Back when I was in high school, I met my nadir with physics. I am a bright person who generally learns things easily but high school physics required a leap of faith that I was unable to make because I wanted it to make sense. I watched the dang filmstrip of the plane dropping the package out and the package’s motion continuing forward to follow the plane’s constant velocity and didn’t understand it any of the 20 times that I watched the dang thing. I kept asking the teacher, Mr. Crandall, and then this one boy, Nathan, who was a genius, why it did that and kept getting the same answer: because of such and such a law of physics, and I still didn’t understand. So I gave up on understanding and went about processing the class in my own way, which meant that when Mr. Crandall assigned us to pick one of Einstein’s theories and write about it, I chose to write a biography of Einstein instead, leaving aside any exploration of his scientific theories. Mr. Crandall said something to me that was not the last time that I heard this: The paper was so well-written that he didn’t want to flunk me, but I hadn’t even attempted to do the assignment; so he was at a loss what to grade to assign it. Luckily I had already aced the SAT and gotten accepted into the college of my choice, where I pursued a major that didn’t require me to study physics, to the appalled horror of my college roommate, so my physics grade mattered only to me because it remained the one “failure” of my academic career in that I failed to learn what they meant to teach me.

I mention this because, to some extent, this book reminds me of my approach to writing that paper. In the first chapter, the author tells the story of “the architect’s dream” in which an architect dreams that he is standing atop a Grecian pillar, staring out at the great buildings of history, perfectly preserved, starting with the Great Pyramid and continuing in an unbroken line away from him towards the horizon. Hollis then posits that all great architects imagine that will be the life of their greatest building: preserved, unchanged, throughout time, an eternal monument to their memory. And yet this untrue: residential buildings become shops or museums; shopping malls become schools and residences; even if a building retains its original purpose, its form evolves, the White House being a case in point – and even great buildings like the pyramid loses its brightly-painted marble façade. The pharaohs would be appalled to see the common people scrambling up the sides of their monuments today.

That idea excited me and I looked forward to reading more about this, maybe seeing pictures demonstrating the evolution of famous landmarks and buildings. Instead, the book proceeds to tell stories about a series of buildings and their evolution. The stories are beautifully written, dreamlike, imaginative – but not at all what I was expecting.

Until I went back and re-read the subtitle while writing this post: From the Ruins of the Pantheon to the Vegas Strip in 13 Stories.

Ah, I had missed that critical last word. Now that I see what he is doing here, I like it much better.

This is a beautifully written, imaginative book, with dream-like stories about buildings through history. The author starts – as it says in the subtitle – by telling the story of the Parthenon, from its origin as a temple, through its evolution to a Christian church sheltering the faith of those who believe in sanctuary¹, a Mosque then – having been blown up in a war of possession, a set of “marbles” hauled off to be a museum exhibit in England, a poorly-restored monument to Greek independence, and finally a future, fully-restored archeological recreation.

One of the most beautiful stories is that of the Santa Casa of Loreto, a magical building that appears and reappears throughout time and space, sometimes miraculously transported by angels, sometimes miraculously inspired through dreams that inspire people – often women of power and wealth – to recreate it anew. The storytelling here is technically wonderous, weaving the author’s story with stories that people who witness the miracle tell each other. When I was thinking this was going to be a technical book about architecture, this chapter confused me, but now that I recognize this book is something else entirely, I appreciate this chapter for what it is.

This story is followed by the story of Gloucester Cathedral, a simple, solid church, managed by a series of abbots, that takes on a new life once King Edward II is entombed there. The design of his tomb, a monument not just to Edward, but to a new style of architecture, inspires subsequent abbots to embroider the church with additional filigree, stained glass windows, flying buttresses – each new addition or remodel inspiring the next and the one after that and the one after that, until the simple, solid church is lost forever beneath the evolution of architectural stylewn from one master mason and architect to the next. This story ends with a mystery and a tomb elsewhere, hidden far from the tomb that everyone recognizes as Edward’s.

If you love great storytelling or are interested in architectural history as an idea – as opposed to a technical history – I recommend this book to you. Hollis is a great storyteller. Nowadays, I am afraid he would have a YouTube channel were a mechanized voice would chant facts in bad English over a montage of B-roll. And we would lose his beautiful ability to put words together on a page in a way that weaves enchantment.

1. Which, unfortunately, the people attacking them do not believe in. ↩︎