Few man-made things seem as stable, as immutable, as a building. Yet the life of any structure is neither fixed nor timeless. Buildings are forced to adapt to each succeeding age. The Parthenon, that epitome of a ruined temple, was for centuries a working church and then a mosque; the cathedral of Notre Dame was and "restored and " to a design that none of its original makers would have recognized; remains of the Berlin Wall, once gleefully smashed, have become precious relics. Here Edward Hollis recounts the most enthralling of these metamorphoses and shows how buildings have come to embody the history of Western culture.