FOGGY TERRITORY.

UNCOMMON GROUND

By David Leatherbarrow. London: MIT Press. 2000.

[pound]25.95

Professor Leatherbarrow is his own worst enemy: he cannot write well enough for the sort of thing he is trying to do. This book has some very subtle observations about defining horizontality and modernity across and within the borders of a building: they are drowned out by too many words and too vague a context. He writes one thing, and too soon says something else. One moment he is in the middle of a peroration about horizons, and the next he is inexplicably talking about beautiful garbage cans.

As with all books of the Alberti-Von KlenzeLoos-Heidegger canon, the author prefers to fill pages with arid discussion on subjects such as the link between a building and its landscape, rather than refer to English 'outsiders' like Ruskin or Lethaby, who said the same things but better. Astonishing unproven assertions abound: 'Louis XIV was King of France for two reasons, his royal birth and the fact that he lived in Versailles'; 'technical objects are exactly the opposite of aesthetic figures, or objects with representational substance, because this latter type are naturally oversaturated with references

A Singaporean Agony Aunt once famously admonished a wordy correspondent with the unforgettable rebuke 'I am becoming increasingly fed up with people who write letters using both sides of the paper'. Leatherbarrow has not found an authentic voice, and he can only be speaking to his own home audience. That great fog of words, a terrible vanity for any author, is used to blur over too many, too different things.