Fallen Glory

October 17, 2016
This well-researched and evocative work turns history into biography with the fascinating tales of the lives and deaths of 20 structures from around the world. Crawford, who manages communications and publications for Scotland’s National Collection of architecture and archaeology, reveals a witty and intelligent literary voice as he attempts to “rebuild these fallen glories in mind’s eye and let them live again.” The 20 chapters cover the creation and desecration of a wide range of subjects, from the Tower of Babel to GeoCities. Most were destroyed by human hubris, with later attempts at resurrecting the sites often leading to further chaos and destruction. Though some of the early chapters seem more biographies of self-aggrandizing romantics such as Arthur Evans and Heinrich Schliemann, later chapters on the World Trade Center’s collapsed Twin Towers and the Islamic State’s obliteration of the ancient city of Palmyra reveal dramatic, startling connections between past and present, creator and destroyer, politics and culture. The book is sprinkled with illustrations and photographs, and it concludes with a welcome section offering suggestions for further in-depth reading. Although the book overly is descriptive at times, it’s archaeologist approach concludes with a compelling view of the future.

Starred review from February 1, 2017
A searching survey of some of humankind's greatest architectural accomplishments.Whereas a human life is usually less than 100 years, writes Scottish preservationist Crawford, "in its lifetime, the same building can meet Julius Caesar, Napoleon and Adolf Hitler." Buildings have come to stand for whole civilizations, have indeed been practically all that survives of a civilization, whether the now-fallen city of Palmyra or the ruins of Angkor Wat. In an arresting vision, Crawford juxtaposes the ancient Tower of Babel and the recently fallen twin towers of the World Trade Center, imagining that the American soldiers who invaded Iraq in 2003 "would have been able to see, had they known what they were looking for, the place where it all began." The author's "it all" includes some grandly noble experiments, such as St. Paul's Cathedral in London, one that both royalists and republicans knew even in a time of civil war "still mattered," so much so that huge energies and treasuries went into rebuilding it after the Great Fire of 1666. Along the route of his detailed but lightly told tour, Crawford stops in at places such as Karakorum, the ancient Central Asian city that afforded the Mongol Empire a stronghold from which to conduct an unusually enlightened kind of administration, encouraging free trade and suppressing the usual bandits and robbers of the caravan routes; the long-gone walled city of Kowloon, victim of a perhaps not so enlightened modern colonizer; and even the imagined metropolises of the here-today, gone-tomorrow virtual world of GeoCities. Some of the most affecting passages, though, concern the World Trade Center and its wealth of intertwined stories, from its designer's acrophobia (hence its narrow, containing windows) to the destruction of old lower Manhattan that preceded the building of those towers. Crawford closes this elegant, charged book with a view of cities now destroyed in the wars of the Middle East, ones that, hopefully, will one day rise from the ashes.A well-written prize for students of history, archaeology, and urban planning.

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November 1, 2016

Crawford's (Aerofilms: A History of Britain from Above) latest title is not the first to offer building necrologies: The AIA Guide to New York City has a chapter devoted to demolished structures. Books with the word "lost" in their titles often document the destroyed architectural heritage of New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Yet with over 2,000 endnotes covering seven millennia, this may be the first to weave an epic tale of how buildings are devastated by war, because of failed social experiments, or as a result of natural disaster. Five parts, each with a regrettably contrived title ("You Say Utopia, I Say Dystopia"), contain 20 chapters tracing iconic architecture, from the Tower of Babel to the World Trade Center, with an epilog about recent ruins in Palmyra, Syria. Crawford shows particular sensitivity to highly charged subjects, such as Israel's control of the Temple Mount since 1967 and the razing of the Pruitt-Igoe housing complex in St. Louis. VERDICT For a book about buildings, the paucity of illustrations is unfortunate. This will appeal more to social than architectural historians.--Paul Glassman, Yeshiva Univ. Libs., New York

Copyright 2016 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 1, 2017
Great buildings arise from all kinds of motivations and fall through forces just as varied. Exploring 21 examples throughout history, Crawford crafts intriguing portraits, beginning with the Tower of Babel and such structures dedicated to the divine as the Temple of Jerusalem and Amarna, the city founded by the heretical pharaoh Akhenaten. Ancient buildings also express power and empire. For Crawford, the Forum of Rome, the Library of Alexandria, and the Hippodrome of Constantinople exemplify the sobering motif of might and impermanence. He reinforces this vision with excursions to the capital of the Mongol empire, Karakorum, the St. Paul's Cathedral that was destroyed in 1666, and ruined citadels in India, Spain, and Peru. Crawford explores the conceit that building design can shape human behavior, using as an example philosopher Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon Prison and mulling over the intended purposes of three short-lived, evocative building projects: the Pruitt-Igoe housing complex in St. Louis, the Berlin Wall, and the World Trade Center. Crawford's astute, entertaining, and affecting gallery of ruins will appeal to readers drawn to the intersection of history and architecture.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)