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Terms and conditions applyThe Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War
Robert Bevan
Product details
Format: Book
Pages: 240
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Date Published: Jan 2006
Stock Code: 35765
Binding: Hardback
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Description
In times of conflict, buildings are inevitably damaged or destroyed. But there has always been another war against architecture: the destruction of the built artefacts of a people or nation as a means of cultural cleansing or division. In this war, architecture takes on a totemic quality: a mosque is not simply a mosque but represents the presence of a community. A library or an art gallery is a cache of cultural memory evidence of the reality of that communitys history that extends and legitimises it in the present. Even office buildings may acquire powerful symbolic value, as was dramatically seen a few years back.
In The Destruction of Memory, Robert Bevan examines both the effects of conflict on architecture over the last century and also examples throughout history: from the conflict between Islam and Hinduism in India and the razing of Aztec cities by Cortez to the Holocaust and the Chinese destruction of Tibetan Lhasa. The recent conflicts in the former Yugoslavia provide some particularly vivid illustrations of Bevan's thesis - that such incidents as the bombing of Dubrovnik and the destruction of the iconic bridge at Mostar were not collateral damage, as some might claim: they were deliberate acts of destruction, an attack not only on the architecture, but also the cultural memory of a nation. He also looks at the social and architectural effects of division, with reference to Ireland and Israel/Palestine. This is a most interesting book.
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