Designs of destruction: the making of monuments in the twentieth century

摘要

Before the recent flames had been extinguished, Notre-Dame de Paris was engulfed in discourse. The dramatic images that ricocheted across the media announced the fire as a spectacle of catastrophe, the kind that demands a pause for collective viewing. Then followed the mediations of governments, institutions, philanthropists. Nearly a billion dollars were donated within days; French President Emmanuel Macron pledged to rebuild within five years; politicians around the world affirmed a collective grief so self-evidently universal that it went without saying, and yet was said again and again - this was a loss of architectural heritage, everyone agreed, whose significance was not only of national but global import. Then came the articles. What did Notre-Dame de Paris stand for, after all? What about leaving it in ruins? What about bringing its spire into the twenty-first century? Which 'original' should it be restored to? Is it the silhouette that matters, the materiality of its irreplaceable forest of mediaeval timber? What to make of restoring a building for which 'restoration' itself - whether Viollet-le-Duc's in the nineteenth century or the ongoing repairs to Viollet's spire that may have played a role in starting the fire - has proven so pivotal to its history? Much of this discourse was marked by different stripes of disciplinary opportunism, but among the more clear-eyed accounts could be found a great deal of theoretical sophistication and familiarity with the evolving nature of 'monuments' and 'heritage' over the twentieth century. The contours of these conversations seemed, in their better moments, well prepared by the flourishing of preservation and heritage studies within the field of architectural history over the past decade, and an emerging centrality of preservation for contemporary architectural practice.