Saturday 6 June 2009

Architecture of Failure I


The secret is the very ash of the archive. . .

1 comment:

Robert Doyle said...

Shouldn't that be Architecture of Failure II?

The billowing clouds of smoke conceal the absence of the North Transept, which had burned down on 30 December 1866 never to be rebuilt, leaving the whole assemblage truncated for 70 out of the 83 years of its existence south of the River.

Sadly therefore, the audience present at the 1888 performance of Israel in Egypt hauntingly preserved on those Edison phonograph cylinders would not have been able to see the colossal Egyptian figures "which are from the temple of Rameses the Great at Aboo Simbel; in Nubia"