Eccentric Spaces

by Robert Harbison

Overview

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.

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.

Since its original publication in 1977, Eccentric Spaces has had a devoted readership. Now it is available to be discovered by a new generation of readers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262581837
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	02/28/2000
Series:	The MIT Press
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	6.06(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.51(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Robert Harbison has lectured widely on architecture at the Museum of Modem Art in New York, the University of Toronto, Stanford University, Cornell University, and the Architectural Association, London. His previous books include Eccentric Spaces, Deliberate Regression, and Pharaoh's Dream.

What People are Saying About This

Endorsement

It awakens the reader to the space around him, and it is a reminder of how much we want from the world.

—Richard Todd, Atlantic Monthly

From the Publisher

It awakens the reader to the space around him, and it is a reminder of how much we want from the world.

—Richard Todd, Atlantic Monthly

Atlantic Monthly - Richard Todd

It awakens the reader to the space around him, and it is a reminder of how much we want from the world.

Editorial Reviews

Eccentric Spaces... makes me want to rush out in every direction at once and reexamine all I have ever seen. You can hardly ask a book to do more than that.—Anatole Broyard, New York Times—

From the Publisher

Eccentric Spaces... makes me want to rush out in every direction at once and reexamine all I have ever seen. You can hardly ask a book to do more than that.

—Anatole Broyard, New York Times

Reviews

Eccentric Spaces... makes me want to rush out in every direction at once and reexamine all I have ever seen. You can hardly ask a book to do more than that.

New York Times - Anatole Broyard