Books
Thirteen Blighted Lives
As in opera, among architects there have been distinguished deaths. But being struck by a tram, disappearing in the high seas, or collapsing in the toilets of a train station are but the final scenes of existences that on the whole were intense, fruitful, and long-lasting, as if plentiful commissions were an excuse for postponing one’s date with the Grim Reaper. If professional successes are associated with lives lived to the fullest, what can we say about those who fail? Charlotte Van den Broeck seems convinced that “failed architects kill themselves.”
Speculation about the designer of her local swimming pool, consumed by guilt for the project’s glitches, awoke in the Belgian poet a fixation with the highest price that some architects decide to pay: the extreme to which a job subject to public pressures and responsibilities, and as art ever swinging between agony and ecstasy, can lead. Through thirteen tales, her first foray into prose takes her to buildings in Europe and the US whose authors, due to error, misunderstanding, or bloated perfectionism, ended up condemning themselves to the seventh circle of hell.
Adorning the accounts with autobiography, the book is a macabre but fascinating travelogue, in the manner of Mariana Enríquez’s trips to cemeteries. Borromini aside, the figures are minor and the works have no more import than their ill repute. But the stories spark thought on architecture’s at once redeeming and destructive nature. And without romanticizing death as librettos do, what matters are the previous efforts that allow all to say “Vissi d’arte.”
