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

by Edward Hollis

  Since his youth the prince of Siam had dreamed of Italy. In 1828, he had gone to Rome for the first time, his progress to the Eternal City marked by stops in Venice, Florence, Naples, and all the other jewels in the crown of European civilization. He returned to the sandy plains of home determined that he could conjure from them the lush gardens and opulent villas of Tivoli. At his command, the gardener Peter Joseph Lenné laid out sinuous paths and elegant boscage, while expansive lawns and tall poplars called to mind the plains and cypress groves of the campagna.

  And with Schinkel at his side, the prince of Siam created himself a villa. Not for the first time, the architect was called upon to construct a building from happy reminiscence. This villa was designed to recall the prince’s grand tour, as well as his readings of Pliny, who, in ancient times, had recalled his own residence with such pleasure. Its rooms were painted in the bold oxblood red and olive green of the houses of Pompeii, exquisitely decorated with grotteschi, and hung with painted scenes of the Bay of Naples. The furniture was designed to look as if it could be folded up and carried away to continue the prince’s travels. One bedroom was even decorated as a large tent, lined in blue and white ticking, inhabited by camp beds with awnings over them supported on crossed spears. It was the perfect place for a summer holiday.

  Siam was a place of cheerfulness and liberty. The people of Siam tripped lightly home through the sunlit fields, rather than trudging through the dark and stony streets of great cities. Dressed in loose robes, they were unrestricted by the corsetry of European manners and customs. Leading simple lives, they were unencumbered by the rows of medals, the military parades, and the court balls that suffocated the spirit. The people of Siam were free: free of drudgery, free of convention, free of politics and history. They were happy.

  And the prince hoped that, in Siam, he could be the same. On that spring afternoon in 1840, his realm had nearly been perfected. Schinkel’s farmhouse completed the view from the terrace of the villa, its pleasing mélange of architectures provoking exactly the sort of idle speculation in which the prince liked to indulge when he was at leisure. And Humboldt had perfected the picture by agreeing to come and spend a few months in it: the natural philosopher in perfect harmony with his habitation and with nature itself. It was going to be a wonderful summer.

  THE OLD MAN who had once been the prince of Siam leaned back and sighed at the reminiscence. Wonderful summers are always cut short, he reflected. A month after that sunny May afternoon, the prince had inherited the throne of Prussia. Schinkel died that very autumn, and Siam faded into memory. It hadn’t really been in far-off Siam anyway, but at the bottom of the royal garden in Potsdam. The prince had called his retreat Siam in a moment of whimsy, for he had hoped that it would resemble what he had supposed to be a land of freedom and pleasure.

  The creation of Siam had been a rehearsal, nothing more, for it was but a small part of the magical demesne that would now be his home: a palace that had been made, the new king knew, so that he could be free of drudgery, free of convention, free of politics and history, free from care. That was why his new residence was called Sans Souci.

  Sans Souci had been created a century before by the king’s great-great-uncle, who liked to be known as Fédéric. He had been a mercurial figure, and like his great-great-nephew he had longed to be anywhere else but at home. Unlike his descendant, however, he preferred France to Italy, dreaming of the elegant manners and witty conversation of the salons of Paris and the court of Versailles—so different, he imagined, from his dull life in the forests and sandy plains of Prussia. “If God made the world for me,” he wrote, “he put France there for my amusement”; and when he ascended the throne, Fédéric decided to be amused. He couldn’t absent himself from his royal duties, of course, but if he could not go to Versailles, he could at least make its Trianons come to him. He repaired to the salubrious airs of his gardens, where he could escape the cares of his kingly office, saying, “Quand je serai là, je serai sans souci” (Once I am there, I shall be carefree).

  In 1744, Fédéric engaged an old friend from his military days, Georg von Knobelsdorf, to build him a palace where he could be sans souci. Like any happy couple, they argued constantly, and Fédéric often took to the drawing board himself to correct his friend’s design. Terraces were laid out on the hillside upon which the dwelling was to be built, and the king decided to cover them with greenhouses, to supply sweet figs and vines and peaches for the royal table. Sans Souci was finished in 1747, and Fédéric took up residence immediately.

  The palace was modest in scale, but its interiors were extraordinary confections, so delicate that they appeared to be spun from sugar, pink clouds, and sunsets rather than built in prosaic brick and plaster. In the music room there still stands the well-tempered clavier that was once played by Johann Sebastian Bach. In 1747, the irascible old man had been invited by Fédéric to come and teach him the principles and the art of music. It is said that the composer was unimpressed by the effete young prince and was all too ready to criticize his musical efforts. Next to the clavier is the music stand at which Fédéric would play the flute to his guests after supper. The architecture of this room dissolves in kaleidoscopic pattern: mirrors are framed in writhing rocaille and hung with soft candles, and the sparkling crystal chandelier hangs from a ceiling ornamented with a gilded trellis, hung with vines among which roll laughing, drunken cherubs.

  Fédéric was an avid reader and had always adored the wit of Voltaire. In 1750, he persuaded the luminary to come and live with him at Sans Souci. (Their affair didn’t last long; the terrier-like writer could not resist biting the hand that fed him, and he fled after three years, returning to his niece—or, depending on whom you believe, his mistress—in Paris.) Voltaire’s bedroom at Sans Souci was as witty and perverse as the writer himself. The ceiling was crazed with delicate tendrils of plaster roses, while the walls were inhabited by an exotic and arbitrary menagerie of monkeys, parrots, and ibises, garlanded with flowers and fruit. The philosopher might wake up on a summer’s morning, the sun streaming in through the tall French windows, and imagine himself in far Cathay or Cipango, until he heard the bark of Fédéric and his dogs on the terrace outside.

  At the heart of Sans Souci was a dining room, for Fédéric loved nothing so much as conversation around the dinner table. His dazzling repartee would flit from art to mathematics, engineering to liberty, as he neatly sliced the fruits that had been brought in from his garden. Lunches and suppers, prepared by his two French chefs, were legendarily long, and the king would down endless glasses of champagne and cups of coffee. His dining room was a veritable temple to the pleasures of the table, an oval pantheon of Corinthian columns of white and gold, its dome inhabited by the cherubs and muses who personified the subjects of their host’s conversation.

  The gardens of Sans Souci were filled with wonderful illusions of other times and other places. There was a Chinese pavilion for the taking of tea, whose roof, shaped like a gigantic tent, was supported by gilded palm trees, and whose verandas were inhabited by mandarins and concubines frozen in gilded attitudes of pleasure. There was a temple of friendship, to which Fédéric would repair to remember his dearest sister Wilhemine. There was a fully functioning windmill, in which the royal children could play at being peasants, and an endless forest of allées and rondpoints planted for the pleasures of the chase.

  But the king reserved the best surprise for the departure of his guests. Leaving the sugary delights of the palace without care, they were presented with a mighty and somber ruin. There was the broken wall of some great amphitheater, reminiscent of nothing so much as the Colosseum in Rome; a dilapidated rotunda, formerly, perhaps, the residence of a philosopher; and a row of three Ionic columns that surely had formed part of the colonnade of some temple of Diana. It was as if the ancients had built a city upon this hill, once upon a time, and Fédéric had made his residence in its shadow.

  It was all a delightful plaisanterie, of course, a postpra
ndial memento mori, which the king hoped would provoke a wistful smile on the powdered faces of his philosophical guests. The ruin was conceived by Innocente Bellavite, a theater set painter from Italy. Bellavite, like Schinkel after him, was a conjuror of the lonely plains and rocks of the Roman campagna, where shepherds corralled their flocks in the shadow of broken aqueducts and peasants made their miserable habitations in deserted shrines.

  In his magical demesne, Fédéric did nothing at all: he wrote, and played his flute, and held dazzling dinner parties, and ate the fruit that grew in his sparkling greenhouses, and contemplated the hazy mirage of ruins that closed the vista from his hallway. He lived without care, sans souci, as he had hoped. It was as if, inside the gates of the park, time stood still, and history was a seductive mirage.

  Sans Souci was a fantasy. It wasn’t a real palace, a proper place to receive ambassadors and to undertake all the other tiresome duties of being a king. Fédéric had one of those sorts of places built at the bottom of the garden, so that he could do those sorts of things without interrupting his leisure. The Neues Palais was a baroque pile, topped by an arrogant dome and entered through a colossal hemicycle of Corinthian columns. It had countless bedrooms, rich ballrooms, an opera house, a shell grotto, and an art museum; but Fédéric couldn’t be bothered to spend time there. “It’s just a fanfaronade,” he said.

  When his duties called him away from Sans Souci, Fédéric dreamed of opening the French windows of his bedroom there and walking out into the morning sun with his favorite greyhound, named Madame de Pompadour for the mistress of the king of France. To quell his longing, he read and wrote: letters to Voltaire, poetry, histories of his own res gestae. It has been said that, were he not a king, he would be known as one of the finest French writers of the eighteenth century.

  There was one book he always took with him; it was the only novel one could read again and again, he said. Voltaire had written Candide after he had fallen out with Fédéric and had left Sans Souci, but the novel, in which a young naïf goes out into the world from his provincial chateau, struck a chord with a king whose inheritance had bound him to do the same. Perhaps Voltaire was thinking of Fédéric when he wrote it, and the king is bound to have smiled and agreed when, at the end of the novel, Candide, having witnessed all the horrors of the “best of all possible worlds,” retires from it with the maxim: “Il faut cultiver notre jardin.”

  Fédéric’s descendant, once the prince of Siam and now the king of Prussia, was only too ready to cultivate his ancestor’s garden and to inhabit the palace that had lain dormant for half a century. Within months of his father’s death, the shutters of Sans Souci were thrown open and the summer sun poured in through the French windows, surprising cherubs and monkeys that had slept for decades. Dust sheets were drawn back to reveal gilded reefs of rocaille, and soon the dining table in the great oval saloon groaned once more under fruits gathered from the garden. (Perhaps it groaned, too, at the earnest witticisms of the new king, who lacked something of Fédéric’s eighteenth-century lightness.)

  The king engaged Ludwig Persius, who had assisted Schinkel in his later years, on a building program that dwarfed anything Fédéric had envisaged. On the crest of a ridge within the forest, Persius and the king conjured an apparition of the Villa Medici in Rome. Endless flights of steps and grottoes, rose gardens and nymphaea led to the villa itself, which was crowned with tall belvederes. To either side, huge greenhouses were filled with the heady scent of orange and lemon trees, so that not only the sights but the smells of Italy could be enjoyed; in the summer the king could imagine that he was some Renaissance humanist, listening to the vespers bells as they rang out over the Eternal City. A pump house, built to power the fountains of the park, was disguised as an Egyptian mosque, reflected in the reservoir as if it were standing by some distant oasis. Nearby the king built a church in the form of a Romanesque monastery, complete with peaceful cloisters; and a little way away, on the top of a hill known as the Pfingstberg, he constructed a gigantic terrace from whose airy arcades and towers one could view the distant horizon.

  In his youth, he had labored to re-create Italy in the loggias of Siam; but the Sans Souci over which the king now ruled had become a panorama, a boundless hallucination, an insubstantial pageant of towers and gorgeous palaces, in which all times and all places were made present through the medium of architecture. At the heart of this magical demesne the king of Prussia was a Prospero calling forth visions of a universal history—in which, as Schinkel had once said, architecture “ennobles all human relationships.” It was such stuff as dreams are made of.

  IN AUGUST 1945, three men sat on the terrace of the Cecilienhof, a half-timbered cottage overgrown with vines that the last of the royal house of Fédéric had built for his daughter-in-law Cécile.

  They had been there for a month, and a very nice month it had been. Their residences were close by, in the gardens of Schinkel’s Gothic fortress of Babelsberg. One of their aides described them in his diary.

  They consisted of a series of villas, all facing onto the lake, and very pleasant. We have a house for the three Chiefs of Staff, and have Jumbo with us. Attlee is next door on one side and Bridges beyond him and PM beyond that. On the other side Pug. I spent the afternoon settling in and in the evening tried for a pike in the lake.

  But the three men were there to do business rather than to go fishing or look at the scenery. The villas did not belong to them. As another of their secretaries recorded:

  All the Germans have of course been turned out. Where they’ve gone, no one knows. Can you imagine what we would feel if Germans and Japanese were doing this in England, and if we had all been bundled out to make way for Hitler and Co.?

  And their deliberations were not of the philosophical kind. The “Big Three”—the leaders of Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States of America—had come to Potsdam to resolve the German question once and for all, and to bring a particularly unsavory historical episode to an end. They did not agree on much, but they did agree on one thing: the kings of Prussia had been careless. The follies they had built on their summer holidays were the stuff that nightmares are made of. Outside Sans Souci time had not stood still, history was anything but a mirage, and the world was full of care.

  For outside his park Fédéric had been far from a reluctant player on the historical stage: out of Sans Souci he was Frederick the Great, one of the most belligerent princes of the eighteenth century. Within a year of taking the throne he had sent his troops to annex neighboring Silesia, and he spent most of the rest of his life trying to prevent his rival, the empress Maria Theresa, from taking it back. His troops marched over the Oder to Breslau, down into Saxony, all the way to Prague, and nearly to the gates of Vienna itself. Frederick made and unmade counts and kings and even emperors; and at the end of his life, in a piece of extraordinary realpolitik, he connived in the partition of Poland between himself and his erstwhile enemies the empress Maria Theresa and the czar of Russia. The consequences were still playing themselves out in 1945. They still are.

  Frederick spent much of his life outside the walls of Sans Souci not only living in a world of care and contemplating ruins, but also creating both. He was well aware of the senselessness of it. When his armies occupied Saxony in 1760, the king wrote: “I spared that beautiful country as far as possible, but now it is utterly devastated. Miserable madmen that we are . . . amusing ourselves with the destruction of masterpieces of industry and of time, we leave an odious memory of our ravages and the calamities that they cause.” Not that it stopped him. He wrote to his friend Henri de Catt: “Admit that war is a cruel thing—what a life for the unhappy soldiers who receive more blows than bread, and who mostly retire with scars or missing limbs. The peasant is even worse off—he often dies of hunger—you must admit that the obstinacy of the Queen of Hungary and myself makes many people wretched.” Obstinate the king was; the queen of Hungary, the empress Maria Theresa, could only pray that “in the end
God will take pity on us and crush this monster.” So terrifying was the reputation of Frederick the Great that when Napoleon, having invaded Prussia, visited his tomb, he was moved to say to his officers: “Hats off, gentlemen! If he were still alive, we would not be here.”

  Frederick the Great’s descendants followed him in his despotic militarism, as they did in his enlightened private life at Sans Souci. In 1848 King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, the very prince who had enjoyed the freedoms of Siam, was confronted by his subjects in Berlin, who demanded the same freedoms for themselves. They gathered in the streets, clamoring for the establishment of a constitution, a liberal government, and the unification of all the states of Germany into one nation-state. History presented the king with the opportunity to turn his whole realm into a happy Siam.

  On 18 March the enlightened and freedom-loving king sent his troops to disperse the demonstrators. Many lost their lives that day in the streets of the city. But the people believed that history was on their side, and they did not return to their homes as the king had wished. Three days later, they forced him to leave Sans Souci and come back to the city. They draped him in the revolutionary tricolor and marched him to the graveyards, to honor the dead whose deaths he himself had ordered so recently. Perhaps at that moment the king also believed that history was on the side of the people, or perhaps he had no choice. Either way, he stood in front of them all and agreed to their demands for liberty and progress. And then he returned to Sans Souci.

  The new Prussia didn’t last long. The king wandered in his park and sat musing in the loggias of his Italian follies; and when autumn came, he dissolved the democratically elected assembly of the people and the modern liberal constitution, and restored his own authority at the point of a gun. The next year, when the general assembly of all the Germans in Frankfurt offered him the imperial crown of all Germany, he dismissed it with disgust as dishonored by “the bestial stench of revolution . . . a phantom crown baked of dirt and mud.” He retired to Sans Souci and contemplated his latest folly. Entirely without irony, he named it the Friedenskirche—the Church of Peace.