Designs of Destruction: The Making of Monuments in the Twentieth Century

Designs of Destruction

Designs of Destruction

The Making of Monuments in the Twentieth Century

Lucia Allais

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2018 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2018

Printed in the United States of America

27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-28655-6 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-52261-6 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226522616.001.0001

This publication is made possible in part from the Barr Ferree Foundation Fund for Publications, Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Allais, Lucia, author.

Title: Designs of destruction : the making of monuments in the twentieth century / Lucia Allais.

Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018014120 | ISBN 9780226286556 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226522616 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Architecture—Conservation and restoration—International cooperation—History—20th century. | Monuments—Conservation and restoration—International cooperation—History—20th century. | Cultural property—Protection—International cooperation—History—20th century. | World Heritage Committee.

Classification: LCC NA111.5 .A45 2018 | DDC 725/.94—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018014120

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Katie and Louis

Contents

Introduction: Monument Survival

1  Wardens of Civilization

Conservation and Diplomacy at the 1931 Athens Conference

2  Battles Designed to Preserve

The Allies’ Lists of Monuments in World War II

3  Unwitting City Planning

Maps of Monuments and the American Bombing of Europe, 1943–1945

Bridge: Let’s Visit UNESCO House

4  Stones Also Die

UNESCO and the Decolonization of Museums, 1960–1975

5  Integrities: The Salvage of Abu Simbel, 1960–1980

Coda: Viscosities

Acknowledgments

List of Acronyms

List of Archives

Notes

Index

A gallery of color plates

Introduction

Monument Survival

The architect still labors under the ancient shadow of the obsolete monument: he has still to utilize modern technics and the modern world picture in creating his designs.

Lewis Mumford¹

In 1937, the American historian Lewis Mumford pronounced the death of the monument, in a trenchant attempt to settle a question that had vexed architects and critics for almost a decade: could a monument be modern? Mumford answered no, and pointed to memorials that had been built across Europe and North America since the mid-1800s (figure 0.1). With their stepped socles and ribbon colonnades, these buildings pretended to the august and the monumental but in fact clung to an architectural mission of a bygone era, to the cult of death, or of personality, with no touch of the modern spirit in them. In an essay that has become a classic of twentieth-century architectural literature, Mumford wove an elaborate organic metaphor, where empty and ubiquitous monuments were dead matter in an immense world body struggling to outgrow its early phases. Building more such landmarks, he warned, was a misplaced attempt at civilizational survival. To Mumford and others, the monument simply seemed an obsolete building type—fixed in an era of mobility, permanent in a time of technological change, and singular in a democratic age. The very idea of a modern monument, Mumford concluded, is a contradiction in terms.²

Figure 0.1 Monuments cited by Lewis Mumford in The Death of the Monument (1937): Giuseppe Sacconi, Altare della Patria (Rome, Italy), 1885. Leo Van Klenze, Walhalla Memorial (Germany), 1830–1842. Henry Bacon, Lincoln Memorial (Washington, DC), 1922. Photo: Vincent Lopez. Library of Congress. Walter Seymour Allward, Canadian National Vimy Memorial (Canada) on July 26, 1937. Image: George Metcalf Archival Collection, Canadian War Museum. Thomas Hastings, Eternal Light Flagstaff (New York, USA), 1924. Photograph: Library of Congress.

This book is about an architectural phenomenon that proved Mumford’s pronouncement wrong, upsetting every assumption on which he based his hard line between the monument and modernity. Foremost among these was the assumption that new monuments would be built from scratch. Think of buildings that count as monuments today (figure 0.2). There are newly built ones, such as the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, an undulating grid of concrete blocks designed by the American architect Peter Eisenman in Berlin in 2005 to commemorate the Holocaust. But there are also ready-made ones, such as the Maison des Esclaves, an eighteenth-century slave-owner’s house in Gorée, Senegal, where the US president Barack Obama paid a state visit in 2013. Or the ancient Roman amphitheater in Palmyra, Syria, a semi-circular stage where a Jihadi organization filmed beheadings after destroying a nearby arch in 2015, and where the Russian military who then occupied the region held a triumphant concert.³ Just because these last three—house, theater, arch—have existed in some form for hundreds or thousands of years does not mean they are not modern too. They contain a hefty percentage of metal, epoxy, asphalt, and concrete. They accrue more significance every time a political leader stops by. The thousands of yearly visitors they attract are motivated not by a cult of death or personality, but a cult of architectural heritage itself, which is fully enmeshed with contemporary local and global politics.⁴ By the contradictory standards Mumford laid out, these are modern monuments: their job is survival and their survival requires precisely the kinds of technics he identified as engines of modern life.⁵

Figure 0.2 Three twenty-first-century monumental sites: Peter Eisenman, Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin, Germany (2005). Photo © Barbara Bestor. Maison des Esclaves, Island of Gorée (Sénégal), built around 1776, and a memorial since 1964. Photo © Jean Krausse. Ancient Roman amphitheater at Palmyra (Syria) built in the second century CE.

More broadly, then: Mumford imagined that architecture’s contribution to the modern world picture would be purely constructive.⁶ But the twentieth century turned out to be the most destructive in human history. Between 1914 and 1970 especially, physical damage to the built environment was enlarged, dispersed, and routinized so far and wide that it became a new architectural category in the public imagination, and an unavoidable datum of global historical thought.⁷ Already at the time of Mumford’s writing, an accelerating pace of manmade catastrophes in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East had washed a sinister tint over progressive and imperial narratives of human betterment.⁸ Over the course of the next three decades, as tens of millions of lives were upended by mass-death and mass-displacement, landscapes of destruction came to be read as emblems of deep, historical tragedy.⁹ Amid this real and imaged tabula rasa, not only did monuments live on. A monument became redefined, as any architectural object whose modernity lies not in its style or form, but in its capacity to survive destruction. This global redistribution of significance was informed by efficacy as much as reevaluation. In order to survive, monuments required new classifications, paperwork, information exchanges, as well as new methods for manipulating visual and architectural form. Monument survival itself became a branch of international diplomacy.

This book, then, addresses the remarkable return of the monument to the world stage, by following a movement of internationalists who mobilized, in the middle of the twentieth century, to design the survival of a vast array of architectural monuments. These were bureaucrats, intellectuals, art historians, archaeologists, curators, lawyers, and architects. They professed no less lofty a spiritual creed than Mumford, and likewise claimed to act on a cogent diagnosis of Western civilization’s deepest impulses. But rather than await an organic renewal of the built environment, they set out to mitigate its impending erasure by activating a pervasive channel of modern power: bureaucratic organization. If destruction was to be systemic, so too would architectural survival need to be rationalized through administration, paperwork, and pragmatics. Thus, this movement first sought a platform in the new diplomacy of the League of Nations, an institution created in 1919 to regularize, and bureaucratize, international relations.¹⁰ Beginning as a small committee in Geneva, and spreading increasingly wide, they worked to transform thousands of objects once known as artistic or historic monuments—from buildings to bridges, shrines to city centers, ruins to colossi—into a new kind of international marker, designated as cultural and later world heritage site. Monument survival, as this book defines it, is the species of international design by committee that they invented.

The movement coalesced at the first-ever diplomatic event devoted to monuments, the 1931 Athens Conference, and worked throughout the 1930s on a transnational blueprint to protect monuments. After war broke out in 1939, the group developed a branch in the Allied Military Government, producing lists and maps of protected monuments, and perfecting formats of architectural information to suit the visual and epistemic needs of the military. These documentary procedures became normalized after the war, as monuments advocates established a foothold in the cultural agency of the United Nations, UNESCO. In the 1950s and 1960s, all manners of monument maintenance and preservation were quietly incorporated into international schemes for economic and urban planning, infrastructural development, and nation-building. By the late 1960s, this multilayered expertise machine was called upon to perform new narratives of cultural cooperation, leveraging the spectacular aspects of technology at various monumental sites. These efforts culminated, in 1972, with the signing of the World Heritage Convention, the first international legal instrument devoted to maintaining the modern world as a place of monuments’ survival. So self-evident had this idea become, that the Convention took monuments as legal bases for a global imperative of environmental survival as well.¹¹ The narrative arc of the book is anchored by these two dates, 1931 and 1972.

After 1972, the hard-fought actions of the preceding decades—visiting and listing monuments, clearing their surroundings, debating their material makeup, documenting their evolution in file upon file—became a repertoire of available gestures, offered to any petitioner and backed by law. But in the interim, the features of the monument that Mumford had so confidently declared antiquated had been entirely sublated into their organizational capacity. Instead of being singular, monuments were nodes in a networked plurality; instead of being fixed they facilitated the global circulation of people and images; and instead of being empty and immutable, they could be regularly inhabited, updated, and maintained—pace Mumford, kept alive.

The story of monument survival helps fill out the picture of how liberal international ideology created a widespread institutional network of power. In particular, monument survival fulfills what Max Weber identified in 1922 as the features of a modern bureaucratic authority: the division of projects into repeatable tasks, the autonomy of expertise, the hierarchization of authority, and the reliance on paperwork for historical continuity.¹² Political theorists have expertly applied this Weberian frame to analyze twentieth-century liberal international organizations, showing how institutions such as the UN develop rules for the world, by creating bureaucracies that are government-like, but detached from the management of a particular territorial domain, such as that of an empire or a nation-state.¹³ In the case of monuments, not only the detachment from a given territory but even the absence of a consistent institutional office did not prevent expertise about monuments from developing a certain autonomy, jumping to new international ventures when it could, following shifts in the availability of precisely a place from which to exercise this kind of authority over monuments from above, at a time when historical events seemed to drag them ineluctably into chaos from below. In other words, monument survival offered tools that were picked up by successive organizations, independent of immediate political program. This mode of impersonal passing on, in turn, became evidence to disprove the widespread belief (voiced by Mumford and innumerable others in architectural historiography) that monumental architecture could be associated only with older forms of social authority, such as those of the patrimonial or traditional state.¹⁴

This liberal, international project of monument survival was not the only meeting of bureaucracy and monumentality at midcentury. A parallel case is found in what Paul Jaskot has called the SS monumental building economy, where the use of forced labor in massive building projects allowed the Nazi regime to integrate cultural goals into punitive processes.¹⁵ Similarly, the Memorials to the Soviet Participants in World War II built across Eastern Europe after 1945 were products of an aesthetic and bureaucratic standardization, assembled from ready-made parts, planned and manufactured by a relatively small handful of organizations.¹⁶ The liberal counterpart to these two examples operated not through forced labor, or dispersed manufacture. It was a more immaterial form of cultural delegation that made monuments powerful instruments for liberal internationalists. And precisely the two causes Mumford named of monuments’ symbolic bankruptcy—their programmatic emptiness and geographic ubiquity—offered entry points into their re-functionalization. As this book shows, international monument survival became a branch of modern design among others through the rationalization of monuments’ interior spaces and the management of their infrastructural and urban location. Helping further the agenda of governing the world, monuments became ends and means of what Mumford called material survival, and which today we more commonly call heritage.¹⁷

Heritage as Total Fact

The recent literature on heritage is vast and rich in perspectives from anthropology, art history, archaeology, cultural and literary criticism, and now heritage studies.¹⁸ While many authors have eloquently described the ubiquity of heritage, or memory, in modern life, this book addresses architecture’s unique role in its globalization in the mid-twentieth century. My aim is to perform a kind of writing back towards literature that has compellingly described heritage as a total social fact, but too often takes architecture for granted as evidence of this totality. Instead, I concern myself with how the opportunity to act architecturally was discovered and integrated into global governance.

To be sure, architecture’s capaciousness as a medium has been central to its patrimonial power for much longer than the twentieth century. Certainly monuments have been intended to outlive those who make them since before antiquity. Wars, conquest, and destruction have shaped the valuation of architecture for just as long; the very notion of art, some classicists suggest, originates in part from the Roman practice of plundering the statuary of enemy cities.¹⁹ But it is modern systems of print communication that arguably turned the monument into a medium for archiving experiences among others, and, eventually, an object of modern governance.²⁰ Insofar as paperwork has been a motor of epistemic and political modernization since the Enlightenment, then, monuments have been modern for over two hundred years. Certainly the European bourgeois class, feeling increasingly severed from its own past since the French Revolution, has resorted to architectural salvage to invent legitimizing inheritances. In the nineteenth century historic preservation began to progress hand in hand with mechanical reproduction in the visual arts, even as monumental heritage was widely used by late imperial and national governments in their invention of traditions.²¹ This book contributes to this broad historical panorama by locating architecture in the international dynamics of heritage modernization during a mid-twentieth-century period when this dynamic was determined overwhelmingly by the pairing of destruction and mass-media.

The committees in this book were all conceived as part of an effort to incorporate media or publicity in international relations, whether through Intellectual Cooperation in the 1930s, morale during World War II, or the minds of men with UNESCO in the postwar.²² At first, their primary tool for the internationalization of monuments was the list, descended from many other bureaucratic instruments—laws, inventories, charters, edicts, declarations—that had been used to tether monuments to governments since the French Revolution. But eventually they came to involve increasing architectural expertise, management, and design. Still today, World Heritage is primarily a list. But as any group who agitates for inscription can attest, listing is not the beginning but an end of monumental politics, the result of numerous spatial and architectural transformations for certain objects to meet certain criteria. The book therefore focuses on the period before the World Heritage Convention was signed, in the tumultuous decades when its principles were worked out on the ground.

Thus this study adds to a growing literature that has probed the significance of destruction in twentieth-century aesthetics, architecture, and art.²³ Rather than focusing on the way destructive transactions unfold around monuments, or that traumatic events heighten their memorial function, I find that destruction (feared or actual) was a normalized circumstance, which made a range of heritage practices practical and desirable (figure 0.3). That is: the projects of monument survival were motivated not by a consistent aesthetic, but by the sheer feasibility of incorporating patrimonial collections into ongoing bureaucratic governance and military strategy. The banality of destruction, not a metaphysic of nostalgia, transformed buildings as diverse as a mud huts and classical palaces into modern monuments.

Figure 0.3 View of the French city of Caen in 1944. © Getty.

Banality was, of course, the pivotal concept in the political theory of Hannah Arendt, who argued in 1956 that a unified humanity could arise only through a negative kind of solidarity, as it was threatened by disappearance.²⁴ It is possible to detect this negative conceptual motif in monument survival: if, as Arendt argued, human togetherness was the material realization of a lost ideal of interconnectedness, so too did buildings that survived the crescendo of destruction acquire a whole new status, as cultural remainders, on an endangered globe. Monuments once partitioned into different architectural traditions became seeds of global collection, and places to build a new alliance between architecture and international ideology.

Thus many of the buildings in this book were already famous monuments by the time international experts visited them—the Parthenon, the temples of Abu Simbel, the Cathedral of Saint-Lô, the Bamyian Buddhas, to name but a very few. But innumerable others were local landmarks, thrust into global visibility. The new glue that came to hold politics and architecture together at all these sites was culture, an international category whose invisibility and apparent self-evidence was precisely its strength. In contrast to other contemporaneous definitions of culture as either lived experience or high art, culture in the international liberal political system was a middling, consensus-building substance that could therefore be attached to inanimate objects: cultural monuments, cultural sites, cultural heritage, cultural property, cultural institutions, cultural affairs.²⁵ In that sense, Arendt’s theory of survival, which called for individual citizens to draw new moral imperatives from the newfound neighborliness of nation-states, is less applicable here.²⁶ Monument survival offered no such individuation. It owed its success instead to the capacity of culture to infect everything with sameness, as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer put it in 1946.²⁷ In the case of monuments it was the material thingliness of architecture that substituted for social cohesion. After all, destruction may have been the century’s great unifying political experience, but architecturally speaking, destruction was not one thing. One of the goals of this book, then, is to show the wide variety of state-sponsored and/or internationally-sanctioned techniques and practices of construction and destruction that fueled monuments’ survival, and to situate them at the fault line between modernism and historicism.

Other International Styles

In architectural history, the four decades in this book correspond to the period when modern architecture achieved unparalleled international success. Whether one imagines the capital cities designed by the so-called Modern masters in India, Brazil, or Bangladesh, the Hilton hotel built on a hilltop in Istanbul, or the skyscrapers with vast fronting plazas of New York’s Madison Avenue, midcentury modernism became ubiquitous between 1930 and 1970 in part through a proliferation of ever-larger building commissions from governments, institutions, and corporations. Already in 1971 Henry-Russell Hitchcock, who had helped to coin the phrase International Style in 1931, surveyed the field and confidently asserted that the brave new world of the 1920s became to a surprising extent the real world of the 1960s and 1970s.²⁸ Recent studies have shown in great detail that the destructions of the midcentury were a blessing in disguise for modern architects, which cleared the slate for them to test out the principles they had been promoting on paper before the war.²⁹ In this context, midcentury geopolitical instability is credited for giving modernism a mandate for a deep symbolic renewal, whether or not destruction demanded it, and especially to replace classical or traditional architecture as a global idiom.³⁰ In contrast, historians of architectural preservation usually describe the efforts of preservationists in this period as foiled by the destructive effects of war, modernism, and development.³¹ Yet it is precisely by engaging with destructive processes that architectural preservation was transformed from a nationally bound technical specialization, into a highly visible international design expertise. This book charts a third course between the modernists and the preservationists, and questions the easy segmentation of the twentieth century into pre- and post-war, pro- and anti-modern, by locating them in a spectrum of engagements with a broad endangerment sensibility.³²

My proposal is to loosen the causality between politics and design. The soft and malleable tissue of culture that came to connect monumental architecture and international politics could also absorb a multitude of architectural aesthetics. Conversely, the increasing popularity of culture as a channel of international politics helped to disseminate building imperatives and opportunities in manifold ways, giving rise to other international styles. The designs in this book’s title come out of destruction as historical fact, as byproducts of its intended targets and chosen instruments. Every time a small sketch in the margins of a memorandum prescribes how to deal with architectural remains, should destruction become necessary, this is a design of destruction.

The book recounts five episodes when the survival of monuments was debated and designed within international organizations. I focus on the connections between monuments and committees, and I explore why certain institutional initiatives gained momentum while others languished, emphasizing how the technical project of planning various monuments’ longevity gave transnational jolts to a branch of architectural practice, preservation, that was still relatively nation-bound.³³ Case studies are threaded through a narrative of institutional and intellectual history; only one of the chapters is devoted to a single building complex. More than a story of an emerging canon, the book identifies the means (from graphic formats like lists, maps, and policy memos, to hard materials like stone, iron, and epoxy glue) through which architectural matter was made to convey historical change.

For the remainder of this introduction, I want to prepare the ground for this episodic approach in two ways. Primarily, I will situate the chapters in a broader historical arc of internationalist history from 1919 to 1972, and fill out aspects of this history that are not otherwise covered in the chapters. Second, I will address four architectural discourses that have conceptualized the modernity of the monument: vandalism, the cult of monuments, the new monumentality, and collective memory. Each of these four discourses was already implicated in certain monumental policies by the time this book begins in 1931. They serve here as a foil against which to comprehend the separate, but related, practice of monument survival.

The Politics of Syncopation

The idea that monuments are collective, belong to no-one, and therefore are the property of all, was articulated in 1793 by the French revolutionary leader Abbé Grégoire, who also coined the term vandalism to label the special category of destruction from which he was trying to save them.³⁴ But Grégoire placed this new class of collective property firmly in the hands of the nation-state. Similar statements about the universality of patrimony emanated from various European intellectuals throughout the nineteenth century, even as new administrations and laws across the continent and its colonies further cemented the bond between monuments and state or imperial bureaucracies.³⁵ Meanwhile, international sentiment for monumental objects grew considerably among learned circles in the second half of the nineteenth century, in friends of monuments societies that proliferated locally, fueled by travel and its literature.³⁶ By the turn of the twentieth century monuments had become one among other motifs in a transnational romantic imagination, which set the terms of various institutional, legal, and commercial agreements to be desired across the globe.³⁷ But not until the end of World War I did monuments advocates set out to formalize this international project, leveraging this sentiment and legal consciousness to place monuments on the agenda of the League of Nations.

Vivid images of destruction had already played an important role in coalescing international activism around monuments at the turn of the century. A 1905 French petition, for example, argued that the Parthenon should be prevented from destruction by calling it the intellectual patrimony of mankind, an international property and publishing photographic evidence that its remains had been tampered with. But the petition called for leaving the monument alone, subject equally to the slow wearing by time and brutal injuries by man. At this stage buildings were to be defended from the vandalism of destroyers as much as from the illusions of rebuilders.³⁸ But after World War I, this view of monumental architecture as suspended equally between human action and natural decay became less tenable, as barbarism was increasingly diagnosed as a disease of the masses, a global political unrest that was constantly threatening to devolve into war or revolution.³⁹

The League had much to gain from becoming involved in this discourse of international patrimony. Created in 1919 in the wake of a Great War that had been widely perceived as avoidable, the League was proposed by the American president Woodrow Wilson to prevent another war by reforming international affairs in a move to institutions.⁴⁰ This so-called new diplomacy was designed not to resolve specific geopolitical problems but to stabilize the rhythm of international relations. An ongoing schedule of conferences, held on the idyllic banks of Lake Geneva and publicized to a world court of public opinion, would force nations into regular dialogue.⁴¹ Regularity was inextricably linked to publicity. In contrast to the earlier diplomatic tradition, with its secret envoys and bilateral pacts, League diplomacy would be public, or at least publicized. This meant doing business in the presence of and with the press, and developing the League’s own media outlets, including its own radio and printing press.⁴²

There was not one committee devoted to monuments at the League of Nations. Rather, monuments appeared on the agenda of various sub-commissions of the Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (CIC), which is widely understood to have been UNESCO’s predecessor.⁴³ Insofar as it amounted to devoting a branch of international government to disseminating ideas or propaganda, intellectual cooperation was a thoroughly modern project and a product of its time. But the CIC often publicized itself as a revival of cosmopolitanisms past, through grandiose appeals to the philosopher-kings of ancient Greece and the European Enlightenment. Worse, the intellectuals leading it often confused their own writerly disposition with the nature of the League as a bureaucracy, which operated through bureaus, or writing desks. By the end of the mid-1920s the CIC had gained a reputation as inextricably elitist, and monuments were brought in as part of an evolving struggle to reach an international public more directly.⁴⁴

In 1930 the CIC launched a League of Minds whose mandate was specifically to reflect on the problem of civilization’s survival.⁴⁵ Proposed by French writer Paul Valéry and French art historian Henri Focillon, this group was to create a politics of the mind by mimicking the format of the League itself, staging a series of conversations among invited thinkers and publishing the transcripts in French and English, with a limited print run⁴⁶ (figure 0.4). As Walter Benjamin noted at the time, Valéry defined modernity as the epoch when longevity (the will to endure) replaced originality (the will to stand out).⁴⁷ Thus many of the topics Valéry suggested to the League dealt with what he diagnosed as Europe’s intellectual disorder, its urge to negate the past by destroying, refuting, and deeply modifying it.⁴⁸ In the inaugural conversation, Valéry even suggested salvage as a metaphor for the intellectuals’ work, asking rhetorically, what remnants do we want to see float up from the shipwreck of civilization?⁴⁹ The group was never given a platform for much more than musing on this weighty task. But they brought the ominous image of a civilization under threat to the League’s reading public and effectively gave the League’s more technical groups permission to define an aesthetic object as something that survives a selective destruction. This was enough of a mandate for the League to begin to diversify its specialized work in art, architecture, and archaeology. Four conferences were organized to bring experts from those fields into the diplomatic fold: art conservation (Rome, 1930), monument conservation (Athens 1931), museum architecture (Madrid, 1934), and archaeological digging (Cairo, 1937).

Figure 0.4 Covers of Conversations among intellectuals published by the Committee on Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations, 1932–1938.

As chapter 1 chronicles in detail, the Athens Conference convened conservators from across Europe and attempted to institute a diplomatic regularity in architectural conservation. Its conclusions were published as a stand-alone volume and became an important legal precedent well into the postwar. The conference itself helped to establish an opportunistic mode of cultural politics in Geneva: intellectual cooperation would work by keeping open two lines of inquiry, the legal and the technical, and waiting for a chance to get on the League’s diplomatic agenda. But diplomatically, the Athens Conference was a total failure.⁵⁰ The schedule of regular meetings it was meant to inaugurate was never launched; the recommendations it delivered to the General Assembly of the League of Nations were never implemented; and an International Committee on Historic Monuments, which was appointed in its wake, never actually met.⁵¹ After the volume proceedings of Athens, the next League publication to address monuments specifically was devoted to practical preparations for war: a Technical and Legal Manual for the Protection of Monuments and Works of Art in Times of War.⁵² The contrast between these two publications is an index of the worsening of the international climate in the 1930s, marked by Hitler’s rise to power, the conflicts in Manchuria and Ethiopia, the Spanish Civil War, the withdrawal of a number of nations from the League, and, eventually, the outbreak of war in September 1939. In fact, what emerges from this period is a pattern where art, archaeological, and architectural objects were consistently used to make of culture a neutralizing, rather than empowering, category of international action.⁵³

For example (and it is the crucial one) two projects for legislating the international protection of monuments circulated between various committees in Paris and Geneva from the mid-1920s to the late 1930s, and were often confused in the paperwork, though they were entirely different.⁵⁴ One was an Italian law to regulate the international trade of movable art and archaeological objects, which was supported by other source nations (Greece and Egypt, notably), who all spoke of their national collections of art and architecture as monuments and of their dispersal as a kind of destruction.⁵⁵ The second was a legal project for an international agreement between states to protect art and architecture from destruction during war. These two projects had opposite fates in the bureaucracy. At first, several draft agreements for trading (and therefore conserving) movable objects between states during peacetime were willingly discussed, whereas until 1936, Geneva repeatedly refused to produce a draft legislation for protecting art or architecture in war, arguing that legislating war went against the logic of moral disarmament. In the words of the CIC’s chairman, Gilbert Murray, if one has the wisdom to spare monuments of art and architecture during war, one should begin by having the wisdom of not waging war at all.⁵⁶ At the heart of this refusal was a fear of having to compare the military value of physical objects and that of human lives. And it is true that the advocates who pressured the League for such a law proposed extensive new legislations that would protect people and things under the single umbrella term culture.⁵⁷ Their expansive definitions of monument protection would have steered the League in a decidedly activist, non-neutral direction—meaning that cultural affairs could have been at the lead of policy more broadly. In this sense, they called the bluff (and the timidity) of the politics of the mind.

But when the Spanish Civil War broke out in July 1936, and reports of church lootings and acts of violence against art and architecture began to circulate in the international press, the CIC changed its rhetoric.⁵⁸ The aforementioned Technical and Legal Manual, published in 1938, was the culmination of the about-face that ensued, a document remarkable for recommending a de-emphasis on moral and educative work about monuments and focus on their material protection instead.⁵⁹ Meanwhile, the idea of placing any regulations on the trade of cultural objects had effectively died. As these two projects followed so closely the vissicitudes of events, the politics of the mind was revealed to be a politics of willful syncopation. Intellectuals could intervene in the League’s politics, but only if their intervention appeared off-beat from whatever geopolitical narrative the League was monitoring—a narrative to which it was, in fact, deeply reactive.

One of the legacies of this syncopated model of cultural internationalism is that international laws about immovable monuments function primarily as customary laws rather than as binding pacts that are brought to bear in court.⁶⁰ Instead of being debated in court, the gap between destruction and protection of monuments still today is negotiated by architectural techniques that are as predictive they are preventive. In the words of this 1938 Manual, to protect a monument meant "to meet the destructive effects of war with defensive measures equally as effective."⁶¹ Thus from the bureaucratic weakness of aesthetic discourse at the League, a preemptive architectural ethos was born. Monuments became physical interfaces for the two opposed forces of building and unbuilding. In what follows then, I give a history of four projects, one per decade, which were designed to perform this architectural task. This four-part history helps to illustrate how existing aesthetic discourses that had bridged the presumed gap between monuments and modernity, were transformed by the events and ideas that are the subject of this book.

Trajan’s Arch, or Vandalism

What was meant by material protection can be discerned by looking at the technical half of the League’s 1938 manual, which described in great visual and textual detail how to protect immovable architectural objects with scaffolds, sandbags, brick, and other materials, in the event of war. The bulk of the manual was a republication of articles that had appeared since 1936 in the journal of the International Museums Office, Mouseion, to publicize the experience of the Spanish Civil War, which itself had built on the earlier experience of World War I.⁶² But a new dimension—a new kind of publicity—was added to these practices when they were drawn, photographed, and disseminated by the League as international norms.

Not only did the League advocate the idea that nations should prepare monuments for war, but more accurately, it forced into the open the fact that many European nations had been preparing them for war. As early as December 1934, the Italian Ministry of Education sent a circular letter to its monuments officials asking them to create projects for the protection of monuments in their charge.⁶³ Similar action was taken by the French monuments service, which established its Civil Defense policy in 1935 by asking each monuments administrator to report how many linear feet of scaffolding and sandbags would be needed to protect every monument in his jurisdiction.⁶⁴ The British Civil Defense Service had also been created in 1935, although preparations for monuments did not begin until April 1939. When developing these emergency schemes, nations were tacitly competing as to who could better protect its patrimony. The competition became overt in July 1937, when the French weekly Nouvelles Littéraires invited European cultural ministers to respond to a proposal for international monument protection law.⁶⁵ Despite sharp divisions about whether such a plan should unfold cooperatively or not (and despite the notable absence of Germany in the discussion), all participating officials began by noting that the time for deliberately destroying monuments had passed, thereby placing themselves unmistakably among the civilized.

The League’s manual was the next entry in this ongoing transnational discourse and it brought the crucial realization that visibility would have to be an integral part of protection. In contrast to movable artworks, architecture could simply not be hidden from the visual field of war. The one point on which all these disparate Civil Defense administrations were unified was that there was no way to protect a monument against a direct hit, given the destructive capacities of aerial bombing. Monuments could be protected only from being byproducts of nearby destruction. And encasing them was a way to highlight, rather than dissimulate, monuments. One of the most material aspects of material protection, in other words, turned out to be the image it created.

Despite its technical nature, then, this 1938 manual was arguably one of the League’s first forays into using visual means of influencing the world court of public opinion, and as such can be taken as an intervention in the history of vandalism, as an architectural subcategory of iconoclasm. According to the discourse of vandalism, any aesthetic object is rendered modern by being the target of destruction, as long as the destructive act is intentional and is registered aesthetically against the wholeness of an original artifact. World War I was, in this sense, already an image war, as both sides accused each other of wantonly targeting each other’s cathedrals, and images and reports of these acts of destruction had been as important as destruction itself.⁶⁶ But World War I was also the first conflict where nations had competed to rescue and protect monuments, with several manuals of protection being published at war’s end.⁶⁷ In that sense, 1918 already showed aspects of what Bruno Latour has called iconoclash: a further devolving of the phenomenon of iconoclasm, where destruction occurs but its underlying intentions are simply unclear.⁶⁸

The intensification of material protection, and monument survival more generally, constitute a further step in this devolution of vandalism, where destructive intention and protective action are blurred and the nature of war as a cultural event is entirely redefined. In particular, the League’s manual helped to popularize and catalyze a new variation on the peculiar genre of before-and-after photography that, as Ines and Eyal Weizman have recently pointed out, serves as a visual code for destruction as a historical event that lies between images.⁶⁹ The manual republished pictures of monuments before and after protection—including pictures of the striking protective outfit, reminiscent of medieval fortifications, that had been built around Madrid’s Cibeles Fountain in 1937 by a group of avant-garde architects. The League republished their section drawings, generalizing this practice of constructing iconic sandbag envelopes around urban statuary.⁷⁰ In 1942 the Italian government went even further, publishing an album that systematically catalogued its protected monuments through an eerily compelling sequence of before-and-after photographs. Here the effect was