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Totems comprises ten texts and lectures on twentieth-century European architecture written and delivered over the past 25 years
\n\n\n\n‘Modernists loved the slenderness of the airplane wing, but Neutelings Riedijk prefer [sic] the nonchalant swing of the elephant trunk,’ writes Irénée Scalbert in the title essay to this collection. He’s referring to a Dutch architecture practice’s unbuilt 1999 competition entry for the design of a concert hall in Bruges. This pithy, droll evocation is typical of the author’s approach in writings on architecture and, to a lesser but related extent, urbanism, painting and literature; it’s one of many flourishes here that encourage the reader to pause and consider a phrase’s merits and implications for the subject at hand, whether in a love letter to London’s least-loved airport (Norman Foster’s Stansted) or a provocative interrogation of similarities between a seminal postmodern design and a death camp (Aldo Rossi’s San Cataldo Cemetery and Auschwitz-Birkenau). In the case of the Bruges concert hall, the elephant becomes the conceptual basis for an argument that connects the proposed building’s profile, ornamented surface and ‘savage gravity’ to Napoleon’s fullscale plaster mockup for a monumental elephant on the site of the former Bastille. And that’s not to mention the many other threads presented along the way, including those of the lacemaking for which Bruges is known.
\n\n\n\nPresented in a format that comes close to matching the Michelin Green Guide my grandparents would have carried on visits to European museums and archaeological sites, Totems comprises ten texts and lectures written and delivered over the past 25 years that mostly address arguments, movements and figures in twentieth-century European architecture. More personally, one gathers, this is a guide to the main intellectual preoccupations of its author – a critic, historian and longtime lecturer in architecture programmes in London, Limerick and beyond. Quietly erudite, dry humoured, at times Socratic, at others mischievous, the texts argue opposing views, disguising the author’s views so that the reader, or student, may consider their own. There is a before-the-fall cast to this writing, which barely engages with today’s pressing ecological and political concerns, but it is a testament to the author’s thoughtful presence that I want to hear his views nonetheless.
\n\n\n\nTotems: Selected Essays on Architecture by Irénée Scalbert. Park Books, CHF 29 (softcover)
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