News/Research

Commons Conversations Revisited: Lucia Allais

12 Feb, 2019

Commons Conversations Revisited: Lucia Allais

Designs of Destruction: The Making of Monuments in the 20th Century

Lucia Allais (Associate Professor of Architecture, Princeton University) lectured to an overflowing house about her remarkable research chronicling the rise of cultural monument as a modern, global building type.

Allais focused on the period of 1943-1945, and the extent the Allied Forces went through to devise a core aerial strategy on “how to miss cultural sites.” Through analysis of photographs, maps, and lists, she questioned what kind of media these were, the uses to which they were put, and the development of technologies of precision that helped inaugurate a new global regime of cultural preservation.

Her scholarship on the birth of this new architectural type, the “cultural monument,” was drawn from her recent book, Designs of Destruction: The Making of Monuments in the 20th Century (Chicago, 2018).