TO AWAKEN the DEAD in the Current Exhibition.) When Macaulay Draws Buildings, He the Uncanny Achievement Ofdavidmacaulay

formality and a theatricality wholly in boy, I worked in myfather'sstore, where has created twenty-three books, sixteen appropriate to Cohen's casual, intimate he sold records," Glass recently told The of which belong to a genre that he has, if language. The effect is comical, sadly— Guardian. "I listened to a lot of music not made, then re-made: books that tell in the same way that Steve Allen used and liked nearly all of it. People forgot to a story about how buildings are made. to get cheap laughs bystanding at a po tell me that some stuff was better than Beginning with Cathedral, an accident dium and reciting rock-song lyrics in others." Musical egalitarianism is one that became a classic—and whose mak stentorial tones. thing, indiscrimination another; and ing became the subject of a book of its In multiple ways, then, Bookof Long someone seems to have forgotten to tell own, Building the Book Cathedral—he ingyearns in vain. "When I was a young Philip Glass the difference. ♦ has proceeded from the ancient world through the Middle Ages to the Renais sance, the industrial revolution, and the twentieth century, though not in se Peter N.Miller quence.(Howhe chosehissubjects isone of the fascinating questions not raised TO AWAKEN THE DEAD in the current exhibition.) When Macaulay draws buildings, he The uncanny achievement ofDavidMacaulay. tells the story of places. And so his sec ond work, City (1974), walksus through author: in abandoning himself to curios the origins and life of a Roman provin What makes a writer a ity,he shows that he stillhas the child in cial "new" city, from the occasion of its children's book writer"? him. And in abandoning ourselves to his creation—a devastating flood—through This is a deep question, love of curiosity, we show that we also the selection of a site, its surveying, the much deeper in fact remain children in this way—or at least laying out of roads and aqueducts and than asking what makes can suspend adultness long enough to walls, to the life of the city: its markets, a "children's book." Those of us who have follow Macaulay wherever he leads. mills, shops, government and sacred worked our way through David Mac Curiosity is a rather ambiguous vir buildings, and private homes. With his aulay's best-selling "information books," tue. Though we now take it for granted, attention to history—to change over which account for 3.5 million of his the fact is that from antiquity until time—and to material history in par 4 million sales, have often puzzled over some time in the seventeenth century ticular, he may remind us of no one the Library of Congress Cataloguing in curiosity was associated with what we more than Piranesi, a prior generation's Publication Data that clas think of as "vanity"—self- architect-guide to the ancient world's indulgent, pointless, and materiality. Mill (1983), just as charac sifies these books as "ju % venile literature." Building more than a little disrep teristically, is more than just a Baedeker DAVID MA CA UL A Y: the cathedral of Amiens, utable. Telescopic and mi to the New England mill towns of the THE ART OF croscopic investigation in nineteenth century. It is also an attempt the pyramid of Cheops, DRAWING Pompeii, a Welsh castle, a ARCHITECTURE the seventeenth century to view architecture through a prism Spanish Renaissance car National Building Museum began to change all that, that helps us to see it as an affair not avel, an Ottoman mosque, so that "curiosity" came only of art, but also of technology, geol a nineteenth-century to refer to both the object ogy, hydrology, sociology,and econom New England mill, or a twentieth- studied ("a curiosity") and the human ics. Where the mill was built, when it was century skyscraper is surely not child's drive to do the studying ("a curious per built, by whom it was built, what it did play. This always seemed to me like a son"), and both could be celebrated as to the physical environment, and how it librarian's bad joke. worthwhile and even admirable. But shaped the human one: these questions No longer. A visitor to the exhibition as the early modern polymath was dis are as central to Macaulay as the "how" devoted to David Macaulay's creative placed at the top of the intellectual food question, as in "How did it work?" process at the National Building Mu chain by the expert, curiosity, too, was Ship (1993), more than any of Macaul seum is confronted right from the start soon displaced by "expertise." And so ay's other books, works at both ends with Macaulay's own words wholeheart nowadays it is only with children and of time's arrow: its first part narrates edly identifying his practice with that in the realm of children that pure, un a marine salvage operation in the Ca of curiosity: "The key behind all of the bridled, unprogrammed curiosity—if ribbean, while the second part unfolds books I do, particularly with the infor it's programmed, is it really curious?— the building of that same vessel five mation books, there's a sense of curiosity. is still licit. Education tends to drum hundred years earlier in Seville. If the I've always had it and I've always been it out of most people by the time they former is done with Macaulay's char willing to keep asking questions until reach university. acteristically analytical style, in the lat I understood the larger picture." Who Macaulay, now sixty, was born in Eng ter he adopts an archaizing graphical among us still possesses this faith in cu land but earned a B.A. in and visual approach— riosity? Children. So maybe it is in this architecture from the with color—that sets it off waythat David Macaulay is a children's Rhode Island School of as belonging to a different Design. He worked as an time and place. Macaulay Peter N. Miller is professor and chair of interior designer and high always lavishes enormous academicprograms at the Bard Graduate school art teacher before attention on the details § Center and editor of Momigliano and becoming an instructor of the everyday material | Antiquarianism: Foundationsof the at RISD, where he re life of the past. For the § Modern Cultural Sciences (University mains on the faculty. Be salvage artist, no detail is < of Toronto Press). tween then and now he too trivial: and so we learn The New Republic January 30, 2008 33 about privies, bakeries, baths, tools, and Ligorio—arguably the most influen engravings by Stradanus, the "Nova techniques. tial interpreter of antiquity of the High Reperta." But they lie also behind the The show in Washington includes sec Renaissance—used his skills as a drafts unequalled machine book of Agostino tions devoted to the role of "Perspec man, and his understanding of how Romelli, one of the most lavishly illus tive," "Structure," and "Imagination" in buildings were built, to "restore" many trated of all early modern printed books, the drawings that it so generously exhib damaged ancient structures on paper, but actually only one of many produced its. But it begins by walking us through in his drawings. And in the eighteenth at the end of the sixteenth century that a single project from beginning to end: century, none was more famous than was devoted to this subject. This connec Mosque, published in 2003. We can leaf Piranesi for his ability to join practical tion between how things once worked through a blown-up facsimile of Mac knowledge and expressive technique to and how they now worked helps us un aulay's sketchbook, full of reading notes, recreate ancient Roman buildings and derstand that the antiquary and the engi quick sketches, and comments. Then the processes that built them. neer could be the same person: the laws there are the on-location photographs, We do not usually link antiquarian- of nature did not change just because home videos, and maps. And finally the ism and engineering, though they were the ancient world collapsed. In this line layers of progressively more finished joined at the hip for most of the fif- of work, past practice was a guide to fu drawings that culminate in the ture performance. The exhi beautiful published work. In all bition in Washington pays no this Macaulay resembles rather attention to Macaulay's aston strikingly the itinerant Euro ishing revision of the classic— pean artist of past centuries and classically off-putting—Tfie who packed his kit and headed Way Things Work, originally a to Italy (usually) and Greece German product of the early (sometimes). Then, too, the en 1960s. But there is this obvious counter with the past served as connection between his forays a stimulus for current projects. into historical reconstruction Trained, like his predeces and into the reconstruction of sors, as an architect, Macaulay modern machines. Once we has always expressed his seem are aware of it, the whole arc ingly limitless curiosity in draw of Macaulay's career begins to ing. As he explained in 1991, come into focus. everyone should draw, because "the better we see, the more in II. evitable curiosity becomes. The European antiquarian Lack of curiosity is the first tradition was marked by step towards visual illiteracy— its attentiveness to visual and by that I mean not really evidence and its developing seeing what is going on around skills for exploiting it. Compar us." With this idea that draw ison with the other great anti ing is seeing and seeing is un quarian tradition, that of China, derstanding (not believing), makes this clear.

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