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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.… (more)
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The actual topic of Eccentric Spaces is the ways in which various arts (practical and expressive) reflect human imaginings of space. In the course of discussing topics such as gardens, machines, cities, and catalogs, Harbison turns often to paintings, sculptures, novels, and, of course, architecture to develop his points. Throughout, however, he engages in a form of criticism more aphoristic than analytical: he offers assessments, not arguments. But that can produce droll maxims like this one:
"Every pilgrim must watch his pocket, and translating a spiritual progress to a feasible journey, everyone ends up in hotels." (128)
I think the most successful chapters were perhaps the opening one on gardens and the penultimate one on maps. The latter in particular attained a sort of rapture of cartographic contemplation. For a text so trained on the sense of vision involved in appreciating spaces, it is in fact completely devoid of graphic illustrations. Paradoxically, that's probably how it should be, although image searching on the Internet makes the volume much more usefully readable for most people now than it would have been when it was published in 1977.