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    Fragments: Architecture and The Unfinished. Essays Presented To Robin Middleton

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    This book is a collection of essays honoring Robin Middleton, an architectural scholar. It is divided into five sections focused on different aspects of fragments in architecture. The essays examine how fragments were used historically, from ruins in antiquity to modernist architects combining fragments into new wholes. They also analyze specific architects like John Soane who incorporated fragments into their designs. The book provides insights into Middleton's academic interests like the role of fragments in Gothic architecture and landscape. An included photographic portrait of Middleton's home further honors his scholarly career.

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    Fragments: Architecture and The Unfinished. Essays Presented To Robin Middleton

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    96 views2 pages
    This book is a collection of essays honoring Robin Middleton, an architectural scholar. It is divided into five sections focused on different aspects of fragments in architecture. The essays examine how fragments were used historically, from ruins in antiquity to modernist architects combining fragments into new wholes. They also analyze specific architects like John Soane who incorporated fragments into their designs. The book provides insights into Middleton's academic interests like the role of fragments in Gothic architecture and landscape. An included photographic portrait of Middleton's home further honors his scholarly career.

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    This book is a collection of essays honoring Robin Middleton, an architectural scholar. It is divided into five sections focused on different aspects of fragments in architecture. The essays examine how fragments were used historically, from ruins in antiquity to modernist architects combining fragments into new wholes. They also analyze specific architects like John Soane who incorporated fragments into their designs. The book provides insights into Middleton's academic interests like the role of fragments in Gothic architecture and landscape. An included photographic portrait of Middleton's home further honors his scholarly career.

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    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
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    96 views2 pages

    Fragments: Architecture and The Unfinished. Essays Presented To Robin Middleton

    Uploaded by

    c
    This book is a collection of essays honoring Robin Middleton, an architectural scholar. It is divided into five sections focused on different aspects of fragments in architecture. The essays examine how fragments were used historically, from ruins in antiquity to modernist architects combining fragments into new wholes. They also analyze specific architects like John Soane who incorporated fragments into their designs. The book provides insights into Middleton's academic interests like the role of fragments in Gothic architecture and landscape. An included photographic portrait of Middleton's home further honors his scholarly career.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
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    of 2

    bookshelf and white cube bookshelf and white cube

    Book Reviews Book Reviews

    Barry Bergdoll, Werner Oechslin, editors


    Fragments: Architecture and the Unfinished. Essays Presented to Robin Middleton
    London: Thames & Hudson, 2006, 392 pp., 25 color + 25 b/w illus., £38.00
    isbn–13: 978-0-500-34214-5, isbn–10: 0-500-34214-8

    In the modern era, architects wanted to give ideal form to society as a whole, and
    their proposals were aimed at forever changing everything from chair to town.
    But they were also eager to produce examples of new forms wherever the possibility
    occurred, whatever small fragment of the vision was possible. Towards the end
    of the modern era, the dream of wholeness and finality was shattered, and in the
    postmodern era the “unfinished and the fragment” became positive connotations
    and even goals in themselves.

    In short, “…fragments may be construed in both negative and positive ways: as


    remnants of achievements and a plentitude that is irrevocably lost, or as elements
    of a restorative power that can provide symbolic and poetic meaning to newly
    constituted wholes.” With this statement by Robin Middleton from 2002, Barry
    Bergdoll opens his introduction to the festschrift honoring the South
    African scholar whose career as a teacher and librarian unfolded between
    London, Cambridge and New York. The book is divided into five parts and a
    bibliography of Middleton’s writings, 1959–2005.

    Part 1 is devoted to “Theories of the Fragment.” Peter Carl tries to capture the
    idea of fragment and the danger of fragmentation by examining the way Daniel
    Libeskind (referring to Benjamin) starts designing by looking for fragments as
    distant as possible from each other. This attempt to reunite fragments into a
    (design) field is coupled with Aristotle’s use of the particular and the universal.
    Accepting fragments as a way in which catastrophe constructs renewal is demon-
    strated by Paul Valéry’s reading of the poem “Un Coup de Dès” by Mallarmé.
    This leads to the way Le Corbusier tried to combine the fragmented chaos of the
    world into the order of his iconostasis sketched in lines and words in his “Poème
    de l’angle droit” (1955), thus constructing a veil between daily experience and trans
    cendent abstraction. Even more complicated and particular is the chapter, “LA
    coi RELama-pré-fer en sac-OSE-deux Sa-fine S aid SONEC–LA” by Philippe Duboy.

    34 eahn newsletter Nº1/07 35 eahn newsletter Nº1/07


    bookshelf and white cube bookshelf and white cube
    Book Reviews Book Reviews

    Dalibor Vesely’s contribution can be read as a second introduction, starting with Part 5 is entitled “Modernity and the Fragment,” but almost all contributions
    the Middle Ages and its use of spolia (spoils) as a way to create continuity by concentrate on classic modernists: Mary McLeod on Le Corbusier, Neil Levine
    active use of fragments, through the origins of the modern fragment in which the on Louis Kahn, Alan Powers on Ernö Goldfinger and Kenneth Frampton on Carlo
    historical role of ruins and the design of artificial ruins evokes the Sublime but Scarpa. The only exception is Sylvia Lavin, whose text and subject are as post-
    also, in contrast, stimulates a new search for wholeness. The hope of achieving modern as it can get: “Twelve Heads Are Better Than One,” about the sculpted
    this completeness flickers for the last time in the Gesamtkunstwerk. horseheads in the oeuvre of Frank Gehry.

    Sometimes this longing for wholeness leads to finishing a project ages How much a love of fragmentation, collage, and hide-and-seek is a central part
    after the architect left the fragments of his vision, as Ian Gow demonstrates in not only of Middleton’s research but also of his life is demonstrated by Perry
    his “Fragmenting Adam’s Charlotte Square, Edinburgh.” But even in elegantly Ogden’s photographs of his dwelling/study in Manhattan’s Tribeca neighborhood.
    finished interiors such as those Robert Adam was famous for, “Discord and Middleton lived there from 1994 until 2002, and the visual record in the heart of
    Dissonance” could seep in, as Eileen Harris tells us. The hero of Part 2 about the book is all that remains of this intriguing environment.
    “Fragments in British Architectural History,” however, is certainly John Soane,
    who appears in the other three articles of this section, and is the master of a Rob Dettingmeijer
    sublime play with the fragments of our memory of the grandeur of antiquity. Universiteit Utrecht
    It is a pity that the monograph on the illustrator of Soane’s vision, Joseph Gandy,
    was published too late to be taken into consideration by the three authors.

    It is interesting to see that the theme of Gothic plays a far more important role in
    the contributions in Part 3, “Fragments of Continental Practices.” Contributions
    range from Werner Oechslin’s “Janus-head Figure of Greek-Gothic…” to Richard
    Wittman’s tale of “A Fictive Debate on Notre-Dame in the Journal de Paris in
    1780.”

    Part 4, “Landscape as Fragment,” is itself the most fragmentary and starts with
    “Natural Histories and Sylvan Aesthetics from Bacon to Evelyn” by Vittoria Di
    Palma and ends with Jean Michel Massing’s “From Dutch Brazil to the West Indies:
    The Paper Image of the Ideal Sugar Plantation,” which could hardly be even a
    fragment in an ideal society, since it was only conceivable when based on the hard
    labor of slaves.

    36 eahn newsletter Nº1/07 37 eahn newsletter Nº1/07

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