Bleak Houses: Disappointment and Failure in Architecture

by Timothy J. Brittain-Catlin

Overview

Why some architects fail to realize their ideal buildings, and what architecture critics can learn from novelists.

The usual history of architecture is a grand narrative of soaring monuments and heroic makers. But it is also a false narrative in many ways, rarely acknowledging the personal failures and disappointments of architects. In Bleak Houses , Timothy Brittain-Catlin investigates the underside of architecture, the stories of losers and unfulfillment often ignored by an architectural criticism that values novelty, fame, and virility over fallibility and rejection.

As architectural criticism promotes increasingly narrow values, dismissing certain styles wholesale and subjecting buildings to a Victorian litmus test of “real” versus “fake,” Brittain-Catlin explains the effect this superficial criticality has had not only on architectural discourse but on the quality of buildings. The fact that most buildings receive no critical scrutiny at all has resulted in vast stretches of ugly modern housing and a pervasive public illiteracy about architecture.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262528856
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	02/12/2016
Series:	The MIT Press
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	192
Sales rank:	1,015,066
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.70(h) x 0.70(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Timothy Brittain-Catlin is a Reader at Kent School of Architecture, University of Kent. His writing has appeared in The World of Interiors, Architectural Review, and many other publications.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

1 Losers 19

2 There is Real and there is Fake 49

3 Bullies and Sissies 75

4 Hopelessness 109

5 Retrenchment and Loss 137

Notes 153

Bibliography 167

Index 175

What People are Saying About This

Robert Harbison

At least half the architects mentioned in this catalog of failure are names you've never heard of. Remarkably, Timothy Brittain-Catlin turns the story of these people he calls losers into one of the most compelling books about architecture I've read in a long time.

Martin Bressani

Timothy Brittain-Catlin's Bleak Houses is unique for being the first history of architects who, by conventional standards, have been considered losers or failures. By telling the story of those who just fell outside the canon, or outside the circle of fame traced by a triumphalist history, Brittain-Catlin maps out an alternative architectural history without teleological narratives about style, change, and influence and thus offers a quieter and more modest way of looking at buildings that can relate much more closely to our own experiences. Witty and captivating, with an interesting touch of melancholy, it makes you think and see the world differently.

Endorsement

Timothy Brittain-Catlin's Bleak Houses is unique for being the first history of architects who, by conventional standards, have been considered losers or failures. By telling the story of those who just fell outside the canon, or outside the circle of fame traced by a triumphalist history, Brittain-Catlin maps out an alternative architectural history without teleological narratives about style, change, and influence and thus offers a quieter and more modest way of looking at buildings that can relate much more closely to our own experiences. Witty and captivating, with an interesting touch of melancholy, it makes you think and see the world differently.

—Martin Bressani, McGill University

From the Publisher

Bleak Houses is a unique guide through architecture's own disconsolate circles of hell, from the hopelessness of revivalism to the curse of the mutilating extension. At once comic and bitter, wry and lachrymose, Brittain-Catlin's Virgil inducts the reader in architecture's vast lacunae of the mediocre, the disappointed and the sad. In speaking to and for the many buildings for which there is no discourse because they merit none, he skillfully reveals how failure can be a whole lot more illuminating than success. This book will make a lot of architects, myself included, feel very uncomfortable indeed.

—Francesca Hughes

At least half the architects mentioned in this catalog of failure are names you've never heard of. Remarkably, Timothy Brittain-Catlin turns the story of these people he calls losers into one of the most compelling books about architecture I've read in a long time.

—Robert Harbison, author of Eccentric Spaces

Timothy Brittain-Catlin's Bleak Houses is unique for being the first history of architects who, by conventional standards, have been considered losers or failures. By telling the story of those who just fell outside the canon, or outside the circle of fame traced by a triumphalist history, Brittain-Catlin maps out an alternative architectural history without teleological narratives about style, change, and influence and thus offers a quieter and more modest way of looking at buildings that can relate much more closely to our own experiences. Witty and captivating, with an interesting touch of melancholy, it makes you think and see the world differently.

—Martin Bressani, McGill University

Francesca Hughes

Bleak Houses is a unique guide through architecture's own disconsolate circles of hell, from the hopelessness of revivalism to the curse of the mutilating extension. At once comic and bitter, wry and lachrymose, Brittain-Catlin's Virgil inducts the reader in architecture's vast lacunae of the mediocre, the disappointed and the sad. In speaking to and for the many buildings for which there is no discourse because they merit none, he skillfully reveals how failure can be a whole lot more illuminating than success. This book will make a lot of architects, myself included, feel very uncomfortable indeed.

Editorial Reviews

...there are few books I can think of that describe the emotional engagement with architecture with such acuity. And despite the subject, Bleak Houses is anything but a bleak read.—Richard Williams, The Times Higher Education—

...this is one of the most intriguing, original and gently provocative books on the meaning of architecture for some while.

—Architecture Review—

...It's a book that all who not only write on architecture but who also have a genuine interest in the welfare of the historic built environment ought to read.

—Alex Bremner, The Victorian—

From the Publisher

...It's a book that all who not only write on architecture but who also have a genuine interest in the welfare of the historic built environment ought to read.

The Victorian - Alex Bremner

...this is one of the most intriguing, original and gently provocative books on the meaning of architecture for some while.

Architecture Review

...there are few books I can think of that describe the emotional engagement with architecture with such acuity. And despite the subject, Bleak Houses is anything but a bleak read.

The Times Higher Education - Richard Williams

...It's a book that all who not only write on architecture but who also have a genuine interest in the welfare of the historic built environment ought to read.

—Alex Bremner, The Victorian

Reviews