Lucia Allais. Designs of Destruction

Amid the destructiveness of the twentieth century, monuments from past eras remained intact and became protected, sanctified spaces. Lucia Allais focuses her book, Designs of Destruction: The Making of Monuments in the Twentieth Century, on four moments in the mid-twentieth century to tell us how this happened. She begins with a 1931 League of Nations conference in Athens meant to develop international guidelines on the protection of significant cultural monuments. She then spends two chapters examining the Roberts Commission, an American group created in August 1943 to influence the bombing policy of the Allies in Europe to better protect Europe’s monuments and heritage spaces. She concludes with two studies of the postcolonial era in the 1960s: the first the work of UNESCO’s heritage missions meant to modernize museum spaces and heritage sites in the decolonizing spaces of Africa and Asia and the second an examination of the protection of Abu Simbel temples built by Ramses II in Egypt during the construction of the Aswan High Dam. Each case study is a fascinating examination of the concepts, ideas, and values intellectuals, art historians, archaeologists, and others brought to the meaning of “protection,” “monument,” and “culture.”

Ancient history · Archaeology · Commission · Cultural heritage · League · Meaning (existential) · Political science · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies