Contenu du sommaire : Monument et ville

The Monument as Event
What relationship to time, and thus to history, have the buildings constructed today ? Is there still a place for commemorations, now that historical clashes, ruptures and upheavals, as it has been said, are things of the past ? What posterity is presently under consideration, now that the future is disconnected from the idea of progress, and is presented as an infinite prolongation of the present ? The answer is that it is this very perpetual present, seen as a perennial capitalism, that monumental works have the mission of celebrating. Thusly, it is logical that the monument now celebrates itself, as an event in itself.

The A-historicism of the Bauhaus and Its Consequences
In the instruction carried out in Bauhaus, the history of architecture was never taught. This neglect had fatal consequences for modern architecture, the first of which was a break with tradition. The student of the Bauhaus would ignor, and even deny, the myths of the past, but they themselves mystified the machine, industry and the present. Adepts of modernism who did not know how to replace history with a new code, with basic principles or with an architectural language, they left the field open to modern eclecticism. Among their contemporaries, only Theo van Doesburg dealt seriously with the problem. Beginning in 1925, he formulated seventeen theses intending to stop modern architecture from becoming monumental architecture.

Henri Lefebvre, the Situationists and the Monumental Dialectic
At a time when the cult of architectural objects is often substituted for care in responding to social needs, it is necessary to call into question the role of monuments in society. The analyses of Henri Lefebvre and the Situationist International clarify the social functions of monuments and relate them to historical and aesthetic values. On the one hand, by its role in transmitting collective memory, its trans-functionality and its utility, the monument is symbolically indispensable. On the other hand, it is clearly a vehicle of repressive ideology. Because of the monument's symbolic power, it must not only be understood as a reified object, but rather as a sort of cultural repository and social vector.

The Irruption of Makkam Ech-Chahid in the Algiers Environment: Physical Vulnerabilities and Social Representations. The Riadh-El-Feth (Victory Park) in which is situated the Martyrs Sanctuary (Makkam Ech-Chahid) is the first important urban project undertaken in the city of Algiers since the country's independance. This prestigious project is a product of the “monumentalist” logic that has characterized the urban history of Algiers from the colonial period until today. It is a conception of public space that reflects both the establishment of the state and the expression of new public forms of sociability. However, the ambivalence of these representations means that the monument can cristalize political issues for the control of public space.

Memory and History: The Monumentalization of the Warsaw Ghetto
The different memorials placed on the site of the former Warsaw Ghetto express in their architectural and sculptural forms the successive historical climates and what the established powers or organisms of preservation and conservation have wished to transmit concerning, on the one hand, the 1943 uprising and the memory of the Jewish-Polish community and, on the other hand, their definition of Nazism. If the first such monument glorifies a whole people, those succeeding it attempt, in addition, to coming closer to a less triumphant type of truth, that of mass extermination and the dehumanization that underlies it.

History, Tradition and Folklorism. On Museification as a Contemporary Cultural Phenomenon
Contemporary interest for the past is no longer satisfied with the cultural models of folklorism. Modern historicism seeks to transform our environment into museified scenery and to submit daily life to the control of an expanding historical consciousness. The limits between yesterday and today, between the museum and its environment tend to fade away, in the confrontation with what seems to be a growing need for cultural stability. This historicism is more than just an answer to a legitimate need for tradition ; it proposes a sort of compensatory praxis to aid in elaborating references for ersatz identities. However, the dynamics of the present is oblivious to such defences and the individual is left with a persistent feeling of mal de vivre.

The Return of Historical Biography
Do history and psychoanalysis intersect ? It is when a theorization of the historical study of “mentalities” was attempted that psychoanalysis, in its structuralist formulation, entered history as a discipline. But, if the renewal of historical biography at the beginning of the 1980s marked the return of the actor, the reference to psychoanalysis disappeared from historical reflection. This apparently paradoxical situation reveals the dilemma created by study of the subjectivity of individuals considered as subjects structured by social and historical contexts.

Why Women Should Not Go Into the Mines...Potosi, Bolivia
In Potosi, as in the majority of mining centers in the Andes, it is said that women should not go into the mines because, if they do, the mineral veins will disappear. Examination of the symbolic representations behind this prohibition reveals the social, economic and ideological logics lying behind it. Studying belief in the bad luck caused by women allows an investigation of cultural norms and how social actors appropriate and manipulate it in accordance with other types of considerations.