Books
The Private Life of Masters
Centered on the ups and downs of three great architects (Wright, Loos, Le Corbusier), Fernando Carrascal’s thesis-turned-book could at first prompt a certain aversion. But soon you enter a familiar world of attempts and failures, both professional and personal, described with the ‘clinical’ restraint of quotes so well connected you are drawn deeper into the text, less because it is an original account of the intimacy of masters than because of how the quotes weave together: a seemingly simple technique immersing us in the darkness and occasional brightness of three lives.
As part of an academic series of publications, the book produces a curious effect as the reader advances, because its documentary-like objectivity highlights all the exertion that goes with architectural practice, in a way that no other narrative method can. Never putting in his own voice, the author makes it clear that his aim is not only to recall biographical milestones, but to depict the unhealthy struggle that the profession unleashes between passion and despair, in a Nietzschean eternal return that makes the work of architects a permanent battle against the world and themselves.
He has ‘built’ a thesis ‘illustrating’ specific moments and spaces, conveying that sense of being trapped in a loop of instances of joy too quickly dissipated by circumstances or obsessions. A thesis-novel that also shows how a dissertation can become an essay and a ‘self-build’ of the author, woven with respect for predecessors who enlightened him with their wisdom.
