Change is forever

Then the virgin was ruined, architect Edward Hollis tells us in his new book, “The Secret Lives of Buildings,” mutilated again and again, even by people who professed to love it. Soldiers blasted it with cannonballs; foreign poachers ransacked its sculptures. Now, he writes, it is doomed to disappear into the city’s pollution-poisoned air, when it “will have become nothing but an idea.”

A tragic tale, right? But Hollis sees the story differently: When it comes to buildings, even our most iconic architectural monuments, change isn’t a curse - it’s their essence. In chapters on the history of the Parthenon and a dozen other far-flung buildings, from Jerusalem’s Western Wall to the Venetian in Las Vegas, he makes the case that buildings always change - and that they should. Reverence for man-made structures in their “pure, original” form simply denies reality, he argues, and, even worse, is impractical and wasteful, discouraging us from adapting buildings to meet our evolving needs.

Along the way, Hollis exposes the surprisingly motley histories of some of the world’s great landmarks, from the arbitrary restorations of Notre Dame in Paris to the sanitized squalor of the Berlin Wall, now bulldozed to pieces and parceled out to souvenir shops and museums. He also chronicles the brief, bizarre life span of a Manchester, England, housing project, the Hulme Crescents, that began with a vision of architecture as a cure for alienation and ended, 25 years later, as a lawless concrete shell smelling of urine and echoing with guitars, after families fled and punk bands and squatters took over.

He spoke with Ideas from his home in Edinburgh.

IDEAS: We’re so conditioned to think of buildings as fixed, especially the ones we see as great architectural achievements. What made you start to see them as fundamentally changeable?

HOLLIS: I spent a year working for this architect in Sri Lanka who made wonderful buildings, using pieces of other buildings that had been demolished and putting them together in different ways, and they always looked as though they were just about to fall apart. They were very carefully maintained to give this illusion that they were just about to be swallowed back into the jungle….And it struck me that buildings are always like that really - they’re always about to slide into ruin or fall to pieces or do something. They never just sit there, doing what we want them to do.

IDEAS: So buildings have a mind of their own?

HOLLIS: There’s this paradox that buildings, if they’re any good, are always going to outlive the people who make them, and that raises a very serious question about why we built them. Because if we build them to outlive us, they’re going to outlive all the purposes we built them for in the first place.

IDEAS: Your chapter on the Parthenon actually brought me to tears, at the violence of the history and the futility of human efforts to undo it. How is it not tragic?

HOLLIS: There’s a lesson in it, that because that building strove to be perfect, or people thought it was perfect, is precisely why things went wrong, because it was an image of timelessness and perfection placed in a world that is neither timeless nor perfect.…We spend our time striving for that, and a building will never be that. The mold will grow on it, and that’s only the beginning. It’s the futility of every effort to restore it that struck me as like Greek tragedy. Every time just makes it worse.

IDEAS: You write about Venice, and the Venetian in Las Vegas - what does the illusion say about the reality?

HOLLIS: I think Venice is an illusion as well, because it’s not a functioning city; it’s a functioning theme park. The buildings happen to be quite old, but in a sense, it’s no more real than Vegas, and in a weird way, Vegas is realer, because it’s this fantastic true story of the West.…I live on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh - at one end is Edinburgh Castle, and at the other is the Queen’s palace - and it’s a lot more like Disneyland than it is anything authentic. I hear bagpipes every day, and I know the only reason they’re there is that they know lots of tourists will come and give them money. And there are lots of shops where people from Texas and Kyoto are finding out their ancient Scottish clan. It’s a fictional world. And in some ways Vegas is more real, because it’s admitting its unreality.

One thing the book isn’t is a huge argument for truth. I’m very interested in exposing illusions, but at the same time I’m not saying we shouldn’t enjoy them.

IDEAS: Do architects think of architecture as art? Is that why it’s so hard for them to accept that their buildings will change?

HOLLIS: Yes. There’s this feeling of authorship, that anyone else doing anything to it can only be spoiling it. But the reality is, builders make buildings. It’s completely cooperative, like an orchestra producing a symphony.

IDEAS: Are you optimistic about the future of architecture?

HOLLIS: There’s nothing like a good recession for architecture, because while nothing gets built, people sit down and think really hard about what they’re going to do. Boom times are terrible, because people just put up any old rubbish.

IDEAS: How should we think about building preservation?

HOLLIS: Thirty or 40 years ago, people talked about restoring a building to make it like it was. But like it was when? Which “when” are you going to choose, and why? Because doing that always involves removing other histories, and it’s selective. There’s a movement now, here, where people are looking at historic buildings and trying to pull them apart, so you can see their stories, and you can see how they’ve changed and developed. I think that’s a huge step forward.

IDEAS: With Notre Dame in Paris, you describe how its appearance now is the product of a mid-19th-century restoration - and you’re critical of it, because it favored the medieval over the other phases of the cathedral.

HOLLIS: The irony is that the architect thought what he was doing was so scientific, but in fact it was as creative as what Victor Hugo was doing [in his 1831 novel, “The Hunchback of Notre-Dame”]. He’s constructed a fiction every bit as fictional as the hunchback.…He made value judgments, and a lot of the wonderful things that were done to the church in the 17th and 18th centuries, he obliterated completely.

IDEAS: Why is it important for people to know this history?

HOLLIS: Perhaps changing the perception of history is a more accessible way to change minds, to get people to think about the way that buildings do change and will change, and how we deal with that. The amount of buildings that get demolished, because we can build a new one, is staggering.

IDEAS: Do you see these stories making a case for the re-use of buildings?

HOLLIS: Well, you look at the Berlin Wall and the Hulme Crescents, and the idea was, “Let’s bring some grand vision into existence,” and then, “Oh, it’s gone wrong - we’ll just get rid of it.” And then you get one like the Hagia Sophia, where it shows how flexible buildings can be, as a church, as a mosque, as a museum.…We do turn buildings into idols, and they shouldn’t be, because they’re tools. We need to make them work for us, not worship them.

Jenna Russell is a Globe reporter. She can be reached at jrussell@globe.com.