The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part I: Filters
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Joe Kerr
ordinary piece of photojournalism was promoted from the very first, and it is
in fact a highly doctored, propagandist image. What it represents is an abstraction
of officially endorsed sentiment, wholly in the manner of a traditional
memorial: no people, no suffering, no death. What remains is simply
the image of the city, posed in defiance against an unprecedented offensive.
Through the ephemeral medium of the photograph the city itself
is memorialized, but from this a wholly new monument is created from the
city. Now it is the very real—and readable—remains of the devastated architecture
that form a new language of remembrance. The shattered fabric
of buildings have become the testimony to the battle, paradoxically through
the calculated conservation of the traces of destruction. This new and highly
literal form of urban memorial can be witnessed universally—in Coventry,
Dresden, and Hiroshima as well as in London—as the mute testimony to the
unspeakable horror of aerial warfare.
Thus in London—first through carefully edited films and photographs,
and later through the selective retention of its ruins—the realities
of death and destruction were translated into universalized images of national
worth and superiority, which have remained powerful and largely uncontested
for much of the period since.
NEW ENEMIES
However, these images of the city at war are also testimony to a new problematic
of memorial culture: the experience of total war and its political
consequences raised unprecedented questions of exactly what it was that
should be memorialized and remembered. Two posters from the same
wartime campaign—one of an idealized pastoral past, one of a utopian urban
future—are symptomatic of a complex confusion of ideologies that lie
at the heart of this argument. For during the course of the war it became increasingly
less simple to encapsulate what was being fought for, and why.
Wartime propaganda widened the definitions of the battlefield to identify
new enemies and new causes unique to this conflict. The “Home Front” had
become a theater of war not only in the physical sense of bombing and rocket
attacks, and enormous concentrations of troops and equipment, but also in
a social sense; the very fabric of society emerged as the ideological terrain of
the conflict.
At home there lurked other enemies of civilization besides just the
Axis powers—especially those christened by Beveridge the “five giants on
the road to reconstruction,” 17 as in some monstrous modern fairy tale. Building
Tomorrow as opposed to merely Preserving Yesterday became the ultimate
purpose of war, with the prospect of social justice in the near future