It may seem odd amidst the loss of life associated with war to pause to express concern over the destruction of buildings, bridges, and other architectural structures. However, as Robert Bevan argues in The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War, the twentieth century witnessed not only an increase in the magnitude of destruction, but also the advent of military forces deliberately seeking in certain conflicts — frequently in conjunction with ethnic cleansing — to erase physical evidence that another people had ever occupied a given territory or that different peoples had ever lived side by side or even intermarried. Bevan observes that “Architecture in the twentieth century became, more and more, a weapon of war rather than something that gets in the way of its smooth conduct. Architecture is not just maimed in the crossfire; it is targeted for assassination or mass murder.” (p. 210)

In the former Yugoslavia, Serbs and Croats not only sought to drive their opponents from a given territory, contending in the face of contrary evidence that the territory was and should always be the exclusive domain of a particular group, but also to obliterate evidence of centuries of occupation by other groups. In the effort to accomplish such a rewriting of history, forces deliberately targeted libraries, museums, archives, and other repositories of documentary and architectural evidence. The wholesale destruction in areas of mosques or of Orthodox or Christian churches permitted one side or the other to claim that other groups had never inhabited such areas.

Nor was the former Yugoslavia a unique case. The Holocaust included not only a genocidal targeting of an entire people but an effort, including the destruction of many places of worship, intended to eradicate even any memory. Debates persist about the extent to which Allied and German air raids in World War II represented conscious destruction of enemy architectural treasures, a negligent lack of concern about architectural heritage, or simply collateral damage. In the case of the German occupation of Warsaw in World War II, a conscious effort was made to identify the most noteworthy buildings of Warsaw’s architectural heritage so that they could be destroyed. At the same time, architects, planners, and students risked their lives as part of an underground effort to document Warsaw’s architectural heritage so the city could be rebuilt after the war. In whole or in part because of a politics of symbolism, Al-Qaeda targeted the Pentagon and World Trade Towers, just as the Taliban destroyed the Buddhas of Bamiyan and factions of the Irish Republican Army destroyed Nelson’s Pillar and the Four Courts in Dublin. Bevan includes many more examples, ranging from instances of deliberate destruction to cases of simple negligence, as in failing to exercise due care to protect treasures from being looted. Some of the examples of deliberate destruction are easy to condemn and deserving of that condemnation. There are other cases where some will argue how far a military force can or should go to avoid damaging historic structures or to protect such structures from criminals seeking to exploit disorder.

The point of Bevan’s fascinating work is that, with the destruction of these buildings, what is diminished is not simply the architectural heritage of one group or another but of the world and the rights of non-combatants to protection. Bevan reflects that “Even in the absence of its builders, a dead building, like a dead language, can be sadly eloquent. It can speak for the sufferings of the Armenians, the Jews and for the Bosnian Muslims whose bones lie in the mass graves of Foça interlocked with fragments of carved stone screens and turned wood, Enlightenment values of equality, justice, reason and aspirations for a history that is objective are at stake, not to mention the notion of a collective world patrimony that evolved from the legacy of the French Revolution” (p. 211). This book is deserving of a wide readership.

James G. Mellon graduated from Dalhousie University, and has taught at Mount Allison, Lakehead, Dalhousie, and Saint Mary’s Universities.