British academic Tom Wilkinson's first book is a rich, insightful inquiry into why buildings should be built first and foremost for people. His prose is smart, witty and opinionated; he wears his considerable learning to the side, like a beret. Even the buildings he picks are fresh and suggestive: one may never have existed while another isn't even a building, it's a footbridge.
Bricks and Mortals meanders from one structure and theme--power, morality, business, colonialism, entertainment, health--to another. The goal is to demonstrate how "architecture shapes people's lives and vice versa." Wilkinson's 10 chosen structures from around the world tell us much about his perspective. He presents them chronologically, starting with the biblical Tower of Babel and moving on to Nero's Golden House in Rome, Beijing's Garden of Perfect Brightness and Richard Wagner's Festspielhaus (Festival Theater) in Germany.
One of his best and most stimulating dissections deals with E.1027, a huge villa overlooking the French Riviera. "A love poem, a present," it was designed and built by Eileen Gray for her partner, architecture critic Jean Badovici. Through this massive house, Wilkinson reveals "the secret sex life of buildings, their capacity to enflame and arouse"--as in the case of the great modern architect Le Corbusier, who painted murals in and on E.1027 and decades later drowned in the water below it, a possible suicide.
As he easily jumps from architecture to popular culture to philosophy to history, Wilkinson's stimulating critical inquiries reveal an engaged social conscience. Outstanding. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher