Architecture RePerformed: The Politics of Reconstruction ed. by Tino Mager (review)

Architecture RePerformed: The Politics of Reconstruction presents a selection of eight essays concerning international case studies of recent architectural and urban reconstruction processes, including both Western and Eastern cultural experiences. These texts are briefly introduced by the editor, Tino Mager, an art and architectural historian. The aim of the book is explicit and amply anticipated by the title, which highlights the editor’s central focus on the overall political matrix of reconstruction processes, regardless of the cultural framework they are set into. The introduction and the conclusion of each essay offer a range of possible reasons for the wide success that the reconstruction of built heritage has recently gained, gradually restructuring the general dynamics of heritage preservation in the world. Mager’s introduction sets a precise tone for the interpretation of these case studies, which are mostly centered upon political, ideological, and cultural reasons for reconstruction, very tightly connected to present issues, not to the heritage of the past. This discussion also mentions, but leaves aside, a central issue of architectural preservation and of architectural reconstruction: the opposition between material and immaterial heritage and the consequent need to pursue material authenticity.

Individual cases of reconstruction are stressed in the eight brief but exhaustive essays, which synthesize and offer the results of scientific research. The authors are mostly scholars: academics and professors with thorough knowledge of their subjects and evident roots in the cultural realms they treat and discuss. The specific position and cultural standpoint of each contributor enhances the quality of the discussions. The collection of case studies offers a broad overview of geo-cultural conditions that span the world. The case studies themselves suggest that the history of a place and the memory that the people retain of the past stimulates counter-reactions, which often result in the reconstruction of architectural icons.

In east-central Europe, reviving architectural heritage destroyed during the regimes of the twentieth century represents an issue in the shaping of cities and sites, as the essays by Arnold Bartetzky and Robert Born explain. They tag reconstruction as a process of “nation building” and history construction, which have become essential in the post–World War II and the post-Soviet era. Similarly, but triggered by a very different past, Brazil, and more specifically the city of São Paulo, has established a fluctuating relationship with the Jesuit College. This site, where the city was first founded in the sixteenth century, has been repeatedly rebuilt and demolished, as described by Renato Cymbalista and João Carlos Santos Kuhn. The present, not just the recent past, gives strong impulse to reconstruction, especially where tourism and the expectations of the public are concerned. For example, Barcelona’s Gothic district, as we learn from Josep-Maria Garcia-Fuentes, corresponds more to the “invention” of the architects of the past decades rather than being a phenomenon of architectural and urban permanence. Also triggered by tourism, but rooted in the French never-ending stylistic approach to the conservation of the past, which leads to the maintenance of the integrity and the physiognomy of the style, reconstruction may well run out of control and trespass into “architectural cloning,” as Julien Bastoen argues about French heritage sites.

A new and interesting chapter on heritage conservation opens next as the focus shifts to Asian case studies, laid out in essays by Alice Y. Tseng and Jing Zhuge. Tseng illustrates the circumstances of building imperial cities and great audience halls that bounce from Chinese to Japanese cultures and back, while Zhuge discusses the reconstruction of the Great BaoEn Pagoda in Nanjing, one of China’s most eloquent and recent case studies highlighting the relationship between development and tradition. Apparently isolated but still completing the general framework traced by this volume is Alexandra Kei’s narration about the building—not the re-building—of Tel Aviv’s White City as a means of reconstruction of...