Architectural Monuments

Abstract

The essay is a previously unpublished manuscript that was included in a collection of Julius Posener’s writings entitled What Architecture might be: Newer Essays. Only published a year before the author’s death, the essay offers a personal memoir surveying the changing meaning of the term “architectural monument” over the course of his long life. The short text draws on Posener’s life in Berlin during the Weimar Republic until the rise of the Third Reich and again from the early 1970s onwards. The detailed arguments also reflect a deep acculturation with British ideas about the preservation of monuments. As a Jew, Posener was forced into exile in 1933. He lived and worked in the British empire (Palestine and Kuala Lumpur) and the UK, respectively.

Keywords:

• Julius Posener
• Paul Schultze-Naumburg
• Deutscher Werkbund
• architectural monument
• Heinrich Tessenow

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Julius Posener

Translated from German by Richard George Elliott

Originally published as “Baudenkmäler” in Julius Posener, Was Architektur sein kann: Neuere Aufsätze (Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag, 1995), 209–12.