A platform for research: civil engineering, architecture and urbanism
A platform for research: civil engineering, architecture and urbanism
Memoirs of Adrian
Each year, when the architectural historian Adrian Forty packs for his annual summer holiday with his wife and daughters, he carries in his suitcase a number of books – the usual assortment of histories, biographies and novels – but among them is always a copy of Memoirs of Hadrian, which he ritualistically rereads and rediscovers every August. This repetition may simply reflect a personal fondness for the Roman emperor and for Yourcenar's impeccably researched prose, but it could also suggest that there is more to this book than first meets the eye. Hadrian therefore seems fundamental because he inhabits the centre of a world more advanced than any other, and the Memoirs goes to some length to detail the component parts – or architecture – of his good governance, highlighting in particular the value of astronomy, mathematics, rhetoric, logic, poetry, art, etc. Memoirs of Hadrian becomes a template not just for the practice of architecture but for its historicisation. And if the good historian, even more than the good emperor, is the ultimate truth behind the book, then Yourcenar's Hadrian is in so many ways analogous to The Bartlett's Adrian. For here is the guardian of architecture's immediate past, a figure at the centre of it all, whose trilogy of couplets – objects and desires, words and buildings, concrete and culture – perfectly captures a way of presenting the world through both things and ideas.
Memoirs of Adrian
Each year, when the architectural historian Adrian Forty packs for his annual summer holiday with his wife and daughters, he carries in his suitcase a number of books – the usual assortment of histories, biographies and novels – but among them is always a copy of Memoirs of Hadrian, which he ritualistically rereads and rediscovers every August. This repetition may simply reflect a personal fondness for the Roman emperor and for Yourcenar's impeccably researched prose, but it could also suggest that there is more to this book than first meets the eye. Hadrian therefore seems fundamental because he inhabits the centre of a world more advanced than any other, and the Memoirs goes to some length to detail the component parts – or architecture – of his good governance, highlighting in particular the value of astronomy, mathematics, rhetoric, logic, poetry, art, etc. Memoirs of Hadrian becomes a template not just for the practice of architecture but for its historicisation. And if the good historian, even more than the good emperor, is the ultimate truth behind the book, then Yourcenar's Hadrian is in so many ways analogous to The Bartlett's Adrian. For here is the guardian of architecture's immediate past, a figure at the centre of it all, whose trilogy of couplets – objects and desires, words and buildings, concrete and culture – perfectly captures a way of presenting the world through both things and ideas.
Memoirs of Adrian
Borden, Iain (editor) / Fraser, Murray (editor) / Penner, Barbara (editor) / Weaver, Thomas (author)
Forty Ways To Think About Architecture ; 235-238
2015-03-24
4 pages
Article/Chapter (Book)
Electronic Resource
English
| TIBKAT | 1999
| TIBKAT | 2009
| DataCite | 1883
Schweigende Lammer Adrian Meyer
British Library Online Contents | 2011