The Value of Monuments

Samir Younés
Francis and Kathleen Rooney Director of Rome Studies in Architecture
University of Notre Dame.

 
Dear Poliphilo,
The following is taken from the text of a lecture delivered in Venice, a city very dear to your heart, on the 3rd of November, 2006, during the Re-visiting the Charter of Venice Conference held at the Arsenale.

Conservation and restoration have always been vital practices for the life of buildings. Both presume an external or internal threat to buildings or to works of art. This phenomenon may be traced back to ancient times when the inhabitants of besieged cities hid their most precious works of art in the adytum of temples. By virtue of this association as well as their intrinsic value, artistic creations came to be endowed with an aura of sacrality, especially when it comes to exemplary works.

Since the eighteenth century conservation has been a direct manifestation of different positions on architectural history and its uses. During the destruction of cultural artifacts that accompanied the French Revolution, the 1790 Commission des Arts designated two locations in Paris dedicated to salvaging building fragments and works of art, entrusting the task to the painter Alexandre Lenoir. One of these locations was the cloister of the Petits Augustins, the convent that was to be absorbed within the future École des Beaux-Arts. The convent was renamed Le Musée des monuments français, and there Lenoir arranged the collected fragments in the rooms that surrounded the cloister, following a sequential historical order: the French Gothic, the French Renaissance, etc. Lenoir also decorated each room in a composition that suited the chosen period. This represented perhaps the first modern understanding of the museum. It was cyclical and followed a loosely Hegelian periodicity. This also implied that the modern museum was born, in part, because of a threat to art, represented by upheavals in society. The institution of the museum came to be seen as a refuge. It was to also participate in presenting art and architecture within a historical narrative.

Other agents in the French cultural arena had opposing concerns. They saw an internal threat to art when art is relegated to the museum. The Musée des monuments français became the subject of bitter debates on art theory and national heritage, accompanied by a political conflict between the opponents of the museum, A.C. Quatremère de Quincy and J.B. Deseine, and its enthusiastic supporters, A. Lenoir and E. David, among others. Quatremère opposed the museum for several ideological reasons. Most importantly, he considered the museum as a cemetery where art was hopelessly fragmented and dispersed out of its proper context. Art in the museum served the aims of the historian more than those of the practicing artist. The museum context relativized different forms of art, a situation that conflicted with the notion of a single architectural ideal. Whereas Lenoir saw the Gothic as the national architectural character par excellence, Quatremère intended for the Classic to achieve that very status. Through his considerable political influence, Quatremère obtained two ordonnances which effectively closed Lenoir’s museum and paved the way for the expropriation of the museum's site and buildings for the use of l'École des Beaux-Arts. F. Debret was commissioned to build the school, replacing parts of Lenoir's museum, while preserving the old convent's cloister buildings. The story of this museum showed the confrontation of two views of history and its uses. On the one hand, there was periodicity coupled with a certain degree of historical determinism and the relativism of multiple architectural exemplars, represented by the museum. On the other, there was the notion of a single superlative cultural ideal, represented by the Gothic or the Classical.

In England, the Romantic cult of ruins in the picturesque garden showed another attitude to artistic culture. The picturesque garden raised the love of ruins to the level of a cult. The idea was similar to Lenoir’s, in the sense that a history can be arranged in a certain narrative, albeit fictive. But, contrary to the contents of Lenoir’s museum, the picturesque garden showed an architecture that was to be built as an artificial ruin, a new ruin. Paralleling this idea, Soane’s Bank of England, as painted by Joseph Gandy, embodied the idea of a culture admiringly prefiguring and aesthetizing the future state of ruination of its own buildings.

Another view was represented by Viollet-le-Duc, who restored the Château de Pierrefonds and the city of Carcassone to forms that they did not necessarily have in the middle ages. For Viollet-le-Duc the Gothic architectural character of Pierrefonds and Carcassone, which he completed in remarkably short time, was a modern practice. Though Quatremère’s and Viollet-le-Duc’s thinking differed considerably, they both considered the Classic and the Gothic to be perfectly modern practices.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the rapidly widening historical perspectives available led the Austrian art historian Alois Riegl to distinguish, in a very influential essay, between intentional and unintentional monuments and four values associated with them. These values were historical value, age value, use value and artistic value. Historical value, according to Riegl, started in the Renaissance with the development of official measures of preserving ancient buildings, e.g., with Raphael under Leo X. Age value, according to Riegl, is a phenomenon of the seventeenth and twentieth centuries, where pastness itself is an aesthetic value. Age value comes from the very traces of age in buildings, such as decay. This gives buildings an aura of legitimacy, of genuineness. The more decay a building exhibits, the more picturesque is the result. However, as many have noted, age value contradicts historical value, for whereas age value is evident in the decay of monuments, historical value depends on the retardation of this very decay. Monuments have a use value, deriving from their utilitarian service to society, but if decay becomes dangerous to human life then the historical building should be destroyed. Finally, art value, arguably the most important, is in the monument being a representation of kuntswollen, an artistic will or ambition. Riegl’s essay, summarized diverse views about historical and artistic value of buildings in a manner that mercifully avoided some of the ideological overtones of his predecessors or his successors.

Then came modernism with its tabula rasa approach, and its consecration of rupture and transgression of former artistic traditions as an integral part of daily artistic practice. All of these positions, willingly or not, contributed to the present cultural impasse regarding the instrumentality of history in the contemporary architect’s intellectual life. Consequently, it is difficult for contemporary architects to have a sense of composure vis–à–vis history, and their modernist ideological training causes a great reluctance to contribute to it. For many architects today, history is a course of events to which they are external.

This was the mentality that permeated two influential modernist documents, the Charter of Athens (1933) and the Charter of Venice (1964). In its more positive aspects, in Article one, the Charter of Venice extends the concept of historical monument to the monument’s context and to high art as well as modest art. In Article Three, the Charter affirms that the “intention of conserving and restoring monuments is to safeguard them less as works of art than as historical evidence,” with the implication that legislation preserves these monuments primarily as historical sources. Here, one finds the merging of two purposes. First is that of the historian, the archaeologist, to whom history is understood within classificatory schemes, within catalogued compartments—in other words, the idea of the museum. And the museum catalogues that which is gone. Second is the tacit assumption that, whereas monuments are inseparable from their history, they are necessarily and irretrievably other to one’s contemporary artistic practice. Here, the tacit assumption is that artistic value takes a secondary place to the classificatory and evidence–gathering methods of the historian. Article Five accepts that buildings can be used for some socially useful purpose, but it disallows changing the layout. In other words, buildings cannot be additively transformed.

Under the section Restoration, historicist and therefore modernist ideology returns in full force: we are admonished to stop where conjecture begins, and only that which is indispensable should be added, but then it must have “a contemporary stamp.” Then we are told that “unity of style is not the aim of a restoration.” To which one must honestly respond: Why not? Further still, in Article Twelve, we are told: “Replacements of missing parts must integrate harmoniously with the whole.” The Charter of Venice is requiring that replacement of missing parts be harmonious with the structure, while simultaneously avoiding stylistic unity. Whereas such a practice is achievable, in the sense that one can add to a building in a way that fits harmoniously but with a different composition, it is used to exclude the possibility of producing stylistic unity. Subsequently, the Charter of Venice requires that additions “must be distinguishable from the original so that restoration does not falsify the artistic or historical evidence.” This is the modernist belief in the falso storico represented as a remark about authenticity. And here is where the brunt of historical determinism is made to weigh upon the architect’s mind. Next, Article Fifteen states that “ruins must be maintained,” but the understanding is that ruins must be maintained as ruins. Then, appears the clinching admonition that “All reconstruction work must be ruled out a priori,” with the exception of anastylosis. But as is perfectly well known, the Stoa in Athens, for example, was built in the 1930s, and no one confuses this with the ancient Stoa. Moreover, historians do not always agree about the previous appearance of a building.

It is evident that the idea of conservation as enshrined in the Charter of Venice emphasizes the establishment, on an international scale, of a certain idea of history, a theory of history rather than the idea of a living architectural tradition. Paradoxical though it may be, it is possible to conserve buildings, on the one hand, but also destroy the practice of a tradition on the other. Conservators claim to themselves the right and the responsibility to protect heritage, but by associating their work with modernist ideology, they participate in the eradication of tradition as a modern practice. This leads to the conclusion that conservation pertains to objects that are no longer to be used, except in a museal sense. If tradition is put in the museum, there to be compartmentalized, catalogued, stored, then it is the surest way to eradicate it.

Nonetheless, buildings can also be damaged because of an excess of respect, e.g., the Roman Forum, an excess of reverence like the idea of an unsurpassable romanità. That buildings are ruined is a natural occurrence, but that they are artificially kept in ruins shows a peculiar love for ruins. Even more peculiar, was the destruction of centuries of matured urban layers in Rome in order to reveal the ruins of the Forae, or Largo Argentina. Much of Rome was burned on the altar of archaeology!

A ruin is a form in decay, and as such it completes the life cycle of a building. Difficult though it is for us to accept, the Pantheon will one day disappear. We can lament such terrible eventual loss and attend to conservation efforts. But we can also open up the possibility of making new traditional buildings which are just as good, daunting though it is today to attain such excellence. Artistic value is more important than age value. People flock to the Pantheon primarily because of its remarkable architectural qualities. They would be less inclined to visit it if it were a mere second-century A.D. building. If the Pantheon were to be rebuilt à l’identique, it would have more value than the present superlative building, because it will have the same qualities and it would be complete. Completing the Pantheon gives more value to the building’s compositional integrity over the historian’s need for dating, categorizing and compartmentalizing.

Consider for a moment objects in their fullness: buildings descend from types. They are transformed through additions, reductions or the inclusion of parts of other buildings. With age they are diminished, ruined, restored and sometimes transported. Later still, they become withered and then eventually disappear. This describes buildings, or art forms or cultures as objects in their fullness.

There is by now a hyper-developed valuation of the historical, be it buildings, sculptures or paintings. And for the past two hundred years, the institution of the museum has played a considerable role in linking artistic value judgment and restoration in a common task of promoting and protecting works that were perceived to be under threat. Because of this phenomenon, age value came to outweigh other values, and venerated objects came to be appreciated for their own sake, and only according to the conditions of their emergence. Promoters of historicist relativism—modernist pundits—relentlessly repeated that traditions in art and architecture were products of a context and time which was now irretrievably gone. In addition, these traditions were presented as irrevocably other to one’s modern sensibilities. It was acceptable to entertain aesthetic sensibilities of past art and architecture, but such appreciation was to be enclosed within the framework of a museal mentality. That millennial traditions of art and architecture could have direct use or instrumentality in modern practice was disallowed. In this manner, manifold traditions of art and architecture were relegated to the museum—there to be critically assessed, compartmentalized, dissected and disseminated according to a constructed narrative. But otherwise, these traditions were locked away, that is, away from direct and daily use by the mind.

This was in keeping with the tenets of historicism to which some philosophers added the notion of historical determinism (L. von Ranke and F. Meinecke). History, according to these philosophers, had an irrevocable teleological direction in which art and architecture were advancing toward a future ideal that would emerge from the very contingencies of history. Though, in general, this position offered the promise of good future possibilities, it was used to promote the idea that art and architecture could only fulfill their purposes by severing their connections with the natural evolution of tradition. Only in this manner could they express the particular spirit of their age. And architects sought to realize this view by wedding their art to the fortunes of technological development while claiming to represent society through this development. Many traditions were mercilessly destroyed in the process, and, as a reaction to these excesses, charters such as the Charter of Venice, most famously, were developed, but without rethinking the modernist ideology that caused the problem in the first place. For though it aimed to protect monuments from destruction, this charter consecrated the utter separation between any historical building and any modern attempt to integrally rebuild it, to integrate it to another building or add to it in a genuinely new traditional way. Once the Charter of Venice became universally applied, the categorical separation between historical architectural elements and their appropriation for daily use by the mind of the architect became an established official practice. Paradoxically, official practices sanction the re-building of modernist masterpieces in their entirety and at exorbitant costs. Even more paradoxical is the fact that notwithstanding the material poverty of modernist buildings, e.g., the Pompidou Center, necessitating their restoration only a few decades after initial completion, the enduring examples of traditional architecture are still mendaciously dismissed.

It is important here to note that the practice of traditional architecture does not imply its blind repetition, but rather the rational agreement and disagreement between many free minds contemplating the same concerns, enriched by the accumulated wisdom of experience. Continuity is judiciously approved where architectural production has rationally been proven successful, and change is carefully accepted where and when there is a rational need to depart from a practice that has failed. The practice of traditional architecture differentiates itself from a blind faith in an unsurpassable and glorious past, and a blind faith in an unknown future ideal which will emerge from a technologically determined reality. That is to say, the practice of modern traditional architecture distinguishes itself from forms of revivalism and forms of modernism.

Modernist critics will, no doubt, consider the arguments presented here as a falso storico. Therefore, a brief clarification is warranted. Modernist ideology founded its own justification on rupture and transgression of former practices of architecture. Modernist historiography, consequently, propagated a view of architectural history as a history of ruptures, one style or manner inexorably breaking with the preceding one, while claiming that this was the only way to interpret the development of architectural history. For this reason, modernist architects see the modern practice of traditional architecture as a false history, and dismiss the history of other traditional modernities. But there are other views of architecture. There are other modernities where the approach to building the city does not necessarily comprise daily rupture and transgression in order to produce difference and exclude commonality. This is not to say that traditional architecture favors continuity exclusively. Our intellectual evolution recognizes both continuities and ruptures. No historical context, no matter its remoteness or proximity to other contexts, is made of all continuities or all ruptures. But seeking change solely because the architect seeks difference and rupture as a modus operandi is a doubtful proposition upon which to build cities. It gives more prominence to personal taste and whim than to the layered maturation of collective living.

Collective reflection leads us to conclude that cities are made out of the layers of other cities, at once literally and figuratively. They evolve in three manners: by the erection of new buildings, by the destruction and replacement of older buildings, and by the integrative transformation of existing buildings. Rome exemplifies these transformations, but it is the last mode of building cities—integrative transformation—that characterizes much of her history, thus contributing to her remarkably integrated urban form. Quite significantly, when one is asked to give a date for buildings such as the Tabularium/Campidoglio, the Teatro di Marcello or the buildings that engage the remnants of the Portico d’Ottavia, one must speak of a historical range rather than a single date. The Mausoleum of Hadrian owes its conservation to its successive transformations into Castel Sant’ Angelo. The Theatre of Marcellus owes its state of preservation to the fact that many buildings engaged it, most importantly, Peruzzi’s transformation of the upper parts, the best-preserved tiers of the theatre into apartments. As a manifestation of the collective consciousness of the minds that produced her architectural character(s), Rome offers rational and enduring examples of how to build rationally with manifold architectural layers—always adding, transforming and integrating. As with architectural invention, the city emerges as a composition and a re-composition of pre-existing buildings. This is not to say that Rome has always exhibited the most successful lessons of urban integration. The Calcararia and the via delle Botteghe oscure were areas where parts of monuments were chipped away at for centuries, and the sventramenti of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries left their heavy marks on the city. Nevertheless, the best lessons of Rome are apposite for conservation.

As a paradigm that painstakingly incorporated urban successes and failures, Rome at present commendably integrates all the practical necessities of modern life. It follows logically that new proposals for Rome should envisage the city’s form centuries into the future. Based on an analysis of the urban, architectural and tectonic typologies of Rome, the architect engages in a difficult task, one that requires much inventiveness. How do we make new traditional buildings whose character is a definite natural outgrowth of local elements, irrespective of the heavy demands of historical categorization? This requires close observation of the rich variety of the architectures of Rome in their distinction and commonality with other regions. This task also necessitates the realization that architectural or artistic invention is not made out of nothing, but is based on the knowledge of the rules of architecture and the use of pre-existing elements which are (re)composed in new ways. Tradition is not an enclosed self-referential system that accepts no external feedback. If it were so, then tradition would be nothing but the repetition of already given forms. There are alternatives to the cultural impasse caused by the confluence of such forces briefly mentioned above. The modern traditional view of architecture does not consider cultural history as a process to which we are now wholly external. We engage and transform historical material. We learn from tradition, and we contribute to it, thereby transforming it. We have the choice of keeping art, architecture and the city locked within the museum, or fully and freely using them in the compositions of our daily artistic practice.