Eccentric Spaces

By Robert Harbison

Book 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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0262581833
• ISBN13: 9780262581837
• Release Date: March 2000
• Publisher: MIT Press
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.74 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.0" x 8.9"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

What is it about?

I've read this book three times. After the first two readings, I still had no clue what the book was even about. I mentioned this to my sister, and she found that rather mystifying. So I tried again, with not much more luck. I am giving this four stars because there must be something here, since I keep re-reading it. I've even got it on my Wish List to buy it and try it for a fourth time.

Mysterious

One of the oddest and most beautiful books I have ever read