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Title:
Eccentric spaces

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$36.00
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Summary:
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. Originally published in 1977.

Title:
Thirteen ways : theoretical investigations in architecture

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$27.95
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Summary:
The chapter titles indicate Harbison's themes, all of which bear parallel, implied, or tangential relations to architecture: Sculpture, Machines, the Body, Landscape, Models, Ideas, Politics, the Sacred, Subjectivity, and Memory. The journey through the chapters is roughly a journey from the physical to the metaphysical, a journey that is at once poetic, technical, and philosophical.

Title:
Travels in the history of architecture

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$29.95
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Summary:
In Travels in the History of Architecture, Robert Harbison provides an engaging and concise companion to the great themes and aesthetic movements in architecture from antiquity to the present day. The book begins its journey with the great temples of the Egyptians and the shrines of Classical Greece and Rome and then provides a complete survey of architecture through the present day. Each chapter of this dynamic and approachable volume focuses on a movement in architectural history, including Byzantine, Baroque, Mannerism, Historicism, Functionalism, and Deconstruction. Unique to this work is Harbison’s wide-ranging approach, which draws on references and examples outside of architecture—from literature, art, sculpture, and history—to further illustrate and contextualize the themes and ideas of each period.

Title:
Ruins and fragments: tales of loss and rediscovery

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$48.95
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Summary:
What is it about ruins that are so alluring, so puzzling, that they can hold some of us in endless wonder over the half-erased story they tell? In this elegant book, Robert Harbison explores the captivating hold these remains and broken pieces—from architecture, art, and literature—have on us. He guides us through ruins and fragments, both ancient and modern, visual and textual, showing us how they are crucial to understanding our current mindset and how we arrived here. First looking at ancient fragments, he examines the ways we have recovered, restored, and exhibited them as artworks. Then he moves on to modernist architecture and the ways that it seeks a fragmentary form, examining modern projects that have been designed into existing ruins, such as the Castelvecchio in Verona, Italy and the reconstruction of the Neues Museum in Berlin. From there he explores literature and the works of T. S. Eliot, Montaigne, Coleridge, Joyce, and Sterne, and how they have used fragments as the foundation for creating new work.