It’s an interesting premise for a book: failed architecture, and the failed architects responsible, who kill themselves in shame. In Bold Ventures, Charlotte Van den Broeck sets out to examine such double tragedies, thirteen of them in Europe and the USA. Except along the way readers begin see that often, neither the architecture nor the architects were tragic, and the book is almost as much about twenty-something year old Van den Broeck as it is about her topic.

It starts out fabulously. In her native Turnhout, Belgium, the local municipal swimming pool is an ongoing manmade disaster. It seems to be closed far longer than it is ever open. The most inconceivable things shut it down. The boiler is in a room under the pool, where it is not so slowly sinking, faster than the pool itself is. Water leaks in, not from the top where the pool and sensors are, but from below. So no one notices until the damage is severe. It is endless. Van den Broeck makes it lively and even comical. But the stories of the architect, tortured by the realization it was his bad design that is responsible, and ultimately committing suicide over it, are just untrue.

This story takes the reader from Van den Broeck’s puberty through her teen years, with her various young girl concerns, boyfriends and sexual awakenings. It seems like a delightfully unusual combination – the author actually involved with the architecture.

But it doesn’t grow; it just stalls in new locations.

Next, we find her at a church with a crooked steeple. It turns out there is a whole association of crooked steeple churches, called, nice and clearly, L’Association des Clochers Tors d’Europe. It has 82 member churches. The people who show her around are far more interesting than the church, and she focuses on them instead. No one sacrificed their life over the design.

As it goes on, it seems to be more and more about her experience visiting the sites: how she got there, what old friends she met up with, what they ate, how her love life was progressing, and so on. At a number of points she tells readers personal things they really don’t need to know about her in this context. There’s the bulge in her boyfriend’s swimsuit in the pool, rubbing against her. There is sliding out from under her lover while he’s trying to make love to her. There’s the threesome of her boyfriend, and his best friend: bumming around Europe together, sharing the same bed. And my favorite – a description the slutwear she chose to wear to a military barracks: Crocs, pink hotpants, tight t-shirt and no bra. She spent the whole visit trying to cover her butt. This is not your average investigative journalism.

Those barracks are “famous” for having no toilets. Designed in 1870, the only toilets for enlisted men were at the top of towers on the corners of the camp. The Rossauer Barracks have no story. They just have inconvenient and insufficient toilets. And a myth that the architect killed himself when everyone discovered his “mistake”.

There are 13 site visits in all, and precious few caused their architects to kill themselves. There are plenty of suicides, though. One architect in Italy was 78 when he let go. Van den Broeck, in her early 20s at the time of her visit, can’t imagine why he would have done that, and narrows it down to two quite ignorant and irrelevant choices. It is the product of a totally inexperienced mind, incapable of empathy for someone approaching 80. All she had to do was chat with anyone over 60 and they would have provided her with a list of really good reasons that would have opened her eyes much wider. But no.

The last chapter portrays an artist in Colorado Springs. He also committed suicide at 78. His story has nothing whatever to do with architecture; he was sculptor. He designed two homes in his lifetime, but neither one is the subject of any controversy or even analysis in the book. He shot himself when he could no longer close his hand over his paintbrush. It had been coming for a long time, and was totally expected.

She also visits an exclusive golf course in New Jersey where visitors, and especially women, are not allowed. This includes her. It seems the developer committed suicide a hundred years ago after using all his own money to design and build the course (not the clubhouse). After searching in vain for a break in the fence, Van den Broeck had to eat stuff she normally would not touch at a local diner. There is no controversy over the design of the golf course. No one was killed, nothing collapsed in a heap, but they did have terrible trouble growing grass. Readers will have no idea what the place looks like; her photo is of a sign.

This leads to another complaint. Despite her always having a camera at the ready, there is only one image per chapter. It is always a small, bad, black and white shot, with no caption outside of the architect’s name. Few of the sites are famous and therefore searchable online, making the reader’s vision entirely dependent on her descriptions. The photos are not very helpful, and the total impression is, to put it kindly, incomplete. Architecture is an intensely visual subject. This book is not. Nor are there any images of the architects, such as the impressively handsome (to Van den Broeck) Charles Rennie Mackintosh. He also did not commit suicide over a design of his.

It might be a romantic notion that architects take everything personally and often commit suicide, but Van den Broeck never takes the obvious step of looking it up. I believe she would have found that, among other things, Europeans are far less repulsed by the notion of suicide, that creatives are far less repulsed by the notion of suicide, and that architects probably don’t stand out as exceptions. Just the myths do. In the book, there is really just one case where the architect’s suicide is clearly a direct result of his building design failing, and fatally so. It was a movie theater in Washington DC in the early 1920s. A record snowfall caused the roof to cave in, killing nearly 100.

There is no doubt that Van den Broeck is a writer. She tells readers several times that she is, that she must be and that she can’t take a regular job for fear of disrupting her writing. That she got published this easily (some of the stories came from her masters’ thesis) means a lot of people recognize her promise. Her two poetry books have won prizes. So has this book, which is a bestseller in the Netherlands. But I think when the day comes for her to reread Bold Ventures in 50 years, she will cringe. As I did.

David Wineberg ( )

Best for:
People who are really into creative non-fiction essays.

In a nutshell:
Author van den Broeck explores architecture where the architect died under circumstances possibly related to their creation.

Worth quoting:
N/A

Why I chose it:
Normally this would be completely up my alley.

Review:
I made it through about 40% of this book and then had to stop because life is too short to read book that just aren’t doing it for you.

I find books on architecture fascinating, and I like to learn the stories behind buildings. I thought that’s what I was in for with this book, but instead it was less about the buildings and the architects and more about the author’s life. Which is fine! But not the book I thought I was buying, and not really the book that I think it is selling.

I’d expect a book like this, looking into the facts and history around not just buildings but also the people who built them would have loads of footnotes or endnotes. A bibliography. An index. This book has none of that. I’m sure van den Broeck did a lot of research, but I don’t know what her sources are, and I find that a bit concerning in a book that is presented as having some basis in research and fact.

The other issue is that each chapter feels a bit like when I’m looking for a recipe online and have to scroll through like 75% of the page learning about the poster’s childhood and life story before I find out how to make easy drop biscuits. I appreciate I’m getting a free service in that case, but also, I’m really not that interested in all that. Same here - I’m sure the author is an interesting person, but I’m not that interested in her life story. It’s always tangentially related to the topic, and I know that non-fiction books can have a hearty element of personal anecdotes (No Place to Go managed to weave a lot of the author’s experience into the book without it feeling like an autobiography). But in this book, it just didn’t work for me.

(Side note, whomever is the publicist for this book is CRUSHING IT. Seriously, this book is prominently displayed in like every bookstore I’ve been in the past month (and I’ve been in like five). It’s, as always, completely possible that I have totally missed the point, but I’m not so sure.)

Recommend to a Friend / Keep / Donate it / Toss it:
Donate it ( )