Johanna Blokker: End Times: Decay, Destruction and Demolition as Experience.

Preventing the loss of buildings as witnesses to history, as bearers of meaning and memory and as markers of identity is the raison d’être and core task of architectural conservation. Ultimately, however, loss is inevitable: the natural law of entropy dictates that all structures dissolve into disorder and must eventually disappear. It is also true that the transience of all things is precisely what makes them valuable and worth preserving in the first place. This tension between keeping and losing, this constant impulse to defy the very law on which our work is predicated, could be described as the inner driving force of architectural conservation, the perpetuum mobile at the heart of our thinking and practice.
The lecture will be taken as an opportunity to reflect on the fraught but necessary relationship between conservation and disintegration. In an attempt to “stay with the trouble“ that defines our discipline, three related but distinct categories of entropy or transience in the built environment will be evoked: decay, destruction and demolition. All are traditional fields of struggle for architectural conservation. What is their value as phenomena of experience? How do they affect us, and how do we, how could we or should we respond? What might be learned from a direct and sustained confrontation with the inescapable yet intolerable reality that they manifest?

Prof. Dr. Johanna Blokker is an historian of art and architecture and holds the Chair in Architectural Conservation at Brandenburg University of Technology in Cottbus. She completed her doctorate at New York University in 2012 with a study of reconstruction in Cologne after World War II, and how the city’s destroyed Romanesque churches were appropriated and mobilized in local processes of renegotiating the past. As a postdoc in Heritage Conservation in Bamberg, she went on to investigate the role of architecture and heritage in advancing the aims and interests of the United States during its occupation of Germany and the early years of the Cold War. This work was awarded Bamberg University‘s Habilitation Prize for 2019 and formed the basis for the current DFG-funded project “Buildings of the Allied Occupation: The heritage of democratization in West Germany’s built landscape, 1945-55”.

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