Search and destroy.

THE DESTRUCTION OF MEMORY: ARCHITECTURE AT WAR

By Robert Bevan. London: Reaktion. 2006. [pounds sterling]19.95

This book by a former editor of Building Design has already attracted considerable attention for good reason: it is a detailed, well researched and well referenced account of the destruction wrought on the architecture of the world in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries for military or political purposes, with special attention to all the best known examples. There are long sections on the Baedeker raids and the retaliatory strikes; on the destruction of Warsaw; on the eradication of Armenian and Greek culture in Turkey and Northern Cyprus; on the miserable events of the 1990s in the former Yugoslavian states; on the wastelands created either side of military barriers; and of course on the major sources of conflict in the Middle East from Ur to Nablus. In addition, Bevan includes short but effective descriptions of other demolition campaigns: attacks on the houses of the Protestant gentry in Ireland; Ceausescu's plans for Bucharest; and Mao in Beijing and Tibet, to name but a few.

So far so good; or rather, so terrible: if you are looking for information, or for further evidence of man's wickedness, this is the place to find it. But there is a problem when Bevan tries to piece together from all this any kind of analytical narrative. What you will not find here is an intellectual argument, a useful personal voice, which gives the information the coherence it needs to make a lasting impact on the reader. There are several ideas floating in the air, in particular the need to eradicate the cultural inheritance of a people seen as a threat as a means to lessening the memory of them; there is also an unconvincing claim that rebuilding a destroyed monument is an exercise in 'falsification'. But in fact most of Bevan's examples are connected more with war than with the actual act of destruction: the road-obsessed rebuilding of Birmingham in the 1960s--the cultural revolution of Sir Herbert Manzoni--was surely also a major exercise in urbanicide, in architectural devastation, however well intended. This book contains excellent journalism, but a rigorous intellectual structure would have transformed it into an achievement on a different scale altogether.

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