Destructive power of the architecture of war
Canberra Times (Australia)
March 18, 2006 Saturday
Final Edition
ROBERT BEVAN appraises “the power of the built form”, architecture,
but from one peculiar, critical angle only. The Destruction of Memory
examines how monumental, venerable buildings can contribute to our
national sense of ourselves, and, conversely, how their destruction
in war constitutes “ethnic cleansing or genocide by other means”.
Bevan assesses our lamentable war-time record of destroying buildings,
monuments, even whole cities, as a way of wrecking our enemies’
morale and rooting out their national memory. As he notes, “There is a
bestial carousel quality to the past century’s destructive acts.” Bevan
concentrates on “enforced forgetting”, through “destruction of cultural
artefacts of an enemy people or nation as a means of dominating,
terrorising, dividing or eradicating it altogether”.
His review of our destructiveness covers much familiar ground: the
demolition of 6000 monasteries in Tibet; the fire-bombing of Dresden;
9/11; the blowing up of the Bamiyan Buddhas; the architectural
dimension of the Armenian genocide; and, particularly, the wholesale
devastation in the recent Balkans wars.
Bevan graduated from being an “architecturally obsessed child”
to editing the British architectural magazine, Building Design. His
fascination with his subject sometimes tempts him into academic jargon
(“commodification” or “the physicality of politics”) or esoteric
digressions (Lacanian mirror theory lost me). There is, though,
a lot of robust common sense in this book.
He is especially good on the conquistadors’ assaults on the New World,
“the world’s largest-ever cultural and human genocide”. He is thorough
and interesting on wanton destruction of mosques, libraries and bridges
in Bosnia. He is well read and acute in a commentary on the burning of
Anglo-Irish “big houses” during the Irish civil war, as well as on the
attentiveness of factions in Islam to sacred spaces and geometry. He
even complains about the deleterious impact of helicopter movements
at a current United States base on the site of ancient Babylon.
That selection of examples demonstrates the eclectic charms in The
Destruction of Memory. The text is complemented by grainy but poignant
black-and-white photographs, before-and-after shots which show what
we have lost. Sometimes we have lost what we had never known. I had
never heard of the five Armenian churches clustered among mountains
at Khitzhonk, but, on the basis of these pictures, am prepared to
mourn their passing.
Bevan invites a few quarrels. I would argue with his account of
Jerusalem, especially the eccentric suggestion that the city’s streets
are now “viscous with local people and lifeless lacunae”. Generally,
though, allowing for the abundance of jargon at the start, this book
makes its case admirably. Bevan’s hero seems to be the German general,
von Choltitz, the man who defied the Fuhrer’s orders to blow up Paris,
saving for all of us what may still be the most beautiful city in
the world.
Another book (or a second one by Bevan) might explain why some sites
which have been utterly destroyed (such as Troy, or Carthage) remain
so evocative. That book could remark on our occasional restraint,
perhaps using the American reluctance to bomb Japan’s ancient capital,
Kyoto, as an example.
Other scholars could also hazard a guess on why Australians seem
so little attached to our built environment. We would lament the
destruction of the MCG, the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge, but
that is about the sum of our list of architectural icons. We need to
understand more about where our idea of the past actually resides;
Pierre Ryckmans has done absorbing work on that subject in relation
to China. Where past and present intersect, in a building as in a
song or a myth, we obtain a clearer insight into those lies which we
collectively agree to tell to each other about ourselves.
Mark Thomas is a Canberra reviewer.