Architecture Sandbagged: A recent exhibition of photographs of French monuments sandbagged to protect them during wartime recorded some intriguing transformations. (View).

SURREAL TRANSFORMATIONS OF FRENCH MONUMENTS THREATENED BY WAR; SNOHETTA WINS MAJOR MUSEUM COMPETITION FOR TURNER COLLECTION IN MARGATE; NEW PORTUGUESE WEBSITE SET UP TO PROMOTE TRADITIONAL ARCHITECTURE; VIEW FROM VANCOUVER; VENTURI DEFENCE; ARE WESTERN EXPERTS NEEDED IN AFRICA?

Sandbags stacked precariously above a sign bearing the word 'NE PAS TOUCHER -- DO NOT TOUCH' at Amiens cathedral in c. 1918. A touch of the Cecil B. de Mule epic added to the Paris streetscape at about the same date, by sandbags piled in front of seventeenth-century allegorical figure carvings representing the conquered Rhine and defeated Holland on the Porte Saint-Denis (built in 1673, to celebrate Louis XIV's European victories).

Record photographs show cathedrals, churches and museums, the park at Versailles, the vista along the Champs Elysees and many other familiar landscapes and townscapes temporarily transformed by the measures adopted to protect French monuments from damage during the wars of 1914-18 and 1939-45, A selection was shown in the exhibition Sac contre sac (staged by the Centre des Monuments Nationaux at the Arles International Photography Festival in the summer and more recently at the Pavillon de l'Arsenal in Paris to coincide with Armistice) and some have been published as postcards by the Centre des Monuments Nationaux.

Particularly striking is a photograph of October 1939 showing the equestrian statue of Louis XIV in Place des Victoires, Paris, sandbagged into a tableau worthy of Boullee. Perhaps the primary purpose of this admirable installation was to hide or camouflage Francois-Joseph Bosio's bronze of 1822, for its two predecessors had both been melted down: a gilded bronze of 1686 by Martin Desjardins representing Louis XIV trampling the Triple Alliance underfoot (destroyed during the Revolution) and a short-lived controversial bronze by Claude Dejoux (inaugurated 1810, destroyed 1814). The latter stood on a 3.25m high plinth and depicted a 5.30m tall General Desaix, fetchingly in the nude, as the valiant hero of the Napoleonic campaign in Upper Egypt.

A good many monuments were removed and melted down during the 1939-1945 war, not least a large and spectacular hot air balloon in bronze by Bartholdi -- the sculptor responsible for the Statue of Liberty. But that is another story. At the time of writing, there are no sandbags in Place des. Victoires and Bosio's imposing bronze of Louis XIV astride a rearing horse is still in place, complete with plinth, bas-reliefs and railings. However, the memory of its surreal wartime transformation makes you look at it in a slightly different light.