Built, the Unbuilt and the Unbuildable

Robert Harbison has acquired a reputation for looking at architecture in a highly original way. The questions he asks are those deliberately suppressed by conventional architectural historians: What draws me to this building? What meaning intended or unintended - does it have? Has that meaning changed through time? To expound his argument, the author chooses examples of buildings "freed from function", the architectural borderland where use and symbolism overlap: gardens - "places of undeclared war between architecture and its antitype nature"; monuments "how sure of themselves yet how entirely fictional"; historic fortifications - "prompting armies of tourists to assault them"; and ruins - "architecture existing only in the mind or in the eye of the beholder". Finally he enters the realm of the imagination in chapters on the internal space of paintings and on projects that have seen the light only as architects' dreams. Robert Harbison has lectured on architecture at MOMA, New York, the University of Toronto, Stanford University, Cornell University and the Architectural Association, London.