Architecture as the Target

© Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, vol. 52: 389-390, December 1993.
Reproduced with permission.

The Italian bombings this summer brought to mind with extraordinary force our tenuous connection to the past. Despite all the loving restorations, the remarkable measured surveys, the books and articles, it can all go in an instant. Much more could easily have been lost in Florence; much more could easily have been lost in Rome.

It is fascinating to see how the Italian explosions mobilize our emotions; the Uffizi and the great monuments of Italy represent, for many of us, a kind of cultural "patria" and so it is understandable that we feel damage to them as damage to us. For most architectural historians in the West, however, feelings are probably not so quickly aroused by the destruction of monuments elsewhere in the world. In India and Pakistan, for example, there has been an ongoing tit-for-tat war of demolition. One of the most noted losses, for example, was the Babri Masjid, built in 1528 over the birthplace of the god Rama at Ayodhya as many Hindus believe. This mosque was disassembled in December 1992, and news photographs show crowds of Hindu militants pulling stone from stone. Yet all these losses pale in comparison with the destruction in former Yugoslavia. Eerie television pictures during the fall and winter 1991 showed the fortifications of the Croatian seaport of Dubrovnik, relics of earlier wars, being used for their original purpose once again. The past may be a foreign country, to paraphrase L.P. Hartley, but it looks all too familiar now.

Nowhere in that region of the world is the situation more distressing for architecture than in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Information Reports published by the Council of Europe concerning architectural losses there (Doc. 6756, 2 February 1993; Doc. 6879, 17 June 1993, and the preliminary report of Marian Wenzel and Roger Shrimplin of their June 1993 visit) make chilling reading. As with every aspect of the Bosnian story, the cultural bloodlines are interwoven with the complexity of fragile nerve-endings and all groups have suffered terribly. Yet, what is particularly disturbing to architectural historians about this most troubling of wars is the systematic targeting of architecture. It is as if the protagonists, unable to strangle the last living representatives of what they see as an alien culture, seem to think that with the destruction of place, an architectural cleansing, as it were, they can eradicate the people who inhabit that place. (The Council of Europe report, Doc. 6756, refers to "cultural and economic cleansing," 3-4). Mosques, churches, synagogues, markets, museums, libraries, cafes, in short, the places where people gather to live out their collective life, have been the focus of bitter attacks. In Mostar, for example, where the Stari-Grad (Old City) project was given the Aga Khan Award in 1986 for historic restoration, photographs show only ruins: the commercial district, the symphony orchestra building, schools, mosques, hotels, all have been bombed. But the most ghastly loss has been the housing at the center of the town near each end of the Old Bridge, much of it only recently restored. "Maybe," the bombs seem to say in crazed logic of this war, "if we remove the architecture that sustains the people in this community, the people themselves will die." The attacks are not symbolic strikes at the representational value of architecture, as in Italy, but an insane effort to eliminate a people by destroying their architecture. The words of the Council of Europe report are not an overstatement: the wars in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina have produced "a major cultural catastrophe," (Doc. 6756, 3).

Have architectural historians, people who love buildings, people whose lives and careers have been formed around the understanding of the meaning of place, faced what these losses in Bosnia mean? The Italian bombings with their superstar subjects have easily found the front pages of our newspapers and our concern. A professor at the University of Rome was quoted in the New York Times (3 June 1993) as saying that, while it would be difficult to defend all of Italy's monuments from terrorists, because the Italian heritage was so rich, New York would present little problem, he thought, because there were relatively few monuments of value here. It is precisely this kind of cultural chauvinism that we should reject in others, and in ourselves.

What separates Bosnia-Herzegovina (and Ayodhya) from the Italian situation is the deliberate and systematic nature of the destruction. Like the horrifying rapes of the women of Bosnia reported last year, these are violent efforts to remake the world in another image. Like the women of Bosnia, for many of whom the preservation of their traditional culture and the creation of home is an essential role, so too architecture creates home, represents memory, and preserves culture. Without minimizing the scale of human suffering, this attempt to destroy architecture, to annihilate place, like the violence against the women, is criminal warfare and cultural genocide.

Can any good come from this tragedy? Despite the continuation of the war, architects from Bosnia-Herzegovina have begun to look beyond the war of 1992-93. One imaginative proposal, by Amir Pasic, formerly director of the Institute for Urban Planning and Preservation of Cultural Heritage in Mostar and now a fellow at the Research Centre for Islamic History, Art and Culture in Istanbul, is to plan the inauguration of the reconstructed town of Mostar for 15 September 2004, at 5 p.m., to celebrate the reconstruction of the town. Invitations have already been issued. It is a visionary proposal, one that insists on the survival of memory through architecture eevn as the war continues.

What can we, as architectural historians, do? The first step, I believe, is to face what is happening and to learn more. Proposals, like that of Amir Pasic, that keep memories alive need to be supported even before reconstruction begins. We need more knowledge, too, and we should encourage agencies in this country that care for architecture to send representatives to former Yugoslavia to document what is still there, and what has been lost. In this way we will nourish the muscle of memory. (The Council of Europe preliminary report of June 1993, 3, mentions the survival of photographic archives with architectural subject matter in Mostar and Sarajevo but, according to the report, there are no facilities for printing the photographs or for making copies of the negatives). We may also want to become more active in our support. Croatia has already solicited aid in the United States through the Save Dubrovnik Fund, and groups in France, Italy, and the United States have joined in sending money or specialists. UNESCO has made funds available, too. But for Bosnia-Herzegovina there is little support as yet, and without the designation of historic status for its monuments by UNESCO it cannot receive UN funds and expertise. This kind of bureaucracy needs to be addressed for we cannot just stand by and watch. (In any United Nations-brokered settlement one wonders whether the new masters of Bosnia-Herzegovina will have any interest in rebuilding the monuments they have so recently torn down?)

Mostar is also the site of the famous thirty-meter single-arched stone bridge built by the Turkish engineer Hayruddin for the Ottoman emperor Suleyman the Magnificent. Admired for four centuries, its elegant arch delicately linked the two banks of the River Neretva until early last month (according to reports in the New York Times, 10 November 1993, the bridge has now been destroyed). Bridges are, of course, powerful symbols of connection, in this region especially. (See, for example, Ivo Andric's Nobel-prize winning epic novel, The Bridge on the Drina, which tells of the construction of the bridge at Visegrad by Mimar Sinan, Hayruddin's master, and of the many cultures that crossed the bridge). For the war of 1992-93, the bridge at Mostar is a symbol of loss in wartime and a symbol of hope for peace. It is the expected thing to say that people come first, and they do, but the survival of architecture and urban life are important to the survival of people. Architectural historians have a clear interest in these matters, an interest we need to express.

Back to More information...