When Stone Weeps: Can Architecture Become a Living Being?

Buildings are called inanimate, yet we are born in them, play in their corridors and wait for loved ones at their windows, and this book asks whether architecture can become a living being. It begins with an old house that has outlived its family, a child's scratch still on the kitchen wall, and reads the building as another body with skin, bones, arteries and lungs, then calls on Le Corbusier's machine for living that people turned into memory, Heidegger's dwelling, Bachelard's house that lives inside us and Aldo Rossi's city as collective memory. An ordinary school torn down after generations studied there shows how a building dies when people leave it and dies again when it leaves memory, and the chapters set the mourned demolition of Pennsylvania Station in New York beside the survival of Grand Central, with Palmyra, Damascus, Hiroshima and Beirut as places where stone bears witness to war and repair. Carlo Scarpa's dialogue between old and new, Peter Zumthor's atmosphere, Gaudí's stone that grew, Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater and Jane Jacobs's eyes on the street lead to buildings that breathe, change with their people and learn how to age, like copper and wood in dialogue with time. The book closes on time as the final inhabitant of every room and on stone that cannot weep, into which a person still places a heart by building a home, hanging a photograph or letting a child grow up among its walls, so that memory becomes the soul humanity gives to stone.