Review: Designs of Destruction: The Making of Monuments in the Twentieth Century, by Lucia Allais

Abstract

Lucia Allais Designs of Destruction: The Making of Monuments in the Twentieth Century Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018, 347 pp., 8 color and 123 b/w illus. $45 (cloth), ISBN 9780226286556 In Designs of Destruction: The Making of Monuments in the Twentieth Century , Lucia Allais delves into the four tumultuous decades that preceded the signing of the World Heritage Convention in 1972. She uncovers the work of the many agents—from bureaucrats and intellectuals to lawyers and architects—who mobilized to engineer the survival of architectural monuments, setting the foundations for “the remarkable return of the monument to the world stage” (2). Allais explores how the opportunity to act architecturally was recognized and integrated into global governance during this period, when “state-sponsored and/or internationally-sanctioned techniques and practices of construction and destruction … fueled monuments' survival” (8). She situates these techniques at the fault line between modernism and historicism, and this is one of the book's greatest contributions. Focusing on a period when modern architecture achieved unparalleled international success, Allais questions the division of the twentieth century into pre- and postwar, and pro- and antimodern, locating modernists and preservationists “in a spectrum of engagements with a broad endangerment sensibility” (8). In her introduction, Allais provides a general theoretical framework for her research, situating it in relation to the relevant literature on heritage, preservation, modern architecture, and global contemporary history. Although she focuses primarily on the mid-twentieth century, she begins by emphasizing the relevance of some of her findings to recent events, such as U.S. president Barack Obama's state visit to Senegal's Maison des Esclaves in 2013 and the political use of the ruins of Palmyra by different parties during the ongoing Syrian civil war. Allais then summarizes each of the book's five chapters, which recount five episodes “when the survival …