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Destruction as cultural cleansing: eradicating architecture
Destruction as cultural cleansing
Building Design, 03 February 2006
A new book examines how attackers use the tactical eradication of architecture.
Book: "The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War" by Robert Bevan, reviewed by Abe Hayeem
Find this article at Archinect: http://archinect.com/news/article.php?id=32810_0_24_0_C
or Building Design, http://www.bdonline.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=429&storyCode=3062126
Building Design, 03 February 2006
A new book examines how attackers use the tactical eradication of architecture.
Book: "The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War" by Robert Bevan, reviewed by Abe Hayeem
"The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then you have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was."
Milan Kundera, The Book Of Laughter and Forgetting.
This quote opens the second chapter of Robert Bevan's timely and original book The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War. As Bevan says, the destruction of symbolic buildings and the physical fabric of cities and civilisations is not merely collateral damage, but a deliberate intention by the attacker, to "dominate, divide, terrorise, and eliminate" the memory, history and identity of the opposing side. Cultural cleansing is inextricably linked to ethnic cleansing, genocide and holocausts.
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Both the Hague and Geneva Conventions consider the destruction of cultural heritage a war crime, unless there is "imperative military necessity". The US has refused to ratify the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, which the UK government reluctantly signed up to in 2005, after 50 years of prevarication.
In this indispensable and beautifully written first international survey of its type, Robert Bevan raises the importance of safeguarding the world's architectural record. The compelling subtext is a plea for heterogeneous, pluralist values, integration and human justice, and for cultural genocide to be made a punishable "crime against humanity".
Abe Hayeem is an architect and member of Architects & Planners for Justice
Find this article at Archinect: http://archinect.com/news/article.php?id=32810_0_24_0_C
or Building Design, http://www.bdonline.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=429&storyCode=3062126
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