, then fell themselves into desuetude. Still, Harbison is correct to cast his question as a pressing one. Ruins have been having an elongated moment, and ‘Ruins and Fragments’ is an erudite addition to the literature.
St Peter’s Seminary, Cardross.
Harbison is well placed to explore these dilapidated cultural precincts; his ‘Eccentric Spaces’ (1977) remains an essential guide to uncanny architecture: grottoes, follies, imaginary dwellings and buildings in diverse states of collapse.
But as in earlier books, Harbison doesn’t restrict himself to architecture. ‘Ruins and Fragments’ canvasses many examples from art and film: Kurt Schwitters’s rambling Merzbau, Gordon Matta-Clark’s interventions into derelict buildings, the montages of Eisenstein and Vertov. Literature provides Harbison with suggestive cases: from Robert Burton’s ragged, rhapsodic ‘Anatomy of Melancholy’, through the labyrinthine metafiction of ‘Tristram Shandy’, to the “collage of exhausted verbiage” in ‘Ulysses’. In a fascinating section on Coleridge, he notes the way fragmented or unfinished works often allegorize their own ruination; they’re frequently more designed and knowing than they let on.
“The currently precarious Brutalist estates of London are part of a ruinous continuum with a neolithic village in the Orkney Islands”
When it comes to actual buildings and places, ‘Ruins and Fragments’ is richly stocked. Harbison moves easily between historical periods. The currently precarious Brutalist estates of London, which he has only lately come to appreciate, are part of a ruinous continuum with a neolithic village in the Orkney Islands, a zen rock-and-sand garden in Kyoto, the archaeological fantasia of Sir John Soane’s house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields: “a temple, a scholar’s hideout, a convent and a necropolis all at once”. In fact, historical vagrancy is part of the point; Harbison is excellent on in-between states: the partial renewal by David Chipperfield of the Neues Museum in Berlin, postwar reconstruction of Warsaw’s Old Town, and the cod-medievalism of the Cloisters in New York.
Section of the Battle of the Gods and Giants from Pergamon, now in Berlin.
So filled is ‘Ruins and Fragments’ with resonant instances of ruination that it’s possible to wish Harbison had spent more time exploring specific structures and locales. Crumbling modern relics such as St Peter’s Seminary near Glasgow, and the pre-radar concrete ‘sound mirrors’ at Dungeness are dispatched in a page or two, so that it’s not even clear this intellectually vagrant writer has been there – this is a great shame, as elsewhere Harbison has proven himself a keen, engaging, almost-personal essayist when it comes to recounting his eccentric excursions. With the present book, it’s also not clear that the rapid turnover of examples amounts to an overarching argument in response to the question regarding our present ruin-lust with which Harbison began. But the form of the book is perhaps its own argument: here is a topic that by definition resists straight chronologies and strict conclusions, and Harbison has written a suitably fractured survey of its strewn and stony landscape.
‘Ruins and Fragments: Tales of Loss and Rediscovery’
Reaktion Books, 208pp, £20
