Ruins and fragments
Subtitle: tales of loss and rediscovery
By: Robert Harbison
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Published: 2015
Language: eng
Number of pages: 272
ISBN-13: 9781780234472
Subjects: Ruins in literature; Classical antiquities in literature; Ruins in motion pictures; Classical antiquities in art; Ruined buildings; Antiquities; Ruins in art
Description: For many of us, ruins are alluring, puzzling and endlessly fascinating: this elegant book seeks to explore why. What is it that makes us suspicious of works or histories that are too smooth, too continuous? Is it that urban experience is inherently discontinuous and fragmented, or that the only truths we can believe are partial ones? This book guides us through ancient and modern worlds, sharing tales of loss, recovery and rediscovery. Beginning with ancient fragments, this book recounts how later history has recuperated, restored and exhibited them, and even how ruins have been found in unlikely places - such as a Hellenistic fragment from Pergamon located in remote Nottinghamshire. It considers modernist architecture's fragmentary effects, and how concrete made some buildings look prematurely ruined. It also explores architecture that has worked with ruins, from the Castelvecchio in Verona to the reconstruction of the Neues Museum in Berlin. In literature, from T.S. Eliot to Laurence Sterne, writers revel in fragments and create anew from literary rubble. Some people deliberately construct or destroy to create ruin, Gordon Matta-Clark attacking buildings, for example, or dispossessed youth scribbling graffiti.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: 1. Rough Edges; title: 2. Fragmented Wholes; title: 3. Modernist Ruin; title: 4. Interrupted Texts; title: 5. Ruined Narratives; title: 6. Art and Destruction; title: 7. Dreams of Recovery.