191016 - Designs of Destruction: The Making of Monuments in the Twentieth Century with Lucia Allais

Seminar Cities are back in town "Designs of Destruction: The Making of Monuments in the Twentieth Century" (Lucia Allais,  University of Chicago Press, 2018)

Wednesday 16 October 2019, 5 - 7 pm, Sciences Po, LIEPP’s Conference Room, 254, boulevard Saint-Germain, 75007 Paris

In 1943, the Allied Air Forces began producing an expansive series of lists, maps, and aerial photographs of monuments for almost every city in Europe, annotated with instructions for bombers on “how to miss cultural sites”. Over the course of two years, these lists expanded and shrank to fit different phases of the war; the longest list of German monuments was 150 pages; at one point, a single map of France containing only 23 monuments was made. What kind of plans were these? To what use were they put; how did they partake in the techniques of precision at the core of Allied aerial strategy, and were they, as one archaeologist put it, instruments for “unwitting urban planning”? Lucia Allais will narrate this remarkable episode, drawn from her book, Designs of Destruction: The Making of Monuments in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: 2018), relating it to the global regime of cultural preservation enforced by UNESCO today.

 Speaker: Lucia Allais, Associate Professor of Architectural History and Theory, Columbia University and Visiting Researcher at Sciences Po, CEE

Lucia Allais is an architectural historian and critic, who writes on the relationship between architectural design, technology, and politics in the modern period, with a special focus on international institutions, global politics, and intellectual history. She is, a member of the Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative, and an editor of the journal Grey Room.

Discussant: Marco Cremaschi, Sciences Po, CEE

Contact: citiesarebackintown@sciencespo.fr

Compulsory registration - For the external people to Sciences Po: You will have to arrive 10 minutes before the beginning of the seminar and to provide you with your identity papers