Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Illustrations
- Introduction
- 1 Architecture, Power and Identities: Surveying the Field
- 2 The Public Discourse of Architecture: Socializing Identities
- 3 Architecture and the Nation: Building an ‘Us’
- 4 Modernity and Mega-Events: Architecturing a Future
- 5 Architecture and Commemoration: The Construction of Memorialization
- 6 Iconic Architecture and Regeneration: The Form is the Function
- 7 ‘European’ Architecture: Politics in Search of Form and Meaning
- 8 Conclusion: Sociology, Architecture and the Politics of Building
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - Architecture and Commemoration: The Construction of Memorialization
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Illustrations
- Introduction
- 1 Architecture, Power and Identities: Surveying the Field
- 2 The Public Discourse of Architecture: Socializing Identities
- 3 Architecture and the Nation: Building an ‘Us’
- 4 Modernity and Mega-Events: Architecturing a Future
- 5 Architecture and Commemoration: The Construction of Memorialization
- 6 Iconic Architecture and Regeneration: The Form is the Function
- 7 ‘European’ Architecture: Politics in Search of Form and Meaning
- 8 Conclusion: Sociology, Architecture and the Politics of Building
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Every period has the impulse to create symbols in the form of monuments, which, according to the Latin meaning are ‘things that remind’, things to be transmitted to later generations. This demand for monumentality cannot, in the long run, be suppressed. It tries to find an outlet at all costs.
Sigfried Giedion, ‘The Need for a New Monumentality’ (1944), 553.
Introduction
Landmark building projects have a complex relationship with broader social forces. This contention is clearly evidenced by the major architectural projects the world over that in addition to their primary function also serve a memorial purpose. In such cases architects seek to reconcile a range of competing contingent functions and meanings, with their work taking on characteristics akin to monuments in an early modern age, a period of time when the built environment was one of the few spaces in which socially significant memories could be communicated widely across society (see Heynen 1999b; Tonkiss 2005). The desire of states and other polities to communicate social messages across rapidly expanding nineteenth-century urban citizenry led to the ascription of messages onto the built environment via a whole range of monuments and statues and major public buildings designed to have a memorial function; the countless monuments and plaques that characterize capitals and other large cities the world over are testament to this tendency (Therbon 2002) (Ruskin's notion of buildings as ‘storehouses of memory’ (1992 [1849]) is to be understood in this context).
However, ethnocentric associations – including, but not limited to, the close links with the nationalisms and fascisms of the twentieth century (Young 1992; 1993) – became bound up with the forms and functions of such traditional monuments, a context that has led to states and memorial designers to pursue increasingly reflexive approaches to commemoration in the built environment. But far from leading to a decline in the monumental impulse, this shift has seen the commemoration of significant losses of life in wars or other socially significant events increasingly transposed onto major architectural projects. As we have seen with cases in previous chapters, architecture not only provides an important space for ‘remembering’ but also, just as crucially, for ‘forgetting’.
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- Chapter
- Information
- The Sociology of ArchitectureConstructing Identities, pp. 92 - 114Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2011