Reflections on Baroque

From its beginnings in the seventeenth century, the eccentric and tumultuous forms of the Baroque spread across not only Europe but colonial Latin America and Asia as well. With Reflections on Baroque, Robert Harbison brings together discussions of aesthetics, science, mysticism, politics, religion, and culture to offer a surprising reinterpretations of the baroque style and its influences and echoes into the twentieth century.

Arts & Photography

HARBISON, Robert

History & Criticism

University of Chicago Press

From its beginnings in the seventeenth century, the eccentric and tumultuous forms of the Baroque spread across not only Europe but colonial Latin America and Asia as well. With Reflections on Baroque, Robert Harbison brings together discussions of aesthetics, science, mysticism, politics, religion, and culture to offer a surprising reinterpretations of the baroque style and its influences and echoes into the twentieth century.

The subject is the human imagination—and the mysterious interplay between the imagination and the spaces it has made for itself to live in: gardens, rooms, buildings, streets, museums and maps, fictional topographies, and architectures. The book is a lesson in seeing and sensing the manifold forms created by the mind for its own pleasure.Like all of Robert Harbison's works, Eccentric Spaces is a hybrid, informed by the author's interests in art, architecture, fiction, poetry, landscape, geography, history, and philosophy. The subject is the human imagination -- and the mysterious interplay between the imagination and the spaces it has made for itself to live in: gardens, rooms, buildings, streets, museums and maps, fictional topographies, and architectures. The book is a lesson in seeing and sensing the manifold forms created by the mind for its own pleasure.Palaces and haunted houses, Victorian parlors, Renaissance sculpture gardens, factories, hill-towns, ruins, cities, even novels and paintings constructed around such environments -- these are the spaces over which the author broods. Brilliantly learned, deliberately remote in form from conventional scholarship, Eccentric Spaces is a magical book, an intellectual adventure, a celebration.Since its original publication in 1977, Eccentric Spaces has had a devoted readership. Now it is available to be discovered by a new generation of readers.

Eccentric Spaces

Architecture

Alfred.A. Knopf

. with dustjacket. frt end paper stained, reading copy

Deliberate Regressions

KNOPF

The Shell Guide to English Parish Churches

Travel

Europe

Andre Deutsch Ltd.

Carlton Books, Limited

The pristine, the ruined, the ephemeral, and even the notional are the subject of Robert Harbison's highly original and admittedly romantic contribution to the literature of architecture. His fresh perceptions open this practical art to new interpretations as he explores the means by which buildings, real or imagined, evade or surpass functional necessities while sometimes satisfying them.  What fascinates Harbison in these discussions are the paradoxes and ironies of function that give rise to meaning, to a psychological impact that may or may not have been intended. He chooses examples from an architectural borderland—of gardens, monuments, ideal cities and fortification, ruins, paintings, and unbuildable buildings—where use and symbolism overlap; he examines the exceptions at the edges of a field that will illuminate its center.  Harbison's pursuit of man's efforts to "fashion art from nonhuman life" begins with a consideration of gardens and the organic architecture of the English Arts and Crafts movement and of Gaudi, then turns to monuments (Claes Oldenburg, Christo, the Vietnam Memorial) that are "either the nearest or the furthest thing from gardens." Harbison's discussion of fortification and urban planning leads to metaphorical themes (fort-features in churches or prisons or Fascist municipal buildings) and mocked-up worlds (Williamsburg, Disneyland), and to the subject of fictional space as expressed in ruins, in painting, in the unbuildable, and finally in the inconceivable as revealed in Kafka's sketches.

The Built, the Unbuilt, and the Unbuildable: In Pursuit of Architectural Meaning

Mit Pr

In his latest book, Robert Harbison offers a novel interpretation of what architectural theory might look like. The title, like everything Harbison selects, is not what it seems at first glance. It is neither a misnomer for the book's ten chapters nor a reference to the investigation it contains, but rather an echo of Wallace Stevens's "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." Like the poem, Harbison's work is a composite structure built of oblique meanings and astonishing shifts that add up to an engaging portrait--in this case a portrait of architecture in which use, symbol, and metaphor coexist. The chapter titles indicate Harbison's themes, all of which bear parallel, implied, or tangential relations to architecture: Sculpture, Machines, the Body, Landscape, Models, Ideas, Politics, the Sacred, Subjectivity, and Memory. The journey through the chapters is roughly a journey from the physical to the metaphysical, a journey that is at once poetic, technical, and philosophical. As in his previous books, Harbison examines his subjects with as few preconceptions as possible, taking familiar concepts and stripping away all associations until they become strange, producing ideas that are refreshing and new for architecture. Again as in his previous books, Harbison has produced a visually stirring text with minimal illustrations, implying the superiority of language over image. His narrative moves rapidly between different centuries, between the center and the edge, between buildings and things that resemble buildings in one or more ways--dioramas, paintings, natural formations, and human institutions. The book straddles the ground between the intellect and the senses, leading the reader beyond the realm of theory and practice into the universe of the imagination, where "space" is experienced as something touched, seen, and thought. The Graham Foundation/MIT Press Series in Contemporary Architectural Discourse

Thirteen Ways: Theoretical Investigations in Architecture (Graham Foundation/Mit Press Series in Contemporary Architectural Discourse)

The pristine, the ruined, the ephemeral, and even the notional are the subject of Robert Harbison's highly original and admittedly romantic contribution to the literature of architecture. His fresh perceptions open this practical art to new interpretations as he explores the means by which buildings, real or imagined, evade or surpass functional necessities while sometimes satisfying them. What fascinates Harbison in these discussions are the paradoxes and ironies of function that give rise to meaning, to a psychological impact that may or may not have been intended. He chooses examples from an architectural borderland - of gardens, monuments, ideal cities and fortification, ruins, paintings, and unbuildable buildings -where use and symbolism overlap; he examines the exceptions at the edges of a field that will illuminate its center. Harbison's pursuit of man's efforts to "fashion art from nonhuman life" begins with a consideration of gardens and the organic architecture of the English Arts and Crafts movement and of Gaudi, then turns to monuments (Claes Oldenburg, Christo, the Vietnam Memorial) that are "either the nearest or the furthest thing from gardens." Harbison's discussion of fortification and urban planning leads to metaphorical themes (fort-features in churches or prisons or Fascist municipal buildings) and mocked-up worlds (Williamsburg, Disneyland), and to the subject of fictional space as expressed in ruins, in painting, in the unbuildable, and finally in the inconceivable as revealed in Kafka's sketches.

In this book, Robert Harbison offers a novel interpretation of what architectural theory might look like. The title is an echo of Wallace Stevens's "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." Like the poem, Harbison's work is a composite structure built of oblique meanings and astonishing shifts that add up to an engaging portrait―in this case a portrait of architecture in which use, symbol, and metaphor coexist.The chapter titles indicate Harbison's themes, all of which bear parallel, implied, or tangential relations to architecture: Sculpture, Machines, the Body, Landscape, Models, Ideas, Politics, the Sacred, Subjectivity, and Memory. The journey through the chapters is roughly a journey from the physical to the metaphysical, a journey that is at once poetic, technical, and philosophical. Harbison examines his subjects with as few preconceptions as possible, taking familiar concepts and stripping away all associations until they become strange, producing ideas that are refreshing and new for architecture. The book straddles the ground between the intellect and the senses, leading the reader beyond the realm of theory and practice into the universe of the imagination, where "space" is experienced as something touched, seen, and thought.

Thirteen Ways: Theoretical Investigations in Architecture

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by HARBISON, Robert. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by HARBISON, Robert

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by HARBISON, Robert. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Reflections on Baroque

Reflections on Baroque

Eccentric Spaces

Deliberate Regressions

The Shell Guide to English Parish Churches

The Shell Guide to English Parish Churches

The Built, the Unbuilt, and the Unbuildable: In Pursuit of Architectural Meaning

Thirteen Ways: Theoretical Investigations in Architecture (Graham Foundation/Mit Press Series in Contemporary Architectural Discourse)

The Built, the Unbuilt, and the Unbuildable: In Pursuit of Architectural Meaning

Thirteen Ways: Theoretical Investigations in Architecture