Puzzling the Will
For the poet Charlotte Van den Broeck, the idea of a building is ludicrous, a bottomless vessel filled by an architect’s unslakable longing.
Bold Ventures: Thirteen Tales of Architectural Tragedy by Charlotte Van den Broeck. Other Press, 304 pp., $28.
The inquiry of a dreary fixation—that is, with a baker’s dozen suicides—has produced Bold Ventures: Thirteen Tales of Architectural Tragedy. Through diary, travelogue, and a series of melancholic biographies, epitaphs more like, Bold Ventures circles the centers of individual fates. Widening history’s narrow throat, the Belgian poet Charlotte Van den Broeck allows her obsessions, and those of her doomed subjects, to remodel architecture into an oneiric store of memory. Swimming pool, church, museum. Hanging, gunshot, a despairing leap.
Van den Broeck places an equal sign between professional failure and self-destruction. Her preoccupation can be traced to the mid-2000s, to her hometown of Turnhout, the location of the aforementioned swimming pool. The pool, seemingly starved, attempts to swallow swimmers through its ducts before a sign is posted: TEMPORARILY PERMANENTLY CLOSED FOR MAINTENANCE. When the facility reopens, its water t…
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