What Makes a Good Monument? Theoretical Starting Points to the Heritological Interpretation of Commemorative Values in the City Space

Abstract

The initial research question in this paper is whether the predispositions for the evaluation of contemporary monumental culture in the city can be determined in the context of heritological research. In order to reach a possible answer, it is necessary to first determine the meaning of the word ‘monument’, and then present the dominant interpretations of what makes a ‘good’ monument. Thus, the paper starts from abstracted experiences concerning the place of monuments in the urban structure, then pays attention to issues of material, shape, and meaning, as well as multiple identities of monuments in the city. Finally, the basic theoretical starting points for the valorization of monuments are determined, which point out the relationship between commemorative values, monumental identities, and urban structure. The aim of this paper is to offer a synthesis of the heritological approach, which could then serve as a model for the analysis of contemporary monumental culture in the city. We can express this approach in the following way: the city is viewed as a heritage corpus, as a function of the relationship of material, form and meaning that is associated with its identities (conceptual, factual, and actual). Hence the initial answer to the question of what the city is through the prism of heritology: the city is a heritage corpus that evokes the maximum of memory in a minimum of space. What would then be a monument-in-a-city? The monument-in-the-city is a point of high commemorative value, an element that activates the memory potential of the urban structure. Thus, we get a basis for answering the question of what makes a ‘good’ monument: a good monument is one that satisfies the requirement of intensive commemorativeness (ie communicativeness of memory contents) in the city, while a ‘bad’ monument is what is insufficient in the mentioned sense.