Bold Ventures by Charlotte Van den Broeck is, to say the least, an odd book. The subtitle, “Thirteen Tales of Architectural Tragedy” gives a sense of the topic but not entirely. Van den Broeck, a poet most of the time, has assembled stories about buildings whose architects “either killed themselves or are rumored to have done so.” The buildings and stories vary widely: they include sculpture and a golf course as well as buildings, the dates of the buildings vary the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries, and the deaths of the architects vary as well. Since Van den Broeck is not a designer or even someone particularly knowledgable about architecture, although she certainly has a strong sense of which buildings she likes and dislikes, her discussion of the buildings is more social. She gives a person-on-the-street view of them and their context.
The book was written in Dutch and translated to English by David McKay. I always wonder how well a translation carries the tone of the author, but in this case I suspect it’s close. The authorial voice here is strong and paints vivid images, as you would expect from a poet.
Ultimately, this is not a book about buildings or architects. It’s a book about some very big themes – including the meaning of work, the relationship of artists to the public, and mortality – that uses buildings and architects (and, not by accident, the author) as case studies. I did not read it because I thought it was about forensic analysis of building failures, but the degree to which it is about philosophy leaves me uncomfortable saying more than I enjoyed it a great deal.
The picture above shows one of Van den Broeck’s stories: the Knickerbocker Theater in Washington DC, which collapsed without warning during a snowstorm in January 1922. That collapse, one of the worst in US history not related to fire, earthquake, or wind, is an interesting story in itself, which I may return to in the future, but the chapter about the theater focusses more on the effect of the collapse on the theater’s architect and owner. Their lives were destroyed by the collapse as surely as were those of the victims, just more slowly.
