Paper Cities and Media Wars: On Lucia Allais’s “Designs of Destruction: The Making of Monuments in the Twentieth Century”

IN 2018, Nature Communications published a hair-raising forecast of the effects of sea-level rise on the various UNESCO world heritage sites along the Mediterranean basin. The results are dire: even if governments enacted the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s recommendations to limit global warming to below two degrees Celsius by 2035, sites like Leptis Magna in Libya, the Venetian Lagoon, and Serra de Tramuntana on the northwest coast of Mallorca would all be subject to potential catastrophic damage from floods and erosion. Only two sites — the Medina of Tunis and the Lycian ruins of Xanthos-Letoon in southwestern Turkey — would be spared from risks associated with sea-level rise.

For art and architectural historians, as well as for cultural preservationists and archeologists, the stakes are clearly high. Global warming is a human-made enterprise of tragic proportions that poses a serious and irreversible threat not only to a region with a high concentration of world heritage sites, but also to another human-made enterprise — UNESCO’s own system of cultural diplomacy that resulted in the identification and conservation of such sites in the first place. The images that are likely to come to mind are not unlike those from recent Hollywood blockbusters: tsunamis overtaking urban coastal areas; earthquakes pulverizing building foundations, reducing cities to rubble. Yet the authors of the Nature Communications article touch on something that had been on the minds of preservation theorists and practitioners since the 19th century: the eventual disappearance of those very objects that have become a record of human civilization. Global climate change is hardly the only threat, as current conflicts in northern Iraq and Syria have resulted in the destruction of parts of the ancient city of Palmyra, the bulldozing of the Great Ziggurat at Nimrud, as well as the bombing of the 2,800-year-old Marib Dam in Yemen. “[T]he survival of statues has become an expression of life,” wrote André Malraux, the French Minister of State for Cultural Affairs, in 1960, words that seem ever so relevant in light of such developments.

At the end of the remarkable Designs of Destruction: The Making of Monuments in the Twentieth Century, architectural historian Lucia Allais casts such pleas in a contemporary light by observing how preservation is at the forefront of architectural practices. The dynamics have changed, however. This is perhaps why the very last image in the book — a collage showing Rotterdam-based Office of Metropolitan Architecture/Architecture Media Office’s (OMA/AMO) proposal for restoring the 13th-century Fondaco dei Tedeschi in Venice — is poignant. The image is a reminder that the conservation of heritage sites is no longer the sole domain of international agencies like UNESCO. Including a protected building as part of a signature project seems as controversial and foresighted as the visionary antipreservationist schemes produced by avant-garde European architects during the 1960s and 1970s. One of them was the Italian radical architecture collective Superstudio, and in the final moments of Designs of Destruction, just before the collage of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, the reader is confronted with their photomontage of a partially submerged Graz, Austria. Created in 1971, this image was one of several meant to ridicule preservationist efforts in Italy, which at that time envisioned the conservation of architectural heritage as a kind of economic resource management. When paired against a photograph of students salvaging rare books from National Central Library of Florence during the flood of 1966, a complicated picture arises. Is the practice of architectural conservation heritage one that captures a particular object in a specific time, or is it what media theorist Bernhard Siegert identifies as “cultural technique” — one where the act of committing such a photomontage to paper is an act of conservation in itself? That Allais linked this image to a photomontage of a flooded Graz illustrates how this threat was as real then as it is now. Yet it is an odd choice in light of the fact that Superstudio also completed a similar photomontage — in the same exaggerated and urgent manner — of an inundated Florence. In this image, sailboats maneuver along crystalline, calm waters, tacking and jibing in-between the submerged dome and campanile of the Duomo di Firenze. The relative serenity of this image belies the natural catastrophe that must have created it in the first place. Nevertheless, this ability to substitute one polemical photomontage for another underscores a point that Allais makes throughout her book — namely, that monuments are not just artifacts, but rhetorical devices that signal evidence of a “technique learned from an ongoing and pervasive conflation of document and monument.” It is a provocative and necessary point, for above everything, Designs of Destruction is an account of the media and material cultures underlying the designation and construction of monuments from the early 20th century through the 1960s. Through deft analyses and nuanced interpretations of archival materials, Allais argues that monuments were “made,” conjured as much from bureaucratic and diplomatic paperwork as they were built from stone, sand, and aggregate.

Arranged in a series of episodes (with an intercalary “Bridge” and concluding “Coda”), Designs of Destruction traces an arc in the history of monuments discourse, from the heady internationalist optimism of the interwar years, by way of the global conflagration of World War II, and finally to the Cold War, with the construction of the Aswan High Dam and Lake Nasser, necessitating the salvage and relocation of the Temple of Abu Simbel in 1968. All are marked by a culture of paperwork logistics that attests to a transformation in thinking about the relationship between cultural diplomacy and heritage conservation. In the first series of episodes, Allais shows that discussions about heritage during the 1930s no longer considered the protection of buildings and art works in moral terms, but rather in material ones. For example, Section VI of 1931 First International Congress of Architects and Technicians of Historic Monuments — the Athens Charter — favored “scrupulous conservation” through the use of recovered, original fragments (“anastylosis”) as well as new material techniques. And by 1938, the Committee on Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations (CIC), an international organ comprising intellectuals, scientists, and artists, also adopted “material protection” as a strategy for heritage preservation. The object of this new legal regime was a newly designated category of legal object — cultural property. Allais’s contribution is to show how a kind of architectural imagination was motivating these international “wardens of civilization” (to use a term used in the 1931 Athens Charter) to create this category.

Although neither the Athens Charter nor the CIC were officially on a wartime footing during this time, the threat of armed conflict was looming. In France, for example, preparations took the form of inventories and studies meant to assess the resources available to protect buildings and other cultural artifacts that would be susceptible to bombing. But with the unprecedented scale of destruction that visited European cities in the early days of World War II, such measures became quaint as the logic of total war meant that “cultural property” was now simply a target. During the two chapters about monuments discourse during World War II, Allais shows how the urgencies of war necessitated a bold, if not controversial approach to the protection of architectural heritage. The main institutional actors here were American. By February 1943, both the American Defense-Harvard Group (ADHG) and the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) established “Monuments Committees” with rosters of notable art and architectural historians tasked with identifying buildings and other objects that were to be spared from aerial bombardment. Later that year, the American Commission for the Protection and Salvage of Artistic and Historic Monuments in War Areas, known more familiarly as the Roberts Commission — after Supreme Court Justice Owen J. Roberts — subsumed the ADHG and ACLS groups and became the de facto military and policy organ dedicated to issues of heritage preservation. Whereas the main artifact of CIC and Athens Convention were legal codes prescribing international cooperation, for the Roberts Commission and its attendant ADHG and ACLS personnel, their main output took form of lists. As Allais skillfully demonstrates, these inventories of buildings, public areas, and other urban artifacts were the products of an acrimonious debate among art and architectural historians. And though they resulted in the preservation, restoration, and in some instances, recovery of artifacts, these lists were as much about the objects that were included (and by the same token, excluded) as they were about the various historians and scholars who became part of this discussion.

This cultural politics of list making is crucial for two reasons. The first, and one that Allais points out, is that it casts new light on recent scholarship about art and architectural production during World War II. The years 1939–1945 were, until recently, a bit of a cipher, as evidenced by monographs, studies, and even university courses that focused on pre- and postwar art and architecture. Architectural historians like Jean-Louis Cohen and others have shown that World War II was a crucial and fertile time for the development of architectural modernism. Indeed, many of the architects and designers associated with “postwar” modernism not only had active practices from 1939 to 1945 but also perfected their craft during these years. This is to say that World War II was a literal and figurative proving ground for modernism. Allais’s contribution, as shown in the sections of Designs of Destruction that deal with World War II, is to reveal the extent to which art historians mobilized for war. Second, and perhaps more important, is the notion that World War II treated the discipline of art history as something to be disciplined — in other words, it modernized the field. Now this seems at first like a restatement of the obvious if only for the fact that the field of art history was always a kind of modern endeavor. Yet for Allais, it was not so much the field of art history, but rather art historical knowledge that was deployed in wartime theaters of operation. Consider, for example, the Roberts Commission’s “tactical” arm, the US Army’s Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives branch (MFAA), a group of soldiers and art historians who provided “on the ground” assistance in the identification of buildings and artifacts in the aftermath of invasions and aerial bombardments. MFAA personnel were the bearers of the very lists and maps produced by Roberts Commission scholars.

The mobilization of art historical knowledge takes a darker turn in what are perhaps the most compelling parts of Designs of Destruction. Continuing her discussion of monuments discourse during the war, Allais outlines Allied efforts to create documents and maps that instructed bomber aircrews on buildings and monuments that were to be destroyed and spared during aerial operations. In 1942, as a response to the Royal Air Force’s bombing of Lübeck, Luftwaffe bombers attacked Canterbury, Bath, Norwich, York, and Exeter — targets deemed significant more for their cultural than their strategic value. These “Baedeker Raids” were the prelude to the prolonged pas de deux between the RAF and Luftwaffe that resulted in the likes of Operation Gomorrah, the horrific July 1943 firebomb raid that left Hamburg a smoking plain of corpses, rubble, and ash. By this time, the logic of strategic bombing lost out to “area bombing” and the targeting of civilian centers, which made the Ministry of Economic Warfare’s publication The Bomber’s Baedeker: Guide to the Economic Importance of German Towns and Cities in 1944 seem quaint even at the time. If such logic made no distinction between a target and the monuments located therein, then the American approach to the issue offered little solace. Relying on Baedeker Guides, the Roberts Commission created maps of targeted cities that identified what not to hit during a bombing raid. Yet it was the “Tedder Atlas,” a set of maps authorized by RAF General Arthur Tedder for the Mediterranean Allied Air Forces that really demonstrated how the kind of knowledge produced by the Roberts Commission could be deployed during aerial operations. The reproductions of maps from the Tedder Atlas in Designs of Destruction are chilling. On a first glance, the reader will notice that they are essentially annotated aerial photographs of major European cities with boxes and arrows showing monuments to be avoided. They are, in essence, a bombardier’s view of art and architectural history.

Due to the nature of the Allied air campaign over Europe, such schemes may have done little to save monuments. The unprecedented scale of bombing reached terrifying proportions, and in terms of policy, resulted in a hierarchy of sorts that favored protection of monuments in France and Italy over those in Germany. Yet Allais reads these efforts from a decidedly architectural lens, which is to say that the Roberts Commission maps and Tedder Atlas photographs comprised a vision of cities as aggregations of monuments dispersed in a continuous isotropic space. This is certainly a view that privileges that of the architectural historian while presenting a new historiographical significance for the Roberts Commission’s own mobilized culture of expertise and paperwork. Familiar as they may be to readers, the photograph and the map still manage to provoke throughout the pages of Designs of Destruction. In this sense, then, the US Army Air Force (USAAF) bombardier stands in perpendicular contrast — literally and figuratively — to the MFAA solider on the ground. The Tedder Atlas aerial photographs show the USAAF bombardier as the agent of a system of hierarchical targeting, with vertical altitude being a kind of metaphor for detachment. The MFAA soldier, on the other hand, works horizontally, traversing the killing fields of Western, Central, and Southern Europe in search of monuments described in maps and lists. Both were engaged in a culture of “unwilling city planning” in that they were part of a calculus of identification, destruction, and preservation of urban centers and monuments in war zones. Yet both were also the instruments of a bureaucratized vision, a chain of command that mediated wartime theaters of operations through the lens of architectural diplomacy.

Until this moment, Allais has presented the dynamics of monuments discourse along two concurrent tracks. The first one considers a reconfiguration of the putative objects of heritage preservation. Whereas the CIC emphasized materiality, the Roberts Commission depended upon an idealized and historicized version of monuments. This was because the survival of a monument depended on its inclusion on a specific kind of map or photograph. The second track is equally complex and also riven with ideological and political implications: the Athens Charter, CIC, and Roberts Commission all viewed the designation and creation of monuments prescriptively — in other words, both the identification of cultural property and listing of monuments to be spared from aerial attack used architectural knowledge to condition state actors before and during war. Building on this last track, the final chapters of Designs of Destruction consider the intended audiences of monuments discourse. And it is here that Allais changes the tone of the book somewhat, as the object of focus changes from the devastation of World War II to the role of monuments discourse in a postwar world.

In Allais’s historical reckoning, UNESCO’s status as a sentinel of heritage preservation relies on a kind of architectural diplomacy as well. For the penultimate chapter — lesser developed yet equally compelling — Allais details UNESCO’s Museums and Monuments Commission’s (MomCom) role in advocating for a network of museums that would, in effect, transfer not only the objects, but also the scientific techniques of conservation to newly decolonized nations in Africa and Southeast Asia during the 1950s and 1960s. These mechanisms were part of a larger “architectural apparatus” that used, designed, and preserved spaces to help the citizens of these nations instruct others about their art and architectural heritage. Allais introduces an indelible theoretical apparatus to its historical counterpart: as discourses before World War II oscillated between a materialist and idealistic conception of monument, in the postwar world, such discussions questioned the scale of intervention necessary for conservation — should it operate at the level of a single material, or through a massive infrastructural object? This is the subject of the final (and thrilling) chapter, where Allais considers the measures taken to salvage and relocate of the Temple of Abu Simbel after the creation of Lake Nasser and the Aswan High Dam. It is, in many ways, a narrative of how the various infrastructural and engineering design schemes were variations on “integrity,” a term borrowed from environmental thinking that Allais labels as “alternatively the morphology of a site, the material properties of an object to be moved, and the moral fiber of the person (or entity) doing the moving.” It also evokes the concept of “integration” from postwar conservation theory, which considers the “creation of an aesthetic ‘whole’ that is visually apprehensible, while not allowing confusion between old and new.” A rock-infill dam; a massive hydraulic lift that would raise Abu Simbel while encased in a concrete vitrine; an underwater pavilion that would allow visitors to view the Temple in its unaltered, flooded state; and even the prevailing scheme, the disassembly, displacement, and reconstruction of Abu Simbel, elevated 200 feet and moved 600 feet west of its original location against a berm hiding a thin concrete shell filled with sand: each is a variation on how the interplay between technology and environment was a kind of integrity in itself, one requiring a reevaluation not just of conservation techniques, but of the very notion of “site.”

As one of the most impressive and significant feats in the history of conservation, Abu Simbel seems a fitting place to end Designs of Destruction — it is also a project that refracts many of the themes that Allais expertly threads throughout the book. For starters, the use of a combination of silicon aggregate, epoxy, and local sand to fill in and enhance the marks caused when Abu Simbel was cut into pieces prior to removal does not seem far removed from the prescriptions in Section VI of the 1931 Athens Charter. There, the Charter states that when conservation of ruins using original materials is impossible, “new materials used for this purpose should in all cases be recognisable.” Allais casts doubt on the efficacy of this provision of the Charter as well as the 1938 CIC manual, suggesting that such measures are customary and neither binding nor peremptory. “Instead of being debated in court,” Allais writes, “the gap between destruction and protection of monuments still today is negotiated by architectural techniques that are as predictive as they are preventative.” This is a reference to one of the overarching principles of what is called Customary International Law, an enforceable category of public international law generally defined as a combination of “general practice” and what jurists have called opinio juris sive necessitatis, or the psychological compulsion explaining why a state acted in a particular way. Yet as Allais has demonstrated throughout the various case studies in Designs of Destruction, the “architectural techniques” of conservation have indeed become customary. Centuries of theory and practice, from Viollet-le-Duc, to Cesare Brandi, and even to Superstudio and OMA/AMO, tell us that architects have been following a set of customary norms when tasked with the conservation of buildings.

The subject of norms arises later in this chapter when Allais expounds on the historiographical significance of Abu Simbel. As the legacy of this project becomes more well known, even to the point at which it stands for fundamental propositions about conservation and monuments, the techniques, or rather “norms and forms” that allow a project like Abu Simbel to succeed on a larger scale become more and more specified. And building on her argument that the salvaging of Abu Simbel was a sociotechnical endeavor, Allais goes even further by asserting that the debates about preservation during the 1960s signaled “the emergence of a new architectural medium.” She continues,

The apparatus that I have been describing […] placed architecture under a logic of media. The logic of moving monuments was allied with the logic of moving images. The logic of storing stones was allied with the logic of storing photographs. And the logic of repeated hand-cutting was allied with the logic of image-reproduction. Throughout these repetitions and translations, the object of preservation was fundamentally transformed. In this sense preservation functioned as a mode of cultural production and communication that incorporated the characteristics of another mode of production, architecture. Could we not, then, see architectural preservation as a medium, whose content is architecture?

In a book whose rich tableau of archival artifacts, innovative arguments, and wide-scanning historical purviews already set it apart from other architectural history monographs, the above quote shows the potential historical and narrative trajectories for Designs of Destruction.

Yet categorizing this book as a kind of “media history” is not without its share of attendant issues. Architectural historians have been writing about their objects of study through the lens of mass media for over a generation. The depiction of architecture in films; construction of film sets; the broadcasting of architectural history over radio; television shows about the history of buildings; the application of film and apparatus theory to architectural history: such domains have been covered in recent (and not-so-recent) monographs. After the deaths of Cornelia Vismann in 2010, Friedrich Kittler in 2011, Hubert Damisch in 2017, Paul Virilio in 2018, readers and scholars will still have to contend with a rich written record — some still untranslated — from which to discern the ways in which media “constructed” or “determined” architecture. And with the recent turn to “cultural techniques,” one wonders if such media history-based approaches could suffer the fate of the conservation techniques outlined in Designs of Destruction and become so finely drawn and specific so as to become almost indistinguishable, perhaps even imperceptible. Given the richness of this text, and Allais’s ability to situate her analyses comfortably alongside other fields, this is unlikely to happen. Though this book is embedded firmly in the rituals and canons of architectural history, it has a generosity of voice that can seem absent in this field. Call it what you like: architectural history of preservation; media history; institutional history of architectural preservation; or media history of international architectural governance. No matter the designation, this is a book for the ages.

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Enrique Ramirez is a historian and scholar of modern and contemporary architecture, urbanism, and landscape.