The invented ruins of 18th-century estates may have been intended to confer legitimacy on newly created landscapes but they are also, at least to modern eyes, pieces of fantasy. There are subtle shifts in emphasis and intent in all these examples. The book comes up to date with the parodic versions of public schools and their grounds that Harrow and Dulwich College, for example, have exported to China. ![]() ![]() And there are the recreations of whole parts of cities, such as Römerberg Square in Frankfurt, which were destroyed by bombing. There are also buildings, or bits of buildings, that have been reconstructed after suffering collapse, such as the campanile of St Mark’s Square in Venice. He begins with an account of Piltdown Man, a notorious archaeological hoax in the early 20th century, before discussing a number of examples of ‘fake heritage’ in which the line between authenticity and artifice is much harder to establish.ĭarlington considers the blatantly inauthentic faux-ruins of the 18th century as well as the educational copies of genuine artefacts in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s ‘cast courts’. In his recent book, Fake Heritage: Why We Rebuild Monuments (Yale University Press), John Darlington looks at historic reconstructions, copies and invented historical structures. To be authentically modern, one can’t recreate the past. Such a belief is clearly antithetical to reconstruction. ![]() The belief, central to modern architecture, that buildings should embody the spirit of the age assumes that they are the logical outcome of the contemporary forces that bring them into being. Authenticity in this sense is about a building’s relationship to time and place. That is unless one subscribes to the idea that architecture should be an authentic reflection of its times. The only thing that an architect actually makes is drawings and so, in a sense, a drawing can be built at any point and remain the same. Photo: Thomas Kienzle/APF via Getty Images (2020)Īrchitecture, however, is a collaborative art and buildings are the work of many hands. Row of half-timbered houses (‘Ostzeile’) on the eastern side of Römerberg Square, Frankfurt, reconstructed in the 1980s. Wasn’t modernism meant to be about shaking off our sentimental obsession with the past? What is modern about reconstructing a 50-year-old building? Yet even a faithful reconstruction is problematic. The ‘new’ Barcelona Pavilion, which was built in the 1980s, is a faithful replica that sits in exactly the same position in Montjuïc as the original, made of the same materials and finished to a high degree of craftsmanship. Despite, or perhaps because of this short lifespan, it came to assume a hugely important status in the history of modern architecture. Designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich, the pavilion lasted less than a year before it was dismantled. The Barcelona Pavilion, as it is commonly known, was originally constructed as the German Pavilion at the International Exposition of 1929 in Barcelona. The process of reconstruction is generally, but not always, reserved for pre-modern buildings. In recent decades a small number of significant ‘lost’ buildings, such as the Frauenkirche in Dresden and the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow, have been reconstructed, usually for political rather than aesthetic reasons. ![]() It can also apply to a building that has been substantially rebuilt or entirely reconstructed. The posthumous construction of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s House for an Art Lover, a prize-winning design from 1901 that was finally realised in the 1990s, is a case in point. In the case of a building completed after an architect’s death or without their blessing, it can mean the lack of the author’s guiding hand. Authenticity can imply a number of things. To speak of fakes in relation to buildings is to talk about a lack of authenticity rather than deliberate deceit. And for the most part they are highly visible, so their provenance is much harder to hide. What is a fake building? Unlike artworks, buildings aren’t faked for short-term or financial gain they cost too much and take too much time to build for that.
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