The value of conserving vestiges of the past for future generations has become naturalized in our evaluation of urban change. Preservation of historic built environments is deemed a good thing, and those who stand in its way are considered mercenary, trading cultural value for short-term monetary return. Or so the argument goes. However, the line between old and new is increasingly hard to draw, as is the definition of cultural value. American historic preservation laws only apply to buildings and sites that are more than fifty years old: The 1950s have now reached “monumental” age, and attempts to preserve utilitarian vestiges from that era, such as filling stations and diners, are increasing. At the same time, efforts to introduce modern architecture into central cities or town centers are almost always doomed to failure. Clearly, we are a far cry from the preservation of the Greco-Roman ruins that first inspired the notion of historic monument in Europe, or the protection of the great public buildings and cultural institutions of the nineteenth century that has mobilized the U.S. public in favor of conservation. Moreover, as the notion of historic value has become more complex, it has come to include economic value. Heritage sells, as so many “ye old shoppes” will attest. How has this come to be?

To answer this question, let me celebrate the English-language arrival of a new book by Françoise Choay, The Invention of the Historic Monument. Her seminal work, The Rule and the Model, a theoretical analysis of urbanism that came out in France in 1980, was only translated and published by MIT Press in 1997. The success of this earlier book, one assumes, precipitated the translation by Lauren M. O’Connell of Choay’s latest work. Originally completed in 1992, it was awarded a Grand Prix National du Patrimoine by the French government in 1995. The book can be considered a new battle in the ongoing war Choay has been waging against linguistic pretension in the field of urbanism. Here, she attacks the theories and language of historic preservation and the notions of historic patrimony, or more familiarly in English, of national heritage, that imbue the discipline. The poorly translated and rather dry title does little justice to the richness of her treatment of the subject or of her premise, more accurately captured in a literal translation of the original title: “The Allegory of National Heritage.”

Choay is a woman with a mission. Her work is both eminently scholarly, yet discreetly engagée; exhaustively and meticulously researched, yet opinionated. This no doubt explains her appeal to architects and urbanists, in addition to the historians and cultural theorists who are her peers. She has dedicated her long and distinguished career at the University of Paris, Cornell University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to documenting the emergence of contemporary epistemology and urbanism theory through an thorough and systematic archaeology of its discourse. Originally rooted in the semiotic analysis of Roland Barthes, she has moved beyond this field in scope and time, developing a unique methodology that examines the epistemological and conceptual shifts in Western culture by analyzing texts from the Greco-Roman period to the Middle Ages, through the great shifts of modernity in the Renaissance and the destabilizing effects of the industrial revolution, to the complex and confusing present. Her research fuels an agenda: to unmask the false heroes of contemporary discourse on the city in order to support the emergence of a truly humanist and creative urbanism.

The great challenge posed to Western culture, shifting from a theocentric mindset to a scientific one, has been to construct a self-conscious identity that can inform what Choay calls the “competence to build.” She defines this as the capacity of modern individuals to engage in autonomous acts of origination and creation, different from the work of transmission of premodern society’s based on faith in and fidelity to custom. The collective act of emancipation that the Renaissance ushered in periodically chills the modern soul facing and struggling with its all too human imperfection. The core anxiety that accompanies the act of building, a fundamentally creative act, is therefore the trigger for a number of cultural defenses. Semiotic fetishes and semantic masks have been created over time to disguise this originating anxiety. Choay reveals their construction: the refuge in science on the one hand, as she argues in The Rule and the Model, or the comforting cult of the past, in this more recent book. Her premise is that the movement to preserve historic patrimony or national heritage is a subset of the larger discourse on urbanism and must be construed as an allegory of man’s situation at the dawn of the twenty-first century: “uncertain of the direction in which science and technics are leading him, seeking a path on which they might liberate him from space and time in order to be differently and more creatively immersed in them” (178).

Choay begins The Invention of the Historic Monument with an examination of the terminology of heritage conservation. The notion of historic monument is just that, a notion that cannot even be broken down into the meaning of its constituent parts. Choay borrows from Alois Riegl’s 1903 essay, “The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Its Origin,” to distinguish between the “monument” as a deliberate creation whose purpose is established a priori and the “historic monument,” which is “not initially desired and created as such…[but] constituted a posteriori by the converging gazes of the historian and the amateur, who choose it from the mass of existing edifices, of which monuments constitute only a small part.” She then traces the emerging notion of “antiquities” as precursors to historic monuments: from the infatuation of the Romans with Greek art and architecture, to the extraordinary conceptual challenge that the remains of Roman civilization scattered throughout medieval Europe posed to the early Christian mind. A significant shift occurs in the centuries of the Renaissance, of course, with the “triumph of concrete observation over oral and written tradition, of visual testimony over the authority of texts” (50). The erudits, collectors, artists, and architects who were fascinated by the vestiges of Roman civilization took on the centuries-long task of developing a descriptive language and illustrative techniques to assimilate them in contemporary culture. These will support the emergence of the notion of a historic monument in the nineteenth century, and the expansion of its meaning to include the Gothic, through the historicization of artistic production.

The radical transformations of the industrial city generalized the educated sensibility to the presence of these monuments and led to the formulation of a doctrine for their conservation, as well as the establishment of a bureaucracy, legislative framework, and professional class to carry out the work. This effort culminates in France with the 1913 Law for the Conservation of Historic Monuments, which was emulated throughout Europe. The temporal expansion that came to include the Gothic was also accompanied by a spatial expansion, as first John Ruskin and then Camillo Sitte introduced the concept of urban fabric, of the need to include in the recognition of the single historical artifact the domestic and modest buildings that surround it. We now hardly think twice about such a conception of urban setting, but it was not formalized legally until the 1962 French law promulgated by Cultural Minister Andre Malraux for the preservation of historic districts, a statute that served as a model for other countries.

This broadening of temporal and spatial scope introduces an ideological tension that has not been entirely resolved. Does the past serve as model in contrast to a rejected present, as Ruskin argued? Can it provide lessons that nonetheless have little application to contemporary conditions, as Sitte feared? Or as the lesser-known Gustavo Giovannoni proposed, can the fragments of the past retain use value as well as heritage value and be assimilated as distinctive elements of a larger contemporary urbanization? Choay examines the contradictory pull of creativity and fidelity in cultural production that is at the heart of the contemporary debates about the preservation of the historic monument and the bounding of the historical city, as well as the definition of architectural and urban heritage. Passions have been exacerbated by the most recent evolution of the concept of heritage that Choay describes: the evolution of the nineteenth-century cult of historical monuments and urban fabric into a late twentieth-century heritage industry.

They have also been fueled by the expansion of the corpus of works to be preserved to other cultures around the world through the globalization of Western values and references, of which UNESCO is emblematic. Along with new findings in archeology and architectural scholarship, this growth has produced a chronological and typological inflation that has produced what Choay calls the “Noah complex,” in which an example of any artifact from the past is deemed valuable. In addition, as Choay points out, the creation of a conservation bureaucracy and legislation are part of a democratization of knowledge that has expanded the public for these artifacts and sites, resulting in the phenomenon of mass cultural tourism. The use value of the monuments has been converted into economic value not only through the techniques of preservation, generally legitimate in their scholarship, but also through strategies of “enhancement” designed to educate and attract new consumers of history. The intellectual and spiritual value associated with patrimony finds itself in conflict with the desire to make historic sites profitable and to support associated commercial venues that contribute economic vitality to adjacent communities. Choay presents this latest development in the idea of heritage as a cautionary tale: The industrial and commercial exploitation of the historic heritage contains the seeds of a dehumanizing demobilization of creativity and cultural invention. The commodification of heritage speaks to the overarching capacity of the market economy to infiltrate all sites of human endeavor, creating what Choay calls a prosthetisized society in which the artificial operates in place of the real. More problematically, this commodification produces a denatured and impoverished reflection in the mirror that heritage represents for modern individuals.

As modern life has increasingly and more radically distanced itself from the rituals, routines, and settings of the past, exacerbating the anxiety surrounding the competence to build, the mirror of the past comes to reflect an increasingly heterogeneous and wide-ranging sweep of history. For Choay, this reflection is a deception, the result of a narcissistic principle at work that reveals the immaturity of the modern self. It bodes poorly for the very creative nature of cultural production and for the production of the built environment. The solution, she urges, is to draw aside the curtain of semantic confusion by a rigorous examination of our language and to “pass through the mirror” in order to assume a mature and unmediated engagement with the act of creation. Strong words to end on, but then, Choay has always set the bar very high for urbanism.