The Spirit of Place

It takes sharp eyes and good insight to discover the spirit of place that makes one city different from the rest. It’s not enough to describe or show the principal sights. What’s important is to have a point of view, for a city is too complex to be encompassed in even a shelf-full of books.

Painters and photographers can capture the essence of a place through light and composition in one iconic image. The look of Paris in the middle of this century and its unchanging spirit are both contained in the black and white photographs of Brassai, Cartier-Bresson, and Willy Ronis. An earlier era lives on in the paintings of Renoir, Monet, and Utrillo. These images frame and inflect much of what we see in Paris today.

It’s harder for writers, who must know how a city evolved, who lives and works there, and what’s hidden behind the facades before they can do justice to the visible. They need more space, but the same principles apply: selection, analysis, and empathy. You have to know and love your subject to make others want to see it for the first or the 50th time. Ideally, text and pictures should complement each other, providing sharp observations, a visual portrait, and a narrative that weaves them together.

Such a book is John Russell’s LONDON (Harry N. Abrams: $45; 256 pp.) --a glorious treat for its writing and eclectic choice of artworks. I’ve lived in London for half my life, and thought I knew it well, but Russell offers something richer and more finely detailed than I can remember. He is also an expatriate, now living in New York, and this may intensify his feelings for the city, but he claims he always felt close to it.

When asked, as a youth, “Where were you educated?” he replied, “On the streets of London.” He recalls his days as a critic, of theater and then art, of hanging out in railroad stations as a kid, and volunteering as a fire warden at Westminster Abbey during the bombing raids of 1943. Drawing on these experiences, he leads us through four centuries of London history, introducing us to the people who made it, and the place they inhabited. Paintings, photographs, and prints enrich the narration.

“It is within four walls, as much as anywhere outside them, that a great city declares itself,” says Russell, and he works from the inside out. The House of Commons, St. Paul’s Cathedral, and Buckingham Palace are each described as a paradigm of what makes London unique. He writes with passion about the high Victorian world that the composer Edward Elgar mirrored in his Cockaigne overture--”cheerful and Londony, stout and steaky”--and about the way that the city can seem “a vast countryside, several hundred square mile in extent, that is subject from time to time to metropolitan intrusions.”

Russell’s best writing comes in a chapter on the theater, now and then. “There was no way to fake it in the London music hall (vaudeville) . . . no prepacked hyperbole, no hidden microphone, no asinine mechanical spectacle, no mind-blowing amplification. It was one man, or one woman against the many. You walked out on the stage by yourself, and you did it. (If you couldn’t do it, the audience would soon tell you.)”

The spirit of Georgian London lives on in the terraces, taverns, and squares of Dublin. Preserved by poverty and neglect, threatened by developers and misguided nationalists, this gorgeous urban fabric is now being cherished and refurbished. Much of the credit is due to Desmond Guinness, for 32 years president of the Irish Georgian Society, and co-author of DUBLIN: A GRAND TOUR (Harry N. Abrams : $65 : 264 pp.). Like Russell, he and photographer Jacqueline O’Brien are insiders. Photographs of rare beauty reveal the marvels of stucco ornament behind the dour facades, and Guinness mixes scholarship and anecdote as he provides a context for these marvels. Despite his efforts to rouse public awareness, much has been lost, and much remains imperiled or hard to see, which makes this definitive survey all the more precious.

Like a legendary movie star, Paris has been photographed so intensively that everyone feels they know her. So it’s a shock to leaf through METROPOLITAN: A PORTRAIT OF PARIS (Phaidon/Chronicle: $49.95; 240 pp.) and see how much we’ve missed. Matthew Weinreb’s photos capture the play of sunlight across noble facades, the symmetry of domes and vaults, the rich details that lurk, often unnoticed, on doors and balconies. He celebrates the city that was built by kings and presidents to glorify themselves and the state, and the vintage department stores, exhibition halls, and theaters that were built for and by the bourgeoisie. He focuses on details, and these have been brilliantly juxtaposed to suggest the stately rhythms of Parisian architecture. Brief notes by Fiona Biddulph provide a historical background, but the pictures tell their own story, leaping from one century or street to another, and back, to extol the beautiful and the exotic. Weinreb omits people, disorder, the ephemeral--everything extraneous to his theme--and achieves mesmerizing effects.

Prague is like a star who spent 50 years in seclusion before returning to her public: time-worn but still captivating. In PRAGUE: HIDDEN SPLENDORS (Flammarion/Abbeville: $35; 128 pp. ), photographer Pavel Stecha explores interiors that have miraculously survived the Nazi occupation and communist austerity.

Every era offers its treasures. Stone ribs snake like errant vines across the vaults of the medieval royal palace, and there are baroque churches and libraries as sumptuous as any in Vienna. Least familiar are the rooms designed just before and after the Czechs achieved independence; marvels of art nouveau, Cubism, and a sensual brand of minimalism. It’s hard to imagine the Marxist-Leninist Institute housed amid the luxurious cabinets and marble veneers of the Villa Muller, or baggy-suited apparatchiks buying their shirts in the sybaritic Adam shop, both designed by Adolf Loos, the modernist who declared that “ornament is crime.”

“Places are spaces that you can remember, that you can care about and make a part of your lives,” wrote Donlyn Lyndon and the late Charles W. Moore in their introduction to CHAMBERS FOR A MEMORY PALACE (The MIT Press: $29.95; 322 pp. ). These two architects, friends and former partners, exchange letters and sketches of places that have impressed them around the world. They dismiss the illusions of virtual reality, “dislodged from the earth and inhabited by electronic speculations. We intend to remain unabashedly earthbound, ready to spend our limited days imagining palpable places, places that people can reach on their feet and fill with their presence.”

These letters explore sweeping vistas and telling details, the variety of built forms and the complexities of enclosed space. Compact and elegant, “Chambers for a Memory Palace” is a perfect companion for the armchair traveler. But the authors have a loftier goal. “Places that are memorable are necessary to the good conduct of our lives,” they write. “We need to think about where we are and what is unique and special about our surroundings so that we can better understand ourselves and how we relate to others . . . Our purpose in writing this book is to help make real places more memorable.”