Thordis Arrhenius The Fragile Monument: On Conservation and Modernity London: Artifice Books and Black Dog Publishing, 2012, 160 pp., 50 color and b/w illus. Paper £19.95/ €23.95 / $29.95, ISBN 9781907317477 Anne Parmly Toxey Materan Contradictions: Architecture, Preservation and Politics Farnham, UK, and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2011, 380 pp., 150 b/w illus. Cloth £65 / $119.95, ISBN 9781409412076; e-book 9781409412083 Academic interest is growing in legally protected “heritage” that helps define the world in which we live. These two important books add significantly to our understanding of both the politics and the sensibilities of preservation, while also opening the way for further research. In considering how architectural remains become what Pierre Bourdieu has referred to as “cultural capital,” both authors see preserving the past as a concept and a process. Both associate it with modernity and with European (perhaps more accurately, “culturally Western”) political and societal life. Both are concerned with preservation and exhibitionary cultures. Thordis Arrhenius is an architect and professor of architectural history and conservation at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design; Anne Parmly Toxey is an exhibition designer and archaeologist. Both deal with processes of history, myth, and memory, with concepts of place and space in the making of usable monuments, and with sociopolitical national and “world” identities. Each makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the theories and practices of architectural heritage preservation and conservation, and the ways in which the preserved past infiltrates our lives. These books will be of interest to scholars and practitioners alike. Taken together, the books complement and compound each other and richly add to current debates. Each deals with specific material resources, acknowledging to varying degrees the sociopolitical circumstances associated with their preservation. Both appreciate relationships between legislation and preservation and that local concerns attract national and international intervention, a process made increasingly complex by the World Heritage program of UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization). Arrhenius’s interest is in the invention of individual monuments and how they have been viewed, restored, conserved, and integrated into various Western European cityscapes from the French Revolution to the mid-twentieth century. She considers the relationship between architecture’s exhibitionary …