ABSTRACT
The need to objectify the memory of war and tragedy is a survival mechanism by which we distance the overwhelming reality that the history of civilisation is shadowed by barbarism. We feel obliged to build memorials, erect plaques, and preserve the remains of brutal episodes in which the act of remembrance is also a desire to forget. To be haunted on a daily basis by the knowledge that the history of capitalism is a history of conquest, enslavement, robbery, and murder is psychologically ruinous (Marx 1976: 874). Equally traumatic is the antithetical history of architecture as a Natural History of Destruction (Sebald 2004: 153).
