OCCAS and Artifice Books celebrate the launch of the Fragile Monument by  Thordis Arrhenius at this year’s Venice Biennale. Duncan Mccorquodale of Artifice books on architecture will be in  conversation with OCCAS scholars Thordis Arrhenius, Mari Lending and Jorge Otero Pailos on the contemporary need  for critical architectural scholarship and publications.

Heritage objects today—monuments, city-quarters, regions,  landscapes and natural habitats—comprise an ever-greater proportion of the physical environment. There is a quality of scaling in this development of heritage both as object and cult. In an inverted magnitude the monumental is discovered in the minute and insignificant at the same time as the generous notion of the monument miniaturises the large. By focusing on particular debates in the history of conservation where critical uncertainties, ambivalence and heated discussion have brought forward novel  ideas of how to save the past, this book provide new insights into  the reasons and causes for this expansion of heritage. Through a series of detailed case studies, from the iconoclastic crises of  the French Revolution to Le Corbusier’s rescue of the past in his  modernisation plans for Paris, The Fragile Monument shows how discourses of saving and protecting have transformed the monument from an object that originally communicated permanence to one that is perceived as fragile and in need of protection.

Paperback • ISBN 978 1 907317 47 7

RRP £19.95 / €23.95 / $29.95

25 x 19 cm / 7.5 x 10 in

50 colour and b/w illustrations • 160 pages

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