BOOK REVIEW : Weekends: A Story of Failed Utopianism : WAITING FOR THE WEEKEND <i> by Witold Rybczynski</i> , Viking, $18.95, 213 pages

“Have a great one!” is the customary Friday salute of the screenwriter-cum-security guard in the building where I work.

The phrase evokes what Witold Rybczynski calls “the sovereignty of the weekend,” the alluring promise of rejoicing and renewal toward which we slouch all week.

Rybczynski, a professor of architecture who discovered in himself a genius for the celebration in prose of where we live, has staked out hearth and home as his realm.

In his earlier books, “Home” and “The Most Beautiful House in the World,” he scrutinized the micro-environment in which we spend much of our lives. Now, in “Waiting for the Weekend,” he ponders how we spend our time there.

As if to demonstrate his major theme--the eternal tug-of-war between work and leisure--he opens the book with a leisurely rumination on Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons.” His point? The four seasons have been replaced by the rhythms of weekday and weekend in setting the tempo of our lives.

“A historical shift has occurred in timekeeping between Vivaldi’s time and my own,” Rybczynski writes. “I could not describe my life in four concertos but in recurring variations--the Weekend Variations.”

“Waiting for the Weekend” is everything you wanted to know about the weekend but were too laid-back to ask. Rybczynski muses on the very idea of time and its measurement. He discourses on the invention of the calendar and the “planetary week.” He points out how our notion of the weekend derives from the ancient and universal observance of the “tabooed day,” the “holy day,” the market day. He comfortably invokes authorities from Aristotle to Lover Boy, sometimes in a single high-spirited sentence.

Rybczynski tracks the development of various weekend institutions, ranging from the Sunday newspaper to “The Ed Sullivan Show,” from picnicking to professional sports, from Sunday morning church to Saturday night movies. By 1879, he reports, the word weekend-- with all that the term implies--first appeared in print.

“No longer were work and play interchanged at will, no longer did they occur in the same milieu; there was now a special time for leisure, as well as a special place,” Rybczynski explains.

“This boundary--exemplified by the weekend--more than anything else characterizes modern leisure.”

Charged with a voracious curiosity and graced with a lilting style, Rybczynski leads us down some odd and intriguing byways in his search for the origins of the weekend. He harks back to “Pamela,” the first English novel, for example, to make the point that the novel itself (and the pleasures of “private” reading) reflect a distinctly modern idea of leisure.

“There is no more leisurely occupation,” he observes in passing, than “reading a novel.”

And he sees in the emergence of the Victorian obsession with “hobbies”--stamp-collecting, gardening, even (as in the case of Winston Churchill) bricklaying--a precursor of our own conflicted attitudes toward leisure.

“The hobbyist was devoted to his private passion out of all proportion to its real importance,” he observes. “It was a way of doing something and doing nothing at the same time.”

Thus Rybczynski reminds us--as if we needed a reminder--that the tantalizing notion of “universal leisure,” so popular among future-thinkers of the ‘60s, has turned out to be just another example of failed utopianism.

Americans are working ever longer hours during the workweek, and we approach the weekend with a grim determination to “have a great one.”

As Rybczynski insists on pointing out, “the lack of carelessness in our recreation” gives the all-important weekend a bittersweet and even tragic cast. That’s the subtext of “Waiting for the Weekend”: The weekend holds the promise of time apart from labor--of “sacred time”--but we work so hard at our leisure that we may no longer know the difference.

Next: Richard Eder reviews “Closing Arguments” by Frederick Busch (Ticknor & Fields) .