HAA 2923 Global Preservation
The late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries debates regarding the role of the architectural monuments as a signifier of the past, as a container of memory and more importantly authenticity, were the definitive moment in the institutionalization and professionalization of architectural preservation around the world. In a 1903 essay titled “The Modern Cult of Monuments,” historian Alois Reigl claimed that while the creation of monuments (i.e. structures built to memorialize certain events or persons) had a long history that predated modernity, the “cult of the monument” (i.e. the allocation of the monument as a unique and original object in a pre-ordained historical narrative of social and cultural evolution) came about as recently as the nineteenth-century. It is this coupling of the advent as well as the progress of modernity along with the formalization of systems of historic preservation that this course seeks to explore. Rather than providing a linear and exhaustive history of preservation this course will interrogate the theories as well as the policies of preservation in different contexts as social and cultural histories, from Victorian Britain to colonial preservation in India and even consider the recent controversies over preservation in our hometown of Pittsburgh.
