Until his retirement in 2011 Robert Harbison was Professor of Architecture at London Metropolitan University. He is also the author of Reflections on Baroque (Reaktion, 2000) and Travels in the History of Architecture (Reaktion, 2010).
"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"
"Teeming study of the aesthetics and reality of ruins. . . .
Harbison is well placed to explore these dilapidated cultural
precincts. . . . Harbison's wide-ranging meditation on the allure
of decline and decay is an erudite addition to the literature."
-- "Architecture Toay"
"There is a beauty in the symmetry between Harbison's 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 . . . Harbison's books . . . consistently provide brief,
fragmentary glimmers of hope."-- "New Yorker"
"An extended meditation on disruption and discontinuity in
(largely) Western culture, on fractures, on remembering and
forgetting what we have lost, and on the 'rough edges' of our
cultural world, from architecture to literature." "Harbison proves
a keen observer of the paradoxes of reconstruction."--Mary Beard
"Times Literary Supplement"
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