The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

London, War, and the Architecture of Remembrance
collapse and eventual supersession of the traditional typologies and iconographies
of war memorial intimately connected to those systems.
TOTAL WAR
For the civilian populations of London and other British cities, the very fact
that from 1940 on they had become active participants in the war—that in
the new bizarre topographies of aerial warfare, the battlefield was now over
and above not only the homeland but even the sanctified space of the home
itself—suggests that traditional, abstracted representations of victory, or of
noble, disinterested sacrifice in distant and foreign fields (as had appeared
on innumerable monuments after 1918), were no longer appropriate or even
tolerable. In fact, as Gavin Stamp points out, already a great deal of unease
about the suitability of these monuments had surfaced as they had been unveiled
from the early 1920s onward; one was contemptuously labeled by the
war poet Siegfried Sassoon “a pile of peace-complacent stone.” 11
Moreover, a generation had been slaughtered en masse in the
trenches only twenty years earlier, supposedly to bring a permanent end to
such conflicts. This firmly held but necessarily transient belief in the efficacy
of the Great War is evoked in the words of George V on a pilgrimage
to the memorials of the Somme in 1922: “I have many times asked myself
whether there can be more potent advocates of peace upon earth through the
years to come than this massed multitude of silent witnesses to the desolation
of war.” 12
THE DEATH OF MEANING
But even the new inappropriateness of the old representations of remembrance
doesn’t account for the disappearance of the tangible typology of the
monument itself—unless, that is, we consider more general debates about
the decreasing ability of certain forms of high cultural expression to convey
ideas about the real world. For just as Walter Benjamin famously argued
that the literal imagery of mechanical reproduction had robbed painting of
its authority to express a commonly recognized reality, 13 so other forms of
cultural production had been divested of their power to capture universal
meanings.
The experience and trauma of the Great War had convinced the
modernist avant-garde of the need to reject the failed ancien régime. They
aggressively denied architecture and painting the authority to carry symbolic
or figurative codes of meaning, turning instead to abstraction to convey
more universal themes of spirit or intellect. The new wish to celebrate