Eccentric Spaces

by Robert Harbison

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.

Genres: Architecture, Art, Nonfiction, Philosophy, History, Geography, Reference

177 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1977

About the author

Robert Harbison taught architectural history for more than 30 years, mainly at the Architectural Association and London Metropolitan University. He became a legendary figure for generations of students and his books earned him an international reputation as a historian and critic. Born in Baltimore, Bob first studied English literature and completed his doctoral thesis on the 19th century English industrial novel at Cornell University in 1969. After moving to London in 1974 he published his first architecture book, Eccentric Spaces, which applied a poetic sensibility to topics as diverse as gardens, maps, machines and ideal cities. It was Bernard Tschumi who, having read the book, invited Bob to lecture at the AA and thereby launched his teaching career.

Eccentric Spaces has become a classic but more architecture books followed, including Ruins and Fragments, Reflections on Baroque and The Built, the Unbuilt and the Unbuildable. Bob’s early books benefited from the fact that his wife Esther was an editor. Thirteen Ways, first published in 1997, is typically unconventional. It borrows its title from a Wallace Stevens poem but refuses the obvious implication, consisting of only ten chapters. Bob was a voracious reader and his learning was profound but it was always the direct encounter with works of art and architecture that ignited his passion. He very rarely wrote about buildings he had not seen. His 2009 book Travels in the History of Architecture is in one sense a traditional ‘survey’ with conventional chapter headings: Roman, Byzantine, Romanesque, Gothic, and so on. But it is also, as its title suggests, a travelogue, the written record of a purposeful exploration of the world’s architecture over several decades.

Reviews

[Jim Coughenour · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite books of the 80s – although it was published in 1977, I didn't discover it until it was republished by Godine in 1988.

This book is an enchanted, oddly-learned meditation on the sense of place. It requires a certain negative capability of its readers. Harbison refers to range of experience, literature, history, architecture and archeology that surpasses almost everyone. (It's obvious from the one-star review here that not everyone is up to the task.) And I've always been entranced by Harbison's preface about how he came to write this book – when I was recently unemployed, it echoed pleasurably in my memory:

I was out of work, a condition the book cured me of, not by landing me a job but by making me think it was the right way to be.... I am a far from mystical person, but I was propelled to begin by a dream. From that moment I have not really been capable of the same depth of unhappiness as before. From then onward I could say with conviction that everyone contains his own happiness within him.

[JOHN HAMMER · Rating 1 out of 5]

boo

[Frank Shifreen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was one of the greatest books I ever read and influenced me. Harbison's treating fictional spaces in literature is a brilliant strategy for evoking the intention of the authors and exploring the ideas that the books represented. I am so glad it is now available via this platform. Read it. It is short, written both like a poem and analysis. A great book. Must read

[Mark Harris · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book was made less tiresome by imagining it was written by Steven Millhauser. Thank you to Jorge Luis Borges for his story of Pierre Menard that gave me the idea.

[Mark]

Museums Journak bookshelf by Riika Kuittinen.

[Katelis Viglas · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book waving between realities and dreaming. Are included a lot of mainly architectural dreams; of Gardens, Sanctums, Cities, Museums, Streets, Monuments, Churches, Castles, Stations, Fictional Places, Maps, Museum Catalogues. You are not sure what is writing about. Of course always there is a space; problems space creates to be solved by infinite solutions by the mind. The places of mind have their reflection on reality and vise versa. The creativity of the Architect enters in this reflection, reflecting it. “Dreaming the fantastic is not enough; it must be lived”, Harbison says, while he is absorbed in Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. But the biggest lesson is that the real architecture is an effort to spiritualize matter. This is a neoplatonic lesson, applied in gothic cathedrals till the sky-scrapers. The point is to consume the life in thinking and dreaming the most powerful creations of human civilization: the cities. So, it can be included in a program of urban studies. The only critical objection is the feeling of an empty aestheticism, without philosophical gravity. The reverie is of course inevitable, and the architectural thought has to do with forms and not essences. The book is between philosophy and art, tending to lift the theory of architecture. The importance of it is the non-important way by which elaborates its subject.

[Ian]

"Gardens always mean something else, man absolutely uses one thing to say another. Vegetation in gardens is symbolic, hence one can write about them without using the names of plants, and people sometimes do without plants entirely in sculpture courts and sand gardens. But the trees in gardens are already statues and the grass a counterpane. Here the outside is arranged to suit the inside, in mocking imitation, in imaginary threat, in soothing reminiscence, as it leads the soul through all the old situations, portraying comforts and dangers enlarged or diminished in neutral unhuman green. Trees, bushes, and slopes show us closeness, separation, dependence, arrest, depression, exultation, until rarely even in dreams can a person get such a sense of traversing years in a jump, surmounting obstacles with a few sloping steps, looking back on the past with a turn of the head. In gardens, everyone is free to go where he pleases, to follow a number of avenues, to make contradictory choices" (Harbison, pg. #20).

[Whitney · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book was very close to going on the "abandoned" shelf - just a few too many references I didn't get (although they were very rewarding when I did) - a little too much like name-dropping when you don't know the names being dropped. You just nod and smile and assume you'll get what they're talking about in the end.