[(Brian Dillon: Sanctuary )] [Author: Brian Dillon] [Dec-2012]

by Brian Dillon

This fictional work about the construction and decay of a late modernist building can also be read as an essay on our contemporary unease with modernism in general. Author Brian Dillon, UK editor of Cabinet magazine, based it on research into St. Peter's Seminary, a college complex commissioned by the Catholic Church in the 1950s, completed in 1968, and abandoned by 1980. On the outskirts of Glasgow - itself a city with a vexed relationship to Le Corbusier-esque modernism - the building is rich with of its architects, its residing student priests, the drug addicts it once housed and treated, and the local teenagers for whom it is a kind of Gothic recreation center. This book takes the material remains of modernism and treats them from a literary point of view.

Genres: Fiction

Unknown Binding

First published December 5, 2012

About the author

BRIAN DILLON was born in Dublin in 1969. His books include Objects in This Mirror: Essays (Sternberg Press, 2014), Sanctuary (Sternberg Press, 2011), Ruins (MIT Press/Whitechapel Gallery, 2011), Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives (Penguin, 2009) and In the Dark Room (Penguin 2005).

His writing appears regularly in the Guardian, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, Artforum and frieze. Dillon is reader in critical writing at the Royal College of Art, and UK editor of Cabinet magazine. He is working on a book about the Great Explosion at Faversham in 1916.

Reviews

[Nate D · Rating 3 out of 5]

He was interested instead in the substance of the place, in the way that concrete and stone, and even earth and air, might embody or imply the ghosts of individuals and their ambitions without having to make such things explicit. He was hoping to get as close to the material strata of the complex as possible, to see and feel and hear in its brute, rank presence something that all his research into the stories and processes that surrounded it could not compass.

Not exactly how I would phrase this, but this does somewhat express what I'm hoping to convey, besides the surface pleasures of what may be dismissed as "ruin porn", when photographing or filming abandoned places. The story name-checks urbex, a zone of practice that was alluring in my early 20s, and later felt like more of an obstacle to approaching in a meaningful way all those places humans have marked and left behind. Now, I tend to deemphasize architectural relics as a part of the larger landscape, one facet of many that describe how humans relate to our environment. But nonetheless, this slim novella strikes at close and familiar lines of thinking.

There's a plot, a woman visits a decaying relic where a loved one mysteriously vanished, and a lot of setting, a 70s-brutalist seminary now long consumed by the Italian countryside, but this is very concerned with the state of architectural deliquescence itself. The way mold and moss creep over and digest stone, the hidden language of graffiti that mark and remark surfaces over time, the effects of fire and rain. Like the "objective" eye of the filmmaker's camera, intercut passages dwell completely on slow inventories of concrete detail. Which are, as the above passage suggests, always subjectively related to deeper meanings. Somehow, in negotiating this ostensibly intriguing plot hook and the metaphysical contemplation of place -- which you might expect to make of this an absolute ideal reading experience for me -- something, instead is lost, displaced, distanced. And the actual magic, the spectral lure of the forgotten, fails to completely materialize in spite of all the precise, perceptive descriptions and insights that gesture towards it.

Instead, he was more and more convinced that the history of the place, as also all such decayed sites, must inhere at the minutest level, in the fabric of the buildings, the water that dropped and flowed, the quality of the light and air, the vegetation that flourished across the site and forced its way into all its interstices, the sounds that passed unnoticed except to the animals that lived there.

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

A hard book to say anything articulate about without doing it a disservice, I fear. The story involves a woman traveling to the the ruin of a seminary where her partner disappeared months earlier, not in hopes of finding him but to encounter the ruin herself. Intercut with the narrative are sections detailing the construction and decay of the seminary itself, and what really makes Sanctuary brilliant is how well Dillon interweaves these threads. As easy as it would have been to either make the building and its decay serve as only a metaphor for the character's internal states, or alternately to make the characters hollow puppets for the sake of describing the ruin, he deftly avoids both of those traps: the characters are full and complex, and the ruined seminary — especially its processes of collapse — are taken seriously in their right. The whole slim book adds up to a surprisingly powerful exploration of how lives are enmeshed in material culture and the physical structures we occupy, not only when those buildings are whole but as their ruins remain a part of our world. And having said all that I still don't feel I've done the book any justice so just read it instead.