The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories

by Edward Hollis

  The buildings described in this book shapeshift from century to century, so the traditional chronologies of style that order architectural history are useless here. Instead, if there is an overarching structure to the sequence of stories, it derives from the ways in which attitudes toward architectural alteration have changed over time. The Visigoth, the medieval monk, and the modern archaeologist have all stood in front of the same classical building with wildly divergent proposals for its future, ranging from a good sacking to iconoclastic exorcism to careful excavation; each one of these approaches represents a commentary, if not necessarily an improvement, upon the attitude it has inherited.

  All histories are in some sense commentaries on their predecessors, and acts of architectural alteration—those sackings, exorcisms, and excavations—can be seen as critiques, in built form, of the buildings they alter. “Anyone can be creative,” Bertolt Brecht once said; “it’s rewriting other people that’s a challenge.” Every performance of every play or piece of music is a reinterpretation, a rereading and rewriting of a script or score, and these performances take place without any of the anxiety we associate with the alteration of existing buildings. Musicians and actors are regarded as creative heroes without ever having had to produce a new work from scratch. It is accepted that their interpretations of Bach or Brecht are as valid a contribution to our culture as any original composition.

  There are analogies here to the alteration of existing buildings.

  The problems that face early music ensembles or “period” performances of Shakespeare, for example, are very similar to those that faced the preservationists of the nineteenth century. Meanwhile, “modern” performances, from Karajan’s renditions of Beethoven to Hollywood reinterpretations of Jane Austen, may be compared to the operations of a Renaissance architect trying to translate a Gothic church into the classical idiom.

  It might be objected that the difference between architecture and literature or music is that while scripts and scores exist independently of performances, buildings are not independent of the alterations wrought upon them. These are always irreversible and can therefore destroy their “hosts” in a way that dramatic or musical productions of a classic work cannot. But there is one field in which the performance and the thing performed are inseparable: the oral tradition. If a story is not written down, the only script that exists for the next performance is the previous telling. This means that the development of every tale is iterative; each retelling sets the conditions for the next, and stories from The Iliad to “Little Red Riding Hood” were both preserved and altered by countless narrators until they arrived on the written page. The classic case is the story of Cinderella, which first appears in the European written record in the Middle Ages. The glass slipper on which much of the plot turns is made of gold in German and is a rubber galosh in Russian. In the German telling of the tale, the ugly sisters even cut off their toes to fit their feet into the slipper and spatter it with their blood. There is a ninth-century Chinese telling of the tale in which the fairy godmother is a fish and the palace ball a village fete; but Cinderella is still Cinderella all the same.

  Buildings are less portable than stories, but there are significant parallels between their modes of transmission. As Christopher Alexander observed, “No building is ever perfect. Each building, when it is first built, is an attempt to make a self-maintaining whole configuration. But the predictions are invariably wrong. People use buildings differently from the way they thought they would.” Accordingly, people have to make changes in order to maintain the fit between a structure and the events that take place in it. Each time this happens to a building “we assume we are going to transform it, that new wholes will be born, that, indeed, the entire whole which is being repaired will become a different whole as a result.” Each alteration is a “retelling” of the building as it exists at a particular time—and when the changes are complete it becomes the existing building for the next retelling. In this way the life of the building is both perpetuated and transformed by the repeated act of alteration and reuse.

  This is exactly how stories are transmitted from generation to generation. Preserved and remade again and again, the buildings whose secret lives are recounted here have undergone metamorphoses that have the character of fairy tales or myths. The story of the transformation of the Berlin Wall into precious relics always makes me think of Rumpelstiltskin’s captive, trying to spin straw into gold, while the tale of the Wondrous Flitting of the Holy House of Loreto always provokes the question: “but what actually happened?”

  I do not know what actually happened, and to answer such a question would be as useful as identifying the real Little Red Riding Hood. It is not the purpose of this book to deconstruct the stories (or the buildings) we have inherited from our forebears, but to narrate them, so that others can do the same in the future. Stories are like gifts; they must be accepted without skepticism and shared with others.

  For stories and for buildings alike, incremental change has been the paradoxical mechanism of their preservation. Not one of the buildings whose secret lives are recounted here has lost anything by having been transformed. Instead, they have endured in a way that they would never have done if no one had ever altered them. Architecture is all too often imagined as if buildings do not—and should not—change. But change they do, and have always done. Buildings are gifts, and because they are, we must pass them on.

  The Parthenon, Athens

  In Which a Virgin Is Ruined

  THE DESTRUCTION OF THE GRAND MOSQUE OF ATHENS

  Drawing by Giacomo Verneda, in Francesco Fanelli, Atina Attica (1707).

  RUIN

  The Parthenon is the architect’s dream. It is perfect. It is what architecture was, is, and should be.

  Or so they say. To Pericles, under whose aegis it was built, the Parthenon symbolized an Athens that was “the school of Hellas,” while Thucydides, who opposed its construction, commented that the Parthenon would cause future ages to imagine that Athens was a far greater civilization than it had ever been. Thucydides was closer to the mark, for Athens became the school not only of Hellas but of the whole Western world, and the Parthenon has been the model of architecture ever since.

  Just as Vitruvius prescribed, the Parthenon holds commodity, firmness, and delight in perfect balance. The Parthenon is beautiful in the Renaissance sense: nothing may be added to it, or taken away, but for the worse. For the dilettanti who visited it in the eighteenth century, the Parthenon was the model for all civilized art; for the citizens of the new nation who stood before it in 1837, the Parthenon was the symbol of Grecian liberty. The French architect Viollet-le-Duc described it as the perfect expression of its own construction, and Le Corbusier compared its refinements to the exhilarating styling of sports cars, calling it “architecture, pure creation of the mind.”

  There are Parthenons everywhere. There is one in Nashville, Tennessee, constructed for an exposition of the arts and industry in 1897, and another one by the banks of the Danube, near Regensburg. The High Court of Sri Lanka is lent an air of gravitas by the expedient of attaching a Parthenon to it as a porch, while Edinburgh College of Art in Scotland was designed to house casts of the sculptures that once adorned the Greek temple. Everywhere it appears, the Parthenon is used to symbolize art and civilization, liberty and eternal fame.

  The Parthenon is what architecture is, and should be; but the perfect Parthenons of architecture have been conjured from a heap of broken stones that are anything but perfect. The Platonic philosophers of ancient Athens would have argued that the Acropolis was crowned by a maimed relic from the very beginning: that the physical Parthenon could never be more than a dim shadow of an ideal temple, which exists only in the mind’s eye. Today, then, this model of architecture is but a phantom of a shadow of an idea: a ruin.

  CIRCA 460

  ONCE UPON A TIME, a philosopher of Athens had a dream. As Proclus slept in his little house below the Acropolis, a goddess armed with a shiel
d and spear appeared to him. “Make your house ready,” she said. “They have turned me out of my temple.”

  Proclus knew exactly who she was, for he had spent his life waiting for her. Every day he would take his students up to the hill above his house, where he would show them the goddess and her temple, and he would tell them stories about the marble figures that were carved across the building.

  He would point up at the figures in the eastern gable of the temple. These figures showed the birth of the goddess Athene, he would say, for Athene was not conceived of a womb but sprang from her father’s head, fully armed, when the god Hephaestus split it open with an ax. Because Athene was not born of a sexual union, she vowed to abstain from such congress, and for this reason she was called Parthenos, which means “virgin.” But Hephaestus, who had given her being with his ax, attempted to ravish Athene. He was so excited that his seed made it no farther than her thigh. Disgusted, she wiped it off and threw it on the ground of the Acropolis, from which sprang a monster, half man and half snake. Athene raised this creature as her son, and he became Erichthonius, the first king of Athens.

  Then Proclus would take his students to the western pediment, where a man and a woman stood in opposition, their antagonism frozen in marble. Once upon a time, he would say, Athene was in dispute with her uncle Poseidon, the god of the sea, since both of them claimed the Acropolis for their own. The wise people who lived there suggested to the gods that the dispute could be settled quite simply. “Give us gifts,” they said, “and the one whose gift we accept shall be our god.”

  Poseidon roared his assent, and he plunged his trident into the Acropolis. The earth shook, and a spring of seawater issued forth from the rock. Athene was quiet. She bent over the ground and planted a seedling. “Wait,” she said. And from that seedling, which was the first olive tree, issued forth oil, and food, and timber, and tinder, and all manner of useful things.

  And the people of the Acropolis, being wise, chose the gift of Athene and dedicated their city to her. Under Athene, the Athenians developed a passion for wisdom. Philosophers disputed and taught in an unbroken chain from Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Zeno all the way down to Proclus himself; and the grove of the Academy and the stoas of the marketplace gave their very names to concepts of learning and conduct. Sophocles, Euripides, and Aeschylus wrote their sublime tragedies for the theater of Athens, while Aristides and Demosthenes perfected the art of rhetoric in its assembly, and Thucydides recorded their acts in his immortal history of the Peloponnesian wars. In the bright morning of civilization, the Athenians both invented and perfected all the arts: rhetoric, politics, philosophy, drama, history, sculpture, painting, and architecture, and in doing so made their city “the school of all Hellas.”

  It was their leader, Pericles, who persuaded the Athenians to set their achievements in marble and to build a magnificent temple to Athene, so that her holy wisdom might be apprehended by the eye as well as the soul, the mind, and the ear. The temple was, like any other shrine, just a darkened chamber surrounded by a colonnade; but it possessed a splendor that set it apart from its rivals and predecessors. This splendor had nothing to do with size or expense. Rather, it resided in the proportion and the refinement of the architecture of the building, whose stones possessed the same undying youth and strength as the carved bodies that adorned it. There was not a single straight line in the Temple of Wisdom. The platform upon which it stood was built very slightly convex, so that it seemed to push upward from the earth. The columns of the peristyle were not simple cylinders, but were wider at the bottom than at the top, and subtly curved, as if they were flexing to support the architrave and the roof above them. They also leaned inward toward one another, so that if each column were extended upward it would meet all the others several miles above the center of the temple. The building was not even symmetrical, but tilted slightly toward the south, so that it might appear more imposing from the plain below the ramparts of the Acropolis.

  The Temple of Wisdom was no mere building. The columns that

  surrounded the inner sanctum were as vigorous and as beautifully proportioned as gods or heroes. Arranged in a phalanx guarding the goddess within, they were in such perfect harmony with one another that it might be said that they were themselves one body: that of the virgin Athene herself. And because the temple was the body of a divine virgin, it never aged. The historian Plutarch saw it some five hundred years after it had been built, yet even then he was moved to write, “There is a sort of bloom of newness upon these works . . . preserving them from the touch of time, as if they had some perennial spirit and undying vitality mingled in the composition of them.”

  After he had shown his students the outside of the building, Proclus would lead them into the interior, which was known as the hekatompedon—the “hundred footer” shrine. Therein stood an image of Athene, over eighteen feet tall, made of gold and ivory. She wore a helmet, and brandished a shield and a spear, and held a winged figure of Victory in her hands.

  This image of Athene, Proclus would say, was wrought by the sculptor Phidias, who was the friend of Pericles. One might imagine that, when he had finished it, he would have been honored by the Athenians for his artistry. But instead they accused him of stealing gold from the statue. He was flung into prison, where not even his friendship with Pericles could save him, and there he died. And so Athene was ravished a second time by the very man who had made her.

  After he had taken them inside the temple, Proclus would bring his students outside again and show them the sculpted frieze that ran around the outer walls of the inner sanctum. This frieze depicted a procession of horsemen, officials with their staffs, and women bearing jars of water and oil. At the head of this procession was a child holding up a folded gown.

  Once upon a time, Proclus said, a Macedonian warlord named Demetrius Poliorcetes—“the besieger of cities”—became the king of Athens. In order to honor him, the Athenians wove a great gown and embroidered it with scenes of all his victories. In accordance with annual custom, this gown was ceremonially carried in a procession to the Athene of Phidias. It was woven, like all the other gowns before it, by a group of young virgin women—the parthenoi—who inhabited their own space in the rear of the temple, a room that was named after

  them and the goddess they served. Now, since they had no royal palace to give him, the Athenians invited Demetrius to take up residence in this parthenon, the room of the virgins, so that he could be close to the goddess who now wore the gown decorated with his triumphs.

  But Demetrius was a barbarian despot who had at least four wives, countless mistresses, and a sexual appetite so voracious it was said that one young man jumped to his death in a cauldron of boiling water in order to escape his advances. And Demetrius’s gown, embroidered with his own image, turned out to be a dubious gift with a blasphemous price. You can imagine the way he had with the weaving virgins and their unfortunate goddess. Demetrius didn’t last long. His rival Lachares seized Athens from him and took up residence in the sanctuary of Athene; he stripped her image of its gold and cut it up in order to pay his barbarous soldiers.

  Athene had been ravished many times, said Proclus, but somehow she remained the virgin goddess, enshrined in her virgin temple, perfect, beautiful, and unchanging. In the nine hundred years since it had first been built, the temple itself had acquired the name of her virginity: the Parthenon. The Romans, the Herulians, and the Visigoths had done many terrible things, Proclus said. They had reduced Athens to ashes, had enslaved her citizens, and had carried off many treasures, but they had left the Parthenon intact. The Roman emperor Nero was so captivated by the beauty of the temple that he adorned it with his name in bronze letters, and Alexander the Great gave the temple three hundred Persian shields in recompense for the three hundred Hellenes who had fallen at Thermopylae. “May it ever remain so,” Proclus would say; and he would conclude his lesson and return to his little house on the southern slope of the Acropolis, where he would meditate on t
he inviolate wisdom of Athene.

  Then, in the year of Our Lord 391, Theodosius, the emperor of Constantinople, sent a proclamation throughout his empire: “No one is to go to the sanctuaries, walk through the temples, or raise his eyes to statues created by the labour of man.” He had the festival days of the old pagan gods declared as workdays, and the doors of the temples closed.

  The Christians took possession of the Temple of Wisdom, and they turned it into a church. The parthenon, the room of the virgins at the back of the building, became the front porch, and the hekatompedon the nave of the church. They blocked up the door to the hekatompedon and placed their altar there, and they opened a new door where Phidias’s image of Athene had been, so that the faithful who entered the church now shook the dust off their sandals onto the pavement where the goddess had stood. The temple, whose doors had opened to the east so that the light of the rising sun would come through its doors, now faced in the opposite direction, so that the altar of the Christians faced the dawn. In a final irony, the Christians named their new church Hagia Sophia, or Holy Wisdom.