WORLD'S MONUMENTS IN PERIL: A TOP 100 COUNTDOWN.

Byline: Herbert Muschamp The New York Times

If you've been putting off that trip to see the Taj Mahal, Hagia Sophia or Angkor, you'd better book your tickets soon. These are three of the monuments that appear on a list of the world's 100 most endangered historic sites, according to World Monuments Watch.

On the other hand, if you'd like these legendary landmarks to be around for the benefit of future generations, perhaps the best thing you could do is stay home.

The major peril faced by nearly one-third of the sites is tourism: the

damage inflicted by feet, hands, and body heat, and the air pollution emitted by the planes, cars, boats and buses that convey travelers to their dream destinations.

World Monuments Watch is a new venture of the World Monuments Fund, a private organization founded in 1965 that sponsors restoration projects internationally.

They range in scale from the lions outside the New York Public Library to more than 20 water-damaged buildings in Venice. World Monuments Watch, established with a $5 million grant from American Express, is designed to heighten public awareness of the damage inflicted on many of the world's architectural treasures. The list will be updated annually.

The 1996 list was culled from 253 sites nominated by conservation experts, public officials and citizens in 70 countries. A selection committee, including historians and critics, made the final choices.

They don't claim that these are the most important works of art at risk in the world. The committee considered whether there is sufficient support and financing to make restoration feasible.

They estimate that it will take about $200 million to rescue the sites on this year's list. Beyond that, they hope that these projects will spur restoration of the areas around them, or similar buildings elsewhere.

American Express put up $5 million to support this project that seeks to resist, among other things, the consequences of the company's own success in promoting global travel.

Reading down the list of sites, you can hear the echoes of feet pounding over ancient petroglyphs in the Philippines, hear the jackhammers setting to work on a new marina on the site of ancient Tyre. The image arises of a moment, perhaps not far off, when every landmark has come to resemble Leonardo's ``Last Supper,'' the blackened ghost of a legendary masterpiece.

Smiling tourists will pose themselves before piles of pedigreed rubble in various states of decomposition. This was Havana. This was Easter Island. This was the world that was.

Tourism isn't the only threat cited in the World Monument Watch report. Pot hunters and earth tremors have ravaged the Southern Temple in Petra, Jordan. Termites have invaded Vat Sisaket, a Buddhist monastery in Vientiane, Laos.

Students from the University of Bologna have defaced the Renaissance portico of the church of San Giacomo Maggiore with graffiti. Saplings have sprouted in the cells of the Eastern State Penitentiary, the landmarked Philadelphia prison where the concept of solitary confinement was first put into practice in 1829.

The overcutting of nearby forests has caused flooding in Ayutthaya, the ancient capital of Thailand, submerging Wat Pa Mok, with its colossal statue of a reclining Buddha.

Then there's war, hot and cold. In 1991-92, Dubrovnik was the target of more than 2,000 missiles. Brancusi's ``Endless Column'' in Romania survived a Communist government effort to topple it in the 1950s but is now threatened by water seeping beneath its metal skin.

Restoration is itself a threat. In Rome, iron clamps used to reinforce the columns of the Temple of Hercules in the 19th century have split the marble. Concrete used to repair the adobe walls of mission buildings in New Mexico have accelerated their decay.

Unless air pollution is drastically reduced worldwide, trying to restore many sites will be like trying to preserve a lump of sugar in a cup of hot tea.

The list of 100 opens a floodgate of world histories: schismatic German Lutheran settlers in Haifa; the folk traditions of Karelian Finns; the impact of Greek, Egyptian and Libyan monks on eighth-century Italian architecture.

Although the pyramids of Egypt didn't make the list, the list itself creates the impression that the surface of the earth has become an immense, fragmented pyramid, a necropolis of extinct ideas bearing down on the living.

This is the sensation Jean Baudrillard describes so vividly in his 1992 book, ``The Illusion of the End.'' He calls it ``the dance of the fossils,'' the contemporary compulsion to unearth monuments built by vanished cultures.

In Baudrillard's view, our preoccupation with ancient relics is transforming them ``from something buried and living into something visible and dead.'' For Baudrillard, the restoration of these relics reflects not a respect for history but an erasure of history, a denial of the century in which we've been living: its mobility, its industry, its power to instill the belief that we're entitled to go anywhere, do anything and evade the consequences.

When the Berlin wall came down, no one mourned. How do we know that one or two of the monuments on the list are not, in effect, Berlin walls, ideological symbols the world would be better off without? In any case, aren't things supposed to die? Aren't they supposed to fade? Isn't transience part of their beauty?

But the Watch report is not just a tract for the restoration of old things. It is also, perhaps mainly, a report on the state of the world. The report maintains that things are inseparable from their environments, and that in a shrinking world, environments extend around the globe.

Indeed, the story of preservation may be the closest thing we have now to an all-encompassing world history in the grand 19th-century manner. We're used to reading the histories of civilizations that built monuments and, now and then, destroyed them. What we're seeing now is a history based on modern encounters with them.

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Photo

Photo: A street dog stands in the Yamuna River near the Taj Mahal, water polluted by nearby factories and foundries. Smog and polluted water is turning the seventh-century white marble monument yellow.

Ajit Kumar/Associated Press