The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War

By Robert Bevan, London: Reaktion Books, 2006, 240 pages, paperback, £19.95. Reviewed by Rosemary Hollow in the May 2006 issue.

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The destruction of architecture has regrettably become a regular feature of our daily news, even on the front page at times. We have watched the bombing of the sacred Shiite shrine in Iraq, the bulldozing of Palestinian homes along the West Bank, the demolition of the Bamiyan Buddhas, and the repeated televised images of the collapse of the World Trade Centre towers. Death does not always accompany the destruction of architecture, but the effect can still be catastrophic and long term. The dismantling and displacement of a community, the removal of centuries-old places of worship, means the removal of the history, if not the memory, of the cultural icons of great significance not only of a particular ethnic community, but to people across the world. Despite the existence of international charters and treaties under UNESCO designed to prevent this destruction, it still continues.

Robert Bevan explores the impact of the destruction of architecture in conflicts on a global scale, from Ireland in the 1920s through the second world war until the current war in Iraq. The destruction of homes and places of worship are he argues part of the 'ethnic cleansing' that accompanies war. By removing physical traces of a community, the 'victors' are not only establishing hegemony over an area, they are, as the title of the book implies, aiming to remove the memory of the community they have displaced.

Bevan is an architect and a former editor of the London journal Building Design. He developed an interest in this topic early. As an architecturally obsessed child, he was fascinated with the film images of the destruction of buildings and cities in Europe in the second world war. His uses his fascination with such images to great effect in the book. There are 'before' and 'after' images of an Armenian monastery complex built between the 7th and 11th centuries, and destroyed by Turkish forces in the 1960s, with only one single shell left standing; the reduction to rubble in 1992 of a 16th century mosque in the Bosnian town of Foca, as Serbian militia in 1992 murdered and expelled its Muslim inhabitants and destroyed about 20 historic mosques around the town, renaming it Srbinje; and the image of a Palestinian woman standing in front of an Israeli bulldozer that is about to destroy houses on the Gaza strip. As Bevan illustrates, wars are now being fought not just with guns and missiles, but also with bulldozers.

The use of these evocative images brings to mind the works of Susan Sontag, particularly her last book Regarding the pain of others, where she wrote about the impact of the images of destruction including Sarajevo in the early 1990s, and the World Trade Centre towers. Bevan has not referred to the works of Sontag, but he does refer to W G Sebald writing about the silence in German post-war literature of the bombing of towns and cites in Germany in the second world war (p 187). A minor quibble is that the title of Sebald's On the Natural History of Destruction is misquoted in the references. And in this age of electronic publishing, is it too much to ask that publishers include a separate bibliography as well as the footnotes? It would greatly improve the reference value of this important book.

The Hague Convention was adopted in 1954 following the massive cultural destruction of the second world war. In 2003 the UNESCO Declaration Concerning the International Destruction of Cultural Heritage was unanimously adopted, mainly in response to the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan in 2001. And yet, as Bevan argues, UNESCO through these Conventions has been unable to prevent the destruction during war of a community's and sometimes the world's treasures. Bevan makes a powerful case for the inclusion of 'cultural genocide', as a crime punishable by an international criminal court.

The last chapter of The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War refers to the trial of Slobodan Milosevic in The Hague for war crimes which included '... the intentional and wanton destruction of religious and cultural buildings of the Bosnian Muslim and Croat communities including... mosques and churches ...' (p 207). With Milosevic's death, we have lost the opportunity to see if this trial would have had any impact on countries respecting rather than destroying the culture of communities they are invading. Regardless of any UNESCO Conventions, are we ever likely to see the Chinese government tried in an international court for the destruction of monasteries in Tibet, or the Israelis for bulldozing houses in Palestine? I would think not.

There are international organistions who are also focused on the protection and preservation of the world's cultural heritage in times of peace and war, including ICOMOS, ICCROM and the Getty Foundation. There is only one mention of these organisations, and that is to the ICOMOS Heritage at Risk program in the references. Although they are unlikely to have any greater impact than UNESCO, it would have been useful for Bevan to refer to the work of these groups.

The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War brings to both the academic and broader community a valuable and considered discussion of the ongoing impacts of the 'cultural genocide' that is happening around the world. Bevan brings credence to the book by having visited many of the places he writes about, including Palestine and Bosnia. It is not just students of architecture, and heritage and who should read this book, but anyone who is trying to understand the awful impact of the ongoing conflicts overseas on the communities and the world's cultural heritage.

Citation

• Rosemary Hollow. 'Review: The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War by Robert Bevan' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), May 2006. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 30 July 2010].

Back Cover Blurb

• 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 community's history that extends and legitimizes it in the present. Even office buildings may acquire powerful symbolic value: this was brought home with singular force by the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York.
  
  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.
  
  A notable example from more recent times is the terrorist activities in the former Yugoslavia. Incidents discussed include the bombing of Dubrovnik; the destruction of the iconic bridge at Mostar; and the blackened leaves of priceless books floating down over Sarajevo after the National Library was shelled. Robert Bevan argues that these 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.

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