Architecture of memorialisation: the Spitfire and the making of a memorial icon

Abstract

ABSTRACT During the Second World War, the Supermarine Spitfire played a pivotal role defending the British nation, notably during the 1940 Battle of Britain. Drawing from the aircraft’s historiography and its continuing afterlife, we discuss the constitutive elements supporting the Spitfire’s transformation from war plane to memorial icon for the British wartime experience. In the context of this machine as memorial, the elements comprising what we refer to as the architecture of memorialisation are narrative permanence, enchantment of war technology, dialogic geometry of remembrance and commemorative adaptive capacity. These elements work to silence war, killing and death and in so doing justify a nation’s values, its moral compass. While these four elements may be unique to this aircraft, the architecture of memorialisation is a conceptual framework for analysing other types of memorials including those that are contested or which reflect regimes of power or cultures of remembrance very different to those of the United Kingdom (UK). Diverse social and cultural contexts will reveal different constitutive elements of the architecture of memorialisation.