Living with History, 1914-1964

Front matter

Living 1914 with

History

NICHOLAS BULLOCK & LUC VERPOEST, EDS

Introduction

Nicholas Bullock & Luc Verpoest

The general history of post-war new building and urban development has been given much attention in recent historiography of twentieth-century architecture and urbanism, even including - but rather occasionally - the actual way historical heritage was dealt within post-war development planning and reconstruction practices. On the other hand some particular studies on postwar preservation history in Belgium, France, Germany, Great Britain and the Netherlands paid attention to the eventual rethinking of preservation concepts because of this particular context of war destruction and post-war reconstruction.! Pre-1914 concepts in conservation and restoration came under pressure, eventually leading to a constrained kind of conservationism if not conservatism, just in favour of conserving ruins or complete ‘reconstruction d l’identique’ or yet rather opting for a more dynamic integration of valuable historic fabric in a unavoidably changing environment. The 1964 Charter of Venice - the constitution of modern architectural and urban heritage conservation since then - has to be understood from that particular perspective, indeed prepared as to its content already half a century before, on the outbreak of the First World War.

Both fields of research - general architectural and urban history and preservation history - seldom really met, if at all. But this book is now, at last, the result of such a confrontation. It goes back to the 2004 symposium ‘Living with History: Rebuilding Europe after the First and Second World Wars and the role of Heritage Preservation,

1914-1964’ The aim then was (1) to establish a status quaestionis as to wartime and postwar preservation historiography and (2) to confront these particular developments in preservation history with the general evolution of architecture and urbanism, i.c. to identify both the specific role of conservationists and heritage institutions and administrations in the overall reconstruction, and the specific role of architects and planners in preservation matters. All this could eventually complete our general understanding of twentieth-century architectural and urban history, more particularly at these decisive moments of wartime destruction and postwar reconstruction of the 1920s and the 1940s- 1950s.

The Frontline Venues: Louvain and Ypres

The ‘Living with History’ symposium started in the fifteenth-century, gothic city hall of Louvain, a wonderful place in history - political, social, economic, cultural, urban and architectural - and a fascinating case moreover in the history of conservation and restoration. Louvain is where humanity was for the first time confronted with modern warfare on the outbreak of the First World War in September 1914, destroying more than thousand houses and the invaluable treasures of the university library and archives. The town hall was saved as it was headquarter of the German army. And this was a representative, monumental build-

See bibliography in this volume. The bibliography was originally established by Luc Verpoest to prepare the ‘Living with History’ symposium and has been supplemented for the publications of these conference proceedings. Publications used by the authors of the articles are marked with an asterisk. The substantial contribution of Herman Stynen, who left us almost a decade ago, continues to inspire our efforts as to further developing the historiography of heritage preservation.

ing of sorts. Since the French writer Victor Hugo in the early nineteenth century urged the municipal authorities “de meubler les niches’, the municipal authorities eventually decided to fill the niches of the facades and towers with statues as “emblematic representations of virtues and vices, biblical figures, prophets ... and representatives of sciences, the arts, industry, military glory”. In the nineteenth century, the fifteenth-century building was most effectively reintegrated, re-installed, restored into contemporary civic society by decorating its walls - inside and outside - with Louvain’s (and young Belgium's) own history, eventually re-written or re-viewed through the contemporary, late-nineteenth-century context of events. One of the monumental wall paintings by André Hennebique in the main assembly room (where the symposium was inaugurated) is about the official opening of the Catholic University on 7 September 1426, and was painted in 1891, nineteenth-century figures as their fifteenth-century counterparts: the late-nineteenth-century liberal burgomaster Leopold Van der Keelen is acting as his fifteenth-century colleague Egide de Rycke, Rector Mgr. Jean-Baptiste Abbeloos as the founder of the University Willem Neefs ...: “Voila en effigie les cléricaux et les libéraux reconciliées”, as was suggested in 1937 by the painter's son Léon Hennebique. The painting was indeed very well understood as a representation of the historical reconciliation of Catholics and liberals after the school funding controversy, dominating Belgian politics from 1878 till 1884.

History (historiography, historical painting and sculpture, opera even, historical monuments especially ...) in the nineteenth century indeed had the primary purpose to give contemporary society - a young nation under construction - a historical identity or an identity through history, also on the local level of a small, provincial but ambitious university and industry town: reenacting the past, (re-)building the future. That is what post-war reconstruction in the twentieth century still was about, in all its different architectural forms, traditional-

ist or modernist. The ‘Living with History’ symposium debates were continued in

the late-twentieth-century bright new and modern premises of the provincial government of Flemish Brabant, by the Portuguese architect Goncalo Byrne. Of course discussions on historical heritage need again and again a present-day context: one can only speak about the past in present tense. After all, the definition or identification of monuments and heritage of the past (the writing of history in general), the development of conservation and restoration concepts and practices very much concern our present-day and future lives, as ‘living with history’ is probably most fundamental to model, shape, form, build the world we would

like to live in today and tomorrow. Or, as Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc wrote in his famous article “Restauration’, in the eight volume, published in 1866, of his still astonishing Dictionnaire raisonné de larchitecture francaise: “Restauration, le mot et la chose sont modernes”.

To learn from history, the history of architecture, and the history of its destructions and reconstructions, re-establishing, re-interpreting the meanings of the past and restoring or, again and again, re-installing (what is the exact meaning of the term) them into an unavoidably new, modern, contemporary context because again and again we need that understanding of history. We need thus these monuments of the past to raise our historical awareness that we are living in another historical time different from those of the past, in order to be able to do so ina reasonable, critical, significant way however modern or contemporary we are again and again.

We did conclude this conference in Ypres, on the Belgian frontline of war in 1914- 1918, almost a century ago, again today the frontline of a battle for the true survival of this cruel memory of the past: this particular past of the Grande Guerre should never lose its present-day topicality or relevance as long as wars will last, and they probably will ... One can only wonder if the popularity of war documentaries - now also in colour - and computer war games do not risk in the end to vulgarise and trivialize wars, these becoming just banally acceptable as almost virtual events you can play yourself. At least buildings and landscapes, in their physical presence - in ruin or precisely reconstructed or carefully restored - are real, sensible, unavoidable testimonies of war violence, still showing its many wounds. In that respect, conservation and restoration - if done correctly, i.e. not idealising the past but presenting all its beauty and cruelty, its good and bad times, as good histories are written - could be critical tools to avoid the kind of virtual creation of empty and superficial images for immediate heritage consumption. Visiting Ypres today - its Flanders Fields Museum, its War Cemeteries, its Battlefields and trenches, the daily Last Post at Menin Gate Memorial ... - is a true and effective experience as to this: indeed Ypres’s war heritage is a successful asset as to mass tourism, but there is this sustained intellectual effort really to understand what happened and why almost a century ago and again not even a quarter of a century later, and what is still going on in many places all over the world. The symposium had indeed to include these site visits in Ypres, and also in Bailleul and Péronne in France. The Mémorial de la Grande Guerre in Péronne is successful as a fully present-day presentation of high architectural and urban quality exactly as war cemeteries in Flanders’ Fields on both sides of the border are excellent examples of early-twentieth-century landscaping and garden design: that astonishingly precise aesthetics of these memori-

als is exactly what makes them so effective in transferring their essential memorial message. Monuments are often beautiful objects we should enjoy, but sometimes serious matters are involved we never should keep off ... when war, violence, terror, destruction is part of their history. That is what this symposium was about, and this book is: a serious and critical understanding of deathly serious matters.

Living with History, a Retrospect

Compressed into an intense three day period, the conference ‘Living with History’ provided an extraordinary panorama of achievements, approaches and debates on reconstruction in Western Europe after the two world wars. Of course there were omissions. In planning the conference the temptation was always to expand the frame of comparison, to bring in the experience of reconstruction in Poland, Russia and Eastern Europe, to draw comparisons with reconstruction after natural disasters and to look ever further afield to other parts of the world. Fortunately this temptation was resisted. Yet even within the boundaries agreed for contributions, framing the terms of comparison in such a way that the different contributions might ‘engage’ one with another and that the resulting conference debates might become more than the sum of the separate presentations, proved to be dauntingly difficult.

These difficulties were both pragmatic and conceptual. With the richness of the material presented and so many presentations packed into so few days, the time available for trying to draw out the comparative themes around which to structure a general debate was short, though the questions

and discussion that followed the individual papers did much to flag up the underly-

ing fascination with comparing international experience. But more challenging was the conceptual problem of trying to find a framework that could structure a debate that would do justice to the richness of the material and the variety of different approaches. To have attempted a summing up, would have been presumptuous; to launch into

the final discussion without some means of marshalling debate would have been foolhardy. In the event it was agreed that the most open-handed way of promoting structured debate was to invite responses to a number of questions intended to reflect key issues that had emerged during the three days of discussion.

I

The first question, ‘What should we preserve, what can we rebuild?’ was an attempt to address a cluster of associated issues that surfaced in many of the papers: whether to reconstruct or to preserve; how much to reconstruct; whether to construct anew rather than to rebuild. In part, this question was an attempt to explore the ideological framework surrounding notions of reconstruction and conservation. Thus for some speakers there was a presumption that conservation was the unquestioned priority, as if the rebuilding of the past were - in some (rarely defined) way - a moral duty owed to both the memory of the past and the desire to discharge an obligation to future generations. Clinging to the past might, of course, be explained in other terms too. Reconstruction, particularly reconstruction à l'identique, might be construed in entirely pragmatic, even craven terms as a way of escaping the larger legal, financial and procedural challenges of rebuilding in any other manner simply ‘what was there before’

However, in other papers the balance between construction and reconstruction was drawn quite differently. Across Europe, particularly after World War I, perhaps because of the architectural ambitions fostered by the Modern Movement and bodies such as CIAM (the Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne, founded by Le Corbusier in 1928), there was a willingness to consider building something new, even a certain boldness that city authorities brought to reconstruction. In France, cities like Saint-Malo or Saint-Dié may have been rebuilt in a way that looked back to the past, but they were matched by Le Havre or Maubeuge where Auguste Perret and André Lurçat were able to construct in a manner that broke radically with the past. Sir Basil Spences Coventry Cathedral, like Egon Eiermann’s more successful contemporary rebuilding of the Kaiser Gedachtniskirche at the heart of West Berlin, are a reminder that even for key symbolic buildings, there was a willingness after 1945 to interpret reconstruction in more adventurous terms than was generally possible in 1918.

Closely associated with this line of discussion were questions raised by those who cast doubt on the authenticity of reconstruction, or those who enjoyed exposing the contradictions between what was ‘permitted’ or ‘acceptable’ and what not - and why. John Ruskin’s Lamp of Memory may not have been explicitly invoked, but his challenge to an ethos of conservation, shared by the majority of speakers, that accepted intervention, remodelling, even rebuilding, and looked back ultimately to the approach of Eugène- Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, was certainly not forgotten.

II

The second question, "How do we reconstruct?, sought to explore the range of legislative and procedural issues that must necessarily surround the processes of reconstruction, especially of historic monuments. What emerged early in our three days of papers and debate was the variety of institutional and legal frameworks that shape these processes. What more revealing insight into national differences, than the contrast between the inspired amateur fashion in which John Summerson (aided by Nikolaus Pevsner, the German architectural historian) tried to document the historic building at risk from the Luftwaffe, with the programmatic methods that the occupying German army, with Josef Stiibben’s advice, sought to identify and then protect the ‘heritage’ of Belgium, the country they had so recently defeated. Moreover, even within the same country, these same processes might be recast or survive, suitably camouflaged, in barely altered form: who would have thought, given Vichy’s refusal to reconstruct à l'identique, how strongly French experience of rebuilding after 1918 would shape what happened in 1940 and again after 1945?

Many of the issues raised by this question were technical: what were the mechanisms of expropriation, of compensation for changes of land use? How was the reconstruction of heritage to be funded? But the questions raised in these debates went well beyond mere technical questions of process. They raised fundamental issues about the legitimacy of the processes of reconstruction: in whose name is reconstruction carried out? Who decides what should be rebuilt and when? Again, the contrast between the experiences of different countries was both a source of fascinating difference and of obvious similarities. Was the heavy-handed centralisation of power in ministerial hands more complete in France than in Britain? Perret might be imposed on Le Havre in place of a favoured ‘son, a local architect with appropriately ‘leftish leanings, but

at Saint-Dié the locals roundly dismissed those appointed by Paris. In Caen, again, the ministerial view prevailed; in Maubeuge, Lurçat, exceptionally, even sought the views of the local populace. Meanwhile in Britain, Donald Gibson and his local Coventry

team were encouraged by Lord Reith, then Minister of Works and Planning, to replan ‘boldly’ without regard to cost. In 1945, they drew up a vision for the future centre of Coventry only to find it pared away by the Ministry of Town and Country Planning from a heroic 400 acres to the miserly 19 acres finally approved by the Ministry in 1948.

III

The third question, “What has reconstruction achieved?, provided an opportunity to take stock of the extraordinary range of achievements of rebuilding to review the range of presentations that ranged from the recreation of stained glass windows in the diocesan churches in Namur - or in the cathedral in Metz - to the Modernist triumph at Royan. What emerged most powerfully from this discussion was, first, how little had indeed been conserved or rebuilt and how much has been lost. This sense of nostalgia was only amplified by the photographic record of the buildings no longer there or occasional films of the devastation such as that, shot from a balloon, of the destruction of Ypres and other towns and villages that lay on the line of the front. Added to this sense of loss was, too, the feeling that what was reconstructed was too often part of a process of editing our cultural heritage and of reinforcing an interpretation from a single point of view. But in contrast to these first impres-

2 Docomomo is the International Committee for Documentation and Conservation of buildings, sites and neighbourhoods of the Modern Movement (see: agence)

sions, came a second and positive set of reactions, a recognition that reconstruction had made adaptation possible to the implacable demand for change. Reconstruction after 1918 and again after 1945 had succeeded in providing exceptional opportunities to reshape the centres of historic towns across Europe and to enable local authorities to overcome that natural - and understandable - resistance to change in order to meet the growing demands of contemporary society exemplified most aggressively by the motorcar.

Perhaps almost as important, was the discussion of the extent to which the achievements of reconstruction have in turn been considered worthy of conservation. Too often, as the records of Docomomo? reveal, even the best work of post-war architects and planners has lost its power to convey the vision of a former future. Too often, local authorities or property developers, whether in response to the legitimate demands of social progress, or to the itch of mere individual greed, have found it all too easy to demolish or radically alter the heritage of reconstruction. There have been occasional and unexpected triumphs - who would have expected to see the restoration of key elements of the Stalinallee - but much depends on the activism of architects, historians and others, particularly in those countries where the protection of scheduled monuments struggles for popular approval.

IV

Finally, the fourth question, “What do ‘you’ - or indeed ‘we’ - understand by reconstruction?’ was intended as a way of discussing issues of reconstruction and heritage in ways that crossed the borders of the nation state. Given the institutional constraints on the processes of reconstruction, it was natural that much of the discussion should start with a framework conceived in terms of the individual country. But one of the more unexpected aspects of the conference was the way in which delegates found themselves stumbling on those differences that are part of any attempt to communicate a range of ideas, from the immediately obvious to the delicately nuanced, across the currents of national debate. Too often the meaning of certain terms became lost in translation. Thus a term like ‘regionalism’ appeared to acquire very different connotations in different presentations. In some it appeared as regressive and nostalgic, for example, in the discussion of German rebuilding in Poland and Russia during the Nazi occupation it might be associated with the architectural imposition of an oppressive ideology. But

in others, regionalism - particularly in the form of the New Regionalism - became one of the rallying cries of a younger generation of Modernists determined to steer the New Architecture away from what they regarded as the stylistic dead-end of the International Style.

In other respects, however, the language of reconstruction and of heritage is international. Indeed what emerged from three days of discussion was the shared understanding of how to judge what to conserve and the level of international debate about these issues. Organisations such as the International Conference for Housing and Town Planning in the interwar years, or CIAM after World War II provided a forum for the discussion of reconstruction. Think, for example, of the terms in which CIAM VIII (Hoddesdon, England, 1951) approached the discussion of the ‘core of the city, that recognition of the role of the public life of the city in shaping the values of European civilisation and the necessity of rebuilding both the city and the values it embodied as a way of rebuilding the foundations for a democratic post-war Europe. Of equal importance is the international role

of Docomomo in defending the heritage of reconstruction. International comparison makes it easier to make the case, in the face of local resistance, to the ‘listing’ for protection of key buildings of the 1950s. As the novel forms of construction tried in the postwar years begin to show their age, or as the buildings of the former regimes of Eastern Europe face the challenge of renovation,

the ability to appeal to the court of international opinion may just incline the balance of judgement in favour of conservation.

These four questions were intended only as the starting point for discussion. In this they were partially successful. They were by no means an exhaustive summary of the issues raised during the conference. But they did indeed provoke debate, vigorous at times, and encouraged us to look back over the conference to see how far we had come in staking out the boundaries of the field. Most important, these questions and the ensuing debate served to suggest that the subject has a larger future. They also acted as a reminder that those who had taken part in the three days in Louvain and Ypres were now at least better equipped to push forward the frontiers of research and debate.

Learning from History / Living with History

Both historiography and preservation should aim at a full and significant re-integration of war and post-war heritage into our present-day and future lives. That is indeed why heritage is preserved: ‘learning from history’ through ‘living with history. As wars go on unstoppable and heritage - material and immaterial - continues to be destroyed by ever more aggressive war violence, profound understanding and radical preservation of war and post-war heritage could even become a critical reference for building peace.

The conference and these proceedings do indeed aim at a profound reflection on the raison détre of heritage, on the existential reasons to write its mental history and to preserve its material evidence. These reasons seem to be even more compelling as to this war heritage the symposium was dealing with. This history and preservation touches issues fundamentally human, profoundly humane ...: history and preservation as a truly humanist reaction against intentional violence and destruction, against that kind of inhuman rationalism that produces wars. It is indeed astonishing that the inventor of modern concepts on heritage and restoration and of l'architecture raisonnée - Eugène- Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc - was a great expert in military affairs, that Vitruvius concludes his De Architectura Libri X with a chapter on war machines. A rational analysis of facts and phenomena should not perforce lead to its abuse when designing buildings. But Stephen Toulmin - in The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (published in 1990), a marvellous history of modernity, analysing the essential rapport of rationalism and humanism since the sixteenth century - comes to this conclusion that at the beginning of the twentieth-century modern society in Europe even if profoundly rationalist, sometimes even excessively, could have retrieved its humanist countenance of political moderation and human tolerance once dreamed of by Michel de Montaigne and Henri IV, if war stayed away ...

The ‘Living with History’ symposium ended with a dramatic testimony by the Italian architect Andrea Bruno, president of the Raymond Lemaire International Centre for Conservation at the K.U. Leuven and since many decades obstinately helping to restore a country and its cultural relics again and again, war after war: sad considerations

3 Bergmans et al., eds, Negentiende-eeuwse restauratiepraktijk en actuele monumentenzorg; Idem et al., eds, Neostijlen in de negentiende eeuw.

- but nevertheless persisting to hope for a makeable and more humane future - on Afghanistan, but it also could have been Iraq, Lebanon, Sudan, Rwanda, Tchetchnia and unfortunately many other places of violence and destruction. Once in recent time historians no longer wanted to write our history exclusively in terms of rulers obsessed with power and their endless wars, but we cannot but continue to do so hoping to write it away from us for ever. A critical history of destruction and reconstruction can be part of it, and that is what the reader is offered with the present book.

The Conference and the Book

The 2004 symposium ‘Living with History: Rebuilding Europe after the First and Second World Wars and the role of Heritage Preservation, 1914-1964 was the third in a series of restoration symposiums on the history of conservation and restoration concepts and practices in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The first symposium ‘Negentiende-eeuwse restauratiepraktijk en actuele monumentenzorg (‘Nineteenth-century restoration practice and conservation today, Louvain, 1996) did focus on nineteenth-century conservation and restoration in Belgium and the Netherlands. The second symposium ‘Neostijlen in de negentiende eeuw. Zorg geboden? (‘Neo-styles in the Nineteenth Century: Care demanded?, Enschede, the Netherlands, 1999) was dealing with the present-day issues, concepts and practices in both countries as to the actual preservation of nineteenth-century architecture. The proceedings of both conferences were published by Leuven University Press in the KADOC Artes series.”

The ‘Living with History’ symposium in Louvain and Ypres was organised as the final one in these series, and also to be the most international: attention was to be given to a particular context and development of heritage preservation in the twentieth century, i.c. against the background of war destruction and post-war reconstruction in Belgium, France, Germany, Great Britain and the Netherlands during and after the First and Second World Wars. After the creation of the Research Community ‘Cultural Identity, World Views and Architecture in Western Europe, 1815-1940’ in 2002 (a KADOC initiative, subsidised by the FWO-Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek-Vlaanderen/ Flemish Research Board), the advisory and organisational committees, already preparing the third restoration symposium ‘Living with History’ did continue as the Living with History Research Committee, one of the subgroups of the FWO Research Community. Members: Marnix Beyen (Universiteit Antwerpen, Vak-groep Geschiedenis),

Jo Braeken (AROHM, Afdeling Monumenten en Landschappen / VIOE, Brussels), Nicolas Bullock (University of Cambridge, Department of Architecture), Thomas Coomans (KADOC-K.U.Leuven / VUB, Brussels), Clemens Guido De Dijn (ICOMOS), Jan De Maeyer (KADOC-K.U.Leuven), Emmanuel Doutriaux (Ecole d’ Architecture de Lille - Régions Nord, Villeneuve-d’Asq), Marieke Kuipers (Universiteit Maastricht, Faculteit Cultuurwetenschappen), Georg Morsch (ETH Zürich - Institut für Denkmalpflege), Alice Thomine (Institut national d'histoire de l'art, Paris), Pieter Uyttenhove (Universiteit Gent); chaired by Luc Verpoest (Raymond Lemaire International Centre for Conservation, K.U.Leuven).

At the ‘Living with History’ symposium a first session on ‘Heritage in Time of War’ was dealing with architectural historiography and its political use before and during World War I and World War II and on heritage preservation during these wars. Followed a substantial session on “Post-war

Preservation and Reconstruction Concepts and Practices. As these particular developments in conservation and restoration concepts and practices in se also have to be seen as a fully significant and fundamen-

tal contribution to the general evolution of contemporary architecture and urbanism, they should not be isolated from contemporary, post-war new building concepts and practices in the actual historical analysis of twentieth-century architecture. That is why this same session on ‘Post-war Preservation and Reconstruction Concepts and Practices’ indeed also had to include the study of postwar ‘modern architecture, eventually in direct confrontation with conservation and reconstruction of historic buildings proper, with the history of architecture as such. Both “Traditionalism after World War I ina Modernising World’ and ‘Late Modernism after World War II and the Rediscovery of Tradition, History, Heritage’ were discussed. Such a completed history of twentieth-century architecture and urbanism is indeed essential to further construct - again and again - our mémoire collective. This correct and comprehensive historical understanding of post-war conservation and reconstruction, of old buildings preserved and restored and new buildings and neighbourhoods built, could then lead to a correct and comprehensive definition and evaluation of post-war building as ‘post-war heritage’ the subject of a final session on ‘Evaluating Post-war Built Heritage Preservation and Reconstruction as Recent Heritage.

Proceedings cannot really reproduce the actual dynamics of a conference, lecturers exchanging information and comments from one lecture to another, adding information reacting on discussion comments. The final table of content of the proceedings is therefore different, restructuring and slightly simplifying the symposium program. Additional texts presented as papers at a research seminar during the symposium are also included: they consist of contributions dealing with ‘Reconstruction after World War I and World War II and its Ideological Dimensions, “Heritage and Modernity’ and ‘Heritage and War Today. For the publication the original conference papers have been mostly revised by the authors, after a critical review by the editors and a peer review group. All texts are published in the original French or English version. As to some lectures and papers presented at the symposium no final versions for publication have been received, which indeed we do very much regret.*

The book has two parts, one on ‘Heritage Reconstruction / La reconstruction du patrimoine’ and one on ‘Reconstruction Heritage / Le patrimoine de la reconstruction.

The first part - on “Heritage Reconstruction’ - is further divided into chapters on “Heritage in Time of War / Patrimoine en temps de guerre’ (texts by Marnix Beyen and Wolfgang Cortjaens) and on “The Institutional Framework / Le cadre institutionnel’ (Daniéle Voldman, Arlette Auduc, Patrice Gourbin) and a series of case studies as to World War I (Benoit Mihail, Nicolas Padiou, Anne Moignet-Gaultier) and World War II

(Céline Frémaux, Christine Blanchet-Vaque, Zsuzsanna Böröcz, Arjen Looyenga, Gabi Dolff-Bonekamper). The second part - on ‘Reconstruction Heritage’ - starts with case studies on World War I (Patrik Jaspers, Leen Meganck, Evert Vandeweghe) and on World War II (Fredie Floré, Ivana Lazanja, Gilles Ragot and Marieke Kuipers) and a concluding chapter on ‘Heritage, Reconstruction, Past and Future / Patrimoine, reconstruction, le passé et le futur’ on the future of war heritage (Jo Braeken, Emmanuel Doutriaux). Nicolas Bullock’s text “Valuing the Past, Seizing the Future. Reconciling Reconstruction and Conservation” is presented as a final envoi.