ABSTRACT

Architecture and Armed Conflict is the first multi-authored scholarly book to address this theme from a comparative, interdisciplinary perspective. By bringing together specialists from a range of relevant fields, and with knowledge of case studies across time and space, it provides the first synthetic body of research on the complex, multifaceted subject of architectural destruction in the context of conflict.

The book addresses several specific research questions:

  • How has the destruction of buildings and landscapes figured in recent historical conflicts, and how have people and states responded to it?
  • How has the destruction of architecture been represented in different historical periods, and to what ends?
  • What are the relationships between the destruction of architecture and the destruction of art, particularly iconoclasm?
  • If architectural destruction is a salient feature of many armed conflicts, how does it feature in post-conflict environments?
  • What are the relationships between architectural destruction and processes of restoration, recreation or replacement?

Considering multiple conflicts, multiple time periods, and multiple locations allows this international cohort of authors to provide an essential primer for this crucial topic.

chapter |7 pages

Introduction

part 1|33 pages

Architectural destruction in contemporary conflicts

chapter 2|15 pages

The Case of Dubrovnik

UNESCO World Heritage Site Under Siege, 1991–92

part 2|44 pages

Representing and replicating architectural destruction in ancient, early modern, and modern contexts

chapter 3|13 pages

‘I Burnt, Razed (and) Destroyed Those Cities'

The Assyrian accounts of deliberate architectural destruction

chapter 4|14 pages

Remaking the Bastille

Architectural destruction and revolutionary consciousness in France, 1789–94

chapter 5|15 pages

Fine Arts Under Fire

Life magazine and the display of architectural destruction

part 3|42 pages

Iconoclasm and architectural destruction

chapter 7|13 pages

Iconoclasm and Resistance

Wayside shrines in the struggle for Lithuanian independence

chapter 8|13 pages

Dublin and Its Georgian Legacy

The battle for iconoclasm

part 4|35 pages

Future destruction: The fate of architecture in post-conflict environments

chapter 9|16 pages

Disciplining Delhi

The 1857 uprising and remodelling of the urban landscape

chapter 10|17 pages

Anything Goes

Architectural destruction in Northern Ireland after ‘the Troubles'

part 5|47 pages

From destruction to reconstruction

chapter 11|15 pages

The Politics of Burgundian Romanesque

Destruction and construction in Cluny and Mâcon during the nineteenth century

chapter 12|16 pages

Making History

The destruction and (re)construction of old Belgian towns during and after the First World War