Black Lives Matters began in the United States, where it has included the dismantlement of commemorations of the Confederacy, a breakaway state established to preserve slavery. In Europe it has sparked discussions of local monuments as well as drawn unprecedented attention to the way in which the slave trade and enslaved labour funded the construction of cities and country estates. This now needs to be acknowledged in public space. The challenge presents an appropriate moment to remember the ties that bind commemorative structures on both sides of the Atlantic and the impact that tributes to European nationalism have had on diverse strands of modern American architecture. These connections provide a back story for the newly discovered relevance, and at time effectiveness, of representational sculpture, which they integrated into built forms that appeared to embed regimes of all stripes in their local landscapes. Abstract counter-monuments often proved effective in addressing the Holocaust. Substituting the human figure for the shards of a shattered past that have long been juxtaposed in German memoryscapes with visions of a utopian future may possibly provide a means of acknowledging the pain that runs through the cities that many of us inhabit. This in turn may prove to be an important step on the way to building the more equitable future for which we attempt to prepare the way as we work to decolonize our curricula.
Black lives matter. Few would disagree with that worthy sentiment, but what does it mean to historians of architecture, and especially to those based in Europe? Such scholars seek to explain why the built environment looks the way that it does. This includes understanding how it was funded, the sources of the materials out of which it was built, and what values it commemorates. Moreover, many historians of architecture are also called upon to offer expert opinions regarding what structures should be offered legal protection so that they remain in place, as well as how to conserve them and how to educate the general public about them. Finally, as experts regarding the built traces of the past, having documented processes of commemoration in public space and how they have changed over time, we may carry this expertise into participation and helping to craft new memoryscapes.
There are thus many paths the discipline can take to address the challenges that Black Lives Matter poses. Although architectural historians are trained to support the retention of cultural heritage, we can shift gears and in appropriate cases support its removal. We also have a responsibility to draw attention to the physical traces of slavery and colonialism that have often slipped from public consciousness. This includes connecting the dots in new ways, as the case study given here that links neo-medieval nationalism in Europe and white suprematism in the United States seeks to do, as well as continuing to draw attention to existing knowledge. And we can encourage efforts to give literal form to a more inclusive Europe. This list, which introduces the topics covered in what follows is, however, by no means exhaustive.
There are many ways in which public history takes physical form. Figural statuary has been important in this regard in Europe since antiquity and became ubiquitous in many of the continent’s cities across the course of the 19th century. Statues have also been the most obvious target of recent protests. Alex Fialho notes that ‘while monuments are perceived as large-scale and longstanding, history demonstrates that the tenuous ideologies monuments represent make them particularly susceptible to contestation, and that the removal and destruction of monuments are often tantamount to incitements for political change’ (
Statues of enslavers are not as common in Europe as memorials to Confederates are in parts of the United States, but anger against them could be just as palpable, as the widely publicized tossing of a statue of Edward Colston into the Bristol harbour clearly showed (
Historians of architecture seldom focus explicitly upon statuary, although the public spaces in which such statues serve as indications of shared community values are a core subject of the discipline. Thus the way in which their meaning and the experience of these places morph over time is one we regularly address. Throughout history regime change and other shifts in public opinion have often been accompanied by hostility towards monuments and buildings whose values clash with current political realities, but monuments are more readily demolished than buildings, as the latter can be put to often highly symbolic new purposes. A case in point is the way in which Irish independence did and did not find physical expression in Dublin. Perhaps the most notorious of the many Irish cases in which monuments that championed the British state and its royal family were destroyed concerns Nelson’s Pillar in Dublin. It was blown up on 8 and 14 March 1966, in advance of the anniversary of the Easter Rising against the British half a century earlier. The IRA were responsible for the first explosion; the Irish Army finished the job the following week. Dublin Castle, however, the official site of the British viceroy in Ireland, remains intact, as does his residence in Phoenix Park, now the seat of the Irish president.
The removal of monuments can be extremely cathartic. Bryan Clark Green, the conservation officer of the Society of Architectural Historians, described the Confederate general ‘Stonewall’ Jackson being lowered from the plinth on Richmond’s Monument Avenue, where he had been installed just over a century earlier:
It was an incredible scene. There was an enormous thunderstorm in progress. Those there could barely see anything. People were cheering, some were just overcome with emotion. It was so loud that at first one could not hear that the nearby church bell — originally offered by the congregation to the Confederacy in 1864 to be melted down for bullets — was ringing. Purchased back from the Secretary of War by a wealthy congregant, the bell survived to herald the end of Richmond’s death grip on the Confederacy. It was an amazing experience. (
Of course, removal alone is never sufficient. A year later, Alexcia Cleveland, a local resident, said to CNN reporter Chandelis Duster, as she watched the statue of Robert E. Lee being taken down from the same avenue, ‘I’m glad to see it down, but I would like to see more progress on issues such as police brutality and housing inequality’ (
Although Black Lives Matter challenges us to change some of the places we teach and study, it also should prompt us to revise our understanding of multiple ways that exploitation and appropriation are embedded in many more places. For me, these have proved inescapable. I am the descendent of enslavers who directed the manufacture in Richmond of ammunition and armaments used by the Confederacy. My great-grandmother’s uncle gave the dedicatory speech when the statue of Lee was dedicated on Monument Avenue. I grew up in a house in which enslavers had lived beside the enslaved. Moving to Ireland did not allow me to escape associations with slavery. I now teach at University College Dublin whose campus is named for Belfield House, which Finola O’Kane has suggested, was probably named after a sugar plantation in Jamaica worked by enslaved labour (
Meanwhile, European exploitation of Africa taints many of the buildings I teach, including some glibly associated with social reform. Take, for example, the model garden suburb of Port Sunlight outside Liverpool. Its paternalistic recreation of an ideal pre-industrial village undoubtedly provided a high standard of housing for the workers of its patron, Lord Leverhulme, the founder of Lever Brothers (
Another building I regularly feature also challenges the equation of stylistic innovation with social improvement. Lever Brothers entered the Congo only in 1910, after it had become a Belgian colony. Previously, the Free State had been the personal property of King Leopold II, for whom it was run by Edmond van Eetvelde, who commissioned Victor Horta to build him a splendid house in Brussels. It was completed in stages between in 1897 and 1901 (
Hotel van Eetvelde, Victor Horta, Brussels, Belgium, 1895–1901. Photo by EmDee, 2009.
Other ties are less direct but still important. Scholars, including Itohan Osayimwese (
Our responsibilities as scholars include not only teaching what is already known but asking tougher questions about how the material with which we are familiar furthers white privilege. In my case this means thinking harder about the connections that bind the commemoration of the Civil War to European nationalism, which turn out to also be tied to efforts by those of European descent to naturalize their ownership of lands wrested away from indigenous inhabitants. These connections provide as well a precedent for the newly discovered relevance, and at time effectiveness, of representational sculpture’s role in contemporary commemoration.
In 1889, the year before work began on Monument Avenue in Richmond, the president of the United States, Benjamin Harrison, travelled from Washington to the midwestern city of Indianapolis, where he had earlier served as governor of Indiana. He came for the ground-breaking of the Indiana Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument (
Bruno Schmitz, Indiana Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument, Indianapolis, USA, 1882–1902. Photo by alexeatswhales, 2014.
The Indianapolis monument was designed by a young architect from Düsseldorf named Bruno Schmitz. He had probably been encouraged to compete for the commission by the members of the large German community in Indianapolis. Some of them would have heard of his earlier victory in the competition for the Vittore Emmanuele Monument in Rome, although in the end he did not get the commission to build it (
Schmitz was present for the dedication ceremony in Indianapolis in 1888, and he returned several times to the United States in the years that followed. Although the details of exactly what buildings he saw for himself are not clear, these trips familiarized him with photographs at the very least of the work of the architect Henry Hobson Richardson (
James O’Gorman has noted of Richardson’s use of geological metaphors,
In the Rockies, Yosemite and Yellowstone were natural forms to rival the man-made landmarks of Europe. One manifestation of this idea is the constant repetition of variations on this theme, found in scientific as well as popular literature, that American landforms were substitutes for European monuments. (
In commissions such as the Ames Monument to the transcontinental railroad, completed in 1882, and the modest gate lodge he built for same family’s estate in North Easton, Massachusetts, finished the previous year, Richardson used rusticated stone and even loose boulders to imply that the buildings themselves were natural formations (
Ames Gate Lodge, Henry Hobson Richardson, North Easton, Massachusetts, USA, 1881. Photo by Daderot, 2007.
Admiration for the Romanesque was widespread in 19th-century Germany, and architectural historians have discerned German influences upon Richardson’s adoption of it (
Upon his return to Germany from the United States, Schmitz almost immediately competed successfully for commissions for three of the largest and most prestigious monuments ever erected in Germany; a fourth, finished only in 1913, eventually followed. The first three celebrate Emperor Wilhelm I, who died in 1888, seventeen years after presiding over German unification at the end of the Franco-Prussian war. The Kyffhäuser Monument (1892–96), the Westphalian Province’s Monument to Wilhelm at Porta Westfalica (1892–96), the Rhine Province’s Monument to Wilhelm at the German Corner in Koblenz, and the Battle of the Nations Monument (1898–1913) in Leipzig (
Schmitz’s monuments are distinguished by three features that did not figure prominently in Indianapolis. The first is the use throughout of rusticated stone that makes his work appear to emerge organically out of the site, which is either located in nature or, if in a city, well away from other buildings. This he clearly got from Richardson. The second is the scale of the free-standing sculptures of Wilhelm I. Here the impact upon him of the Statue of Liberty, which he would have seen as he sailed into New York harbour, is clear. The third are the sculptures that, although executed by others, are integral to the architecture out of which they appear to grow. Many are clearly based upon what were then the relatively recently excavated ancient Mesopotamian statuary from sites like Ashurnasirpal II’s Palace at Nimrud in what is now Iraq. Uncovered beginning in 1845, much of this material is now divided between museums in Asia, Europe and North America, including Berlin, where Schmitz was living (
The Battle of the Nations Monument undoubtedly accounts for much of Schmitz’s influence in the United States (
Bruno Schmitz, Battle of the Nations Monument, Leipzig, Germany, 1896–1913. Photo by Kel207, 2016.
Schmitz’s monuments were seen at the time as contributing to national integration. Koblenz was where the Treaty of Verdun, dividing Charlemagne’s empire into thirds, had been drawn up; furthermore, his Koblenz site had been a 13th-century stronghold of the Teutonic Knights. The memorial in Porta Westfalica signalled the return of largely Catholic Westphalia to the Prussian Protestant patriotic fold after the Kulturkampf of the 1870s (
At least three major figures — Frank Lloyd Wright, Bertram Goodhue, and Gutzon Borglum — infused their designs for buildings and sculptures in the United States with lessons absorbed directly or indirectly from Schmitz’s Leipzig monument, which Wright probably saw for himself. The range of these works and of their political associations reveals, however, that just as Schmitz put Richardson’s geologically infused Romanesque to new uses, so, too, could those who borrowed from him and his collaborators employ what they had learned from him to serve diverse purposes. Although their politics varied, in all cases the intent was at least in part to naturalize white inhabitation of land that people of European descent had begun to occupy in large numbers only in the 19th century.
Anthony Alofsin has documented the impact the sculpture at the Battle of the Nations Monument had upon Wright’s approach to architectural sculpture (
The second house Wright built for Herbert and Katherine Jacobs, completed in 1948, nearly four decades after the first iteration of Taliesin, is best known as a pioneering example of solar design (
Herbert and Katherine Jacobs House, Frank Lloyd Wright, Madison, Wisconsin, USA, 1948. Photo by TheCatalyst31, 2017.
Nor was this the only context in which Schmitz’s influence could be seen in the United States. Upon his death in 1924, Bertram Goodhue was widely hailed as having been the country’s greatest living architect. This was a stature Wright was widely accorded only a decade later. Goodhue’s Nebraska State Capitol (1920–32) in Lincoln clearly references schemes by the Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen, who moved to the United States in 1923 (
Finally, the example of Stone Mountain ties Schmitz back to commemoration of the Civil War, but now of the Confederacy rather than the Union. Stone Mountain was originally conceived by Gutzon Borglum, who went on to initiate Mount Rushmore (
Confederate Memorial, Henry Augustus Lukeman et al., Stone Mountain, Georgia, USA, 1914–1970. Photo by Diego Deiso, 2009.
As completed by Henry Augustus Lukeman and others, the figures of Jefferson Davis, Lee, and Jackson on horseback striding across the face of the mountain comprise the largest memorial to the Confederacy, although it lacked the reflecting pool proposed by Borglum that clearly echoed the forecourt of the Battle of the Nations Monument. Stone Mountain was conceived and finished in the context of local outpourings of racist hate. In 1913 Leo Frank, who was Jewish, was lynched in nearby Marietta. Two years later Caroline Helen Jemison Plane, the honorary life president of the Georgia Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, approached Borglum to ask whether he would be interested in carving the proposed memorial. In the same year the Ku Klux Klan was re-founded atop the mountain, where it would rally annually for decades to come. Borglum joined the Klan in an unsuccessful attempt to keep the Stone Mountain commission. The effort to finally finish Stone Mountain was a direct response to the Civil Rights movement. After the state of Georgia acquired the land, the resulting state park was open to the public in 1965 on the centennial of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, with the memorial finally dedicated in 1970 in the presence of Georgia governor Jimmy Carter and Vice President Spiro Agnew.
The story of Schmitz’s role in American memorial culture, which commenced when he won the competition for an outsize monument to the defenders of the Union, concluded nearly a century later with an even larger Confederate memorial, almost certainly inconceivable without the example of the nationalist monuments he had erected back in Germany using lessons drawn from his American experience. Although more democratically minded architects made arguably less offensive use of the paradigm he established, these examples should cause us to think twice about what architects and their clients are doing when they attempt to create a strong sense of place that denies other people’s legitimate claims to territory and to rights, as well as about the degree to which supposedly site-specific products of nationalism are, perhaps paradoxically, often transnational.
Finally, the centrality of figural sculpture to recent debates over commemoration challenges historians of architecture who respond to Black Lives Matter by participating in the discussions around the formation of new commemorative environments, to think about the degree to which reckoning with the ways in which Europe has been shaped by enslavement and colonialism may require different strategies than counter-monuments (see Young (
Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, Franz Schwechten, and Egon Eiermann, Berlin, Germany, 1895, 1961. Photo by GerardM, 2004.
But if monuments matter, so, it turns out, do bodies. A powerful source for the abstraction of many of Berlin’s memorial landscapes was the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C., designed by Maya Lin and completed in 1983. Lin’s monument is anchored in her appreciation of land art but also, quite crucially, of the imprint the Hopewell Mound culture left on the Ohio landscape in which she grew up (
National Memorial For Peace and Justice for the Equal Justice Initiative, MASS Design Group, sculpture by Kwame Akoto-Bamfo, Montgomery, Alabama, USA, 2018. Photo by Equal Justice Initiative, n.d.
While this in turn may prove to be an important step on the way to building a more equitable future for ourselves and our students, representing such violence may simply re-enact it (
No matter the intention, every monument or memorial to atrocities against Black people already contains its failure. Because they are projects of reform and not radical projects, they do not imagine new worlds. They stage encounters. But for whom? Who is the subject seen to be coming to terms with an ongoing brutality imagined as past and then reimagined as an aesthetic project? Who are the subjects imagined as witness and participant in the encounter, and who is imagined by being moved by the encounter and to what end? How is such movement facilitated or inhibited by its architectures? The monument or memorial is a staged encounter in which the terrible grammars of the past, though disrupted, still remain.
Whether or not figural representation is the direction in which commemoration should head in the case of acknowledging slavery and lynching, it has certainly been effective in other European contexts. I first became cognizant of the power it can still have in another context, that of the fight to legalize abortion in Ireland. A single photograph of the married Indian-born dentist Savita Halappanavar up-ended the terms of the debate (
Mural of Savita Halappanavar, Dublin, Ireland, May 2018. Photo by Zcbeaton, 2018.
Not all of the few monuments to European culpability for the slave trade and for colonial exploitation of Africa take a figural approach, however. The Memorial to the Abolition of Slavery, for instance, in Nantes, France, completed in 2012, is clearly a counter-monument (
The Memorial to the Abolition of Slavery, Krzysztof Wodiczko and Julian Bonder, Nantes, France, 2012. Parcours méditatif. Le Mémorial de l’abolition de l’esclavage. Nantes © Jean-Dominique Billaud — Nautilus/LVAN. Copyright: Jean-Dominique Billaud — Nautilus/LVAN, Nantes.
Statues of Blacks are also beginning to populate Europe’s cities in ways intended to encourage pride rather than reproduce suffering. A case in point is La Vaughn Belle and Jeanette Ehler’s
Those of us engaging in the creation of new commemorative landscapes must be ready to move beyond established paradigms. We must also recognize that having a commitment to building more inclusive societies includes a willingness to work with those whose tastes may differ quite radically from our own. Whether or not we personally choose to enter into these discussions, however, we face the challenge of supporting such societies by paying more attention in our scholarship and our teaching to the relationship between the exploitation of Black bodies and the built environment. This includes admitting how iconic buildings from which we have derived considerable aesthetic and intellectual pleasure are nonetheless expressions of cultural, economic, and political systems that have encouraged or profited from such exploitation. These stories are moreover too important to stay buried on the shelves of university libraries and the pages of peer-reviewed journals available only through online subscriptions. They need to be integrated into basic survey courses and into public outreach that furthers awareness of the degree to which all Europeans have, if often unwittingly, benefitted from these legacies. This can be one small step towards ensuring that Black Lives Matter.
I thank Nicola Figgis for first pointing this out to me.
This text is based on my opening address to the 2021 EAHN meeting. I thank Aruna d’Souza, Luke Fidler, Juliet Koss, Jeffrey Moser, Thaïsa Way, two anonymous peer reviewers and my editors for their many helpful comments. The revisions were begun during the time that I was an Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study of the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art. This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 101019419).
The author has no competing interests to declare.