Monument: antimonument. (Royal Academy Forum).

New intellectual strategies confirm that monuments remain a great challenge for architects and artists, heightened by Modernism's ambiguity towards them and the continuing occurrence of events which demand cathartic commemoration. Jeremy Melvin introduces this report from the Royal Academy Forum on Mounument:Antimonument.

The term monument carries so many associations that it almost evokes its antithesis without spelling it out as antimonument. Even Adolf Loos' pithy statement that monuments and tombs were the only fitting subjects for architecture is ambiguous. Are tombs the opposite of monuments, or is it necessary to leave the Cold of architecture altogether and go to something which might be termed 'ordinary building' to find an antimonument? Ordinary building suggests heimlichheit, which in turn implies that monuments might be unheimlich, or uncanny: the disturbing or worrying are themselves among the qualities which might be considered monumental. By definition, Loos must have thought that his near contemporary Hannes Meyer's claim that architecture function x economy was phoney, yet it may have seemed reasonable enough as a panacea against so many inarticulate memorials to victims of the First World War dating from the same time. In any case, several of those architects who came close to sharing Meyer's puritanical Func tionalism had, as Sandy Wilson writes, designed monuments themselves, including Mies and Gropius, while Sigfried Giedion himself would slightly later define monumentality as the third constituent of Modernism. The first two were the cell, or individual dwelling, and the second, the city. Richard MacCormac outlined two groups of associations of 'monumental', one implying overwhelming imposition, the other suggesting qualities that societies or individuals might ascribe. Scratch a monument and, by unsettling that finely balanced ideological skein that relates form and appearance to collective memory, you automatically conjure an antimonument.

If architecture has always carried some notion of the monument, Barry Bergdoll showed that relationship had become especially problematic before the fall of the Ancien Regime, and how it accelerated wildly during the French Revolution and its aftermath. Shelley's poem Ozymandias, with which Richard Cork concluded the first session, encapsulates one aspect of that extended drama: how monuments can heighten a sense of futility or the vainglory of human achievement. In noting that in the 'frown, and wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, the sculptor well those passions read', Shelley's 'traveller from an antique land' reveals that the statue of the King of Kings is figurative rather than stylized. Perhaps inadvertently, Shelley also pinpoints a critical moment in the history of visual expression, where uniquely personal and subjective qualities become the material for representation, and all that entails for the position of the individual within society. As the poem concludes, 'nothing beside remains. Around the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away'. In the early nineteenth century, monuments could still just about depict honour and glory, but Shelley's vision inverts that kudos as an image to invert the aspirations of Romanticism into a sense of waste and futility.

A century later the implicit waste of human lives in Ozpmandias -- the monument must have been built with slave labour, after all -- would be made explicit in Orpen's blinded soldiers in Gassed, or T. S. Eliot's nameless clerks crossing London Bridge in The Wasteland. And, as Sergiusz Michalski explains, the trauma of such events as the First World War and the Holocaust, in their inconceivable multiplication of individual tragedies, has underlain conceptions of public monuments ever since. Waste in this sense, and its social repercussions, provides the inspiration for Jochen Gerz's extraordinary conceptions. 'You need a commission ... someone to tell you what to do', he explained, 'a society that takes up the job of telling you what to do'. This sense of waste, in other words, has to be present in a psychological or non-material sense. Shunning the idea that history can be a 'laundromat which washes cleaner and whiter', for a strategy of warning, 'of making a noise if something goes wrong, preventing ... neve r again'.

In several projects Gerz embodies this sense of waste, futility or loss in haunting physical presences. A monument against fascism in Hamburg -- 'a strange thing to want' -- was the first place where he found a 'society ... ready to accept this confrontation'. A giant steel column invited graffiti or inscription around its base. When covered, the column sank to bring more of its surface within reach, until after seven years it disappeared totally below ground. What started as a Samizdat operation by art students in Saarbrucken, taking up cobblestones and inscribing each on its underside with the name of a deported Jew from the town, was adopted as an official 'Monument against Racism', despite the inscriptions being face down below the ground. 'Les Mots de Paris' gives visibility to the city's homeless, 12 of whom have been given employment for six months in creating the monument in front of Notre Dame.

For Richard Wentworth, who intuits significance to what most people pass over in silence, waste in another sense underlies what might constitute an antimonument. When skate-boarders appropriate a war memorial for their moves, their discarded clothing might be mistaken, from a distance, for wreaths around the monument; or a flaw in an otherwise perfectly laid mosaic floor might be the key to understanding the tensions that produced it. If Robert Musil thought public monuments are by their nature invisible, as Michalski explains, that Wentworth sees these tiny imperfections might make them antimonuments. Traditional monuments, pointed out Wentworth, are selfish, appropriating space for their own purposes and thereby imposing limits on use and interpretation. What might be worth commemorating though is the 'democracy of walking on the street', and at the Walsall Art Gallery this involved 'settling for stealing land' in an attempt to give to people in the public realm the 'dignity' which Giacometti imbued into hi s sculptural figures of the 1930s.

In the buddleia taking over a telephone box Wentworth pinpointed how even the detritus of ordinary and everyday occurrences might contain the latent possibility of monumental meanings. If the main purpose of traditional monuments, at least those elevated nineteenth-century worthies, was to instruct with moral purpose, Wentworth's buddleia indicates a reversal which might be another sense of antimonument. For in colonizing the now more or less redundant public facility the buddleia might be an equivalent, in a democratic poetry of the pavement, of Poussin's reminder to the shepherds, Et in Arcadia Ego.

Two examples which bring together Poussin and waste illustrate this phenomenon further. Coming from Britain in the immediate post war period, when issues of representation, art and society were under scrutiny almost as never before, they are the opening passage of Tony Powell's novel A Question of Upbringing (1951), and an entrance at the Churchill Gardens housing estate, designed by Powell & Moya (1946 onwards). Powell's narrator, looking out of a window in wintertime, sees a group of workmen clustering around a brazier, and a pattern of movement evokes '... scattered, uncoordinated events from a fabulous past, infinitely removed from life; and yet bringing memories of things real and imagined'. These impressions 'suddenly suggested Poussin's scene in which the Seasons, hand in hand and facing outward tread in rhythm to the notes of the lyre that the winged and naked greybeard plays ...' - this is A Dance to the Music of Time, by Nicolas Poussin c1639, in the Wallace Collection.

An apparently innocent glance out of the window calls forth a series of associations leading to one of the most complex allegorical paintings: the workmen are, in effect, an antimonoment, in that their action to some extent illuminates, through association with reality, the extraordinarily complex intellectual programme of the painting. This reverses the conventional monument, which through its static though perhaps suggestive form, suggests patterns of behaviour or belief on its observers.

Powell & Moya's Churchill Gardens entrance represents a further step. Here the challenge was to celebrate the new housing, the opportunities and way of life it offered its residents. Following convention, the act and presence of entrance is the centrepiece of the composition, but it is integrated with the rubbish store. Not only does this break with traditional housing design (where rubbish disposal is rarely prominent), it also follows the Modernist aim of eliminating a distinction between backs arid fronts of buildings. Further, it suggests that rubbish, detritus, is as essential a part of life as the elements which are conventionally celebrated, and perhaps, by extension that the people housed at Churchill Gardens were as important (in a reconstituting democracy) as their grand neighbours in Eaton Square. Here even the act of waste disposal is monumentalized.

Enlightened Problems: Barry Bergdoll

It was during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that the meaning and very possibility of monuments became a subject of' doubt, anxiety, and philosophical debate. At this time the new secular religion, which Alois Riegl later labelled 'The Modern Cult of Monuments', took shape. A few episodes drawn from Paris at this time underscore that thorny issues associated with the concept of the monument originate well before the twentieth-century challenges to the figurative tradition in monument making, or more recent attempts to find a public consensus in the use of public space and representation.

Originally conceived in 1749 as the Place Louis XV, the most influential and ideologically charged of the numerous squares created in the eighteenth century has been known as the Place de la Concorde since 1830. Before then, it was called Place de la Revolution, Place de la Concorde between 1795 and 1815, Place Louis XV again briefly and then Place Louis XVI in the 1820s. The name Concorde points to its opposite: a compensatory reflection that the square and nearly every representation placed upon it has entered into a complex network of conflicting claims about the nature of modern France. It underlines the difficulty of monumental certainties against the backdrop of the birth of modern political realities. Pierre Patte's commemorative map of the numerous entries produced 15 years after a design competition for the square shows how they had far wider aims than the old compositional topos of the royal square -- a perfect fit between a frame of open space around a frozen moment of the crown's essence. Patte's map suggested that the modern city should be inherently legible, structured semantically by its monuments which were the carriers of clear ideas, but composed of spaces that responded to shifting values of the functions that rulership should provide for the cultural and economic life of the city.

Etienne Louis Boullee was perhaps the first to propose that monuments might be moved from the realm of figurative sculpture to the art of space, of architecture, as the most perfected laboratory for an instrumental monumentality. Their messages would speak directly to the senses, rather than rhetorically through persuasion. 'Our buildings, especially our public buildings', he wrote 'should be, after a fashion, poems'. The images they present to our senses should excite in us sentiments analogous to the usage for which the building is intended.' In his commemorative monuments, Boullee achieved his greatest aspiration to be the Newton of architecture, creating an architecture which would have the status of science in imitating the universal principles of nature. Architecture thus could have a moral role in society even as it made evident the underlying laws of human nature.

Boullee's monument to Newton would pose the problem in the most challenging terms. Could a monument communicate the essence of Newton, the reason that his memory had become a veritable cult of the Enlightenment? Boullee goes beyond portraiture in his desire for representation, even as he postulates an architecture that does without any of the conventional modes of representation, columns, friezes, swags and so on. He composed a prose poem to explain this architectural poem. 'Sublime mind! Vast and profound genius! Divine being! Newton! [he adds lest we think he might be speaking of the author rather than the subject of this drawing] ... "Newton. Deign to accept the homage of my feeble talents." Ah! If I dare to make it public, it is because I am persuaded that I have surpassed myself in the project which I shall discuss'.

In his project for a monument for a warrior, perhaps the first of modern projects for the unknown soldier, he even asks if a monument can be created without an individual referent. Perhaps a monument to Boullee who first, even if unwittingly, defined the paradox of modern monuments, is what is needed for the empty plinth in Trafalgar Square.

Among the many thinkers of the period who were intensely aware of the Paradox of Monuments, was the Marquis de Girardin. He created another monument to a great man, Rousseau's final resting place, and nearby a Temple of Modern Philosophy. The temporal state of this temple/monument is deliberately rendered ambiguous. Inscriptions come to our aid, for each of the columns has the name of a philosopher: Newton, Descartes, Voltaire, Montesquieu, William Penn, and Rousseau. An inscribed column in the grass nearby lies opposite the frieze inscription which asks 'Who will finish it?' Almost in response to Boullee's confidence in the perfect monument Girardin considered his temple an instrument to 'reveal the imperfection of human understanding'.

Nothing brought into sharper relief the paradox of monumentality than the cultural politics of the French Revolution. As Anthony Vidler argued about one of its most insightful and influential cultural critics, the Abbe Gregoire, two of the neologisms coined during the Revolution make a symbiotic pair. Symbolized by the Citizen Alexandre Lenoir, they are vandalisme and conservateur. Vandalism is the violent destruction of cultural symbols, and a curator achieves what Lenoir tries to achieve: to convince the sans-culottes that the great royal tombs at St Denis are not symbols of royal repression but rather vessels of French cultural identity.

The Pantheon itself was posited on such symbolic reversals. In its original incarnation as the great church of Ste Genevieve, it was conceived as a complex sign of the interrelationship between the crown, the altar, and the popular cult of Ste Genevieve, the patron saint of Paris. By August 1791, the schemes for transforming it into the site for a secular cult that might rival Britain's Westminster Abbey without any admixture of religion occasioned a major theoretic definition of both a new ritual and a new notion of a civic memorial site. But the honours of the Pantheon did not for long remain uncontested. When the radical Marat was granted the honours of Pantheonization it was also decided that he could not cohabitate in the Pantheon of national heroes with the moderate Mirabeau. When Marat's body entered the front door, Mirabeau's body left through the transept.

No less revelatory is the fate of the Pantheon under the Bourbon Restoration between 1815 and 1830. During that period the building was returned to the church, its famous inscription 'Aux Grands Hommes La Patrie Reconnaissante', scraped off in favour of Christian symbols, and the cult of Great Men was politicized even further. 'The homages of the public square belong only to sovereigns', Charles X declared in response to a proposal to erect a monument to Moliere. His comment typifies the oppression of his regime and goes a long way to explaining why the burial of figures of the liberal opposition turned the Cemetery of Pere Lachaise into a plein-air pantheon of the left. In 1830 Louis Philippe returned the Pantheon to civic use, but for the first rocky decade of his reign not a single figure was buried there for fear of public protest.

Six years later Louis Philippe's government hesitated to unveil the newly carved pediment of the Pantheon, fearful that the new constellation of political figures and its narrative of France might arouse reactions, even anti-government demonstrations. Meanwhile the king himself enthusiastically revealed the new centrepiece of the Place de la Concorde, the Obelisk. As Louis Philippe explained to his Prefect, the Comte de Rambuteau, it 'would not recall a single political event'. Its lack of modern meaning made it the perfect solution to the ephemerality of all urban monuments. Here was one monument that would never need to be removed.

Useful Monuments: Colin St John Wilson 

The meaning of the word Monument draws upon notions of remembering, commemorating, making memorable: major philosophers of our time like Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Gadamer and Habermas, addressed the extent to which architecture has the capacity to embrace and embody that concept. Wittgenstein, who at one time did work as an architect, pronounced, 'Architecture immortalizes or glorifies something': hence where there is nothing to glorify there can be no architecture'. There are three terms at work here: the capacity of architecture to evoke ideas; the cultural significance of the time -- its prevailing ideas; and the alertness of the man-in-the-street to those ideas.

In 1944, Sigfried Giedion identified a dilemma in the concept of the monument. He argued broadly as follows: Nineteenth-Century historicism had debased the currency of traditional architectural forms by detaching them from their original roots and cultural meaning. The Dictators, of whatever political persuasion, had used inflated scale and the same traditional symbols to serve a power-political rhetoric. Meanwhile the Modernists, having convinced themselves that pragmatic and technical problems of housing the masses took priority over all else, had simply pushed the issue of Monumentality to one side. That diagnosis is at best a half-truth to support Giedion's own agenda as Secretary and Scribe of the propaganda of the Congress of Modern Architects. After the First World War the scene was buzzing with projects and buildings for Monuments, not just the work of Lutyens for the War Cemeteries but the work of Giedion's own avant-garde. Gropius did it. Mies did it; Scharoun, Taut and the Russian Constructivists d id it and of course all of the Dictators did it -- as they still do today -- and he ignores the Expressionists. Only Hannes Meyer spoke out explicitly: 'Architecture symbolizes nothing'.

Wittgenstein insists the values that could give 'meaning' to such an act of celebration must 'be outside the world, because all that happens in the day-to-day world is subject to accident.

'In the world everything is as it is and everything happens as it does happen: in it no value exists ... what makes it non-accidental cannot lie within the world since if it did it would itself be accidental. It must lie outside the world' (Tractatus 6.41).

In Greek Temples and Chartres the symbolism and meaning are transparent. Borromini could celebrate the mysteries of the Holy Trinity in an interlocking of three figures, the oval, the cross and the octagon at San Carlo Alle Quattro Fontane, recondite but still publicly accountable. At the Karlskirche in Vienna, Fischer von Erlach erected a billboard of interlocking political and religious references perfectly intelligible in its day. The churches of Lewerentz 50 years ago and more recently the luminous churches of Juha Leiviska in Finland celebrate a whole tradition of accessible public symbolism. In these cases, the symbolism and sense of the numinous are not carried by the architecture alone but by the celebration of the sacramental order that brought the building into existence in the first place.

Terragni's 'Danteum' pursues such themes to an extraordinary level of abstraction. In this project, architecture is employed to evoke theological propositions 'tout court' without serving as the place of enactment of any sacramental celebration. The public is simply invited to walk on a pilgrimage through a series of spaces in which the architecture is intended to convey the explicit metaphysical and theological propositions recounted in Dante's Divina Commedia. It starts in the 'Dark Wood' where Dante found himself at the age of 35 and thence leads into a tour of the Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso. Terragni concluded it, sad to say, with a processional way dedicated to the Empire of Rome's Past and Mussolini's Present.

Terragni wrote 'Architectural monument and literary work can adhere to a singular theme, without losing any of each work's essential qualities only if both possess a structure and a harmonic rule that allow them to confront each other'. In his case, the common feature was a numerical order based on the figure seven and a geometrical order based on the Golden Section, playing upon its property of squares interlocking spirally seven times (seven mortal sins, seven cardinal virtues, seven days of Dante's tour on 7 April 1300!).

The claims of the Modern Movement are grounded in more secular values, epitomized in the mind of the general public in the much misrepresented concept of Functionalism. 'Functionalism' very happily transcends into the Sacred if the spirit is willing but it does not start there. Its one claim to novelty lies in its commitment to serve the day-to-day life of its community at all levels with equal respect. From the garden shed to the Cathedral the spectrum of use is a continuum in which, to use the phrase of Wittgenstein 'the meaning lies in the Use'. Our job is to explore the patterns of activity of a society and to raise them to a level of architectural realization in which a frame for the actions of men suddenly focuses into a place where those actions are not merely made possible but are made manifest. Perhaps for the first time, they become vivid and recognizable to themselves. This recalls Vincent van Gogh's loving ambition to 'give back to ordinary men that something of the eternal that the halo used to r epresent. Heidegger described this process as the unveiling of the 'Truth' of each occasion resulting in 'the setting-up of a world'. In his paper on 'The origin of the work of Art', he illustrated by describing the temple as one of the clearest ways in which Truth is revealed by art. He argues that the temple articulates and thereby unifies the culture of its people. It 'first fits together and at the same time gathers around itself the unity of those paths and relations in which birth and death, disaster and blessing, victory and disgrace, endurance and decline acquire the shape of destiny for human beings'. It is both an embodiment of values and a physical place of meeting and celebration. Heidegger then makes a vital point: the truth that has been revealed must be taken up and 'lived' by its participants in order to be fulfilled and that means that we have to be talking about a publicly approved set of values.

That principle is embodied in the British Library in the way that George III's great collection of books, bound in leather and vellum, stands free at the centre in a bronze and glass tower six storeys high. In its origin and its day-to-day use it is a unique collection of rare books that are frequently consulted in the Rare Book Reading Room. The symbolism here is not an added rhetorical gesture: its meaning lies in its use.

Monument versus Anti-Monument -- the Last Century and its Lessons: Sergiusz Michalski

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the once domineering and ideologically prevalent scheme of socle-cum-figure for public monuments appears to be discarded, and the whole concept of a public monument is being permanently questioned. This situation has arisen less through a conflation of public monuments with ideologically indifferent sculptures erected in public space, but through new artistic solutions bent on invoking intellectual reflection and participatory responses that appeared after 1980 in Western Europe and America. Fed by media publicity, unprecedented interest in the subject grew.

Since Apollinaire's poetic vision of a 'monument devoted to nothing' (Le Poete assassine, 1916) the idea that mass carnage could not be expressed adequately through figure or representation has shaped an important strand of the new public monuments. Monuments -- or projects for monuments -- began to espouse holes, void spaces and black surfaces, and inversions.

Four waves of iconoclastic destruction have followed the great political upheavals of 1918-22, 1939-1945, 1945-1950, and the continuing one since 1989, The fall of Communist statues impelled the feeling that public monuments are in reality temporary. From a historical perspective, this was paradoxical, since public monuments did not weigh much in Communist propaganda. Their ex post significance owes much to our media-oriented penchant for short TV clips or newspaper photographs symbolically condensing a complicated political sequence of events. Having acquired a post mortem life the metonymic image of the Communist pantheon started to haunt the collective mythology to an astonishing degree. In Victor Pelevin's Generation P (1999), the most interesting novel to have come from Boris Yeltsin's messy decade, the cynical hero is haunted by a plethora of mostly Stalinist Moscow monuments.

Post-Communist, derogatory sculpture parks like the one behind the Tretyakov Gallery -- Temporary Museum of Totalitarian Art -- are vivid testimonies to the provisional nature of public monuments. But more far-reaching consequences lie in the artistic dialogue and parodying revamping of the Lenin iconography after 1989. Examples include Krzysztof Wodiczko's projection of a Polish shopper on East Berlin's gigantic Lenin (1990), Komar & Melamid's transformation of Lenin's Mausoleum into a 'symbolic grave of Leninist theory and practice' (1993), Florence Weisz's Cleaning House (1992) with a Lenin statue cleaning carpets. Most melancholic of all is Rudolf Herz's rendering of the relics of a destroyed Lenin statue as Lenin's resting place (1991). Transcending the limits of retroactive anti-Communist parody, these Lenin cult remakes -- mostly conceptual anti-monuments -- helped to instil a corrective principle. Maybe public monuments might be designed to show their provisional, discussion-worthy status and even inv ite the possibility of creating anti-monuments.

The lack of pretension and apparent visual recessiveness in the new type of public monuments might be taken at face value. Micha Ullman's gripping Empty Library (1995) on Berlin's Bebelplatz, commemorating the Nazi bonfires of 'hostile' literature there on 10 May 1933, has been threatened -- only seven years after its unveiling -- by plans to build an underground car park. In a recent interview the developer claimed tongue in cheek that its ascetic underground character meant Ullman's monument might be moved without damaging its aura or character. That commercial stratagem has now been averted, but nonetheless this incident prefigures a possible course of events.

In 2002, the major generative and dividing lines appear more clearly than 10 or 15 years ago. The new type of public monument originates from lines of development going back to the early 1960s, but comprising different strands like early conceptual art, Fluxus, early happenings and some more intellectual aspects of Pop Art.

A common trait of avant-garde public monuments or projects for them during the 1990s is their directly appealing character. But very often the moral appeal has no direct consequences for the tua res agitur sphere. Katharina Karrenberg's prize-winning project (1998) for a Berlin memorial devoted to the workers' uprising of 17 June 1953 is a gigantic 90m inscription formed by 468 lights running across the Leipziger StraBe stating, 'Who are you that you would dare to say -- these were heroes?' Behind the theatrical stridency we discover a supreme ambivalence to the possibility of modern-day heroism. This thought-provoking espousal of personal modesty might lead to resigned, passive attitudes towards authoritarian oppression. Unsurprisingly loud protests by veterans of the uprising blocked it.

Replication and contextualization is another novel problem. Almost since the day of its inauguration, Auguste Rodin's Burghers of Calais (1895) enjoyed unparalleled fame as an artistic masterpiece and a novel kind of monument. But art historians have treated the partly commercially motivated, incessant replication of the group with unusual reticence. During Rodin's life three replicas were cast in his foundry; nine further official and authenticated replicas have been cast since 1917 and put on view in museums and -- as in London -- in public gardens. The London placement certainly fitted with the Entente Cordiale before 1914 but was at odds with the monument's historical narrative and context. Since a monument should be expressly designed for one place, this praxis was in opposition to the mainstream twentieth-century view of the work of art and its aura.

As leading artists enter competitions for them, public monuments have for the first time joined the mainstream of artistic development. However, the influences on this process and the strictures determining it are disconcertingly diverse. Foremost is the strange alliance of a deconstructionist view of the image with the new public morality reconstructing historical facts and a commentary imbued by ethical norms. Since many new monuments combine reference to history with a pseudo-documentary, minuscule reconstruction of individual fates, they encourage a sequential perception which reflects the ambivalence of the symbolic image. What is more, the new monuments aspire to a 'work in progress' aesthetic; their very nature is open-ended.

In an essay about 'Die Denkmale' (1932), Robert Musil wrote that the public monument is in reality invisible -- the passers-by see it in the streets, but never take a closer look, as if the monuments had been expressly designed to deflect attention. Yet Musil did not question the ontological status of the monument proper, for him a part of a hallowed convention. In a recent brochure revealingly entitled Der Prozess ist genauso wichtig wie dos Ergebnis (The Process is as important as the Result, Berlin 1995), Jochen Spielmann dramatically widens the functions of the public monument. He includes, 'Identification, representation, anticipation, interpretation and information'. And, the '... phase of preliminary discussions, the creative process and the process of reception are integral components of the monument itself. The monument needs in order to become a public monument ... a ritualized reception.'

There are pitfalls. Ritualized reception might preclude discussion and interpretation; the visual chaos of today's sprawling metropolis might obscure didactic elements. A monument's beholders might never inform themselves about its history -- now deemed integral to its message. It remains to be seen whether abandoning the search for universally accepted signs and metaphors, and the rise of a new didacticism will constrict the visual impact of the new monuments and limit the ranks of the public to the Stendhalian 'happy few'. Given the formidable intellectual and moral effort that went into them and the democratic participatory actions they elicited, that would be an unhappy ending.

Monument and Memory: Richard MacCormac

Modernism may have made traditional monumental rhetoric difficult for us, but if anything that heightens the importance of addressing memory. Ruskin explained how memories -- those evoked by historic traces, or personal ones -- structure our perceptions; my Ruskin Library is accordingly a very small monument about memory. More recently Simon Schama's Landscape and Memory shows how deeply embedded was the concept of English arcadia; first portrayed in the seventeenth century, it resurfaced almost unaltered in a Second World War propaganda poster. Along with the derivation of monument from the Latin 'monere', to remind or warn, thesauruses tend to associate two themes with the word; one, including monolithic, awesome and catastrophic refers to overwhelming impositions; the other comprises enduring, memorable and outstanding attributions which lie in our gift.

These attributes, significant to us as individuals and social beings, structure our understanding of our surroundings. Kevin Lynch called this 'imageability', and it may he related to the way memory itself can be structured visually. In 'Memory and the Making of Fiction', A. S. Byatt wrote 'One builds large, static structures of mnemonics, to put things into, to remember their relations', and goes on to discuss Elizabethan memory theatres, which were means to remember philosophical arguments by putting them into visual arenas.

Wren's 1667 plan for London suggests that the city itself might be a giant memory theatre. As London like other cities grew, in the eighteenth century into a city of secular institutions as well as churches, the possibilities for different mnemonic relationships proliferated. But the populace could also affect the perception of a city; events such as the sacking in 1831 of Queen Square in Bristol, a fashionable residential address, by crowds demanding electoral reform was one of many such occurrences when the populace took temporary possession of parts of cities to change their significance and give them a special charge. Richard Sennett, in 'Disturbing Memories', develops further the potential for events like this to give the urban fabric an extreme case of representational significance. He recounts how the sociologist Maurice Halbwack studied the various occupiers of Jerusalem. Successive ruling powers had to shift the centre of the city to accord with their own views of themselves. Religious intolerance, s uggests Halbwack was anchored in these irreconcilable 'moral geographies'.

Recently in London, the Jubilee celebrations and the World Cup have helped Trafalgar Square to surpass Piccadilly Circus as a public focus. It is an example of how events which 'take place' -- literally the appropriating of a locality -- can recharge localities as if they were on an electrical circuit. Trafalgar Square originated in the desire to commemorate Nelson's epoch-making victory. But it is a 'place' which has continually been 'taken' for layer upon layer of political and celebratory purposes. This is what Ruskin meant by historical, the effect of human presence. In the 'Lamp of Memory' he tries to imagine how he would feel about the landscape of the Jura had it been untouched by cultivation, and is chilled by the thought of the vast emptiness of North America, 'The American Sublime' of the recent Tate Britain exhibition.

The potential for recharging is important. The countless statues to Imperial heroes, which London's mayor Ken Livingstone wants to replace, are probably non-rechargeable; their effect recalls Shelley's Ozymandias with which Richard Cork concluded the first of our two discussions. What appeals about the empty plinth in Trafalgar Square is that it is demonstrably rechargeable -- even with a temporary appearance by David Beckham. Cities are mapped for each of us by a 'topography of significance'. In so far as this is shared, it is part of our collective memory. Two powerful representations of London which each give a highly partial though resonant view of London are MacDonald Gill's mural in the St Stephen's entrance to the Palace of Westminster (1930-32), showing the public buildings of the cities of London and Westminster, and the 1937 Coronation route map. From its origin at Buckingham Palace and obvious nodes like Westminster Abbey and Trafalgar Square, the Coronation procession also appropriated Piccadilly Circus, Regent Street, the Ritz and Selfridges, Marble Arch and Hyde Park Corner before returning to its source. With a few additions like the Royal Festival Hall, Tate Modern and the Millennium Bridge, the Globe Theatre, the British Library and the prospective Eurostar Terminal, this still defines a generally accepted concept of central London.

Underlying this 'minds-eye' picture, and almost impossible to reconcile in a rational way, is Beck's geometric London Underground map of 1933. There is no obvious means of calibrating the locations on the Underground map with those on a true plan, as the distortions relative to the river show. Yet in its own way it extends the same image-building process of the city. The Coronation route and Gill's mural both privilege the central area; Beck's map exaggerates the scale of the central area while also bringing in the suburbs, though in condensed form.

Many beliefs about different areas arise from these distortions, which create a kind of psychological geography. Until recently, West-Enders considered Spitalfields where I live to be much further from Westminster than the World's End in Chelsea, though it is actually about the same distance. However, even as Londoners more or less share a collective map of London's two cities -- reinforced by such staged celebratory events as Royal Funerals, Jubilees and Coronations -- we cannot be anything but amazed by the vast scale of what we have yet to appropriate to the East. The length of the Royal Docks is the same distance as Buckingham Palace is from the Tower of London.