Cover Design by Xi Chen
Cover Design by Thomas McCormick
DESIGNS OF DESTRUCTION
The Making of Monuments in the Twentieth Century
Lucia Allais
Cover Design by Hallee Thompson
DESIGNS OF DESTRUCTION
THE MAKING OF MONUMENTS IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY CHAPTER 1: WARDENS OF CIVILIZATION
EXCERPT
HALLEE THOMPSON
In the first chapter of Designs of Destruction: The Making of Monuments in the Twentieth Century, Allais describes a desire for architectural continuity in the fabric of cities. She continues by explaining the aspirations of Horta to create harmony in Brussels rather than blocks of mix-matched architecture without cohesion. From his perspective, cohesion would “neutralize the disaster,” with monuments that would enhance the characteristic of the neighborhoods. Designs for such cities would extend beyond the limitations of a building and bleed into the city streets and culture itself. This idea of harmony gives reason for Horta’s destruction to enhance the city for its “optimal aesthetic effect.” This notion of aesthetic unity in the culture of a city was carried on in Rome with Mussolini as its chief operator of destruction: “In contrast to Horta’s more dynamic image, this one was to be photographic, staged, and dependent upon freezing a view of imperial grandeur along monumental axes. It was also as part of this campaign to brand the fascist regime as preservationist that Mussolini dispatched over twenty architects to Athens, the largest national delegation by far. The Italian government had been trying to steer the CIC’s work towards visual culture to make it a continuation of its own art conservation.” Art and architecture became a way for the Fascist regime to propagate their power and beliefs across the nation and the world. Large swaths of the city were destroyed to make room for their agenda. Giovannoni, the leader of the Italian architecture group in Athens, described the “phenomenon of Italian restoration” taking part in Italy. This reconfiguring for aesthetic unity was formulated by analyzing historical architecture and determining value by determining which structures best served fascism. This was more than reconfiguring streets, and buildings, it was the reconfiguration of a nation. Through continuity of architecture, urban design, and political principles, the fascist regime strived to change the culture of a nation, which is a fascinating way to understand the power of architecture can have in political uprisings. Unlike Haussmann’s Paris restructure, this reconfiguration was a tactical placement of aesthetics embedded into the existing figure void ratio of the city. To maintain this fascist cohesion, Giovannoni went to the extent of requiring the neutrality of facades of new architecture such that they would not undermine the aesthetic and historical unity. This however led to, much like Haussmann, the displacement of the lowerclass citizens to the outskirts of the city; known today as gentrification. This questions the value of the citizen in the remaking of the city under a new cultural perspective. The city then becomes a tool to meet 1
DESIGNS OF DESTRUCTION
THE MAKING OF MONUMENTS IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY CHAPTER 1: WARDENS OF CIVILIZATION
the political agenda. These notions of power are important to understand as they still exist today. In the United States, President Trump proposed an executive order to “Make Federal Buildings Beautiful Again,� which would alter the vernacular of American federal architecture to solely Neo-Classical. This ignores the multifaceted culture of the USA and narrows the scope of what federal buildings could be to Trumps view of what the United States should be. This controlling of federal architecture begins to control the culture of the USA as a whole, much like that of Mussolini in the text. Architecture extends beyond the realm of building; it is the cities and culture around us. What we preserve, destroy, and rebuild then affects the future of our culture.
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DESIGNS OF DESTRUCTION
THE MAKING OF MONUMENTS IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY CHAPTER 5: INTEGRITIES
ILLUSTRATION
THOMAS MCCORMICK
In Lucia Allais’ fifth chapter Integrities: The Salvage of Abu Simbel, 1960-1980, the author documents the tremendous coordinated effort of relocating Abu Simbel along with twenty-three other ancient temple sites within the newly engorged region of the Nile river affected by the construction of the Aswan High Dam of 1964. Lucia Allais’ map (Figure 5.4) of the relocation of these twenty-four temples illustrates an effort by Western nations to not only preserve these ancient Egyptian sites, but to also simultaneously construct a Western narrative that would be framed in direct opposition to a Soviet effort to gain influence in the region. In this way, the task of the preservation of Abu Simbel can be understood as an opportunity for many nations to present their own idealized notions of how the preservation might take place while ultimately resulting in an enormous utilization of resources to construct a pointed political statement in response to an opposing one. In Lucia Allais’ map, the author co-opts the notational language of the “Tedder Map” of the Italian city of Verona, produced by the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington D.C., that documented the locations of significant monuments in the city and their proximity to the explosions of bombs dropped by Allied forces during the second world war. The simultaneous and seemingly incongruous acts of both careful documentation of monuments to be preserved and literal destruction of “communication” nodes of the Axis forces reveals a political tightrope walk that would be performed similarly again twenty to thirty years later. The subject of the Aswan Dam, while originally being solely an economic stimulus in the eyes of Egypt’s president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, quickly became a political opportunity for both the western and eastern sides of the Cold War conflict. After Nasser refused political allegiance with the United States after their bid to help fund the dam and after the international conflicts generated by Nasser’s attempt to fund the dam himself through a nationalization of the Suez Canal, Russia and Yemen claimed their opportunity to politicize the dam’s construction. This left the capitalist democratic western nations to, through UNESCO, politicize the ensuing efforts to “Save the Treasures of Nubia.” Considering the tensions between these western nations, namely Great Britain and France, and Egypt due to a history of violent colonization and appropriation, the irony of the ensuing naive and bold propositions for conserving and relocating the twenty-four temples becomes obvious. Through Lucia’s map, we can begin to see the ridiculous consolidation of resources to construct and preserve political ideas and beliefs through and as a result of growing economic activity in the world. The expansive web of frantic vectors represents both the impressive 3
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THE MAKING OF MONUMENTS IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY CHAPTER 5: INTEGRITIES
coordination of different nations while illustrating the tragic divided condition of the world at large and the constant, inevitable and wasteful competition that results. The steady rise of capitalism and industrialization after the second world war and the resulting economic pressure on smaller, less “developed” nations resulted in an extreme confluence of political will within one region. This conflict between preservation and infrastructural construction, the opposing sides of which could have taken on either role, resulted in an ultimately needless opposition of forces to preserve history and political ideas in the face of the generation of capital viability. A fragment of this seemingly endless feedback loop of creation and destruction is illustrated here in Allais’ illustration.
Figure 5.4 Lucia Allais, Relocation of twentyfour temples to four oases along the Nile, and five Western museums, during UNESCO’s Campaign to Salvage the Temples of Nubia, 1960-1980. © Lucia Allais
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DESIGNS OF DESTRUCTION
THE MAKING OF MONUMENTS IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY CODA: VISCOSITIES
DIAGRAM
To de
XI CHEN
The traces of the cultural politics built into hard architectural materials and permanent monumental structure across the globe.
Post-modernism
Humanistic Scholarship
International preservation changed history. Instead, design no longer h
The transnational discipline in post-modernism is to reuse the forms of the past and explode “monument” as stable object-referent for international preservation. Monumental heritage became a geographically amorphous imaginary.
Architectural mon from platforms for new technologie public good. The could be conclud an ideal of inte viscosity, a possib and resilien
The new discipline, the theoretical innovation, shows as thinking across disciplines as the post-structuralist Michel Foucault’s theory undermining the hierarchy between monument and document, and express social meanings.
everyone’s monument is everyone else’s document
Avant-garde
The avant-garde revives interest in monuments as architectural ironies seen in the example of Superstudio’s Twelve Italian Cities and Bauhaus master Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s Architects’ Congress.
Between the middle decades of the twentieth century
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In the 1970s
esign the survival over the destruction with the help of bureaucratic organization and rationalized system.
d architecture’s capacity as a design medium for storing holds the monopoly over heritage preservation.
numents transferred r experimenting with es to a transnational shift/transformation ded as from integrity, ernal resistance, to bility of permeability, nce to context.
Four ways that politics, technologies, and aesthetics intersect in global preservation practice: First, non-governmentality, blurring the boundary between World Heritage historic and functionalist architecture.
Second, financial and economic agencies manage the World Heritage and provide “criteria” for sites.
Third, to see culture as a substance, a glue for cohabitation between different types of patrimony. The definition of heritage as a language and of “untranslatability” as a value.
Fourth, there is no document but only data, no authenticity but only stickiness in the concept of international preservation.
There are a few practices that follow the rules of today’s international preservation:
1. Rem Koolhaas and OMA-AMO. The research project focusing on how to intervene in historic cities in China creates a sense of ironic defamiliarization, instead of an obligatory self-distancing.
2. A group of American and European architectural designers take the un-ironic path and turn architectural preservation into “experimental” practice with the model of international avant-garde.
Today
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DESIGNS OF DESTRUCTION
THE MAKING OF MONUMENTS IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
BOOK AS BUILDING THOMAS MCCORMICK
If Lucia Allais’ book Designs of Destruction: The Making of Monuments in the Twentieth Century were to be equated to a building, it would be that of the Acropolis Museum by Bernard Tschumi Architects constructed between 2001 and 2009. The museum, situated just southeast of the Acropolis hill, seeks to contend with and situate, much like Allais’ book, an overwhelming abundance of historical monuments and sites. The museum, resulting from an enormous contribution of economic resources and Greek political will, illustrates Allais’ thesis that monuments are constructed as a result of a network of specific forces that can influence and generate a continual cycle of preservation and destruction. The seemingly inevitable decision to place the new building directly adjacent to the famous hill resulted in the unplanned-for excavation of the ancient layers of the city of Athens, obviously replete with tightly clustered domicile foundations that Bernard Tschumi’s office narrowly avoided through the monumental uplift of specific parts of the building through massive structural pilotis. The building simulates and mimics the ancient act of parallax and rise that one experiences when traversing the Acropolis hill and its many enormous and obsessively preserved monuments. The crown of the interior of the building is composed of a recreation of fragments of the Parthenon temple such as its frieze and the Elgin Marbles through ersatz constructions that begrudgingly replace the original fragments claimed by the British Empire in the early 19th Century. With this contextual information, we can see that the museum itself performs as a near perfect example of the struggle of political will and national pride between nation-states that defines Lucia Allais’ conception of the history of the preservation of monuments.
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Figure 1 Bernard Tschumi Architects, aerial photograph of the Acropolis Museum and interior photograph situated at the top floor of the building looking towards the ancient hill, 2009. Š Bernard Tschumi Architects
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DESIGNS OF DESTRUCTION
THE MAKING OF MONUMENTS IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
BOOK REVIEW
HALLEE THOMPSON
In an era of war, a new cultural movement emerged. In Designs of Destruction: The Making of Monuments in the Twentieth Century, Lucia Allais recounts the World War era as the most destructive time in history. As nations filled with ruins, people were forced to address the survival of monuments. This interdisciplinary act included bureaucrats, intellectuals, art historians, archaeologists, curators, lawyers, and architects to name a few and brought forth new diplomacy and a new movement with preservation at the forefront of architecture and a political construct for society. The first chapter begins with the first ever diplomatic meeting for the preservation of monuments, the 1913 Athens Conference. Here, we see the “wardens of citizens,” meeting to imagine an international stance towards preservation. This debate transpired through law, laboratory, and the city. The Athens document created radical terms for further potentially regulating conservation. Giovannoni, however, mimicked the ideas for Italy’s fascist political agenda. There, he could create a manifesto of prescriptions for what architecture in the age of fascist aesthetics would look like. Allais then powerfully highlights how buildings and monuments can then be visual tools for witnessing cultural civilizations. These cultural implications of architecture become more apparent in the following chapters which show how architecture entangled itself with the military powers. Dwight Eisenhower set protocols to salvage monuments, which developed into maps, art, and architectural objects that were decided on by those Allies in military power that could then be exploited for cultural propaganda. Their protection system was calculated based off of information, channels, responsibility, compliance, and spirit, which described the transmission, and behavioral strategy for monuments as psychological warfare. This calculation continues through the detailed mapping of monuments which was important in the era of air strikes as to provide maps as to what cultural sites should be avoided. Allais points to how visual criteria of aesthetics became increasingly relevant to the selection of monuments in mappings. She successfully visualizes this by displaying bombing maps in dialogue with locations the Allies deemed more valuable to protect. However, this poses the question of why the focus is on monuments being avoided during bombing rather than salvaging afterwards. The monuments themselves that are selected create a hierarchy of importance through categories which signify what 11
monuments and cultures are determined to be important which later continued into other aspects of the city such as tourism, preservation, and future military conquest. Following the categorical system of preservation, Allais brings to the forefront that “stones also die.” Die in this sense expanded beyond the realms of physical destruction. She importantly points to the destruction of culture through colonialism. The subject of her later chapters is to then examine how UNESCO worked as a diplomacy tool to decolonize nations in Africa and Asia. Radical change followed with UNESCO’s competition for Abu Simbel. Similar to changing political structures, Allais points out the value of following the changes of technology which altered the perception and construction of historical architecture progress. Here we see the various design strategies which came from designers across the world. Allais wisely points out that not all of them were focused on the cultural presence of Abu Simbel. The USA, for example, were focused on using this opportunity to extend their national presence in the world. UNESCO itself utilizes film and photography to exaggerate the depiction of the site and the preservation of Abu Simbel is put into question as a medium for cultural and political power. Rounding out this historical text, the CODA emerges as Allais points out that this preservation discourse is still relevant today. As architecture is a cultural tool for the world, she ends the book with a strong statement that creative production can be a “model for human freedom and volition at large.” This highlights the historical progression that follows the text. We see, from the beginning, how those in power could shape the perspective of culture through monuments. This is the power that architecture has. These are the steps and processes that we need to understand as designers to further balance our own preservation desires before modernism and beyond. The book can then be described as a tool for us to understand this interdisciplinary process alongside other fields for the future of architecture, art, history, and culture.
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DESIGNS OF DESTRUCTION
THE MAKING OF MONUMENTS IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
SEEDS OF DISCUSSION
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1.
Do we consider the cultural implications of our designs often enough? (Hallee Thompson)
2.
What are ways in which politics are still directly engaged with the preservation and construction of architecture? (Hallee Thompson)
3.
What are some ways in which we, as politically situated citizens, can engage in preservation acts that co-opt or subvert larger institutional practices of preservation? (Thomas McCormick)
4.
What are the limits of preservation? How much is too much when it comes to the massive quantities of time and resources needed to preserve a piece of cultural architectural heritage? What are some alternatives to the large scale political strategies of preservation that institutions have used in the past? (Thomas McCormick)
5.
Who will be the person to determine the quality of today’s preservation projects when authenticity and documentation are no longer important in the process of preservation, and it becomes a series of data accumulating and following the preset “criteria”? (Xi Chen)
6.
Instead of following the avant-garde and the post-modern successors to create a sense of ironic defamiliarization or turning into “experimental” practices, are there other ways to practice architectural preservation as a soft cultural politics? (Xi Chen)