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

by Edward Hollis

  This design had been prepared by Pedro Machuca, a painter who had studied in Rome under Raphael; and there was everything Roman about the new palace, and nothing Spanish, let alone Moorish. The proposed Palacio Real was an austere quadrangular block of stone. Its severe geometry, thick walls, and absolute symmetry were of a very different stock from the Alhambra’s airy lattice of columns and domes and pools.

  The child of the latest Italian fashions, the Palacio Real was to be absolutely modern. But those latest fashions were not intended to be something new. The masonry base of the palace and the colonnades that ornamented its principal floor were based on scholarly reconstructions of the residences of ancient Rome. The circular courtyard at the heart of the palace and its mighty gates were derived from disquisitions upon the luxurious villas of Pliny and Cicero. The pediments, columns, cornices, and mythological reliefs that covered its facade were also closely modeled on the antique, in the latest Roman manner.

  The architecture of Italy was described by its practitioners at the time as a Renaissance—a rebirth—of the arts of ancient Rome. This reconstructed architecture was perfectly suited to the purposes of Keiser Karel, who had inherited the offices of antiquity. Just as the emperor appeared in public with the laurel on his brow, so he intended to hold court in a palace that recalled the magnificence of his titles, and thereby deserve the name keiser, césar, caesar. But the laurel wreath was a mask laid over the emperor’s churning jaw; and the new palace was also a mask, an attempt to give the Flemish chieftain and his band of warriors the look of imperial gravitas. And like Keiser Karel himself, the Palacio Real, while it was clearly the heir of ancient Rome, had other, altogether less respectable antecedents.

  The classical decor of the Palacio Real was as correct as it could be, but its layout was quite unlike the airy colonnades and gardens of the palaces of ancient Rome. The elegant principal floor rested upon a fortified base of cyclopean stone blocks with bars on their windows. The gates were large enough to take two men riding abreast, and the courtyard within them was no elegant garden cloister but a yard for the marshaling of ordnance and the reviewing of the guard. For while the mothers of the Palacio Real might have been the palaces of the Roman emperors, its fathers were the palazzi of the Italian cities: gloomy blocks of stone in which rival banking families shut themselves up with their money.

  These intimidating fortresses were entered through strong gates, which were often closed against the rioting mob: gangs of Guelphs or Ghibellines, or the private armies of other families. Behind the gates and the guards were hard courtyards surrounded by stables, workshops, and businesses. There were hardly any external windows at street level, and those that did exist were barred against intruders. The women were kept upstairs, away from filth and away from danger, on the principal floor a level or two above the ground; above that were the attics and garrets where children, maiden aunts, and servants were barracked in cramped obscurity under gigantic cornices that darkened the narrow streets far below. These Italian palaces were vertical fortresses, heirs to the towers of Bologna and San Gimignano, from which rival clans conducted vendettas so violent that their cities were no longer theaters of civilization but arenas of strife.

  And their ancestors were the castles of the Middle Ages—made of heavy stone blocks, bristling with castellations, possessing only arrow slits for windows and portcullises for gates. Their towers were not belvederes for enjoying the cooling breeze but vantage points for archers, places from which boiling oil would be poured and rocks cast down. It was in just such a castle, in Ghent, that Keiser Karel had been born. His Palacio Real, for all the studied Latinity of its decor, was a bastard, an offspring of the bourgeois town houses and barbaric castles of the Middle Ages.

  The Palacio Real towered above the Alhambra. Its high walls cast her intimate courtyards into shadow and obstructed the view of the pale mountains from her delicate miradors. The refined Alhambra of the Moors had been made respectable by means of an arranged marriage with an overbearing partner, and just as in most arranged marriages of the time the two communicated through no more than a chink in the wall that divided them: a darkened passage and a narrow stair.

  Karel and Ysabel stayed in the Alhambra for about six months. They delighted in the Moorish palace and indulged themselves in dreams of classical splendor; but they did not forget that the real purpose of their honeymoon was to produce a legitimate heir to the empires of the Romans and the Roman Catholics, east and west. In December 1526, it was announced that the empress was pregnant. The court doctors were impressed to calculate that she must have conceived during the siesta on a hunting trip. Their work done, the imperial couple reentered the world of political care and intrigue, returning to the empires of which they were the master and mistress.

  KEISER KAREL WAS sorry to leave the Alhambra behind him, for it had seduced him with exotic lures and promises of pleasure. He was loath to abandon building projects that were still unborn, conceived only on paper and in conversation, and he longed to see them completed. Sighing one last sigh for the Alhambra, he thought of the Moor who had done the same before him. “Had I been he, or he been I, I would rather have made this place my sepulcher,” he murmured; and then he turned away. He told himself that he was called to greater things, that it had all been a very happy fantasy, but that it was best for it to come to an end—it would never have worked out anyway. For although Keiser Karel loved the Alhambra, he had never quite worked out how to live in it.

  There was one person who could have told him, for in 1526 the man who should have made the Alhambra his sepulcher was still alive. Boabdil, Abu Abdallah Muhammad, once emir of Granada, was by then a mercenary in northern Africa. The emir could have shown the emperor how to read the palace; for the ornament that covered the Alhambra, which was to Keiser Karel merely a gorgeous tapestry, was in fact pages and pages of instructions. To Abu Abdallah Muhammad, able to read Arabic script, the walls of the Alhambra were poetry and proclamation, warning and holy writ.

  These inscriptions brought the palace into life as they were read or spoken—as if they were secret incantations that might open a door, or show the way, or explain the forgotten purpose of a court or hall. Almost lost in the fretted decoration of the south wall of the Court of Gold, for example, was an inscription that indicated the way into the palace: that wall, it said, was “a gate where the roads bifurcate, and through which the east envies the west.” Below, a verse from the Koran indicated the location of the emir’s divan.

  His throne comprises the heaven and earth;

  The preserving of them oppresses him not;

  He is the all-high, the all-glorious.

  But Keiser Karel could not read the palace, and he did not know what its courts and halls had been for. He sat at his high table in the harem, chewing his food alone, while his wife made her private quarters where once stood the throne of Heaven and Earth.

  The inscriptions explained how the palace had been designed and furnished, and how it might be properly inhabited. In Arabic these inscriptions were known as tiraz, which also refers to the embroidered hems of textiles, and indeed the Alhambra was a palace that was woven and embroidered quite as much as it was built. The antechamber to the Hall of the Ambassadors proclaimed, “I am like a bride in her nuptial attire, endowed with beauty and perfection.” And the court poet Ibn Zamrak wrote to whoever had decorated the Court of the Lions, “With how many fine draperies you have adorned it, whose colourful embroidery makes us forget the brocades of Yemen.”

  At night the Alhambra was lit with low lamps. Koranic verses carved into walls of the Hall of the Ambassadors contrasted its sevenfold dome with the softness of the lanterns that hung below it.

  He is the all-mighty, the all-forgiving, who

  Created the seven heavens above one another . . .

  Thou seest not in the creation

  Of the all-mighty any imperfection.

  Return thy gaze; seest thou any fissure?

  Then return thy gaz
e again, and thy gaze comes

  Back to thee dazzled aweary.

  And we adorned the lower heavens with lamps.

  For the interiors of the Alhambra were gently illuminated, shaded by brocades, and padded with divans and carpets.

  In the time of Abu Abdallah Muhammad, dinner in the Alhambra would have been an affair of couches on the floor furnished with silken bolsters. Reclining, rather than sitting upright, the emir would have been able to peer out through latticed casements into the gardens and the landscape below. Indeed, the verses inscribed into the mirador of the Hall of the Two Sisters encouraged the emir to gaze over the city of Granada laid out below him: “In this garden I am an eye filled with delight, and the pupil of this eye is none other than our Lord . . . In me he looks out from his caliphal throne towards the capital of his entire kingdom.” But Keiser Karel could not read the palace, and he ate alone, trussed up in rough wool and linen and leather, unable to enjoy the view of his kingdom out of the low windows because he was sitting bolt upright at a high table on a high chair on a royal dais.

  The inscriptions that covered the Alhambra not only explained its purpose and its form, but subjected it to magical metamorphoses. The water that trickled from the fountain of the lions was transformed by the court poet Ibn Zamrak into a miraculous substance: “a pearl which adorns the environs with the diffusion of gems; silver melting which flows between jewels one like the other in beauty, white in purity.” Verses written in the Hall of the Two Sisters transformed it into the heavens.

  The hands of the Pleiades will spend the night invoking God’s protection in their favour, and they will awaken to the gentle blowing of the breeze.

  In here is a cupola which by its height becomes lost from sight; beauty in it appears both concealed and visible.

  The constellation of Gemini extends a ready hand to help it, and the full moon of the heavens draws near to whisper secretly to it.

  And the bright stars would like to establish themselves firmly in it rather than continue wandering about in the vault of the sky.

  The palace spoke its meaning to those would read it; but Keiser Karel could not read the palace, and he sat at his high table in the harem, oblivious to the magic of the heavenly vault above him and the fountain before him.

  Finally, besides explaining its function, its adornment, and its meaning, the inscriptions that covered the Alhambra also told its history. The palace was inscribed everywhere with the motto of the Nasrid dynasty that had made it: “No victor but Allah.” Their military triumphs were emblazoned on the walls of the Court of the Myrtles.

  And how many infidel lands did you reach in the morning only to become the arbiter of their lives in the evening!

  You put upon them the yoke of captives so that they appear at your doorstep to build palaces in servitude.

  You conquered Algeciras by the sword, and opened a gate that had been denied to our victory.

  The Nasrid emirs traced themselves all the way back to the adventurer Ibn al Nasr, who seized Granada in the thirteenth century; they also claimed to be able to trace their family all the way back to the companions of the prophet Muhammad himself. But Keiser Karel could not read the Alhambra, and he sat in solitude on his royal dais in the harem, satisfied that the palace was his birthright.

  JUST AS KEISER Karel liked to trace his lineage and his titles back to ancient times, so did the family of Abu Abdallah Muhammad. So, indeed, did the Alhambra herself, since she was the last in a line of great palaces. Her mother was the Alcazar of Seville, where Karel and Ysabel had married each other. The Alcazar had originally been built by the dynasty that preceded the Nasrids, the Almohads; and her courtyards of hanging vaults, cusped arches, and trickling fountains were among the examples to which the builders of the daughter palace had looked for inspiration and example.

  Both the Almohads of Seville and the Nasrids of Granada traced their palaces back to the Madinat al-Zahra in Cordoba, which had been built by the caliphs of Al Andalus five hundred years before. Like the Alhambra, the Madinat al-Zahra was an airy complex of miradors and gardens, with marble columns supporting cusped arches. Here, in primitive form, were to be seen the geometric and vegetal ornaments whose lacy descendants were draped over the Alhambra’s walls. In the throne room of the Madinat al-Zahra there was a great bowl of quicksilver, which cast scintillating reflections around the room when its surface was disturbed by the hand of the caliph. Ibn Zamrak may have had it in mind when he composed his inscriptions about the stellar vaults and the crystalline fountains of the Alhambra.

  And the Madinat al-Zahra herself was the magnificent daughter of magnificent mothers, for the dynasty that built it was descended from the Umayyad caliphs of Damascus, who had established Islam in Al Andalus in the eighth century. Each of the Umayyad princes built himself a palace more magnificent than the last, with courtyards and cloisters and fountains, domed halls and fretted screens and perfumed gardens. In veiled throne rooms suspended below the vault of heaven the princes reclined on their royal divans, as one day Abu Abdallah Muhammad would do in the Court of Gold.

  These Umayyad palaces spawned not only the Madinat al-Zahra and its ultimate descendant, the Alhambra, but also the Fatimid palaces of Cairo, the caliphal palaces of Baghdad and Persia, and the Red Forts of Mogul India. “The Tale of the King’s Son and the She-Ghoul” in The Arabian Nights tells of a royal residence that calls to mind nothing so much as the Court of the Lions in the Alhambra.

  The palace was furnished with silk carpets and hung with drapes . . . In the middle there stood a spacious courtyard, surrounded by four adjoining recessed courts facing one another. In the centre stood a fountain, on top of which crouched four lions in red gold, spouting water from their mouths in droplets that looked like gems and pearls.

  But the line of descent goes back much farther than that. In the days of the prophet Muhammad himself, the ambassadors of the Arabs went to Constantinople. They brought home stories of a throne room guarded by lions and gryphons in which stood trees filled with birds, all made of gold, which all sprang to life and tweeted and roared as the ambassadors approached the imperial presence. The throne itself, they said, could be raised and lowered at will, so that the emperor seemed to appear and disappear in a cloud of smoke. His Sacred Palace was an endless labyrinth of courtyards and vaulted chambers, more of a city than a residence; only perfumers, they said, were permitted to ply their trade in its vicinity, so that no foul smells would assault the imperial nose. In a colonnaded belvedere looking out over the palace gardens a fountain spouted fruit juices, while in another one water issued from the mouths of brass lions and filled a nymphaeum with mysterious echoes. The walls were embroidered in silk, carved in marble, and tessellated with golden mosaic that looked like sprouting, abundant vegetation.

  The Sacred Palace of Constantinople, in turn, was heir to the Golden House of Nero, in which the emperor would dine with his court, reclining on couches beneath a dome, as slaves poured rose petals down upon them and perfumed air rose through hidden grilles in the floor. It was the descendant of Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli, a fantastic landscape of courtyards and porticos and baths whose vaults were pierced with crystal stars; there was a vast niche where Hadrian would dine, reclining by a colonnaded lake, while food and wine were floated to him down marble rills. And it was the heir above all of the Palatine, a natural hill which, by the end of antiquity, had been carved, extended, and remodeled into a marble maze of atria, belvederes, vaulted galleries, hippodromes, and swimming pools, whose full extent is still unknown.

  The first emperor Augustus also lived on the Palatine, but as a mere primus inter pares he dwelled in much more modest style. The house of Augustus was entered, like the Alhambra, through a simple door in a blank wall, which led to an atrium containing a small pool of water that reflected the sky. In the morning the emperor would sit in the atrium on his low chair in order to receive his clients and suppliants. He was framed by the columns of the peristyle behind him: an enclosed
garden surrounded by a cloister. In the evening Augustus would dine dressed in loose robes, reclining, like his Muslim successors, on couches and divans. Augustus’s house was just one among many on the Palatine, which in those days was merely an aristocratic district of Rome, but it was the germ of its imperial successors. From the name of the hill on which it stood we derive the very name and the very idea of palace.

  One can still discern, in the capitals of the slim columns of the Alhambra, echoes of the Corinthian acanthus and the Ionic scroll of classical architecture, and the pleasure domes of Nero and Hadrian are still present in the crystalline vaults that hang above every room in the Court of the Lions. In the ornament that covers every surface, the memories of Byzantium linger; and, above all, the courtyards and fountains that percolate a cooling breeze through the architecture are the scions of millennia of palaces. Thus was the classical world preserved and transformed, generation after generation, as palace succeeded palace around the Mediterranean, from Rome to Constantinople, to Damascus, and to Al Andalus.

  The poets and courtiers of the Muslim world had been practicing the arts and the sciences of antiquity for centuries. It was in Muslim Syria and Egypt that astronomers and geometers had continued the studies begun in Alexandria long ago by Ptolemy and Euclid. Mehmet, the conqueror of Constantinople, had the exploits of Caesar and Alexander read to him every day to prepare him for the defeat of their enfeebled descendants. It was in Al Andalus that the philosophy of Aristotle was pored over by the famous Averroes of Cordoba, long before anyone in Western Europe had even read his works. The mosque of that city is a forest of classical columns taken from the Roman ruins that once covered the site, and its mihrab sparkles with mosaics donated by the emperor of Constantinople.