Design and Heritage: The Construction of Identity and Belonging [1 ed.] 9780367560263, 9780367540487, 9781003096146

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DESIGN AND HERITAGE

Design and Heritage provides the first extended study of heritage from the point of view of design history. Exploring the material objects and spaces that contribute to our experience of heritage, the volume also examines the processes and practices that shape them. Bringing together 18 case studies, written by authors from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Brazil, Norway, India, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, the book questions how design functions to produce heritage. Including provocative case studies of objects that reinterpret visual symbols of cultural identity and buildings and monuments that evoke feelings of national pride and historical memory, as well as landscapes embedded with trauma, contributors consider how we can work to develop adequate shared conceptual models of heritage and apply them to design and its histories. Exploring the distinction between tangible and intangible heritages, the chapters consider what these categories mean for design history and heritage. Finally, the book questions whether it might be possible to promote a truly equitable understanding of heritage that illuminates the social, cultural and economic roles of design. Design and Heritage demonstrates that design historical methods of inquiry contribute significantly to critical heritage studies. Academics, researchers and students engaged in the study of heritage, design history, material culture, folklore, art history, architectural history and social and cultural history will find much to interest them within the pages of the book. Grace Lees-Maffei is Professor of Design History and Programme Director for DHeritage, the Professional Doctorate in Heritage, at the University of Hertfordshire, UK, and Chair of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Design History. She researches the mediation of design, design discourse, domesticity, national identity and globalization in design and the interplay of design and heritage. Rebecca Houze is Professor of Art and Design History at Northern Illinois University, USA and General Editor of the Bloomsbury Design Library. Her research examines cultures of collection and display in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She writes about the built environment in Europe and North America with a focus on women designers, international exhibitions, and national parks.

KEY ISSUES IN CULTURAL HERITAGE Series Editors: William Logan and Laurajane Smith

The following list includes only the most-recent titles to publish within the series. A list of the full catalogue of titles is available at: https://www.routledge. com/Key-Issues-in-Cultural-Heritage/book-series/KICH Emotion, Affective Practices, and the Past in the Present Edited by Laurajane Smith, Margaret Wetherell and Gary Campbell Safeguarding Intangible Heritage Practices and Politics Edited by Natsuko Akagawa and Laurajane Smith World Heritage and Sustainable Development New Directions in World Heritage Management Edited by Peter Bille Larsen and William Logan Urban Heritage in Divided Cities Contested Pasts Edited by Mirjana Ristic and Sybille Frank Migrant, Multicultural and Diasporic Heritage Beyond and Between Borders Edited by Alexandra Dellios and Eureka Henrich Design and Heritage The Construction of Identity and Belonging Edited by Grace Lees-Maffei and Rebecca Houze

DESIGN AND HERITAGE The Construction of Identity and Belonging

Edited by Grace Lees-Maffei and Rebecca Houze

Cover image: Image courtesy of Royal Copenhagen / Image courtesy of the producer First published 2022 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 selection and editorial matter, Grace Lees-Maffei and Rebecca Houze; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Grace Lees-Maffei and Rebecca Houze to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-56026-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-54048-7 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-09614-6 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003096146 Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

CONTENTS

List of figures List of contributors Acknowledgements Series co-editors’ general foreword Design (history) and heritage (studies): an introduction Grace Lees-Maffei

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PART I

Monuments and memorials

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1 Wellington Monument and the uses of heritage: changing purpose, new meanings, multiple identities Barbara Wood

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2 Marginalised heritage and invisible history: the Silvertown War Memorial Louise Purbrick

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3 The India-Pakistan border as site for the production of national identity: heritage by design Suchitra Balasubrahmanyan

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Contents

PART II

Landscape, place and visitor experience design 4 Indigenous living [‘heritage’] designing tenets: Kulin ways of singing, designing, nurturing and nourishing terrains of identity Mandy Nicholson and David S. Jones

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5 Hopi House and the design of heritage at Grand Canyon National Park Rebecca Houze

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6 The design heritage of the Wintergardens at the Auckland Domain: spectacular enchantment Jacqueline Naismith

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7 Toward a typology of designed heritage in Southeast Ohio: mound, marker, mine Samuel Dodd

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PART III

Craft and industrial design

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8 Dürer, Goethe, and the poetics of Richard Riemerschmid’s modern wooden furniture Freyja Hartzell

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9 Royal Copenhagen vs. Porsgrund: negotiating ceramic design heritage in the age of copyright Peder Valle

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10 Lifestyle branding, nostalgia and Hong Kong’s contested heritage Daniel J. Huppatz

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PART IV

Textiles and dress 11 Reclaiming heritage narratives: reweaving the story of a royal wedding dress Zoë Hendon

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12 A Canadian maple leaf quilt: design history and natural heritage Vanessa Nicholas

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13 Design, politics, and Croatian folk heritage: gingerbread and lace Heidi A. Cook

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PART V

Graphic design, information design and typography

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14 South African heritage postcards: the same old story? Jeanne van Eeden

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15 Modernist graphics, new typography, and the design of identity in the first Czechoslovak Republic Benjamin Benus 16 Typography and lettering as design heritage in Brazil Priscila Farias

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PART VI

Digitisation and online user experience design 17 Recontextualizing Burmese colonial photographs as contemporary fashion accessories at Yangoods: ‘to revitalize Myanmar’s heritage’ Carmín Berchiolly 18 Designing absence at the Anne Frank House museum, Amsterdam, and the Secret Annex online: exhibition design, virtual reality, and historic preservation Sarah A. Lichtman Index

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FIGURES

1.1 Wellington Monument during renovations, Somerset, 2019 1.2 Statue of Edward Colston, Bristol, 2019 2.1 Silvertown War Memorial, Royal Wharf development, view of monument in a gentrified Docklands landscape, London, 2019 2.2 Silvertown War Memorial, Royal Wharf development, view of monument in its new location, London, 2019 3.1 Upper. The joint lowering of the f lags of India and Pakistan. Lower. Peace activists at the Attari-Wagah border on the midnight of 14–15 August 3.2 Upper. BSF soldiers describing their equipment to visitors at Nadabet Border Outpost. Lower. Beating Retreat ceremony at Nadabet Border Outpost 4.1 Keelup baluk clan Country seasonal movement patterns 5.1 Hopi House, Grand Canyon National Park 5.2 Ground-f loor sales rooms in Hopi House, showing display of baskets and Navajo blankets, c.1905 6.1 The Domain Wintergardens. Looking northwest from Auckland War Memorial Museum ca.1930 6.2 Display in the Cool House at the Auckland Domain Wintergardens, 1968 7.1 Mound Street in The Plains, Ohio, with view of the Hartman Mound and two informational markers positioned nearby 7.2 Excerpt from Brian Harnetty’s published score for Shawnee, Ohio (2016), which demonstrates the artist’s interlacing of sheet music, oral history transcripts, and archival photographs 8.1 Richard Riemerschmid, Machine Furniture: living room (spruce with brass fittings), installed at Third German Applied Arts Exhibition, Dresden, summer 1906

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62 78 84 87 99 103 112

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Figures

8.2 Richard Riemerschmid, Herrenzimmer installed at Third German Applied Arts Exhibition, Dresden, summer 1906 9.1 Left. Plate, Blue Fluted Mega, Royal Copenhagen, 2000. Right. Plate, Maxistrå, Porsgrunds Porselænsfabrik, 2004 9.2 Advertising photo showing Blue Fluted Mega combined with Blue Fluted 10.1 Shanghai Tang storefront, Pedder Building, Pedder Street, Hong Kong, 18 November 2006 10.2 “Bing Sutt Corner” at Starbucks on Duddell Street, Hong Kong, 20 June 2009 11.1 The bride’s procession in St. James’s Palace, 1893 11.2 One of a series of sketch designs for silk brocades featuring a vertical border of roses and thistles, 1893 12.1 Betsy Adams Dodge, maple leaf quilt (c. 1875), cotton, 202 × 156 cm. Collection of the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Accession #Q85-003 13.1 Bruketa&Žinić&Grey, National Folk Dance Ensemble of Croatia LADO performance brochure, 2013 13.2 Maksimilijan Vanka and Zdenka Sertić, Poster for the X. Zagreb Trade Exhibition, 1928 14.1 ‘Folk Dancers at the Residence of the State President, Pretoria’ 14.2 ‘Welcome to Africa’ postcard 15.1 Cover of Little Homeland Reader (Prague: Státní nakladatelství, 1935) 15.2 ‘Population by Nationality’, in Little Homeland Reader (Prague: Státní nakladatelství, 1935), 17 16.1 Upper. Wood type, the University of São Paulo School of Architecture and Urbanism letterpress printing shop. Lower. Page of a Brazilian type specimen, in Especimen dos Typos de Phantasia Existentes nas Officinas da Imprensa Official, São Paulo, 1931 16.2 Upper. Old hand-painted ad revealed after the collapse of an adjacent building in São Paulo. Lower left. Architectonic epigraph, damaged during building façade renovation in São Paulo. Lower right. Lettering on boat in Belém 17.1 Upper. Felice Beato, title unknown, c.1890s. Lower. Yangoods, ‘Princess’ handbag 17.2 Left. Photographer unknown, ‘Burmese Dancing Girl’, c.1900. Right. Yangoods, ‘Enchantress’ collection hand clutch 18.1 The Anne Frank House, showing the front of the former warehouse at 263 Prinsengracht, Amsterdam, Netherlands, with displays designed by Dagmar von Wilcken 18.2 Anne Frank’s empty room in the Secret Annex displaying her picture postcards

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186 199 200 220 224 234 238

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CONTRIBUTORS

Suchitra Balasubrahmanyan is an independent scholar and visiting professor of

design based in New Delhi and Ahmedabad. Her research interests centre on the intersections between craft, design and nationalism in India against the backdrop of decolonization and Cold War diplomacy. She has written on the impact of the Bauhaus on design education in India and on the relationship between religion, nationalism and design. Benjamin Benus is Associate Professor of Art and Design History at Loyola

University in New Orleans. He specializes in the history of twentieth-century graphic art and design, with a focus on Central Europe in the years between the world wars. His research examines connections between avant-garde art, scientific illustration and data visualization during this period. Carmín Berchiolly is Program Coordinator at Northern Illinois University’s

Center for Burma Studies, where she works closely with the Burma Art Collection, one of the most comprehensive collections of Burmese Art outside of Myanmar. She is one of the editorial assistants to The Journal of Burma Studies. Her research examines the history of photography in Burma/Myanmar. Heidi A. Cook is Assistant Professor of Art History and Director of the Univer-

sity Art Gallery at Truman State University. She specializes in the art, design, architecture and museum history of modern Central Europe. Her work explores visual constructions of nationalisms and the relationship of tradition to modernity and modernism. Samuel Dodd is Director of the Ohio Valley Center for Collaborative Arts and Assistant Professor of Instruction in Art History at Ohio University. His research

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has been published in the Journal of Design History, Journal of Architectural Education, Art Journal and Design Issues. Priscila Farias is Associate Professor in the School of Architecture and Urban-

ism at the University of São Paulo (FAU USP), Brazil, where she coordinates the Visual Design Research Lab (LabVisual), and a visiting scholar in American and European universities. She is the author of various articles and books on typography, graphic design and design history. Freyja Hartzell is Assistant Professor of Modern Design History, Architecture

and Art at Bard Graduate Center in New York City. She specializes in European topics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a focus on German design and architecture from the late nineteenth century to World War II. Zoë Hendon is Head of Collections at the Museum of Domestic Design and

Architecture, (MoDA) Middlesex University. Her interests include the Silver Studio Collection, both as historic artefact and as resource for current teaching and research. Rebecca Houze is Professor of Art and Design History at Northern Illinois Uni-

versity and General Editor of the Bloomsbury Design Library. Her research examines cultures of collection and display in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She writes about the built environment in Europe and North America, with a focus on women designers, international exhibitions, and national parks. Daniel J. Huppatz is Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture and

Industrial Design, Swinburne University, Melbourne. His books include a fourvolume edited collection, Design: Critical and Primary Sources (Bloomsbury, 2016), Modern Asian Design (Bloomsbury, 2018) and Design: The Key Concepts (Bloomsbury, 2019). Huppatz is currently on the editorial board of the Journal of Design History and an editorial advisor for the Bloomsbury Design Library. David S. Jones oversees Strategic Planning and Urban Design for the Wadawur-

rung Traditional Owners Aboriginal Corporation and has been involved in teaching and researching Australian cultural landscapes, Indigenous landscapes and knowledge systems and regional planning and is also Professor (Research) at University, Adjunct Professor at University of Canberra, and Adjunct Professor at Griffith University. Grace Lees-Maffei is Professor of Design History and Programme Director for

DHeritage, the Professional Doctorate in Heritage, at the University of Hertfordshire (UK) and Chair of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Design History. She researches the mediation of design, design discourse, domesticity, national identity and globalization in design and the interplay of design and heritage.

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Contributors

Sarah A. Lichtman is Assistant Professor of Design History at Parsons School of

Design (The New School), where she directs the masters program in the history of design and curatorial studies. She is co-editor of Interiors Stage and Screen: From Country Houses to Cosmic Heterotopias (Bloomsbury, 2021) and the managing editor of the Journal of Design History. Jacqueline Naismith is Senior Lecturer, Design Theory and Practice, at the

School of Design Nga Pae Mahutonga, College of Creative Arts Toi Rauwharangi at Massey University in Wellington, New Zealand. Her research is concerned with the role of design practices in public place making, with a particular focus on histories of the built and natural environments of parks in New Zealand. Vanessa Nicholas is a postdoctoral fellow at Concordia University. Her research interest is nineteenth-century visual and material culture, particularly the environmental history of Canadian decorative arts and interiors. Mandy Nicholson is a Wurundjeri woman, archaeologist, dancer and linguist,

undertaking doctoral studies investigating Gunditjmara Country as to ‘Being On Country Off Country’ as part of an Australian Research Council–funded project through Monash University. Louise Purbrick is Principle Lecturer in Design History at the University of Brighton School of Humanities. She works on sites of political and ecological violence as well as the material culture of everyday life. Her work on the legacies of mining colonialism is part of the Traces of Nitrate project, www. tracesofnitrate.org. Peder Valle is a doctoral research fellow at the University of Oslo, Department

of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas. His work explores the relation of modern consumer goods to notions of heritage and national identity, as well as the history and museology of design museums. He is a former employee of the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design in Oslo and lectures on design history at the Norwegian National Academy of the Arts. Jeanne van Eeden is Professor Emerita in Visual Culture in the Department of

Visual Arts, University of Pretoria. She taught art history and visual culture at the University of Pretoria (1985 and 2017). She co-edited South African Visual Culture (2005) and was editor of the journal Image & Text. Barbara Wood is a curatorial practitioner. Originally an archaeologist, she has worked in national, local and community museums; taught museum studies, public history and archaeology; and led projects in museums, heritage and arts. Her doctoral research addresses the changing nature of power in heritage.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The editors would like to thank the organizers and audiences of two conferences at which some of the work in this book was first shared: the College Art Association annual conference, New York, January 2019, and the Association of Critical Heritage Studies conference, ‘Heritage Futures’, University College London, August 2020. We are grateful to the Design History Society and the Design Museum, London, for their financial and in-kind support of a symposium at the Museum in January 2020. We would also like to thank Heidi Lowther and Kangan Gupta at Routledge, and Laurajane Smith and William Logan.

SERIES CO-EDITORS’ GENERAL FOREWORD

This series of edited books was conceived as a platform for disseminating innovative research in heritage studies around specific research themes. The series aims to help identify and set agendas in new research areas in heritage studies. It showcases areas and issues often overlooked in more mainstream research that has tended to narrowly focus on technical heritage management and preservation issues. While challenging the traditional research focus, the series, nonetheless, is concerned with critical and ref lective engagements with the practical and policy applications of research. With the development of the critical heritage studies movement the ability to question and interrogate the nature of heritage and the social and political consequences it has on policy and practice and on peoples’ lived experiences has become increasingly important. Interest in heritage preservation is never apolitical and simply technical, the developing field continues to explore ‘heritage’ as a social and political construct encompassing all those places, artefacts and cultural expressions inherited from the past which, because they are seen to ref lect and validate our identity as nations, communities, families and even individuals, are worthy of some form of respect and protection. What is named as ‘heritage’ results from a selection process; a process that intersects with the practices of remembering and forgetting, commemoration, leisure and tourism, and the development and expression of historical consciousness. This selection can often be ‘top down’ and regulated by experts, policy and legislation, but it is equally a process ‘from below’ that can challenge or ignore established forms of heritage making and selection and thus foster new ways of thinking about heritage and its relationship to the past and present. Heritage has a complex relationship with both the past and present, and can be used in both positive and negative ways. For example, it may be used to foster respect for cultural and social diversity, provide community and individual selfesteem, and challenge prejudice and misrecognition. Equally it may be used to

Series co-editors’ general foreword xv

foster exclusion, and the maintenance of misrecognition and prejudice, or it can be used to promote undemocratic political agendas and rally people against their neighbours in civil and international wars, ethnic cleansing and genocide. Heritage is highly political and entwined with contemporary struggles over social justice and equity and is, as a consequence, integral to the setting and reimagining of aspirations for the future. Gönül Bozoğlu and Laurajane Smith

DESIGN (HISTORY) AND HERITAGE (STUDIES) An introduction Grace Lees-Maffei

Introduction This book brings together design and heritage, design history and heritage studies to reveal the common ground shared by these fields. The introductory chapter begins with the contexts for the book – the development of design history and critical heritage studies – and explores the intersections of these fields. It then introduces the contribution and structure of the book, the chapters and links between them. Alternative reading routes through the material focused on chronology and geography are outlined, as are the book’s treatments of tangible/intangible cultural heritage and ownership and belonging. Limitations are considered in relation to each of these topics. The introduction concludes by summarizing the project of Design and Heritage as demonstrating that heritage is designed, design produces heritage and design has a heritage.

Contexts for design and heritage Heritage and design are each complex phenomena, encompassing practices as well as material cultures. Part of this complexity derives from the ways in which heritage is understood in different contexts (Harrison 2009a). Heritage means different things to those working in different parts of the heritage sector, from national collections to entertainment attractions, for example. Heritage is also used differently in academic fields of study, from heritage studies to public, social and cultural histories; design history and material culture studies; business studies; tourism; law; and education. Further complexity derives from the ways in which heritage is understood in different regions, as we shall see. Like archaeologists, curators, historians and educators, design historians work with heritage. Heritage is designed, from artefacts and buildings, sites and landscapes to rituals DOI: 10.4324/9781003096146-1

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and traditions. And yet, to date, design historians have engaged remarkably little with heritage studies, and heritage studies practitioners have not substantially called on, or contributed to, design history. Design and Heritage: The Construction of Identity and Belonging brings design and heritage, design history and heritage studies, together in the first extended study of heritage from the vantage point of design history. Eighteen chapters explore some of the material objects, spaces and places that contribute to our experiences of heritage(s) and the processes and practices that shape them. We ask how design functions to produce heritage and what heritage means for design and show how design history and heritage studies inform one another in mutually beneficial ways. This book demonstrates how design history brings to the discourse surrounding heritage insights into the various ways in which heritage itself is designed.

Design and design history Design is an almost inconceivably large category of human endeavour. As true wilderness has been eroded, an entirely designed world has emerged in which even ostensibly untouched landscapes are the result of design decisions. In many languages, including those spoken in some of the places discussed in this book, design is an imported word (Fujita 2007–9; Fujita 2008). Design is a verb as well as a noun: it is a group of practices, as well as the results of those practices. John Heskett wrote ‘Design is when designers design a design to produce a design’ (Heskett 2001, 18). To design is to decide, to plan; therefore, the entire built and natural environments, and the behaviours conducted within them, are designed. Design can be a system, service or behaviour, from transport infrastructures to employee codes of conduct (see, for instance, Brody 2016). John A. Walker (1989) distinguished between design history and the history of design, with the former constituting the subject of study for the latter. Design developed as a distinct practice with the advent of industrialization and mass manufacture, which separated making and designing. Design historians have therefore tended to focus their analysis on the industrial period (Lees-Maffei and Houze 2010, 3, 13). Design history developed as an academic subject following the UK’s ‘Coldstream Reports’ of 1960 and 1970. Among other higher education reforms mandated was the need for art college programmes seeking degree status to deliver subject-specific contextual studies. Design students needed design history, therefore. Design history gained recognition following a meeting of interested researchers at the UK Association of Art Historians annual conference in 1977. This genesis meant that UK design history was first housed largely in the polytechnics (now post-1992 universities), though today it is taught and researched internationally (Huppatz and Lees-Maffei 2013). Design history has developed along the lines of a ‘Production-ConsumptionMediation Paradigm’ ( Lees-Maffei 2009) in which the field’s initial concern in the 1970s and early 1980s to promote the work of a canon of modernist designers,

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under the inf luence of Pevsner’s Pioneers of the Modern Movement (1936, 1949, 1960, 1975), ceded in the later 1980s and 1990s to the broader inf luences of cultural studies (the UK Birmingham School particularly) and social, cultural and economic histories inf luenced by Marxist theory and feminist and gender studies. These wider contextual inf luences produced a body of work concerned with the consumption of design, and in the current century, design historians have increasingly interrogated the mediation of design. Just as design extends across every sphere of human activity, so design history is unusually interdisciplinary. As a relatively small academic field of study, design history draws knowledge and understanding from across the arts, humanities, social sciences and history of science to understand the role of design, past, present and future. Because design history has concerned itself with a definition of design based on its separation from industrial manufacture, so most design histories have, until recently, focused on Western industrialized nations. Responding to critiques of this bias, design historians have worked, in the past two decades, to internationalize the field with ambitious geographically inclusive titles such Global Design History (Adamson, Riello, and Teasley, eds. 2011), World History of Design (Margolin 2015) and Designing Worlds: National Design Histories in an Age of Globalization (Fallan and Lees-Maffei, eds. 2016). The globalization of design history requires design historians to engage with areas of practice that were excluded from the narrower project of Western design history. Design, as both practice and product, is conditioned by geography, and This is as true of designs intended to transcend local, regional or national contexts to pursue an international agenda, as it is of vernacular design, which is defined in part by the use of local materials, practices, markets and networks. (Lees-Maffei and Houze 2010, 467) Heritage studies and, more recently, critical heritage studies, has interrogated the local, regional, national and international contexts in which a westernized authorized heritage discourse (AHD) and intangible cultural heritage (ICH) are situated and understood (Smith 2006a; Smith and Akagawa 2008, 31; UNESCO 2018), and therefore engagement across and between these fields can bring fresh approaches to understanding design in the global context. Focusing on the intersection of design and heritage complicates the idea of the designer as a product of modernity and the process of professionalization in productive ways. Many instances of heritage design involve co-design with communities. See, for instance, the role of local community members in reinscribing meanings for the Wellington Monument in Barbara Wood’s chapter in this book, and the chapter by Mandy Nicholson and David S. Jones on how design practice can incorporate indigenous knowledge and experience. Likewise, heritage studies can benefit the ways in which design historians examine demotic design and its ubiquity and embeddedness in everyday life as practice and product, along with

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an array of sister fields, including art history, material culture studies, science and technology studies and popular culture studies.

Critical heritage studies Organizations engaged with heritage, notably UNESCO, understand it as including both ‘World Heritage’ sites of outstanding universal value and ICH, meaning traditions with an ongoing presence in contemporary life. As material culture, landscape and practice, heritage is apparently all encompassing, and yet UNESCO, like other heritage organizations and their critics, is aware of the need to implement much more inclusive strategies to overcome Eurocentric and elitist legacies and pervasive tendencies (UNESCO 2008; Smith and Akagawa 2008). It is useful brief ly to consider the trajectories of heritage studies and critical heritage studies alongside the development of design history. Just as design extends over every area of life, so heritage is similarly extensive, meaning that, like design history, heritage studies exists at the interface of a number of fields with related interests. Heritage studies initially developed from the established fields of archaeology, history, art history, the history of architecture and newer fields such as tourism studies (MacCannell 1976; Urry 1990), and it has developed through engagement with a widening range of fields. Heritage studies in the United Kingdom has benefitted from a ‘heritage debate’ initiated by Patrick Wright in his On Living in an Old Country (1985) in the same year that David Lowenthal’s The Past Is a Foreign Country appeared (1985). The debate was extended by Robert Hewison’s The Heritage Industry (1987).1 These critiques of the politicized uses of heritage in contemporary British and US society showed heritage, and national identity, to be constructed and refashioned in response to modernity, progress, industrialization, deindustrialization, globalization, increased mobility and immigration (Harrison 2013). While the heritage debate called attention to some ways in which heritage is ideological and incorporated into power negotiations on the national scale, it also prompted revisionism in the identification, communication and management of heritage internationally. UNESCO’s World Heritage List was criticized for operating a Eurocentric and elitist standard of outstanding universal value in Laurajane Smith’s critique of the Westernized AHD (Smith 2006a, 11). UNESCO’s ICH list, introduced in 2003 (UNESCO 2018), has not succeeded in redressing the inequalities of the World Heritage listing (Smith and Akagawa 2009; Akagawa and Smith 2018; Blake and Lixinski 2020). This work shows that much remains to be done in the heritage field to achieve a truly equitable, globally sensitive heritage practice, and it underpins an important shift from heritage studies to critical heritage studies. Critical heritage studies, a term used by Harrison (2009a), developed as a field through conversations during the 2010s between researchers working in Australia, Sweden and the United Kingdom. They resulted in a preliminary

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manifesto circulated at the launch conference of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies at the University of Gothenberg, Sweden in 2012. The manifesto proposed a politicized practice of questioning existing heritage studies methodology, increased dialogue with communities, particularly those that have been marginalized and excluded, and engagement with non-Western cultural heritage traditions. This expanded arena for the field requires an expanded understanding of data and their qualitative analysis and multi- and interdisciplinary approaches including ‘sociology, anthropology, political science’ and other social sciences and ‘The integration of heritage and museum studies with studies of memory, public history, community, tourism, planning and development’ (Association of Critical Heritage Studies 2012). In addition to some shared roots in twentieth-century intellectual history, then, heritage studies and design history have in common three factors which directly underpin this book. First, the drive to diversify heritage studies methodologically and inter- and multi-disciplinarily mirrors methods and approaches which have always characterized design history. Second, the geo-cultural expansion of the heritage studies field, by engaging more profoundly with nonWestern heritage and communities, ref lects the efforts to internationalize or globalize design history which have taken place since the 1990s and throughout the current century. Third, heritage studies’ development from its roots in archaeology, in which material remains are signs of past societies, through the critique of AHD, recognition of ICH and analyses of these practices, presents a timely exemplar for design historians who are increasingly concerned with the discourses that mediate design as well as with design itself. Rodney Harrison has criticized the discursive turn in critical heritage studies for not always producing accounts that adequately theorize the role of material ‘things’ in the complex set of relationships in which human and non-human agents, heritage objects, places, and practices are bound together in contemporary worlds’ and, furthermore, the ways in which ‘heritage objects, places and practices .  .  . are themselves active players in assembling presents, in composing worlds, and in designing futures. (2018, 1369; also Harrison 2013) Design and Heritage responds to Harrison’s call for ‘a distinctive “materialdiscursive” approach to heritage studies’ (2018, 1379) by focusing specifically and explicitly on design as a practice constitutive of heritage.

Intersections between design history and heritage studies This book addresses a lack of existing studies of the relationship between design (history) and heritage (studies). The leading journals on design explore heritage in isolated studies (e.g. Stanfield 1992; Bártolo 2021; see also Alaca 2017)

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rather than in focused, concerted outputs. Similarly, design is recognized but also somewhat subsumed in heritage-focused journals, with some valuable exceptions (e.g. Jeremiah 2003; Avery 2009; Leach 2016; Wesener 2017). However, a useful number of anthologies and collections aim to represent each of these fields, and they can be read with their intersection in mind. Heritage studies anthologies include some discussions of design, but they do not explicitly define it as such. Smith’s four-volume collection of key texts for cultural heritage studies (2006b) includes essays by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, John Ruskin, William Morris and Alois Riegl, theorists whose ideas are likewise at the foundation of design history. This shared ancestry between design history and heritage studies underpins the need for this current book to address the fields together and chart their mutual inf luence. Michelle L. Stefano, Peter Davis and Gerard Corsane’s 2012 edited book Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage deals with the preservation of intangible practices and traditions that form an important aspect of cultural heritage in diverse geographical contexts such as Dayak ikat weaving in Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo) and what it means to be ‘Dutch’ in today’s multicultural Netherlands. Recent design historical scholarship has explored similar topics: Falls and Smith (2011) examine transnational artisan partnerships (TAPs) producing ikat in Cambodia, while Meroz (2016) interrogates Dutch design as a carrier of Dutch identity. These specific examples demonstrate how design history and critical heritage studies share subject matter as well as broader concerns. Matthew Rampley’s edited collection Heritage, Ideology, and Identity in Central and Eastern Europe (2012) sees design historians and critical heritage studies practitioners working together to examine the establishment and management of monuments and memorials, engaging both fine art, in the form of public sculpture, and design, in the production of public heritage spaces. Also published in 2012, a museum studies collection, Narrating Objects, Collecting Stories ( Dudley et al 2012), has much to offer design historians and heritage studies practitioners in terms of object-focused studies and for reasons of space must stand here for its field. In Heritage: Critical Approaches, Rodney Harrison (2013) promotes an inclusive definition of heritage attentive to its ubiquity as a symptom of modernity. The chronology offered by the book mirrors developments in design: the recognition of heritage in Western societies was coterminous with industrialization, during which design emerged as a discrete activity. The post-1970 heritage boom coincided with the development of design history as a field, and the globalization of the subject and attention to Indigenous and non-Western examples in the current century is common to both fields. Lynn Meskell’s Global Heritage: A Reader (2015) is situated in anthropology and is concerned with diversity and the ethical dimensions of heritage practices. Although Meskell’s contributors do not necessarily describe their objects of study as ‘design’, they examine multiple aspects of design, from urban planning to museums, transport and souvenirs. For instance, Noel B. Balazar and Yujie Zhu interrogate the material culture of ‘Heritage and Tourism’ at UNESCO World Heritage sites around the globe. William Logan,

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Máiréad Nic Craith and Ullrich Kockel’s Companion to Heritage Studies (2016) contains a helpful section on ‘Expanding Heritage’, and some chapters get near the relationship between design (history) and heritage (studies), such as ‘Heritage in an Expanded Field: Reconstructing Bridge-ness in Mostar’ by Andrea Connor and ‘Re-Building Heritage: Integrating Tangible and Intangible’ by Máiréad Nic Craith and Ullrich Kockel, but, again, neither design nor material culture is foregrounded as such. In Safeguarding Intangible Heritage: Practices and Politics, Natsuko Akagawa and Smith (2018) focus on ICH policies and politics while also addressing topics of interest to design historians, such as Jakub Majewski’s investigation of how video game technology may be used to preserve ICH. Published in the same year, Adriana Campelo, Laura Reynolds, Adam Lindgreen and Michael Beverland’s edited collection, Cultural Heritage, surveys the titular field and issues of concern to design historians, including cultural value, urban planning, Olympic design, industrial heritage and national parks, some of which are also addressed in this book, for instance, in the chapters by Barbara Wood, Louise Purbrick, Samuel Dodd and Rebecca Houze. From the design of textbooks and websites for school curricula, to museums and pilgrimage sites, to ephemeral rituals, such as the one described by Margo Shea in ‘Troubling Heritage: Intimate Pasts and Public Memories at Derry/ Londonderry’s “Temple”’ (in Smith, Wetherell, and Campbell 2018), the spaces and places of heritage exist within the designed world. But many heritage studies practitioners do not use the terminology of design or even necessarily recognize their subject matter as design. Harrison and Breithoff ’s 2017 summary of the field of the archaeology of the contemporary world (see also Harrison and Schofield 2010) mentions design only once. Although heritage studies might seem to have much in common with design history, especially design history oriented to heritage, its distinguishing feature is a concern for the process and products of design. Our book asks how experiences of heritage are designed, explicitly, and provides a range of answers. Similarly, design history, as represented by key anthologies in the field (see Lees-Maffei and Huppatz 2017), often addresses heritage but not under the heritage studies or critical heritage studies banners. Fiona Candlin and Raiford Guins’ The Object Reader (2009) does not address ‘heritage’ as a thematic category, but it does probe personal relationships with the objects which populate our lives. We respond by asking: how might we understand these objects differently through the lens of heritage? and we provide some answers. Hazel Clark and David Brody’s Design Studies: A Reader (2009) helps to define one of design history’s sister fields, design studies. It examines some designed objects, such as the London Tube Map and Tokyo’s Shinkansen (bullet train), that are today so closely associated with their places of origin that they have become visual signifiers of cultural heritage. Ben Highmore’s The Design Culture Reader (2009) includes, among an eclectic range of texts, an excerpt from Svetlana Boym’s The Future of Nostalgia (2001), which is located at the intersection of design history

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and heritage studies, though written from the point of view of comparative literature and personal memoir. How do designed things/objects help us to access memory and a sense of belonging? How do designed fashions (‘The Zoot-Suit and Style Warfare’) or buildings (‘Gendered Spaces in Colonial Algiers’) communicate shared cultural identities and experiences of belonging or oppression? Examining design through the lens of heritage, and vice versa, informs timely conversations about global spaces, communities, inclusion and exclusion. The Design History Reader ( Lees-Maffei and Houze 2010) explores the histories of industrialization and the design education system that emerged in the late nineteenth century as forms of heritage, both celebrated and interrogated for their link to empire and colonialism. This collection begins with Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s ‘An Indian Basket, Providence, Rhode Island, 1676’, in which the history of design in the United States is linked to a history of settlement and violence. The things we make, use, collect, preserve and give as gifts connect us to larger narratives of encounter, conf lict and settlement, which shape cultural heritage. By drawing on critical heritage studies, design and its histories can better address these challenging issues, and vice versa. Clive Edwards’ The Bloomsbury Encyclopaedia of Design (2016) includes, among almost 1800 entries, ‘heritage’, ‘authenticity’, ‘cultural capital’, ‘power’ and more focused examples, for instance, of industrial heritage, such as ‘Coalbrookdale’. The last of Daniel J. Huppatz’s four-volume Design: Critical and Primary Sources (2016) examines ‘Development, Globalization, Sustainability’, through texts such as Ashoke Chatterjee’s ‘Design in India: The Experience of Tradition’. Chatterjee explores the postcolonial history of design in a country where local craft traditions played an important role in the economic and political life of the nation as well as in the shared experience of cultural heritage (see the chapter by Suchitra Balasubrahmanyan in this book for more on how the state uses design heritage). This brief survey has demonstrated that heritage studies and design history share certain developmental conditions, subject matter and approaches. Therefore, it is no surprise that some of the texts discussed here could sit interchangeably in heritage studies and design history collections. In many instances, these two fields offer different, but related, lenses on similar material. Although scholars of both heritage and design ask connected questions, they have not explicitly acknowledged one another much to date. This book brings together the two fields of inquiry, each with its rich history and methodology.

The contribution of this book This book makes an original contribution by examining design as heritage, and heritage as design, in ways informed by both design history and critical heritage studies. The chapters examine design (history) and heritage (studies) through engagement with at least three overlapping and mutually informative tensions that are drawn out here: (1) the need for mutual understanding based on shared definitions and concepts of design and heritage, (2) a problematized

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conception of the intersection of design with tangible and intangible cultural heritage and (3) the need for critical analysis of the politics of design and heritage. The authors hail from a variety of disciplinary contexts, including, in addition to design history and design practice, the history of architecture and curatorial roles in the heritage sector. The chapters combine object analysis, close reading and contextual understanding employed by design historians with the practicebased empirical research of heritage studies. To make clear how design constructs heritage, the chapters are organized by different types of design. Each provides answers to the book’s core question of how heritage is designed, and each shows how and what design historical methods of inquiry contribute to critical heritage studies. Part I, Monuments and Memorials, explores designed expressions of cultural heritage in the built environment, politicized spaces and performance. In Chapter 1, Barbara Wood draws on her experience as a curator working for the National Trust (England, Wales and Northern Ireland) to examine the Wellington Monument in Somerset from a practitioner’s point of view. Faced with expensive repairs in 2007 and forced to restrict access to the monument, the National Trust consulted with local communities to understand what it means to them today. Wood shows how the physical and intellectual ownership of heritage material can change over time, accommodating new meanings that may diverge from its originally intended ones. Wood’s chapter compares productively with activist and academic Louise Purbrick’s analysis of the memorial for the 1917 Silvertown Explosion at Brunner Mund munitions factory in East London, which killed 73 people. Purbrick mines the transatlantic networks which underpinned the explosion, as the extraction and export of mineral wealth in the Atacama Desert in Chile, by engancheros – gang labour from Chile, Bolivia and Peru – accumulated profit in the City of London. She traces the impact of gentrification on the memorial as it is displaced to facilitate real estate development, adding to existing studies of urban heritage and gentrification (Labadi and Logan 2015; Taylor and Lennon 2012), monuments and the heritage of labour (Smith, Shackel, and Campbell 2011). The local historical landscape of this East London site was, and is, a site of the heritage of global capital (see Labadi and Long 2010) and of the absences and erasure of industrial Silvertown. Closing Part I, Suchitra Balasubrahmanyan considers how heritage is produced by the state through design, using the example of the ceremonies which take place on the India-Pakistan border to commemorate partition in 1947. Choreographed military rituals, invented ceremonies and curated didactic events produce national heritage through the design of border festivities, spectatorship and tourism. Although the examples she analyses lack a clearly defined designer in the conventional sense, Balasubrahmanyan shows design to be an instrumental medium in debates about what constitutes heritage, whose heritage it is and how it should be presented (on folk tradition and performance, see also the chapter by Heidi A. Cook in this book; Smith and Akagawa 2008; Akagawa and Smith 2018).

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Part II, Landscape, Place and Visitor Experience Design, examines how the physical and spatial design of cultural sites mediate the tourist’s feeling of connection to constructed narratives of cultural heritage, using two examples from Australasia and two from the United States. Mandy Nicholson and David S. Jones explain how designing and constructing identity and belonging in First Nation’s (Aboriginal) Australia involves multi-genre modes of navigating and empowering respectful Indigenous design, which has been substantially stif led by Australian contemporary history and colonization. Their study of the Mirambeek Murrup/North Gardens project on Wadawurrung Country engages issues of sovereignty, dispossession and dislocation, biological and forceful invasion as well as respect, identity, Country, language and relational ontologies. It forms a rich comparison, therefore, with Jacqueline Naismith’s analysis of the Wintergardens (1919–31) inserted into the volcanic terrain of the Māori Pukekawa site as a twentieth-century urban park for both botanical and social display. The Wintergardens are the product of the interwoven histories of New Zealand and Britain and a Category 1 Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga listed public leisure space. Naismith shows how the architecture mediates specific kinds of social interaction and intensifies relationships between people and plants in a process she terms ‘spectacular enchantment’. Between these two chapters, Rebecca Houze considers another instance of colonization. When ancient sites in what is now the United States, such as those at Chaco Canyon in New Mexico and Mesa Verde in Colorado, were developed as national monuments and later as parks by the US Department of the Interior, their ancestral Puebloan ruins and fragments of material culture were incorporated into a new narrative of United States national identity. The Hopi House is a living museum and curio shop designed in 1905 by architect Mary Colter and modelled on the ancient Puebloan architecture at Old Oraibi, a Hopi village in Navajo County, Arizona, dating to the ninth century CE. Houze raises questions about design, travel, tourism, heritage, national identity, cultural appropriation and preservation, such as how the US National Park Service’s efforts to express traces of the land’s indigenous past in the design of its parks can be reconciled with the US government’s killing and forceful removal of native peoples from their hereditary lands in the nineteenth century. In the final chapter of Part II, Samuel Dodd explores Southeast Ohio. Formerly a prosperous industrial corridor in the United States, the region contains historical sites associated with Indigenous, Black and white settlements and the manufacture of coal, iron, ceramics and other extractive industries. Dodd contributes to understanding of the role of trauma in how heritage is constructed and maintained (see also Gegner and Ziino 2011; Logan and Reeves 2008) in his discussion of the memorialization of war. Dodd positions his approach as one of thickening a history that is otherwise thinned by heritage as he interrogates the heritage claims made in and for the region. Part III, Craft and Industrial Design, examines how German wooden furniture, Scandinavian ceramic tableware and lifestyle branding in Hong Kong

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each embody characteristics associated with national identity and heritage in their materials, patterns and mediation. Freyja Hartzell analyses the relevance of Albrecht Dürer and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe for Germany’s industrial design in the first decade of the twentieth century. Nineteenth-century art historian Gustav Waagen associated Dürer with a ‘true German spirit’, authentic and idiosyncratic, while Goethe’s Biedermeier home in Weimar was filled with simple wooden furniture displaying rings, knots and grain. For Karl Schmidt, Director of Dresden’s German Workshops, and his principal designer, Munich artist Richard Riemerschmid, wood offered a means of preserving German heritage in modern, standardized, machine-made furniture. Designing visual and material references to the past into product design, be it national, regional, local or brand history, is an effective way to exploit the added value of heritage. Yet this process remains under-studied in design history and critical heritage studies alike (an exception is Skou 2019, on Danish ceramics company Kähler). Peder Valle’s chapter traces a rich example in Scandinavian ceramic design. The resemblance of Norwegian company Porsgrund’s tableware design ‘MaxiStrå’ (2004) to Royal Copenhagen’s ‘Blue Fluted Mega’ (2000) resulted in a lawsuit. Both designs feature enlarged motifs sourced from the iconic blue-and-white ‘strawf lower’ pattern, a signature product of each company based on an eighteenth-century German imitation of Chinese porcelain, which predates copyright (see Antons and Logan 2017; Gillette 2016). This case raises questions about design heritage, appropriation and globalization, as does Carmín Berchiolly in her chapter for this book (see also Labadi and Long 2010). Copyright law is recognized as a tool of colonial oppression: heritage infrastructure such as UNESCO’s ICH listing ‘activate cultural pasts to secure a global pax’ (Dutta 2006, 315). Valle’s chapter also demonstrates the cultural, geo-political and symbolic importance of f lora, as do the chapters by Vanessa Nicholas, Zoë Hendon, Heidi A. Cook and Jacqueline Naismith, which variously engage with the contested category of natural heritage (Lowenthal 2005; Roigé and Frigolé 2010). Daniel J. Huppatz shows Hong Kong to be a unique place for analysing the relationship between design history and heritage, political and socio-cultural change, due to its shift in 1997 from British colony to Chinese city. From the late 1980s, ‘nostalgia fever’ characterized a range of cultural products that used local motifs and design cues to relieve handover anxiety and construct an identity before it (potentially) disappeared. Huppatz’s chapter can be read as a Hong Kong comparator for studies such as Hewison’s discussion of the popularization of nostalgia in Britain of the 1980s (Hewison 1987) and Brembeck and Sörum’s account of nostalgia retailing in Gothenberg, Sweden (2017). By analysing the rise (and fall) of two prominent Hong Kong lifestyle brands, fashion house Shanghai Tang and homewares brand G.O.D., Huppatz examines how designers used aspects of ‘Hong Kong-ness’ and ‘Chinese-ness’ to differentiate their products from mainland China’s dominant culture, its imperial history and its current political centre, Beijing. Huppatz’s chapter connects with Carmín Berchiolly’s

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study of the reappropriation of Burmese photographs in digital prints on contemporary fashion accessories sold by a (French) fashion boutique in Myanmar as Burmese heritage. Part IV, Textiles and Dress, demonstrates how historical narratives are woven and stitched into textiles which signify place through reference to the natural environment, its settlement and its industrial economy. Zoë Hendon writes about Princess Mary of Teck’s wedding dress (1893), which was designed, woven, and sewn in Britain, albeit with imported silk. The history of this patriotically produced royal wedding dress has been fractured across three institutions. Hendon asks whether it would be possible to interpret the dress in a public exhibition setting as anything other than a part of the AHD (Smith 2006a). From silk to cotton: Vanessa Nicholas examines a cotton quilt made by Betsy Adams Dodge (1829–1911) in Ontario, which features 20 pieced maple leaves with appliqué stems. Aside from anticipating the Canadian f lag, Nicholas contends that Dodge used the maple leaf in an ecological expression of her personal and political identification with the sugar maple and its environment at a time of deforestation. Rather than reinscribing a problematic association of women with nature, or indeed women with craft, Nicholas suggests that Dodge and others used homecrafts such as quilting to express complex and often contradictory views of the natural world that bear comparison with views expressed through the masculine genre of landscape painting. Nicholas’s chapter can be read in tandem with Jacqueline Naismith’s chapter on the Auckland Domain Wintergardens for two views about natural heritage and what it means to local communities. Heidi A. Cook surveys Croatia’s case for a national identity through its folk culture, 17 instances of which are currently recognized by UNESCO as ICH. Cook focuses particularly on graphic representations of folk dress and performance. Just as Huppatz explains the role of nostalgia narratives in lifestyle branding in Hong Kong at the time of the handover as communicating distinctiveness, so Cook demonstrates how ICH designation for Croatian folk heritage legitimizes Croatia’s national identity as distinct from that of the former Yugoslavia. Part V considers how graphic design, information design and typography communicate messages about history and political power in subtle yet profound ways and have functioned as expressions of cultural heritage in interwar postApartheid South Africa, Czechoslovakia and present-day Brazil. Jeanne van Eeden provides a comparative analysis of two postcards that offer essentialized views of heritage and identity but also ref lect a shift in representation. While during most of the twentieth century, heritage sites, both natural and cultural, were represented as the exclusive preserve of white people and served to establish their entitlement and identity, the last 25 years have seen more inclusive representations of tangible and intangible heritage that ostensibly ref lect the diversity of cultures in South Africa. Benjamin Benus analyses an atlas designed by Prague-based graphic artists Ladislav Sutnar and Augustin Tschinkel for use in Czech-language primary schools. Published in 1935, the Little Homeland Reader (Sutnar, Mendl, and

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Tschinkel 1935) provided in maps and charts a geographic and historical survey of the First Czechoslovak Republic that emphasized its medieval origins; distinct Czechoslovak national heritage; and modern, demographically diverse, democratic character. Sutnar and Tschinkel adapted a variety of modernist graphic strategies to serve the requirements of the Czechoslovak state educational system. Benus highlights the roles that designers have played in shaping and mediating the visual expression of national identity and heritage in state education. Typography and lettering are important elements in the configuration of public and private environments and documents, but their role is not always acknowledged. In heritage contexts, letters and numbers are usually taken as verbal language (what a given text ‘says’) rather than visible language (the visual techniques a text uses). Priscila Farias explains the relevance of typography and lettering for design and heritage using examples related to Brazilian design and cultural heritage policies that are, in many cases, applicable to other geographic contexts. Part VI, Digitization and Online User Experience Design, shows how new media are designed in ways which reveal something of the past. These chapters add to the literature on digital heritage (for instance, Harrison 2009b; Poole 2018; Walden 2019) a focus on design. Carmín Berchiolly interrogates the work of French-owned fashion and household goods company Yangoods, based in Myanmar. Yangoods digitally manipulates copyright-free colonial Burmese photographs and prints them onto fashion accessories such as bags. Berchiolly problematizes the commercialization of nostalgic heritage with an orientalizing, colonial gaze for tourist consumption and fashion. In the closing chapter, Sarah A. Lichtman reads the Anne Frank House as a total designed object – from its interiors to its graphics to its website. 263 Prinsengrach, Amsterdam, is both a real building, opened to the public in 1960, and an award-winning virtual reconstruction, the Secret Annex Online (2010). Lichtman asks how, and how well, the 2017 redesign of the house museum by exhibition designer Dagmar von Wilcken communicates a place of Jewish heritage, a world war memorial and a reminder of the holocaust, one of the most popular Dutch heritage sites, a place of pilgrimage for adolescent girls and for writers (in 2009, UNESCO listed Anne Frank’s diary in the Memory of the World Register.) Such diverse and multifaceted heritage(s) raise questions about whose heritage the house represents.

Chronology and geography The chapters here can be read in various ways, such as chronologically or by region. The book’s temporal coverage ranges from 1815 to the present, beginning with Barbara Wood’s study of the Wellington Monument. Carmín Berchiolly analyses photographs dating back to 1852 which were creatively reused from 2015 onwards. Vanessa Nicholas’s discussion of a Canadian quilt extends from 1875 to 1900, while Zoë Hendon examines a wedding dress dating from 1893. Rebecca Houze considers a building dating from 1905, and Freyja Hartzell’s

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chapter focuses on the following year. Louise Purbrick critiques a memorial of an explosion which occurred in 1917. The object of Jacqueline Naismith’s chapter, the public Wintergardens at the Auckland Domain, was constructed between 1919 and 1931. Heidi A. Cook’s analysis of Croatian ICH extends across the 1920s and 1930s to 2008. Benjamin Benus explores maps of interwar Czechoslovakia from c.1935. Suchitra Balasubrahmanyan examines border ceremonies from 1959, which followed India’s partition in 1947. Among the key years in Sarah A. Lichtman’s account of the Anne Frank House museum are 1960 and 2010, while Daniel J. Huppatz considers the design heritage of Hong Kong within the context of events in the 1980s, 1997 and subsequently. Priscila Farias’s discussion of typography and lettering in Brazil spans the twentieth century to the present, as do Jeanne van Eeden’s account of South African heritage postcards and Samuel Dodd’s study of the design of heritage in Southeastern Ohio, which closes in 2016. Peder Valle recounts a copyright dispute dating from 2000–2012. Of course, this chronology is not straightforward because the authors focus on a variety of designs, places and artefacts dating from different moments in time and consider their prehistories, reception and legacies over time. The temporal scope of this book, roughly 1815 to now, is broad – especially when considered alongside the book’s geographic reach (see the following). So, we hope it will lead to further studies, for there is much more to say about design of earlier periods, design which defies the periodization of Western historiography, and design of the future. Heritage in the global context, as in UNESCO World Heritage Sites which demonstrate outstanding universal value, has been critiqued for universalizing Western values (Smith 2006a). The language of heritage varies, too, in national contexts among organizations that seek to preserve it: the name of the UK preservation charity ‘English Heritage’ differs, for example, from its US counterpart, ‘National Trust for Historic Preservation’. Those who work with, research, and write about heritage use keywords with care, to clarify their meanings. Our book provides views on this from an international range of contexts. The chapters extend across Africa, Asia, Oceania, South and North America and Europe, and the contributing authors live in different parts of the world. Some of the chapters may be understood as national studies, including those addressing Brazil, Germany, Croatia, the Netherlands, Canada and the United Kingdom. Jeanne van Eeden’s chapter examines the representation of South African heritage through the graphic design of postcards. Jacqueline Naismith explores an instance of the design and heritage of a New Zealand park. Other chapters are transnational or transcultural, exploring indigenous and settler design heritages in the United States, how New Zealand negotiates British inf luences, a court wrangle between Norwegian and Danish manufacturers, Indian and Pakistani border ceremonies and the refashioning of Burmese visual culture by a French designer working in contemporary Myanmar, among others. Chapters addressing design and heritage in Asia include Carmín Berchiolly’s study of the creative reuse of Burmese colonial photographs in contemporary

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Myanmar, Daniel J. Huppatz’s chapter on lifestyle branding and nostalgia in Hong Kong and Suchitra Balasubrahmanyan’s analysis of ICH on the India/ Pakistan border. Four chapters offer a diverse account of design and heritage in the Americas: Priscila Farias examines typography and lettering in Brazil, with a focus on São Paulo; Vanessa Nicholas studies an emblematic Canadian quilt; Rebecca Houze explores Mary Colter’s ‘Hopi House’ at the Grand Canyon, USA; and Samuel Dodd investigates layers of constructed heritage in Southeastern Ohio. Chapters exploring design and heritage in Europe include Freyja Hartzell’s study of the meanings of wood in Germany; an investigation of cartography in interwar Czechoslovakia by Benjamin Benus; Heidi A. Cook’s examination of heritage and national identity in Croatia; Sarah A. Lichtman’s analysis of the Anne Frank House museum in Amsterdam, Netherlands; Peder Valle’s transnational, regional account of ceramics in Scandinavia; and three studies located in England, Barbara Wood’s study of the Wellington Monument, Louise Purbrick’s study of the Silvertown memorial and Zoë Hendon’s analysis of a royal wedding dress. We have endeavoured to represent a variety of geographic contexts in this collection of essays, though we recognize that its authors and editors hail mainly from Europe and North America. We consider our book a starting point in this regard, and we hope it serves well as a springboard for further, yet more geographically and culturally diverse studies, which will continue to engage the practice and politics of decolonization. Place is important for every chapter. The authors provide rich interpretations of visual symbols, buildings, monuments and places that engage local, regional and national cultural identities, as well as those embedded with trauma and contestation. The chapters show, in fact, that places, things and identities are indivisible. Is the Wellington Monument a place or a thing? Is a plate by Royal Copenhagen more of a thing than a building such as the Hopi House? Is the quilt discussed by Vanessa Nicholas a thing about a place? Things and places are different in scale and complexity, but as subjects for design historical analysis, they are equally revealing because things stand in for places. This book contributes several studies of tourism and the role of design in constructing tourist spaces, sites and experiences. The authors ask: What do the landscapes, places, buildings and objects of heritage look like? How are they made? What are they made of? How do their users use them? Looking closely at the design of cultural heritage reveals new insights into topics such as the urban environment, sustainability, trauma, language and human rights that invite further interdisciplinary study.

Tangible/intangible Another reason for the complexity of the term ‘heritage’ relates to the faultline between tangible and intangible cultural heritage, between a version of heritage rooted in the material, located in objects or places, and heritage as a practice, a world view or a way of life. Discussions of heritage within academic

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and professional practice circles initially privileged material heritage as providing a tangible link to the past, as a result of the subject’s roots in archaeology. However, the tendency to associate heritage with places, spaces and things has been convincingly challenged through the recognition of ICH. What does the claim that all heritage is intangible heritage (Smith 2011) mean for design history, which has long privileged objects as the focus of analysis? Our book provides a variety of answers to this question, suggesting that design is where the tangible and intangible meet. See, for instance, Jacqueline Naismith’s chapter on natural heritage in which the preservation of the architecture of the Auckland Domain Wintergardens has maintained a space for plants to f lourish and even perform. The design of performance is key in Samuel Dodd’s typology of heritage in Ohio and to the border ceremonies examined by Suchitra Balasubrahmanyan. Freyja Hartzell’s chapter on wood in Germany exemplifies what materials can mean in heritage terms. Sarah A. Lichtman analyses the heritage of absence at the Anne Frank House, while Daniel J. Huppatz explores the design of nostalgia. The 18 chapters of this book cover a rich variety of design, including digital design and interaction design, as well as architecture, landscape design, visitor experience design, craft, industrial design, textile design, graphic design and typography. And yet the field of design is so vast that many other design specialisms, such as transport or food design, which likewise engage with heritage, could not be included.

Ownership and belonging Whether tangible or intangible, etymologically, heritage is associated with something we inherit (OED 2021; Harrison 2009a, 9), a birth right provided to us through our inclusion in a given group, be it familial, national, ethnic or via some other marker of identity. Heritage is therefore bound up with identity, belonging and ownership, whether literally or as a feeling of allegiance. The questions of ownership of heritage, including ownership of the authority by which heritage is identified and perpetuated, are highly political and extremely pressing. Within the academic sphere and in the heritage industry, definitions of heritage are tied to different, and competing, political agenda and ideologies. Approaches to heritage within the professional discipline of history associated with the Marxist-inspired ‘history from below’ promulgated through the History Workshop Journal in the United Kingdom and the Annales School in France highlight its capacity for public engagement, public history, social and cultural history and the contributions made by amateur historians and local history groups. The heritage ‘industry’, a branch of the tourist industry (Hewison 1987), is critiqued as being artificial, sanitized, narrativized and, above all, commercially oriented. In this critique, the heritage industry commodifies authentic heritage, selling its visitors an inauthentic experience. Heritage is sometimes associated with bad history or history-‘lite’ for touristic or corporate ends (Lowenthal 1985,

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1998, x). This final point may help to explain why design heritage has remained largely unexamined by design historians and others, until now.

Conclusion While it would be intriguing to offer a mirror study in which design historians examine heritage and heritage studies practitioners examine design, this book is not a symmetrical account. In one sense, Design and Heritage brings to critical heritage studies a snapshot of the foci and methods employed by design historians, designers and curators. Yet, while the editors are both design historians, one directs a professional doctorate in heritage, developing a generation of heritage practitioners making practice-based research contributions to the heritage field. The authors occupy a diverse range of fields and roles, including hybrid roles in art and design history, visual and material culture and design practice. At least four of the authors have curatorial roles, and one is an archaeologist, dancer and linguist. A core theme of this book is interrogating and questioning ownership and belonging as they are instantiated in heritage. The contributing authors’ blended expertise informs this work and supports our project of establishing the connections between design and heritage in an open, inter- and multi-disciplinary way, refusing the idea that fields and disciplines own particular areas of study and approaches. Above all, Design and Heritage demonstrates that heritage is designed and design has a heritage. The chapters show how we can better understand heritage by considering the social, cultural and economic roles of design in producing heritage. We hope the book will ignite further work.

Note 1 The title of Hewison’s book recalls Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s essay ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’ (1944), an essay that has been a touchstone in art and design history.

References Adamson, Glenn, Giorgio Riello, and Sarah Teasley, eds. 2011. Global Design History. London: Routledge. Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer. 2002[1944]. “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” In Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Akagawa, Natsuko, and Laurajane Smith, eds. 2018. Safeguarding Intangible Heritage: Practices and Politics. Abingdon: Routledge. Alaca, Fahfrettin Ersin. 2017. “Globalising a Design Heritage Strategy: From Finland’s Artek to Turkey’s Grand Bazaar.” Aalto University publication series Doctoral diss. 194/2017. Helsinki, Finland: Aalto ARTS Books. Antons, Christoph, and William Logan, eds. 2017. Intellectual Property, Cultural Property, and Intangible Cultural Heritage. Abingdon: Routledge.

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Association of Critical Heritage Studies. 2012. “‘2012 Manifesto’ Association of Critical Heritage Studies History.” Accessed April 20, 2021. www.criticalheritagestudies. org/history. Avery, Tracey. 2009. “Values Not Shared: The Street Art of Melbourne’s City Laneways.” In Valuing Historic Environments, edited by Lisanne Gibson and John Pendlebury, 139–156. Abingdon: Routledge. Bártolo, Carlos. 2021. “The Story of a Portuguese Cock and Other Knick-Knacks: Heritage, Propaganda and Design in a Far-Right Dictatorship.” In Design, History and Time: New Temporalities in a Digital Age, edited by Zoë Hendon and Anne Massey, 65–80. London: Bloomsbury. Blake, Janet, and Lucas Lixinski. 2020. The 2003 UNESCO Intangible Heritage Convention, A Commentary, Oxford Commentaries on International Cultural Heritage Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brembeck, Helene, and Niklas Sörum. 2017. “Assembling Nostalgia: Devices for Affective Captation on the Re:heritage Market.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 23, no. 6: 556–574. Boym, Svetlana. 2001. “Immigrant Souvenirs.” In The Future of Nostalgia, 327–336. New York: Basic Books, excerpted in Ben Highmore, ed. 2009. The Design Culture Reader, 178–187. Abingdon: Routledge. Brody, David. 2016. Housekeeping by Design: Hotels and Labor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Campelo, Adriana, Laura Reynolds, Adam Lindgreen, and Michael Beverland, eds. 2018. Cultural Heritage. Abingdon: Routledge. Candlin, Fiona, and Raiford Guins, eds. 2009. The Object Reader. Abingdon: Routledge. Clark, Hazel, and David Brody. 2009. Design Studies: A Reader. Oxford: Berg. Dudley, Sandra, Amy Jane Barnes, Jennifer Binnie, Julia Petrov, and Jennifer Walklate, eds. 2012. Narrating Objects, Collecting Stories. London and New York: Routledge. Dutta, Arindam. 2006. The Bureaucracy of Beauty: Design in the Age of Its Global Reproducibility. Abingdon: Routledge. Edwards, Clive, ed. 2016. The Bloomsbury Encyclopaedia of Design (3 vols.). London: Bloomsbury Academic. Fallan, Kjetil, and Grace Lees-Maffei, eds. 2016. Designing Worlds: National Design Histories in an Age of Globalization. New York: Berghahn. Falls, Susan, and Jessica Smith. 2011. “Branding Authenticity: Cambodian Ikat in Transnational Artisan Partnerships (TAPs).” Journal of Design History 24, no. 3: 255–271. Fujita, Haruhiko, ed. 2007–9. Words for Design: Comparative Etymology and Terminology of Design and Its Equivalents (vols. 1–3). Osaka: Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. Fujita, Haruhiko, ed. 2008. Another Name for Design: Words for Creation. International Conference of Design History and Design Studies. Osaka: Osaka University. Gegner, Martin, and Bart Ziino, eds. 2011. The Heritage of War. Abingdon: Routledge. Gillette, Maris Boyd. 2016. “From Porcelain Capital to Heritage Site.” In China’s Porcelain Capital: The Rise, Fall and Reinvention of Ceramics in Jingdezhen, 115–132. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Harrison, Rodney, ed. 2009a. Understanding the Politics of Heritage. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Harrison, Rodney. 2009b. “Excavating Second Life: Cyber-Archaeologies, Heritage and Virtual Communities.” Journal of Material Culture, 14, no. 1: 75–106. Harrison, Rodney. 2013. Heritage: Critical Approaches. Abingdon: Routledge.

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Harrison, Rodney. 2018. “On Heritage Ontologies: Rethinking the Material Worlds of Heritage.” Anthropological Quarterly 91, no. 4: 1365–1383. Harrison, Rodney, and Esther Breithoff. 2017. “Archaeologies of the Contemporary World.” Annual Review of Anthropology 46, no. 1: 203–221. Harrison, Rodney, and John Schofield. 2010. After Modernity: Archaeological Approaches to the Contemporary Past. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heskett, John. 2001. “Past, Present, and Future in Design for Industry.” Design Issues 17, no. 1: 18–26. Hewison, Robert. 1987. The Heritage Industry. London: Methuen. Highmore, Ben, ed. 2009. The Design Culture Reader, 178–187. Abingdon: Routledge. Huppatz, D. J. ed. 2016. Design: Critical and Primary Sources (4 vols.). London: Bloomsbury. Huppatz, D. J., and Grace Lees-Maffei. 2013. “Why Design History? A Multi-National Perspective on the State and Purpose of the Field.” Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 12, no. 3: 310–330. Jeremiah, David. 2003. “Museums and the History and Heritage of British Motoring.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 9, no. 2: 169–190. Labadi, Sophia, and William Logan, eds. 2015. Urban Heritage, Development, and Sustainability. Abingdon: Routledge. Labadi, Sophia, and Colin Long, eds. 2010. Heritage and Globalization. Abingdon: Routledge. Leach, Rebecca. 2016. “The Turnover Club: Locality and Identity in the North Staffordshire Practice of Turning over Ceramic Ware.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 22, no. 6: 482–494. Lees-Maffei, Grace. 2009. “The Production-Consumption-Mediation Paradigm.” Journal of Design History 22, 4: 351–376. Lees-Maffei, Grace, and Rebecca Houze, eds. 2010. The Design History Reader. Oxford: Berg. Lees-Maffei, Grace, and D. J. Huppatz. 2017. “A Gathering of Flowers: On Design Anthologies.” The Design Journal 20, no. 4: 477–491. Logan, William, Máiréad Nic Craith, and Ullrich Kockel, eds. 2016. A Companion to Heritage Studies, Blackwell Companions to Anthropology. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. Logan, William, and Keir Reeves, eds. 2008. Places of Pain and Shame. Abingdon: Routledge. Lowenthal, David. 1985. The Past Is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lowenthal, David. 1998. The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lowenthal, David. 2005. “Natural and Cultural Heritage.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 11, no. 1: 81–92. MacCannell, Dean. 1976. The Tourist. New York: Schocken Books. Margolin, Victor. 2015. World History of Design (2 vols.). London: Bloomsbury Academic. Meroz, Joana. 2016. “Exhibiting Confrontations: Negotiating Dutch Design between National and Global Imaginations.” Journal of Design History 29, no. 3: 273–286. Special Issue. Meskell, Lynn. 2015. Global Heritage: A Reader, Blackwell Readers in Anthropology. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. OED (Oxford English Dictionary). 2021. “Heritage, n.” OED Online. March. Oxford University Press. Accessed May 24, 2021. www.oed.com/view/Entry/86230. Pevsner, Nikolaus. (1936). Pioneers of the Modern Movement. London: Faber & Faber; 2nd ed. (1949) New York: Museum of Modern Art; revised ed. (1960, 1975), Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter Gropius. London: Pelican Books.

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Poole, Steve. 2018. “Ghosts in the Garden: Locative Gameplay and Historical Interpretation from Below.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 24, no. 3: 300–314. Rampley, Matthew, ed. 2012. Heritage, Ideology, and Identity in Central and Eastern Europe: Contested Pasts, Contested Presents. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer. Roigé, Xavier, and Joan Frigolé. 2010. Constructing Cultural and Natural Heritage: Parks, Museums and Rural Heritage. Girona: Documenta Universitaria. Skou, Niels Peter. 2019. “Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed: Relocating Kähler’s Brand Heritage.” In Design Culture: Objects and Approaches, edited by Guy Julier, Anders V. Munch, Mads Nygaard Folkmann, Hans-Christian Jensen, and Niels Peter Skou, 175–188. London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts. Smith, Laurajane. 2006a. Uses of Heritage. Abingdon: Routledge. Smith, Laurajane, ed. 2006b. Cultural Heritage: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies (4 vols.). Abingdon: Routledge. Smith, Laurajane. 2011. All Heritage is Intangible: Critical Heritage Studies and Museums. Text of the Reinwardt Memorial Lecture, May 26, 2011. Amsterdam: Reinwardt Academy. Smith, Laurajane, and Natsuko Akagawa, eds. 2008. Intangible Heritage. Abingdon: Routledge. Smith, Laurajane, Paul Shackel, and Gary Campbell, eds. 2011. Heritage, Labour and the Working Classes. Abingdon: Routledge. Smith, Laurajane, Margaret Wetherell, and Gary Campbell, eds. 2018. Emotion, Affective Practices, and the Past in the Present. Abingdon: Routledge. Stanfield, Peter. 1992. “Heritage Design: The Harley-Davidson Motor Company.” Journal of Design History 5, no. 2: 141–155. Stefano, Michelle L., Peter Davis, and Gerard Corsane, eds. 2012. Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage. Woodbridge: Boydell Press. Sutnar, Ladislav, Bedřich Mendl, and Augustin Tschinkel. 1935.  Malá vlastivěda  [Little Homeland Reader]. Prague: Státní nakladatelství. Taylor, Ken, and Jane Lennon, eds. 2012. Managing Cultural Landscapes. Abingdon: Routledge. UNESCO. 2008. World Heritage Information Kit. Paris: UNESCO World Heritage Centre. June. UNESCO. 2018. Basic Texts of the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. Paris: UNESCO. Urry, John. 1990. The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies. London: SAGE. Walden, Kim. 2019. “Film Websites: A Transmedia Archaeology.” Unpublished PhD diss., University of Hertfordshire. https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.797421. Walker, John A., ed. 1989. Design History and the History of Design. London: Pluto. Wesener, Andreas. 2017. “Adopting ‘Things of the Little’: Intangible Cultural Heritage and Experiential Authenticity of Place in the Jewellery Quarter, Birmingham.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 23, no. 2: 141–155. Wright, Patrick. 1985. On Living in an Old Country. London: Verso.

PART I

Monuments and memorials

1 WELLINGTON MONUMENT AND THE USES OF HERITAGE Changing purpose, new meanings, multiple identities Barbara Wood

This chapter considers the cultural construction of heritage sites and their changing meaning in the United Kingdom. Using the Wellington Monument in Somerset as an example, it examines the shifting physical and intellectual ownership of heritage material over time and its potential for new and different meanings in the present and future. In 2007, when the structure of Wellington Monument began to fail, the National Trust, which cares for the site, was faced with the question of how to approach major repairs. With limited resources, the project team had to consider whether the monument should be rebuilt or if it would be more fitting to manage its decline and eventual loss. The National Trust undertook extensive discussion with surrounding communities to understand what Wellington Monument means today. The response from local people shaped how the organization responded to this challenge, revealing how a sense of the past contributes to the forming of public, community and personal identities and to the multiplicity of meanings that are invested in such tangible and intangible remains. The material remains, and memories of the past, historical materials and places, myths and legends are incorporated into the fabric and operations of contemporary life. This is never clearer than in the monuments, memorials and municipal spaces that were created or erected by previous generations and which have remained static over time. Such remnants have often been absorbed into the design of new spaces. Community gardens, public squares, office developments and residential areas incorporate statuary, plaques and memorials, founded long ago with passion and purpose. Open spaces, rural landscapes and village greens similarly host and often hide structures, commemorative works and monuments intended to recognise actions and individuals considered, at some point, to be so important that a permanent and unchanging record was necessary. DOI: 10.4324/9781003096146-3

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These products and markers from the past bring challenges for the present. How far can such memorials be relevant, and for how long do they need to be cared for and maintained? Some such questions are practical, concerned with planning, development or cost considerations. Others are far more difficult. While the material remains of the past can remain relatively stable, the meanings with which items are imbued cannot have the same consistency. Purposes will change, emotional connections will be different, an alternative view of the person or historical event commemorated may emerge which changes how the object is seen. This reality has never been more evident than in the reassessment of statuary and memorials engendered by the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests of 2020. An obligation and compulsion to decolonise and reappraise collections of historical materials and to democratise such dialogue became increasingly evident and urgent. Existing, well-intentioned debates which sought to question the validity and address the purpose of public memorialisation were joined by activists who began to take decision-making into their own hands and remove or reinterpret the history making of the past in order to address issues of importance in the present. Notable in the United Kingdom was the removal of the bronze statue of Edward Colston (1636–1721), a prosperous merchant, leading member of the Royal Africa Company and slave trader, from its plinth in the centre of the City of Bristol during a BLM rally on 7 June 2020. This event attracted attention from the public, but this is just one of many examples in which an alternative view of a monument has emerged as more relevant in a different era (BBC 2020; Museum of the Home 2020). Recognising that multiple histories are embedded in such objects is important. It is part of an ongoing negotiation or re-creation of purpose, whether undertaken in passionate public action and thoughtful discussion or informally, imperceptibly and even individually. Changes in the meaning of historical materials, while not always so visible or arresting as the toppling of statues, are always in play. Whether objects are physically re-purposed and incorporated into new designs for public spaces, or their continuing validity is questioned, the meaning of the historical assets within contemporary spaces must be found in the present.

Wellington Monument The Wellington Monument that stands on the Blackdown Hills of Somerset, South West England, provides an alternative example to the emotive and visible discussion of Colston and similar statues. It is a significant structure of national relevance but primarily of local impact. It fulfils a role which has changed over time but with little recognition. It was erected on land belonging to Arthur Wellesley (1769–1852), later ennobled as the Duke of Wellington in 1814. Wellesley had no original connection with the area, the purchase of the estate being made on his behalf by his brother due to the similarity of the names

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Wellesley and Wellington. A proposal to erect a local monument commemorating the Napoleonic Wars and specifically the Duke’s victory at Waterloo was first suggested soon after that battle in 1815. In 1816, the Duke was contacted about the potential to use the site, and a meeting was subsequently held by interested parties in London to launch an architectural competition (Lutley 2017). Architect Thomas Lee Jnr (1794–1834) proposed the winning design constituting a triangular shaft with a statue of the Duke on the top. He intended that it would include an internal staircase with canon and alms houses for veterans of the Waterloo Battle at the base. Funds were raised from local landed gentry and members of the Somerset militia, but interest and money soon ran out, and construction ceased with the pillar at only 14 metres in height. Work resumed but was beset with construction problems. By 1829, the monument was left at 37 m. Despite occasional renewals of interest and intermittent building, it was not until 1892 that a simplified version of the original design was completed with the tower at 53 m. Our 21stcentury understanding of the original purpose of the monument is largely limited to reports of the building process. Wellesley was a national hero, and the scheme began in a spirit of enthusiasm amongst his peers. However, little is known of how the local community regarded the project or the construction. It stands on what had been publicly open land that was enclosed for this purpose. Funds appear to have come from particular social groups, with only one reference to ‘the servants of Heatherton’ suggesting any wider contributions (Lutley 2017, 138). It may have been intended to commemorate a national military victory or as a monument to an individual. It has also been suggested that it was for some, perhaps even for the Duke himself, a symbol of a hope for lasting peace. In 1956, its national significance was recognised as a Grade II listed structure, although it is unclear whether this was primarily due to its commemoration of the Duke or the battle or to its architectural design. In 1933, management and ownership of the monument passed from its own charitable trust to the National Trust (England, Wales & Northern Ireland). Despite regular repair, by the turn of the 21st century, the monument was again in decline, with the degradation and loss of surface stone leading to restricted access and installation of a safety cordon (Figure 1.1). Costs for the repair of such structures is high. For the National Trust (NT), there were some challenging questions to be debated. How did the monument fulfil the charity’s purpose ‘To look after places of historic interest or natural beauty permanently for the benefit of the nation’ (National Trust 2020)? Was it appropriate to raise almost 4 million pounds to repair a single monument, and why this one? Two centuries after it was erected, was anyone still concerned about it? The process of asking such questions raised in turn the concept of ‘curated decay’ (DeSilvey 2017), the possibility that such built monuments may ultimately reach a point where they are no longer relevant

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or when they are too costly or difficult to maintain. In such a situation, there may be an acceptance of managed decline leading finally to loss. Could this be such a situation? Around 2009, as the project formed, the NT had limited data to inform initial discussions. As an open-access countryside property, there was no counting of visitor numbers and as a small site within a large management portfolio, staff presence was not permanent. Organisational understanding was that it was primarily an outdoor experience offering a short walk or a picnic spot to enjoy extensive views and that visitors included some regular local walkers and longdistance travellers from the nearby motorway taking a break in their journey. There was little sense of a particularly strong connection with the town of Wellington or those living in the surrounding countryside. But perceptions about the monument began to change when conversations between the NT and the local community began. It became clear that the understanding of the organisation that owned and managed the site and that of the community around it were disconnected. Discussions regarding other public monuments have recognised a similar phenomenon (Frisch 1990, xxi; Gentry 2013, 517; MacLeod 2010, 6–7; Smith and Akagawa 2009, 7; Waterton 2010, 3). Engagement with schools and the town council, connecting with local people and media and counting and meeting visitors revealed an extraordinary difference between what had been assumed as the local view and use of the monument site and the actual local experience of it. It was clear that the monument was in fact performing a purpose within the community which had not been tracked or understood and that there existed a deep emotional, largely local, sense of ‘ownership’. Unrelated to original purpose, new meaning has developed for the monument. The tower has been appropriated, and a sense of ownership has developed that is invisible and unrecognised beyond the immediate area. It has come to symbolise, and contribute to, the construction of both personal and community identity. It appears on the mayoral chain, the town arms, and the badges of Wellesley Primary school and sports clubs. It is ref lected in the names of local roads and businesses. This sense of ownership is ‘grass roots’, not constructed or created by the NT, which had considered the site very differently, as described above. The Wellington Monument demonstrates how places change, often with little or no recognition, ref lecting contemporary concerns and interests, and how rarely current meanings or perception may connect primarily with an original purpose. As with the NT, visitors from further afield were probably also unaware of the active role that the monument had come to play in its local environment. Their response to the site would be to connect first with the woodland surroundings and perhaps secondarily to acknowledge the original purpose and intention of commemoration and memorialisation. However, all these views of the monument were valid and important to recognise in discussions about the future, as was the understanding that each identity was operating without reference to the wider multiplicity of meanings of which each was also a part.

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FIGURE 1.1

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Wellington Monument during renovations, Somerset, 2019.

Source: Photograph by Barbara Wood, reproduced with permission of the author.

The past at work in the present Use of the past is part of the cultural construction of society. We draw on it to contextualise ourselves and to rationalise the political and social positions which we adopt. A sense of heritage is part of identity politics, whether personal, local or

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national, and is employed to create community cohesion, vibrancy and activity as well as to stir division and conflict. Objects, places and oral testimonies are multivoiced, with complex histories encompassing many experiences that may speak to or of numerous individuals and groups. A chinoiserie cabinet in a country house collection, for example, may tell of the craft of its making or the tastes of its collector. It may reflect a life of wealth and travel or demonstrate a view of the world at a particular moment. It could equally be used to describe the toil of those who built and cared for the environment in which it stands or perhaps the circumstances in which the wealth to purchase it may have been made. Any object can be used to uncover personal and historical stories or to generate contemporary debate. We have rightly begun to discuss more openly, and explore more deeply, the multiple interpretations of objects in our museum collections, the figures or subjects which have been raised as public monuments and the places and events which have been memorialised or retained in public and private collections. Kynan Gentry discussed how in formal situations, the agency and energy of working with historical assets has moved away from national institutions and that ‘In almost every instance, heritage preservation has emerged at the local level’ (2013, 508). While such a generalisation may be challenged, it is evident that the activity of heritage and the operation of curatorial practice are functioning in opposing cycles of time. ‘Heritage’ is a term which embraces a range of activities, including, for example, community projects, exhibitions, experiences and events, which use the material of the past as the basis for activity in the present. ‘Heritage’ has both a function and a meaning which is contemporary; it operates primarily in the short term, often with a sense of immediacy and ref lecting current context. The work of heritage is highly valued by participants and by those who fund it. It contributes to our sense of self as individuals, and shared pasts are explored, researched and often reconstructed. But while those involved may think of this activity as history being collected and passed on for the future, in fact very little produced through such heritage practice is sustained. The material assets of history, however, whether objects, places or records, are – once identified as such – subject to multi-generational processes of care which are focused on the future rather than the present. Those assets are available for regular reconsideration and use, not only by those such as curators and archivists, working in this long-term cycle, but, in parallel, also by all those engaged with heritage, who use such assets as the foundation for much of this shorter-term activity. The parallel work of professional and informal practitioners operates within the same spaces as heritage activity without necessarily connecting. As Michael Frisch described in his discussions of the shared authorities coexisting in oral and public history, much of the activity around historical assets continues with or without the involvement of professional practice (Frisch 1990). Perhaps this is because scholarship and formal activity have focused on conservation and management of historic sites rather than on how that heritage is used in contemporary or local societies (Harrison and Linkman 2010, 75). ‘Monuments don’t mean much without the help of exhibition makers’ (Crew and Sims 1991, 163), and the same

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conclusion can be applied to other forms of historical asset. While recorders and researchers may investigate and compile data, it is the collector, the interpreter or the viewer who employs historical materials in a present function and constructs or reconstructs one or more of a multiplicity of meanings ( Jordanova 2006, r).

Changing ownership of heritage How does the recognition of multiple meanings align with questions of ownership of historical materials or even of heritage experiences? Ownership brings control, managing physical and intellectual access to collections of objects or to places (Herzfeld 2015, 10–11). Owners can authorise and define interpretation and the ‘story telling’ which provides the foundation for many heritage visits. However, ‘For every object of tangible heritage there is also an intangible heritage that “wraps” around it’ (Harrison 2010, 10). These invisible histories and the ownership of multiple forms of meaning can generate debate, and rivalry, between stakeholders. Gentry maintained in 2013 the role for professionals as adjudicators and therefore owners of ideas and values (2013, 509), but other authors recognise that ‘public history practice is wrestling with issues of shifting authority’ (Adair, Filene, and Koloski 2011, 11), particularly given the imperative to decolonise the presentation of historical material and to recognise history from different perspectives (Ellen 2013; Jordanova 2006; Swenson 2013). The potential for independent agency of objects in the construction of their own identity or context has been raised in debates which ‘highlight the active role of nonhuman materials in public life’ (Bennett 2010, 2) and the life histories which become ‘frozen in their use value [and] . . . decommoditised’ in museums ( Benton and Watson 2010, 131). However, such a focus on materiality has been overtaken by recognition of the existence and vibrancy of the multiple views and interpretations which operate at historic sites and in relation to object collections as more diverse voices are heard. There are competing notions of what counts as heritage. Thus, guidance and measures for professional practitioners and owners of historical assets in caring for data and enabling intellectual access have been established (Ellen 2013, 469; Herzfeld 2015, 11). Clearly, consumers of heritage are ready to accept alternative forms of expertise and expressions of authorisation.

The role of historic sites in the present Rodney Harrison has described: two inter-related understandings of heritage .  .  . the largely ‘top-down’ approach to the classification and promotion of particular places by the state . . . which creates ‘official heritage’ and the ‘bottom up’ relationship between people, objects, places and memories which forms the basis for the creation of unofficial forms of heritage (usually) at local level. (2010, 8)

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We all create social and cultural bonds with places. There may be an original significance, perhaps of architecture, historical connection or commemoration, but it is human activity and perceptions that make contemporary relationships. The use of places changes as their stories fade or as new uses happen (Black 2010, 2; Gentry 2013, 511; Isnart 2012, 482, 488). However, there are official forms of heritage at all levels. It is simply that the processes of making and legitimisation are located in different places (Wood 2019). ‘History is remembered and thus recreated in many unofficial forms’, and ‘public use of history is related to the process described as the invention of tradition’ (Black 2010, 3, 7). Concepts of heritage, the sites of activity and experiences are cocreated with consumers whether this is done knowingly or not (Swenson et al. 2013, 203; Urry 1990, 108, 110). As time passes, the meaning of monuments and places must alter as direct personal connections dissolve and as monuments transmute from an articulation of lived experience and personal history (Ashton and Hamilton 2012, 31, 34) to be absorbed as part of the construction of a more nebulous social, cultural or personal ‘heritage’ which forms part of a sense of belonging (Ashley 2005, 7; Jones 2009, 133, 136).

Multiple meanings, multiple histories, changing meaning If heritage is about the present, there will be diverse views and multiple understandings and uses to accommodate. Just as the process of display transforms objects, often meaning that the original purpose or identity may not be foremost, so the same is true of monuments (Crew and Sims 1991, 159, 169, 174). Their existence in public spaces, often of significant scale, regularly functioning as community totems – way markers, meeting places, sites of shared experiences – means that there cannot be a single meaning or value. Equally, as time passes and interests change, so meaning also develops, ‘emerging in dialogue’, whether between individuals, within communities or simply in an exchange between monument and viewer (Harrison 2015, 35). Without such exchange, they have no contemporary resonance, for ‘places do not exist in a sense other than culturally’ (Selby 2010, 41).

Appropriating, forgetting, remaking and repurposing heritage assets Remaking and reusing heritage is not necessarily problematic. Recognising the multiplicity and relevance of different meanings of events, objects and places and the validity of different experiences can invigorate discourse and illuminate our past. The fact that these attributes can change can be hugely productive. In Wellington, the monument has new life, readopted by the community for whom it contributes to a local sense of identity. Something of the past has been repurposed for the present without denying its original value. However, change is not always welcomed or easy, and deconstructing the complexity of historical artefacts, places and monuments can be extremely difficult.

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Questions are raised about the unseen and multiple histories of many familiar places and objects in public collections by critics and by visitors and users of such institutions. How can we embrace dialogue that allows for difference, dissonance and even conf lict? Public memorials are a highly visible presence in the architecture of our environments, but their original purpose and current rationale are often unexplained and obscure. They may now be irrelevant or even offensive. What values does a society demonstrate with the statues and commemorative devices that it creates and that it chooses to retain and to maintain? In 1895, a figure of Edward Colston, for example, was unveiled in the City of Bristol, UK, 174 years after his death in 1721 (Figure 1.2). The dedication recognised the contributions made by the ‘virtuous and wise’ merchant adventurer to the development of the city, but the statue was not established by his contemporaries. Rather the memorial, commissioned by Bristol printer and publisher J.W. Arrowsmith from the sculptor John Cassidy, ref lects an incorporation of the past to help create a present in the 19th century. By the later 20th century, it was clear that the statue symbolised a sense of place and identity that was far more complex and problematic. One of the most visible public monuments in one of Britain’s most vibrant multicultural cities was of a particularly notorious slave trader and sugar refiner (Dresser and Fleming 2009, 156). It recognised a city benefactor, but it was equally a symbol of the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade and, increasingly obviously, a reminder of history unresolved (Olusoga 2020). This statue has become emblematic of the complexity of multiple or changing meanings, particularly since its dramatic removal by crowds at a Black Lives Matter demonstration in 2020, where it was dragged to the Bristol harbourside, from where so many slaving ships departed, and thrown in. But similarly, multifaceted items can be found throughout our living and working spaces. By placing or retaining historical pieces in our homes, in our thoughts, in our public spaces and buildings, we apply meaning and some form of recognition. Historical assets ref lect diverse histories and will be relevant to diverse enquiry (MacLeod 2010, 6–8). Museums and researchers can be part of these processes but, particularly when such items are in active use, they will rightly be only one segment of voices among many (Ashley 2005, 6). John Urry has noted that ‘There is only the present, in the context of which the past is being continually recreated’ (1999, 48). In other words, it is the understanding or construction of meaning in a present which is resonant and with which we connect. This continual questioning and remaking of the past takes place with public monuments and museum collections and through formal and informal actions. The concerns of the funders and managers of historical collections inf luence what we collect or record. Their views are evident in the decisions of acquisition committees, in the choosing of exhibition themes and the shaping of contemporary heritage experiences. In this way, collections can be used to reinforce a particular narrative or privilege certain stories. It is not only high-profile or public pieces of the past that make, change or commemorate heritage. Contemporary concerns generate ‘bottom up’ questions,

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FIGURE 1.2

Statue of Edward Colston, Bristol, 2019.

Source: Photograph by Barbara Wood, reproduced with permission of the author.

and projects created by communities and groups also employ such materials to research and equally to repurpose the past. This seemed particularly evident in the United Kingdom during the centenary years of World War I, 2014–18. Most of those who fought did not return home to relate the experiences that, in many cases, survivors chose to forget or obscure. And yet experiences were created for

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them as contemporary society began to revisit the conf lict and define how to memorialise that war in a way that intervening generations had not. Intangible heritage, in particular, is created and recreated every time it is ‘performed’ with a ‘gradual detachment . . . from original identity’ (Smith and Akagawa 2009, 78, 90). Smith and Campbell note the diminishing of the role of professional ‘expert’ in such exercises, although, as with most authors, they do not recognise the alternative forms of authority in play (Smith and Campbell 2018, 4, Wood 2019 17, 19). But the same is equally true of the ‘performances’ around objects displaced into museums or which surround monuments such as Wellington. Some such performances eventually fail to happen or become lost; others are rejected or entirely altered (Elliott 2020; Wood 2018).

Who owns the past? The past is often used in personal narratives informed by the present which are ref lective of the debate connected to national, cultural or personal identities ( Jordanova 2006, r). Heritage is one of the ‘ideological tools that circulate the values on which particular visions of nationhood are established . . . expressions of culture . . . [and] . . . sets of values’ (Harrison 2015, 10). There is increasing discussion between those responsible for historical resources. However, as Kalliope Fouseki has noted, ‘community consultation’ does not necessarily result in active dialogue or a shared sense of power and ownership (Fouseki 2010, 180). Indeed, the experience at Wellington Monument demonstrates that different stakeholders do not need to be brought together to share knowledge or define meaning. Knowledge and relevance existed in parallel to the sense of place defined by the NT long before their conservation project began. The same applies to other monuments, historical sites and museum collections. The construction, loss and reconstruction of meanings are ongoing. In the early 21st century, democratisation and decolonisation and a potential mass assumption of some form of ownership of historical materials demonstrate the continuing use of ‘heritage’ not only for personal interest but also as a tool for contemporary identity building (Bruner 2001, 881). Reassessment also happens when resources are limited and thus when communities may become responsible for managing their own heritage (Lagerqvist 2016, 65, 66, 69). The original intent of Wellington Monument remains, but more than 200 years after the first stones were laid, few now make emotional connections to its original purpose. However, over those centuries, the monument has become absorbed into other local or personal stories and histories and adopted in the present for a new purpose. Thus, we recognise that ‘If heritage is understood to be changeable, then so must the values given to it’ and that our communities may be ‘less impressed by “things” than in recruiting a sense of the past to do various forms of identity work in the present’ (Smith and Campbell 2018, 5, 12). This local reckoning of what is valuable or not, what should be kept or retained, how we choose to use or to forget is important. When we refer to the ‘crisis’ of accumulation ‘of heritage’ (Harrison 2013, 580), we are ref lecting

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that it is human to forget as well as to remember and that ‘remembering, recollecting and forgetting all become part and parcel of the process of doing heritage’ ( Waterton 2010, 6). That process is both knowing and unknowing, intellectual and applied.

Conclusion There is an ‘ongoing process of using and relating to the past in the present, rather than just [recognising] objects from the past’ (Lagerqvist 2016, 60). The meanings of Wellington Monument changed locally and invisibly. The meanings of statues such as that of Colston were always multiple. At different times, that multiplicity may be more apparent and challenging to untangle, but questioning it is the activity of heritage at work, not the changing of history. Emotive debates swirl around public statues, national monuments and collections which have been displayed to present a single experience while obscuring others, even if unintentionally. While often enlightening, national examples of reconsideration or remaking can feel challenging as multiple voices seek to be heard in the public arena. However, such processes are at work across heritage. Wellington Monument exemplifies changing meaning in a less visible situation, at a local level and in a quieter environment. Nothing is permanent, but meanings are rarely entirely lost. They are retained but also remade to be relevant for contemporary times. Sometimes a new meaning, sometimes one of multiple meanings becomes more relevant or interesting. Colston has been reappraised, and the removal of his statue from a prominent public site reveals Bristol’s intentions for the city it wants to be in the future, without denying its past. The monument at Wellington has equally been part of the creation of a current identity. No longer primarily a war memorial with little direct link to place, it is now also entirely relevant to the town from which it took its name.

Acknowledgements With thanks to Lis Ford, Emma Jones, Wendy Lutley, Helen Sharp, Jenny Weston, and the National Trust Somerset Coast & Countryside Team.

References Adair, Bill, Benjamin Filene, and Laura Koloski. 2011. eds. Letting Go? Sharing Historical Authority in a User-Generated World. Philadelphia: The Pew Centre for Arts & Heritage, Left Coast Press. Ashley, Susan. 2005. “State Authority and the Public Sphere: Ideas on the Changing Role of the Museum as a Canadian Social Institution.” Museum and Society 3, no. 1 (March): 5–17. Ashton, Paul, and Paula Hamilton. 2012. “Connecting with History: Australians and Their Past.” In Public History and Heritage Today, edited by Paul Ashton and Hilda Kean, 23–41. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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BBC. 2020. “Black Lives Matter Protest: Why Was Churchill’s Statue Defaced?” www. bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-england-london-52972531. Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Benton, Tim, and Nicola J. Watson. 2010. “Museum Practice and Heritage.” In Understanding Heritage in Practice, edited by Susie West, 127–165. Manchester: Manchester University Press and The Open University. Black, Jeremy. 2010. Using History. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Bruner, Edward M. 2001. “The Maasai and the Lion King: Authenticity, Nationalism and Globalisation in African Tourism.” American Ethnologist 28, no. 4: 881–908. Crew, Spencer R., and James E. Sims. 1991. “Locating Authenticity: Fragments of a Dialogue.” In Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, edited by Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine, 159–175. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press. DeSilvey, Caitlin. 2017. Curated Decay: Heritage Beyond Saving. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Dresser, Madge, and Peter Fleming. 2009[2007]. Bristol Ethnic Minorities and the City 1000–2001. Chichester, West Sussex, England: Victoria County History Publication Published by Phillimore & Co Ltd. Citations refer to the 2009 edition. Ellen, Roy. 2013. “‘These Rude Implements’: Competing Claims for Authenticity in the Eolithic Controversy.” Anthropological Quarterly 86, no. 20 (Spring): 445–479. Elliott, Mark. 2020. Accessed September 12, 2020. www.museums.cam.ac.uk/blog/ 2020/07/20/knowing-what-is-important-rethinking-collections-with-maasai-culturalleaders/. Fouseki, Kalliopi. 2010. “‘Community Voices, Curatorial Choices’: Community Consultation for the 1807 Exhibitions.” Museum and Society 8, no. 3 (November): 180–192. Frisch, Michael H. 1990. A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History. Albany: State University of New York Press. Gentry, Kynan. 2013. “History, Heritage and Localism.” Policy Studies 34, nos. 5–6: 508–522. Routledge. Harrison, Rodney. 2010. “What Is Heritage?” In Understanding the Politics of Heritage, edited by Rodney Harrison, 5–42. Manchester University Press in association with The Open University. Harrison, Rodney. 2013. “Forgetting to Remember, Remembering to Forget: Late Modern Heritage Practices, Sustainability and the ‘Crisis’ of Accumulation of the Past.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 19, no. 6: 579–595. Harrison, Rodney. 2015. “Beyond ‘Natural’ and ‘Cultural’ Heritage: Toward an Ontological Politics of Heritage in the Age of Anthropocene.” Heritage and Society 8, no. 1: 24–42. Harrison, Rodney, and Audrey Linkman. 2010. “Critical Approaches to Heritage.” In Understanding the Politics of Heritage, edited by Rodney Harrison, 43–80. Manchester: Manchester University Press in association with The Open University. Herzfeld, Michael. 2015. “Heritage and the Right to the City: When Securing the Past Creates Insecurity in the Present.” Heritage and Society 8, no. 1: 8–21. Isnart, Cyril. 2012. “The Mayor, the Ancestors and the Chapel: Clientelism, Emotion and Heritagisation in Southern France.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 18, no. 5: 479–494. Jones, Siân. 2009. “Experiencing Authenticity at Heritage Sites: Some Implications for Heritage Management and Conservation.” Conservation and Management of Archaeological Sites 11, no. 2: 133–147. Routledge.

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Jordanova, Ludmilla. 2006. History in Practice. London: Bloomsbury. Lagerqvist, Maja. 2016. “Reverberations of a Crisis: The Practical and Ideological Reworkings of Irish State Heritage Work in Economic Crisis and Austerity.” Heritage and Society 9, no. 1: 57–75. Lutley, W. 2017. “Wellington Monument: A Tour Through Some Aspects of Its History, Archival Research for the National Trust.” Proceedings of the Somerset Archaeological and Natural History Society 160, no. 2016: 134–148. Macleod, Donald V. L. 2010 “Power, Culture and the Production of Heritage.” In Tourism, Power and Culture: Anthropological Insights, edited by Donald V. L. Macleod and James G. Carrier, Series: Tourism and Cultural Change, 1–18. Bristol: Channel View Publications Ltd. Museum of the Home. 2020. “Geffrye, His Statue and Its Future.” Accessed 12th October 2021. https://www.museumofthehome.org.uk/what-we-do/our-story/the-statueof-sir-robert-geffrye/. National Trust. 2020. Accessed September 13, 2020. https://register-of-charities.charity commission.gov.uk/charity. Olusoga, David. 2020. “I Shared My Home with Edward Colston for More Than 20 Years: Good Riddance.” The Guardian, June 11. Accessed September 14, 2020. www. theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/11/i-shared-my-home-with-edward-colston-formore-than-20-years-good-riddance. Selby, Martin. 2010. “People-Place-Past: The Visitor Experience of Cultural Heritage.” In Culture, Heritage and Representation, edited by Emma Waterton and Steve Watson, 39–56. Farnham: Ashgate. Smith, Laurajane, and Natsuko Akagawa. 2009. Intangible Heritage. Oxford: Routledge. Smith, Laurajane, and Gary Campbell. 2018. “The Tautology of ‘Intangible Values’ and the Misrecognition of Intangible Cultural Heritage.” Heritage & Society, 1–19. Swenson, Astrid. 2013 The Rise of Heritage: Preserving the Past in France, Germany and England, 1789–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Swenson, Grete, Gro B. Jerpåsen, Oddrun Sæter, and Mari Sundli Tveit. 2013 “Capturing the Intangible and Tangible Aspects of Heritage: Personal versus Official Perspectives in Cultural Heritage Management.” Landscape Research 38, no. 2: 203–221. Routledge. Urry, John. 1990 The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies. London: Sage. Urry, John. 1999[1996]. “How Societies Remember the Past.” In Theorizing Museums, edited by Sharon Macdonald and Gordon Fyfe, 45–65. Oxford: Blackwell. Waterton, Emma. 2010. Politics, Policy and the Discourses of Heritage in Britain. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. Wood, Barbara. 2018. “Between Revere and Remove.” Accessed September 16, 2020. http://tvad-uh.blogspot.com/. Wood, Barbara. 2019. “Who Holds Power in Heritage and What Does That Mean for Museums?” Museological Review no. 23: 15–23.

2 MARGINALISED HERITAGE AND INVISIBLE HISTORY The Silvertown War Memorial Louise Purbrick

Unstable substance/invisible history At eight minutes to seven on Friday evening 19 January 1917, the Brunner Mond munitions factory on Crescent Wharf, Silvertown, exploded. A factory fire ignited fifty tons of trinitrotoluene, usually known by its acronym, TNT. The East London skyline glowed red; the explosion was heard across the whole city. Sixty thousand properties were damaged, a thousand of which, including working peoples’ homes close to the furnace, were destroyed. Seventy-three people died. ‘It was the most destructive explosion ever to blast London’, according to London historical geographer Toby Butler in an article published exactly a hundred years after its effects (2017). Photographs of the immediate aftermath of the explosion, digitised by the Museum of London in another centenary imperative, confirm the wasteful force of the substance that filled shells with their fatal agency. John H. Avery’s Port of London Authority images taken to ‘assist in dealing with claims for compensation’ (Sparkes 2017) reveal widespread devastation to warehouses of the riverside industry. The impact of the fire upon the Silvertown streets was described by its residents: at first, they were full of the cries of people searching for their friends and family; then, later, they were filled with furniture dragged from fallen houses in sad attempts to save possessions (Hill and Bloch 2003, 109). The official Ministry of Munitions investigation reported that the ‘explosion followed upon an outbreak of fire in or above the melt pot’, but its exact cause was not definitively established. One ‘possible explanation’ was a ‘friction spark’. The factory had been found to be in a ‘dirty condition’ (Home Office 1917), and any contact between a deposit of grit or shard of metal or ‘a nail from a worker’s boot’ could have lighted the TNT. Another explanation was DOI: 10.4324/9781003096146-4

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‘spontaneous ignition’ due to overheating or impurity. A spilt pile of TNT may have become contaminated, or impurities may have been contained within the TNT itself rather than the factory. Bags that were opened on the melt pot f loor often contained tiny pieces of wood or paper. These impurities might or might not be noticed as the bag’s contents were poured into the hopper and poked with a wooden pole over coils heated to 160 degrees centigrade to ensure even distribution and liquification. But the substance itself was unstable. Indeed, its dynamism was the reason it was manufactured for war. The TNT being processed on the evening shift 19 January 1917 was supplied by the firm J.W. Leith of Huddersfield. The nitric acid from which the batch of TNT was produced in this Yorkshire town depended upon, as did all Allied Forces’ munitions industry, sodium nitrate imported from Chile.

Heritage of industrial war/history of colonial capitalism This chapter ref lects upon matters of heritage that circulate around the centenary of the Silvertown Explosion and settle upon its memorial, a modest stone structure, now repositioned in a gentrified docklands landscape (Figure 2.1). How is a community heritage (Dicks 2000) performed in its local spaces as they are erased? How can an industrial heritage already losing its place acknowledge its colonial history? What is the role of design in the spatial politics of urban development and heritage practices? What is that of design history in its interpretation? The memorial of the Explosion, listed by Historic England as Grade II under the name the Silvertown War Memorial, represents a local heritage as it represses a global history; it is also caught up in the hierarchies of national war memory. Despite the scale of destruction of people and place and the number of fatalities, casualties and destroyed homes, the Silvertown Explosion is not widely known beyond the borough in which it occurred. The blast and its effects are not part of the official history or heritage, national memory or myth, of the First World War. The battlefields and monuments that register the loss of thousands of young male soldiers are the focus of heritage practice of tourists and relatives, national politicians and local representatives, academics and armed forces (King 1998; Winter 1995). Capitalised spaces dependent upon substances extracted from colonised land and labour for arms manufacturing are more difficult to assimilate into either national narratives of war or those of local London life. The raw materials of war, such as sodium nitrate from Chile, are not honoured in military heritage. They are not well remembered. The minerals used within armaments have less historical presence than the armaments themselves. Empty shell cases, battered and broken or engraved and polished, are a defining object of First World War memory (Saunders 2004). Their explosive contents, however, are used and gone; the volatility of nitrate compounds on which their dynamic force depends means they disappear. Materialisations of history and memory underpin heritage practices. Even attempts to preserve intangible

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FIGURE 2.1

Silvertown War Memorial, Royal Wharf development, view of monument in a gentrified Docklands landscape, London, 2019.

Source: Photograph by Louise Purbrick, reproduced with permission of the author.

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heritage require tangible forms, some kind of marker of an unrecorded history that would otherwise be forgotten, which can jolt memories to create a place for the past in the present. This is, of course, a question of design: what are the forms through which heritage can be practiced? Design histories that attend not only to the appearance of things in their present condition and local surroundings but also the global patterns of past and present commodity circulation that have shaped them have an important role in reclaiming unseen histories for heritage practice. Nitrate is a case in point. Lost in a ‘field of force of destructive torrents and explosions’ (Benjamin 1992, 84) is a history of colonial extraction and exploitation. Where are the forms through which this could be remembered? Heritage practices devoted to the First World War are widespread across Europe. Its battlefield pilgrimages and annual state ceremonies are dominant heritage practices, which are not only authorised (Smith 2006) but, as demonstrations of sacred nationalism, mingle militarism, Christianity and patriarchy. The once-neglected First World War experiences of women and animals are now officially acknowledged and monumentalised. The role of soldiers of colour is recognised in academic writing (Das 2018) and museum exhibitions and shared with local and diasporic communities through Black History events ( Brighton and Hove Black History n.d.). But the colonial relationships upon which the business of war depended are suppressed. Nitrate was an essential ingredient of the industrialisation of war, required for the mass production of high explosives. The nitrate industry was driven by British capital and capitalists (Monteón 1975) who colonised the Atacama Desert. Sodium nitrate, sought after in Europe from the late nineteenth century for its fertilising rather than its explosive effects, was extensively and intensively mined in Antofagasta and Tarapacá by companies based in Liverpool and London. They built nitrate mines, factories and towns; they laid the nitrate railways and extended the ports from which nitrate was exported. The Chilean government taxed nitrate exports, but the profits from its trade, often in the inf lated shares of a series of nitrate monopolies, were made in the City of London as hessian bags of the unstable and irritant substance landed in the capital’s docks or those of Liverpool. British interests in nitrate cultivated a system of colonial capitalism based on extraction of material value, the metabolisms (Clark and Foster 2009) of both land and labour, that fed financial markets as well as urban populations. The entire mechanical assemblage of las oficinas was imported from Britain, sailed down the Thames or across the Irish Sea. People, who shovelled the nitrogen-rich rocks through these industrial colonies, were brought and bound in gangs from the Chilean south, the Bolivian and Peruvian Andes. Engancheros began their life as nitrate workers indebted to those who trafficked them to the Atacama Desert and unable to redeem their passage (Monteón 1979). The British trade in nitrate created a labour system that extended the hierarchies of European and Latin American ethnicities and indigeneities, a colonial system of global extraction which supplied explosives to the Allied Forces in the First World War.

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Traffic in goods of life and death, food and weapons, is part of warfare. Vast amounts of nitrate were essential for both sides as they launched shells at each other’s trenches across the No Man’s Land of northern France and Belgium. However, supplies from the ‘natural deposits’ of the Atacama desert to the Central Powers were halted by the Allied naval blockade, successfully upheld following battleship confrontations off the coast of South America, in particular the 1914 Battle of the Falklands (Bown 2005, 197). Germany had been the largest single market for British trade in Chilean fertiliser (Nitrogen Products Committee 1920, 9–10). Lack of natural nitrate, for either guns or grain, directed the German war economy towards production of its synthetic forms. Fritz Haber had developed, by 1909, a laboratory process of ammonia synthesis, and four years later, Carl Bosch engineered the industrial structures for the commercial production of Haber’s process. The Haber-Bosch process sustained the German war effort (Haber 1971, 93–95). Meanwhile, a British banker, Herbert Gibbs, whose family firm had made its fortune dealing in fertiliser from Chile, controlled supplies of natural nitrate to the Allies. He became director of the British government’s Nitrate and Soda Executive. The Ministry of Munitions had tried to solve the shell shortage since 1915 by converting existing industrial factories into war production, of which Brunner Mond in Silvertown was one.

East London: local and industrial The Silvertown Explosion, marginal in national First World War narratives, is honoured locally and forms part of the industrial and community heritage of East London. The loss of life and livelihoods is remembered as an historical event of humanitarian significance within local community spaces; the historical period of long shifts undertaken by male and female workers at Brunner Mond is recalled in narratives of the past industrial life of East London. Three physical interventions assert the memory of the Explosion in its locality and constitute material heritage of the munitions industry in Silvertown, or at least did so until around the time of the Explosion’s centenary. A wooden plaque was installed inside St John’s Church, Albert Road, before the end of First World War, on 19 January 1918, the first anniversary of the Explosion. In shadowed capital letters, it presents itself to the ‘memory of all those who lost their lives in that disaster’; it also marks the destruction of St Barnabas Church and gives thanks for the lives of children that were saved. A wooden board raised on the pavement outside of Silvertown’s fire station on the North Woolwich Road, the busy A1020, is ‘dedicated to the memory of the firemen and their families killed and injured’. This was placed opposite the blast site at the Brunner Mond soda factory turned munitions workshop. The most substantial form of material heritage was the Silvertown War Memorial, a limestone obelisk by commissioned by Brunner Mond and erected at the former entrance to their factory on Crescent Wharf. It has the conventional form of a war memorial, abstract but inscribed. The side

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of its tapering rectangular form facing the street is offered to ‘THE MEMORY OF THOSE WHO WHILST SERVING THEIR COUNTRY BY MAKING TNT PERISHED IN THE EXPLOSION IN THESE WORKS JANUARY 19TH 1917’ and towards the wharf to the ‘GLORIOUS MEMORY OF THE MEN FROM THESE WORKS WHO FELL IN THE GREAT WAR 1914–18’. The wood and words of the ‘firemen and their families’ memorial and the stone and engraved sides of the Brunner Mond factory obelisk faced each other across the North Woolwich Road for most of the twentieth century, but both were removed in second decade of the twenty-first century, around the time of the Explosion’s centenary. The Silvertown Explosion centenary took place at a moment of change in the historical environment of Silvertown. The East London docklands area is a third of a mile square between the Thames and the North Woolwich Road. It encompassed the former munitions factory site and was subject to large-scale replanning by property developer Ballymore and partner Oxley, entitled Royal Wharf. The Silvertown War Memorial had been boxed up to protect it from the heavy traffic of large-scale construction and was by January 2017 inaccessible behind site hoardings. On my first visit to the memorial, I was the only person behind the hoarding who was not wearing a hi-vis jacket and a hard hat. A notebook clutched in one hand and camera around my neck, I felt I had to stride around as if invited into a space to which I had no right. I had taken a few images of the Fire Brigade memorial just before I entered the Royal Wharf construction site, but it was gone on my last visit in late 2019, disappeared with the fire station’s demolition. Centenary commemorations took place in local spaces at varying distances from the original location of the Brunner Mond and its memorial. With a diminished or distant physical presence of Explosion memorials, a depleted materiality of local memory increased the dependence upon performative acts of heritage. Recalling the past through performance, which often characterised marginalised histories that have not been endowed with substantial material forms, is how the Silvertown Explosion always has been remembered. Historian and blogger Colin Grainger details the Newham Teachers Theatre production of The Silvertown Disaster in 1975, noting that it was the subject of two short stories by Keith Lloyd and featured in an episode of the long-running ITV costume drama, Upstairs Downstairs, focused on Ruby, a servant (Grainger 2017). When spatial connections to the past cannot be kept, temporal markers provide a point of performance. A minute silence was observed at the moment of the explosion, fifty-two minutes past six o’clock in the evening, at St. Luke’s Community Centre in Canning Town, the adjoining neighbourhood to Silvertown and the next underground and DLR stop towards the City. Here, an exhibition, produced by experienced local history practitioners Eastside Community Heritage, placed the Explosion in a longer history of industrial growth and decline. Eastside Community Heritage undertook oral histories and instigated drama workshops at local schools (Eastside Community Heritage 2017). Their work is

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exemplary of the importance of the performative in recalling the industrial past of a locality as its structures are erased or overlaid by those of a newer economic order. The concluding panel of the exhibition is an account of the unsuccessful local opposition to the relandscaping of East London in the 1980s when the City of London airport plans were completed. The Silvertown Explosion centenary generated a digital heritage of word and image across institutional, community and individual websites with a London focus, from the Museum of London’s digitisation of John H. Avery’s sublime sepia scenes of destroyed docklands to a page on a local historian’s blog, eastlondonhistory.co.uk. Even a small exhibition of Newham Archives and Local Studies Library records of the Explosion, which toured the Borough’s book borrowing sites, left an internet trail, albeit just an announcement. But neither these digital spaces nor those local places of church, school or library are imposing sites of heritage. Hierarchies of history and memory are registered in the brutal measure of space and scale: large structures in central locations, such as the Cenotaph in the middle of Whitehall’s wide avenue of political offices, assert the importance of battlefield confrontations between uniformed soldiers in nationalist narratives of state power. The material form of great political status is height and weight. Marginal heritages can be read in their lesser materiality; they do not take up much space. The scale of local heritage is small. Compared to the substantial heritage forms that sustain national narratives of the First World War, the density of heritage tourism at London’s national sites, Silvertown’s heritage performances establish only a thin line of continuity of memory to the lost labouring lives of local people (Tully 2014). Furthermore, whilst the centenary commemorations were successful expressions of the continuity in the gatherings at local buildings and in digital domains, these were acutely problematic: a rhetoric of heritage continuity is performed at the moment of historical discontinuity registered in the removal of the main memorial. It had been lifted away from public view. A private memorial event attended by the families of victims, the great-grandson of J.T. Brunner and the mayor of Newham was convened at the stone obelisk memorial then within the construction site of the Royal Wharf development (Hopps 2017).

Moving a memorial On 11 November 2014, an application was made to London Borough of Newham for consent for ‘alterations’ to a listed building from Philip Dunphy of Rolfe Judd Planning on behalf of Oxley Wharf Limited, a part of Oxley International Holdings, Singaporean property developers, of the same southwest London address. A series of tick-box responses on a short and hastily completed document made clear that no advice was sought from the ‘local authority’, and there was no consultation with neighbours or communities. Philip Dunphy also declared that he was the owner.

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That the Silvertown War Memorial, or indeed any memorials as collective sites of memory, can be individually owned should be questioned. Elsewhere Philip Dunphy acknowledged he acted on behalf of the developer and was not then the ‘exclusive’ owner of a ‘freehold’ or ‘leasehold’ that never existed ( Dunphy 2014). The actual alteration to status of the memorial, from a structure donated to local collective memory into the control, if not ownership, of a developer, is found in the unscrutinised process of urban planning. On 30 March 2012, Newham Borough Council granted ‘hybrid planning permission’ for the Royal Wharf Development, a 363,000-square-metre site, reoccupying and retitling three former industrial wharves: Venesta, Crescent and Minoco (Rolfe Judd Planning 2015, 2). The planning application also announced the ‘demolition of all existing buildings’ to make way for ‘mixed use redevelopment’ that followed the familiar form of gentrification: retail outlets, financial offices, cafes and takeaways dominated by high-rise housing. Of the 363,000 square metres, 329,900 were for residential use. Rolfe Judd’s argument, made in retrospect, is that the ‘principle of moving the memorial was consented through the original masterplan application’, a blanket approval development that neither identified nor considered this listed structure. A ‘reserved matters approval’ by Newham Council granted over two years later on 16 October 2014 agreed to ‘a new site entrance and road’ exactly where the memorial stood (Rolfe Judd Planning 2015, 6). It was in the way. By the time there was any paperwork relating to the Silvertown War Memorial itself, its relocation was inevitable. The planner’s argument for moving it was presented as case for improving its heritage, but The Silvertown War Memorial Listed Building Application: Assessment of Relocation of Heritage Asset was driven by priorities of the construction industry (Rolfe Judd Planning 2015). Authorisation from English Heritage to carry out works on a listed building was given in the same month, on 24 February 2015. The case for relocating a memorial from the place it had occupied for a hundred years has never been publicly interrogated. I do so here in an attempt to understand the intersections of heritage and design. The Silvertown War Memorial Listed Building Application initially dismisses the relationship of heritage form to heritage site and design in its setting. The document’s authors, Rolfe Judd, or those the company commissioned to write for them, claim that the Memorial has neither archaeological associations nor aesthetic properties; its ‘listing is not based or related to the architectural quality of the design’ (Rolfe Judd Planning 2015, 6). It is an ordinary monument, the same as many structures that commemorate the loss of lives in war, a familiar obelisk landmark of the absence of the dead in the abstract classicism that defines empty tombs. None of these early twentieth-century structures were built over dead bodies; there would never be any human archaeological remains. The Silvertown Memorial, like others erected as the First World War ended, are not graves but their substitutes. As the dead of the battlefields were never to be returned, stone forms in simple geometry such as Edwin Lutyen’s Whitehall Cenotaph communicated the presence of absence. It is in the ordinariness of the

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Silvertown Memorial that its architectural and artistic significant lies: its form and setting, its typical design and street-facing position. The planner’s dismissal of design is intended to make way for an argument about relocation despite the significance of stability of structures in the continuity of memory. We return to the place in order to return to the time. However, for the convenience of the case for development, the importance of ‘setting’ is acknowledged in an argument against keeping things in their place and for moving them somewhere better (Rolfe Judd Planning 2015, 6). This is a logic of gentrification and property capitalism: development improves. The original place of the Memorial at the former entrance to Brunner Mond’s munitions factory was unsatisfactory as a heritage site: ‘of poor quality accessibility and character’ (Rolfe Judd Planning 2015, 8). The lorry depot of TDG Logistics, a Californian ‘logistics provider’, was the then-occupant of this section of Crescent and Minoco Wharf. ‘The existing location is within a strong street scene’ and the ‘industrial nature of the site’, the planner argues, ‘does not encourage footfall or attract public visits to the area’ (Rolfe Judd Planning 2015, 8). The descriptions of the Memorial’s setting, a ‘strong street scene’ of ‘industrial nature’, are not inaccurate. Beneath an overland section of the Docklands Light Railway within the landscape of warehouses, yards, fences, gates and the North Woolwich Road, the Silvertown War Memorial occupied an everyday space that demonstrates the continuity of the global transactions of Thames docks within which Chilean nitrate processing was once a part. The lost lives of industrial workers haunt the intersection of the transport networks that cross the world and the borough. Yet the planner’s application expediently argues the opposite: ‘the memorial retains less of a connection to its origin being located adjacent to goods warehouses and other recent industrial properties’ and ‘is no longer directly associated with the properties and structures it was built to commemorate’. The Brunner Mond factory is long gone; its erasure is the reason for the Memorial. The Silvertown Explosion blew it apart. Its context is absence. All memorials are indications of absences, and none more so than the obelisks of First World War. From the planner’s perspective, the everyday bleakness of the original site was not ‘an appropriate setting for this asset’, for it ‘does not encourage visitors’. Their Listed Building Application asserts heritage expertise but rests upon a conventional and dominant version of it: heritage is a thing that is visited. The concept of heritage as destination within regeneration schemes presents the past as best served up in a newly designed historic environment. Moving a local memorial because it will be a better tourist attraction elsewhere follows the regeneration logic that new designs inevitably improve any existing local forms. Poppy wreaths at Silvertown War Memorial before its relocation are evidence otherwise; they are signs that it remains meaningful in its place. The people who carried paper f lower votives to its site and held them as they focused upon the lives ruptured by industrial war inscribed on its stone faces already knew where it was. There was no need to attract them. Remembering the past in everyday spaces, in the ‘strong street scene’ that the planner derided, is a type of community heritage.

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Rolfe Judd describes the Silvertown War Memorial’s new site as ‘a more appropriate setting’ in a ‘public park’. It will be an ‘open space’ in which ‘the war memorial is very prevalent within public views and accessible to all’; it will be ‘more attractive’ with a ‘quieter and more relaxed atmosphere’, and, furthermore, it ‘more accurately ref lects the original location of the TNT factory’ (Rolfe Judd Planning 2015, 7). The last claim is disingenuous. While the Memorial was relocated within the footprint of the former soda, then munitions, factory, a third of a mile back from the North Woolwich Road, it was to a spot further from the actual place of the explosion on the melt pot f loor, the blast site itself. Its move undoes the decision of the factory owner to face the streets affected by the subsequent fire. It is difficult to accept that this is ‘more accurate’. But ‘more’, more appropriate, more attractive, more accurate, is used repeatedly in the application; more is the language of improvement, a planner’s discourse of development in which buildings are constructed and entire areas landscaped. Large-scale residential developments, such as the 3,385 f lats in the high rises of Royal Wharf, are set in a scenery of improvement. The ‘new location’, it is claimed, ‘will not alter the architectural appearance of the War Memorial’ (Rolfe Judd Planning 2015, 7); it will ‘seek to promote the significance of the design by using landscaped planting which both compliments and accentuates the Memorial in the context of the park’. The need for landscaping is also offered as a reason the Memorial had to be moved. If it remained at the site of the ‘proposed road’, in the ‘constrained development parameters it would be difficult to provide landscaping’. Cropped lawns with clear hedged borders marking paved walkways around glass high-rise buildings form the commercial aesthetic of London and other global cities. Remodelling of urban space in the image of a masterplan clears away the messy layers of architecture that have accrued over time into an ordered single view, often with one or two structures of interest, a new sculpture or historic monument that refers to a local past in a managed way. The Silvertown War Memorial serves this purpose. Its new location inside the Royal Wharf Development and in the shadow of Ballymore’s marketing suite is described as a ‘public park’. But the space to which the Memorial was moved was greened over and is not public (Figure 2.2). Relocation privatised the Silvertown Memorial; it become part of a commercial development. The planner describes how it will be ‘accessible by any member of the public who chooses to visit the park, not just the residents of the development’ and preserved as part of the ‘maintenance strategy for the development as a whole’. Assurances that ‘the architectural appearance of the War Memorial’ will be well managed ( Rolfe Judd Planning 2015, 8) only serve to affirm its loss to a local public. At the time of the centenary of the Silver Explosion, its memorial was inaccessible to all except for local dignitaries and close family behind construction site hoardings.

Gentrifying Silvertown The centenary of the Explosion occurred as Silvertown was subject to irrevocable rupture. The expansion of large-scale, high-rise new glass buildings that have

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FIGURE 2.2

Silvertown War Memorial, Royal Wharf development, view of monument in its new location, London, 2019.

Source: Photograph by Louise Purbrick, reproduced with permission of the author.

transformed central London, especially its East End, has spread further east along the River Thames to Deptford on the south side and Silvertown on the north. The demarcation of the construction site, with its graphic messages, projects the arrival of new architecture that promises a landscaped lifestyle rather than just a place to live. It does not simply announce a structural change to the locality; it immediately brings it about. Demolition begins the displacement of spatial and temporal markers, such as the Silvertown War Memorial, that once sustained continuity between past and present. Community heritage loses its place before the development is complete. The Memorial was boxed off in its original location, protected from the construction site traffic but out of sight almost as soon as construction started. Construction continues the displacement of demolition: tall cranes, blocks of concrete, walls of glass, thin wooden hoardings dominate the space. They are imposed over small structures and organic growth, brick buildings of one or two storeys, grass verges, urban hedgerows. They require new roads as their foundations are laid over previous traffic systems. The scale of architectural transformation, the speed of its complete imposition, the immediate rearrangement of local space, is disorienting. The architecture of a gentrifying global capital is beginning to dominate in Silvertown, to impose itself on local spaces such that they are no longer local. The spatial relationship to a local past is ruptured. The new residential setting of the Silvertown War Memorial is a small site of confusion. An explanatory panel moved with the memorial reads as if neither had left their original industrial site: ‘This Memorial is located on the site of the

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entrance to Minoco Wharf, the location of the former TNT explosives factory of Brunner Mond & Co.’ A third of a mile matters within the wider decontextualisation that has occurred. Tall towers of gentrified architecture represent the conquest of the global over the local and overshadow the memorial. The preservation of a small part of the past, such as an inscription on an obelisk, announces that victory. It may look like benevolent or knowledgeable concession to a history of place, but it is the colonisation of the local, a material conquest. The architecture and economy of global capital is imposed over an entire locality, erasing the routes of a local life, transforming the class identity of another London borough: from ‘previously industrial’ according to Royal Wharf ’s website to ‘an epicentre of culture and creativity’.

Globalising heritage The geometric glass towers of global landscapes have been imposed upon Silvertown’s docklands and surrounding streets. It appears as if the international financial institution of the City of London has intruded too far and become an architectural occupation of the riverside of the Thames as it f lows east to its North Kent and Essex estuary. But global capital always underpinned the economy of Silvertown and the local livelihoods of its working-class inhabitants. The entire waterfront of London is a landscape of colonising commerce and industry. As the proud legend, ‘warehouse of the world’, proclaims, Silvertown was the recipient of global goods; it was named after the rubber factory owner Samuel Winkworth Silver, whose own name referred to the earliest form of commodity extraction. Parts of this history remain. Next to the Royal Wharf development is Lyle Park, which contains Harland and Wolff ’s dockyard gates, a monument to past industry overlooked by a still-working Tate and Lyle refinery. Here is a material expression of Silvertown’s location in the global circuit of capital. In a modest, civic space amongst the local people walking their dogs or practising football, the visual references to sugar and shipping could allow, or even encourage, some ref lection on the place of East London in histories of slavery and empire. But there is no sign of the extraction of natural substances or human labour from Latin America. Nothing evokes a history of nitrate mining in the brutal conditions in las oficinas of the Atacama desert owned by British speculators who traded their shares for artificially inf lated profits in the City a few miles west up the River Thames. The acronym TNT on the Silvertown War Memorial now enclosed in the Royal Wharf residential landscape and in view of its marketing office refers to an industrial product without an origin. The reduced and removed material forms of the war industry in East London are enlarged upon by the performative practices of Silvertown’s local heritage; the plays, the commemorative silences and the exhibition visits that mark the time of the Explosion increase, if only momentarily, the material presence the lost lives of working people. Performance of marginalised histories simultaneously addresses and illustrates the hierarchies of intangible and tangible heritages that

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occur in a capitalist culture where amassing ownership of physical forms is the sign of historical significance. Also, it appears, or at least it does to me, that the intangible requires the tangible, however slight the material form may be, to call it up. If there is nothing there: what can be done? The Latin American land and labour upon which the East London docklands economy and First World War armaments depended have no place in Silvertown. The history of the Chilean, Bolivian, Peruvian and Andean people who hauled desert rocks into carts, pushed them through crushers and into boiling tanks, shovelled away the residue of nitrate processing onto slag heaps and its sodium nitrate commodity into hessian bags then heaved them onto trains bound for the Pacific ports of Iquique or Pisagua is, I suggest, not even neglected. Neglect implies some awareness of existence but dismissed responsibility; their labour, the coerced toil of the colonised, is invisible. Local heritage is preserved without its global history. This is a difficult argument to make at a moment when invisibility also threatens the presence of a local past: the sites of industrial labour in London are being obscured to the point of erasure by the forms of financial capital. The political imperative of heritage practised with regeneration of de-industrialised places has been to recognise the meanings they once held for the people who lived and worked within them. Whether explicitly acknowledged or not, such heritage practices assert the significance of local over global as it seeks to remember labour, not capital, and celebrate community rather than corporation. It reclaims place, at least as the property of memory, for those who are now economically excluded. Belonging is often premised on another exclusion of the distant but dependent lives entangled in far-reaching and unequal relationships of global capital. The history of Silvertown, like those of all industrial waterfront sites, from the Liverpool docks to the shipyards of Glasgow, is inseparable from the colonising project of capitalism. It is, perhaps, more appealing to remember a heritage of lost local labour isolated from the wider world system of exploitation upon which it depended. Globalisation is not out of place in Silvertown: it has a new form. It is not a matter of asserting one history in the place of another, one heritage in the site of another. Heritage theory and practice has promoted the polyvalency of a palimpsest (Huyssen 2003) or dissonance (Tunbridge and Ashworth 1996) intended to reclaim the marginalised or once invisible. Writing about the place of nitrate colonial capitalism in the Silvertown Explosion allows it some historical and material presence. But how can the heritage traced in this chapter be inscribed within the space where it matters most? Where can it be inserted, since the site of the Silvertown Explosion has been buried under tarmac and its memorial removed to a residential enclosure of glass towers?

Heritage practice and design history How to create a form through which an invisible history can be made visible at a site of its historical significance must be a matter of design. A conjunction

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between heritage practice and design history can foreground, ask if not answer, the questions that spin out from the form of memorials: whose history is permitted a material form? While heritage performances may be less dependent upon material form, a memorial of some kind, they still require a site of some significance in which they can take place: what spatial forms permit the practices of heritage? It is the spatial politics of heritage that the centenary of the Silvertown Explosion brings into view. The imposition of a landscape which serves to dislocate the past from the present and appropriate a history of industrial labour for a gentrified lifestyle demonstrates the historical loss that a development-driven designed environment can create. Recognition of that loss, if not the capacity to repair it, is a design historical matter. Form is not the only design historical focus. Attention to the global circuits of production, to the mobilities of materials across the globe as they carry with them the unequal relationships of capitalism and colonialism is design history at its most radical (Adamson, Teasley, and Riello 2011; Lees-Maffei and Fallan 2016). Less attention has been paid to materials in their raw commodity forms, for they are often invisible, or almost so, disappeared into the composition of consumer goods just as sodium nitrate from the Atacama desert exploded in f lames. The Silvertown Explosion was a collision between global history and local labour, and its heritage now exists at an intersection of their legacies. At a moment when the industrial heritage of community is being evacuated, how can that local history be reclaimed in a form that acknowledges its dependency upon the extraction of the land and labour of others?

References Adamson, Glenn, Sarah Teasley, and Giorgio Riello, eds. 2011. Global Design History. Abingdon: Routledge. Benjamin, Walter. 1992. “The Storyteller.” In Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt. London: Fontana. Bown, Stephen. 2005. A Most Damnable Invention: Dynamite, Nitrates and the Making of the Modern World. New York: Thomas Dunne Books. Brighton and Hove Black History. n.d. “The Chattri Memorial.” Accessed February 20, 2020. www.black-history.org.uk/21st-century/the-chattri-memorial/. Butler, Toby. 2017. “Silvertown a Century on: The Mysterious Cause and Tragic Legacy of London’s Biggest Explosion.” History Workshop, 20 January. www.historywork shop.org.uk/silvertown-a-century-on-the-mysterious-cause-and-tragic-legacy-oflondons-biggest-explosion/. Clark, Brett, and John Bellamy Foster. 2009. “Ecological Imperialism and the Global Metabolic Rift: Unequal Exchange and the Guano/Nitrates Trade.” International Journal of Comparative Sociology 50, nos. 3–4: 311–334. Das, S. 2018. India, Empire, and First World War Culture: Writings, Images, and Songs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dicks, Bella. 2000. Heritage, Place and Community. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Dunphy, Philip. 2014. “Application for Listed Building Consent for Alterations, Extension or Demolition of a Listed Building.” Accessed January 1, 2017. https://pa.newham.

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gov.uk/online-applications/applicationDetails.do?activeTab=documents&keyVal=NFL 24Q JYJX000. Eastside Community Heritage. 2017. “Silvertown Explosion.” Accessed 05/01/2020. https:// eastsidech.wixsite.com/silvertownexplosion/exhibition-launch. Grainger, Colin. 2017. “Poignant Anniversary of the Shocking Silvertown Explosion: An Accident Waiting to Happen.” Accessed June 1, 2019. www.colin-grainger.co.uk/ poignant-anniversary-of-the-shocking-silvertown-explosion-an-accident-waitingto-happen/. Haber, L. F. 1971. The Chemical Industry 1900–1930. International Growth and Technological Change. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hill, Graham, and Howard Bloch. 2003. The Silvertown Explosion: London 1917. Stroud: Tempus. Home Office. 1917. Report of the Committee into the Explosion Which Occurred on Friday 19th January 1917, at the Chemical Works of Messrs. Brunner, Mond and Company, Limited, Crescent Wharf, Silvertown. London: National Archives Catalogue Ref: HO 326/9. Hopps, Kat. 2017. “Relatives of Silvertown Explosion Victims Mark Centenary of Disaster.” The Newham Recorder, January 20. www.newhamrecorder.co.uk/news/ relatives-of-silvertown-explosion-victims-mark-centenary-of-disaster-1-4856830. Huyssen, Andreas. 2003. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford: Stanford University Press. King, Alex. 1998. Memorials of the Great War in Britain: The Symbolism and Politics of Remembrance. Oxford: Berg. Lees-Maffei, Grace, and Kjetil Fallan, eds. 2016. Designing Worlds: National Design Histories in an Age of Globalization. New York: Berghahn. Monteón, Michael. 1975. “The British in the Atacama Desert: The Cultural Bases of Economic Imperialism.” The Journal of Economic History 35, no. 1 (March): 117–133. Monteón, Michael. 1979. “The Enganche in the Chilean Nitrate Sector, 1880–1930.” Latin American Perspectives 6. no. 3 (Summer): 66–79. Nitrogen Products Committee. 1920. Final Report. Munitions Inventions Department, Ministry of Munitions of War. National Archives Catalogue Ref DSIR37/59. Rolfe Judd Planning. 2015. “Silvertown War Memorial Listed Building Application: Assessment of Relocation of Heritage Asset.” Accessed January 1, 2017. https:// pa.newham.gov.uk/online-applications/applicationDetails.do?activeTab=documents& keyVal=NFL24Q JYJX000. Saunders, Nicholas. 2004, Matters of Conflict: Material Culture, Memory and the First World War. London: Routledge. Smith, Laurajane. 2006. Uses of Heritage. Abingdon: Routledge. Sparkes, Vyki. 2017. “Commemorating Silvertown: 100 Years after London’s Largest Explosion.” Museum of London, January 17. www.museumof london.org.uk/ discover/silvertown-explosion-100-years-photographs-docklands. Tully, John. 2014. Silvertown: The Lost Story of a Strike That Shook London and Helped Launch the Modern Labour Movement. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Tunbridge, J. E., and G. J. Ashworth. 1996. Dissonant Heritage: The Management of the Past as a Resource in Conflict. Chichester: Wiley. Winter, Jay. 1995. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

3 THE INDIA-PAKISTAN BORDER AS SITE FOR THE PRODUCTION OF NATIONAL IDENTITY Heritage by design Suchitra Balasubrahmanyan

The drawing of borders In 1908, two artists in western India associated with the freedom movement against British rule designed a poster depicting the subcontinent as a four-armed mother goddess, Hind Devi (Goddess India) or Bharat Mata (Mother India). In the poster, Hind Devi took the form of the map of British India; one end of her sari stretched all the way east, draping over Bengal and Burma, and the other end draped over Gujarat in the west. One left palm cupped her chin, while a right arm supported the left elbow, striking a thoughtful pose. The second left arm stretched towards the east in a gesture of benediction, while the other right arm held a trident in the region of Sind to the west. Her head occupied the position of Kashmir, while her feet lay at the southern extremity of Kanyakumari, and her long hair swept across the Himalayas. Inscribed across the Bay of Bengal were the words janani janmabhoomishcha swargaadapi gariyasi (mother and motherland are more glorious than heaven) (Yagnik and Sheth 2005, 155). The image drew on layers of cultural signifiers which were available and in general circulation at the time. The conception of country-as-goddess drew its iconography from the cultural constellation of local mother goddesses in the subcontinent, each of whom is believed to protect the populace from disease, misfortune or evil. The word ‘Hind’ was used by the Arabs in around the ninth century to refer to the region east of the river Indus (Asif 2020, 48–49). Bharat is a toponym for the subcontinent cited in a Puranic text from the first century CE (Clémentin-Ojha 2014, par. 8). The Sanskrit quote is from the Ramayana epic believed to have been composed in the fifth century BCE. The image was mass produced with modern technology at the Ravi Varma Lithographic Press and found its way all over the country and became part of the popular visual culture of the time through reproduction on matchboxes and DOI: 10.4324/9781003096146-5

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textile labels. The historian Sumathi Ramaswamy terms the graphic design of such images as the patriotic visualisation of the territorial idea of India where the scientific-geographic and the anthropomorphic-sacred come together to progressively reconfigure and spatially stabilise a place called India as a geo-body (2010, 8). This image, and its many subsequent versions, played a key role in setting the stage for a territorial nationalist mobilisation and, later, for borders as the site for its performance. Forty years after the Hind Devi image spread across the country, after a long political struggle where the slogans Bharat Mata ki Jai (Victory to Mother India) and Jai Hind (Victory to India) became popular clarion calls, independence from British rule was achieved in 1947. Political differences between Muslims and Hindus in the subcontinent led to the partition of Hind Devi to create two countries, Pakistan and India. On 17 August 1947, two days after independence (14 August for Pakistan and 15 August for India), the Radcliffe Boundary Award was announced, finalising the territorial limits of the two new countries. Muslimdominated districts in the eastern and western extremities of the Hind Devi image coalesced into Pakistan, and the Hindu-dominated area in between was designated India. What followed was a massive mass migration, considered the largest in the twentieth century, as Hindus and Muslims in India began making their way to the countries of their choice. Their journeys were marked by intense violence, bloodshed, rape and looting, and the trauma of the experience led to a pall of silence falling over the event. On 17 August 2017, on the 70th anniversary of the Radcliffe Boundary Award, the Partition Museum opened to the public (Partition Museum n.d.). Housed in the Town Hall of Amritsar in Punjab, the museum has refugee artefacts, art, archival material and oral histories, and the day was marked as Partition Remembrance Day. In this process of the memorialisation of partition, the event has come to be part of the postcolonial national heritage, an event that created two countries and new borders which became sites for the production of ‘national’ heritage.1 The India-Pakistan border gains salience particularly because the two countries continue to have a tense relationship. They fought two wars, in 1965 and 1971 (when Pakistan was split to create two countries, Pakistan and Bangladesh), and continue to experience conf lagrations. This brittle relationship and persistent hostility make the border a powerful stage for articulating national heritage by different actors. The sections that follow focus on the design of ‘border ceremonies’ at two locations on India’s northern and northwestern border with Pakistan, exploring how re-choreographed military rituals, invented public events and curated tours, incorporating multi-layered cultural signifiers invoking the distant and proximate past, produce multiple imaginations of ‘national’ heritage through spectatorship and tourism. Through such an emphasis, the chapter also hopes to contribute to the field of border studies where considerations of the role of design are as yet nascent.

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While the relevance of design is clear in border sites which take the form of walls such as the Great Wall of China, Hadrian’s Wall between Scotland and England, the Berlin Wall in divided Germany and, more recently, US President Donald Trump’s proposal for a wall on the Mexican border, this chapter takes a more expansive view. It will become clear that design here refers not only to the creation of graphic materials like the Hind Devi poster but also to acts of intentional organisation of spatial configurations, performative practices and visual artefacts in order to create specific impact on all those who participate in, and who are spectators of, these acts. Design acts are rhetorical and didactic, simultaneously embedded in, responding to and operating upon external historical, social and political imperatives. The case studies explore how the border becomes a contested ‘site’ where both the state and its citizens act through design to articulate their own versions of a ‘national’ heritage for strategic use in the present in order to shape future views of the past.

Ceremonies at the Attari-Wagah border The Radcliffe Line bifurcated the undivided province of Punjab in north India, a lush, fertile area, creating two eponymous states in Pakistan and India. At the point where the line intersects with the sixteenth-century Grand Trunk Road 2 lie the villages Attari on the Indian side and Wagah on the Pakistani side, and the Attari-Wagah border check post is the site of our first case study.

The military ceremony Every evening since 1959, the ceremonial lowering of f lags of the two countries takes place at the Attari-Wagah border check post at sunset. It is a symbolic rendering of a colonial military practice of ‘Beating Retreat’ during wartime to indicate cessation of hostilities for the day. Flags of the two warring parties were lowered to the call of bugles signalling soldiers to cease fighting and return to their barracks to tend to the wounded and the dead. Over the years, this brief, solemn military ritual has grown into a veritable spectacle before a large crowd of spectators, consisting of local people and national and international tourists gathering to witness the ceremony and has become part of the tourist circuit in the region. By late afternoon, crowds start gathering on the Indian side of the Grand Trunk Road. One end is sealed with large iron gates beyond which is the white zero line, the actual political border. Stadium-like stepped stands have been constructed on either side to seat the spectators. The stands are topped with chhatris, small domed pavilions, which are architectural features seen in medieval Rajput and Mughal forts, inscribing the setting with visual reminders of past valour and victory. Increasingly, spectators come with the Indian national tricolour (saffron, white and green) painted on their cheeks, carrying the national f lag. As the crowds swell, a soldier of India’s Border Security Force (BSF) recites slogans

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through a microphone: Bharat Mata ki Jai (Victory to Mother India), Hindustan Zindabad (Long live India) and Vande Mataram (Salutation to Mother [India]), and crowds roar after him in unison. The continuity between the cartographed Hind Devi/Bharat Mata of a hundred years ago and the chanting becomes clear. On the public address system, speakers play patriotic songs from popular Bollywood films from the 1950s and 60s – mere desh ki dharti (the soil of my land), wo Bharat desh hai mera (this is my country Bharat). Groups of spectators, sometimes visiting schoolchildren in uniforms, come down from the stands and dance to these tunes on the road. This is followed by soldiers of the BSF marching down the road holding the Indian f lag and the BSF f lag with a running commentary on the public address system. As sunset approaches, the speakers fall silent to make way for the military ceremony. At the call of bugles, the military ceremony begins. A small group of BSF soldiers and Pakistan Rangers march in formation towards each other. One BSF soldier marches ahead with goose-steps, stops and f lexes his arms and a Pakistani Ranger mirrors these gestures from the other side as they goose-step their way to each other. They stand at attention near their respective gates, wearing ferocious expressions. Sometimes they twirl their moustaches, strike poses with arms akimbo, goose-step and stamp their feet in formation, to the applause of spectators. They are joined by other soldiers and in unison, march to their superior and ask for permission to lower the f lag. With permission granted, the gates of both countries are opened in a single simultaneous motion and the soldiers march to their respective f lags at the zero line. The f lags of both countries are lowered simultaneously to the sound of the ‘Last Post’ played in synchrony by buglers on both sides (Figure 3.1, upper), folded in the prescribed manner and carried away ceremonially. Then one soldier from each side marches towards the other; there is a brief handshake and an abrupt about turn. The gates are shut, bringing the ceremony to an end.3 It is clear that what was originally a ceremony calling for a truce has been redesigned into a war ritual complete with belligerent body language and gestures. Soldiers of imposing height (over six feet tall) with good physique and luxuriant moustaches and beards are specially selected for this performance, and it is rumoured that they receive a special grooming allowance. The effect of aggression and intimidation from both sides is carefully crafted, from the ceremonial uniforms in contrasting colours – khaki with plumed crimson turbans and cummerbunds with white trim on the Indian side and black kurtas over matching pants and black plumed turbans with white trim for the Pakistanis – to the choreographed manoeuvres. Little do the spectators realise that this synchronised display of aggressive nationalism and arrogance requires meticulous planning, cooperation at monthly meetings between commandants of both sides and coordinated rehearsals. The spectator experience has been designed to the last detail – the stepped seating for a better view, the medieval fort-like architectural elements to create a martial ambience, the popular Bollywood music for mass entertainment and

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FIGURE 3.1

Upper. The joint lowering of the f lags of India and Pakistan. Lower. Peace activists at the Attari-Wagah border on the midnight of 14–15 August.

Source: Photographs by Rana Simranjit Singh.

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whipping up popular patriotic sentiment and an exaggerated military ceremony that serves to underline the animus across the white line. The theatrical hostility is key to the enjoyment, heightened by Bollywood-style melodramatic hyper-patriotism. The design of the Attari-Wagah ceremony is adjusted from time to time depending on what the states wish to communicate to each other and, didactically, to the audience. In 2010, the Indian side decided to begin the ceremony with a drill by two women officers (“Now BSF Women” 2010). Pakistan followed suit two years later (“Wagah Ceremony” 2012). These changes were brought in against the backdrop of resumption of high-level talks to de-escalate tension where border forces on both sides agreed to tone down their aggressive postures at the ceremony. Together, they decided to bring some cordiality to the final handshake, accompanied by a brief smile (“Wagah border ceremony” 2010; Mir 2010). The Beating Retreat ceremony regards the border as an arena for displaying the might of the state, two states, created on the premise of irreconcilable differences. It is this premise that leads to the design of ceremonies just described, which draw on the past through carefully chosen visual cues, aural effects and spatial design. Carefully layered onto these are elements from contemporary popular culture which the audience can relate to and identify with. Each layer and element is contingent upon an imperative in the present with a view to producing a citizen-spectator who can support and perpetuate the combative stance of the Indian state towards its western neighbour. The Wagah-Attari spectacle has become so popular with tourists that similar, but less elaborate, displays have been purposively developed at the Sadqi-Sulemanki and Hussainiwala-Ganda Singh Wala checkpoints further south.

The ceremony for friendship The possibility of designing events at the Attari-Wagah border is not the preserve of the state alone. Once a year, at midnight on 14–15 August, (the time at which the British transferred power in 1947), it becomes the site for a completely different expression – the wish for peace between the two countries that, until recently, were one. The relatively free movement across the border deteriorated after the IndiaPakistan war in 1965. Efforts for citizen-to-citizen contact resumed in the early 1980s, involving peace activists, academics, journalists and artists from the two countries. These exchanges resulted in the formation of Pakistan-India People’s Forum for Peace and Democracy in 1994 and the Hind-Pak Dosti Manch (IndiaPakistan Friendship Forum) in 1996. A key figure in these efforts was eminent Indian journalist Kuldip Nayar, who organised the first friendship ceremony at Attari in 1996. Nayar was in his twenties at the time of partition when his family moved from Sialkot to Delhi. He writes of his memories of this period, of the Grand Trunk

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Road being choked with people and vehicles moving in both directions, littered with dead bodies, luggage scattered, weeping women and children. The new borders snapped links going back centuries, and he wondered ‘whether the high walls that fear and distrust had raised on the borders would ever crumble and whether the people on the two sides, without giving up on their separate identity, would work together for the common good’ (2010, 88). This led to his lifelong effort to enable both sides to meet. The friendship ceremony starts with seminars on the multiple dimensions of relationships between India and Pakistan. A stage is erected near the AttariWagah border for performances starting on the evening of 14 August. At 12:30 am, which is midnight for Pakistan, as Indian time is thirty minutes ahead, the crowd moves to the gate at the border. Candles are lit right at the gate of the border to mark the birth of the two nations, accompanied by slogans of HindustanPakistan Dosti Zindabad (Long live India-Pakistan friendship). Nayar writes that it was ‘a symbolic gesture to emit peace and friendship, and to say that people on both sides had no enmity against one another’ (2010, 90). Many carry in their hands the f lags of both India and Pakistan in the hope of repairing broken bonds, building amicable relations across soft borders with the possibility of frequent exchange (Figure 3.1, lower). Over the years, ordinary people have joined the initiative, reaching the border on tractors and trolleys, as if going to attend a carnival, with spontaneous hospitality from local people. In 2018, Aaghaz-e-Dosti (Dawn of Friendship) organised the Aman Dosti Yatra (Pilgrimage for Peace and Friendship), where a busload of activists and students travelled in a bus from Delhi to Wagah, spreading the message of peace between India and Pakistan along the villages on the way, finally reaching the Attari-Wagah border to light candles. Unlike the military ceremony, the friendship ceremony is not always mirrored symmetrically on the other side, as Pakistan Rangers sometimes do not allow their citizens to participate. Nayar recalls waving to a Pakistani human rights activist across the gate in 2005 before an officer of the Pakistan Rangers pushed her away. On the Indian side, too, these activists are derisively referred to as ‘mombattiwallahs’ (candle-holders) and, depending on the government of the day, ‘anti-national’ ( Nayar 2004). The efforts at peace are periodically marred by graphic expressions of official hostility designed to deliberately vitiate the atmosphere. In 2009, Pakistani authorities put up ten reliefs, visible only from the Indian side, depicting how Hindus and Sikhs had killed and looted Muslims during partition ( Nayar 2009). In 2017, India hoisted the largest and tallest national tricolour on the Indian side of the Attari-Wagah checkpoint. The gigantic 120-by-80-foot f lag was hoisted at a height of 360 feet at immense public cost as a show of strength visible at a great distance (Sen 2017). The Indian national f lag becomes a key device, used in multiple variations. Later versions of the Hind Devi/Bharat Mata image replace the trident with the tricolour or show her wearing a saffron, white and green sari. Spectators at the military ceremony wave f lags or have its colours painted on their faces to

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heighten the nationalist atmosphere. In the Beating Retreat ceremony, the lowering and removal of national f lags by security forces on both sides of the border is the central feature of the military ritual, just as holding them together is in the candle-light ceremony. The military and friendship ceremonies described here show us that that the colonial past has imbued the checkpoint at Attari-Wagah with historical significance. Yet it is through design that radically different conceptions of place and memory are animated at the site. Equally, it is imaginations of the future that dictate design in the present, producing contrasting ceremonies, actors and spectators. The design of the two ceremonies makes them inversions of each other: one is predicated on the animus of irreconcilable historical differences and the other on pacifism and friendship based on historical bonds; for one, the border is an impermeable barrier that needs to be secured, while the other dreams of porous boundaries allowing free movement; and, last, the actor in one becomes spectator in the other. A new kind of spectator of the Attari-Wagah border is emerging in the digital world where algorithms play designer. A search for videos on border ceremonies returns numerous clips of the military ceremony from both sides of the border but none of the candle-light ceremony for friendship between India and Pakistan. As a result, one conception of place and memory becomes available and circulates to become the dominant narrative of the border. This kind of selective representation can be observed in academic scholarship, too. While there are numerous accounts of the military ceremony at Attari-Wagah by historians, anthropologists and scholars of performance studies, scarcely any of them mention the friendship ceremony. This suggests that academic scholarship too plays a role in reifying a particular strand of national heritage production, as do digital technologies of archiving and retrieval. However, a meta-analysis of design and its representation exceeds the focus of this chapter. We now move to our second location, where the border is designed as a site for tourism.

Experiencing the border at Nadabet Unlike the lush fertile fields of Punjab, the border region of the western Indian state of Gujarat is a vast marshland where sea water ingresses from the Arabian Sea at low tide. It is a fragile ecosystem of grasslands and salt f lats where pastoralist communities, Hindu and Muslim, raised camels, sheep, goats and cattle, migrating seasonally across the region to graze their livestock. After partition, this open area was inscribed with a border between the states of Gujarat and Rajasthan on the Indian side and Sindh in Pakistan. By the 1990s, this border was secured by barbed wire fences patrolled by camel-mounted personnel of the BSF, allowing no movement across the zero line. These new security practices restricted varied forms of self-regulated mobilities and altered connections to the land, history, social relations and identity.

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In 2016, Tourism Corporation of Gujarat Limited and the BSF inaugurated Seema Darshan (Border Visit) as part of a larger border tourism initiative. The location is Nadabet Border Outpost, a remote island in the marshland, in Suigam block of Banaskantha district in Gujarat, 25 kilometres from the border with Pakistan. For the government of Gujarat, the intention was to promote tourism ‘through an Attari-Wagah border kind of experience’ (“Seema Darshan-A gallant affair” n.d., 14); for the BSF, it was an opportunity to showcase their work in securing the national boundaries and acquaint the public with the life of the force in inhospitable border terrains. The complex brings into play a matrix of cultural symbols along with an understanding of the site’s pedagogic potential for nationalism and the visitors’ need for entertainment. Unlike the Attari-Wagah border ceremony, where the f lag-lowering military ritual has grown to become a vast spectacle drawing thousands of tourists daily, the Nadabet experience has been designed by the BSF specifically to attract tourists. As mentioned earlier, the hostile relationship between India and Pakistan makes the border an object of curiosity and fascination. The potential of this fascination is central to the visualisation of the Nadabet complex, and border tourism is regarded as a didactic opportunity to acquaint citizens with the territorial expanse of India and role of the BSF in securing its borders. As a tourist website says, Beyond the obvious thrill of looking across the ‘fence’ to another country from your homeland, a visit to ‘Seema Darshan’ is an eye-opener for tourists about the life of villagers living at the border . . . [and] an opportunity, to see the lives of the brave soldiers who safeguard our territories day and night. (“Seema Darshan” n.d.) While the Hind Devi poster tried to transform cartographic representation into an image that people could identify with and revere, the concept at Nadabet draws from an even more ancient source: the peregrinations, or digvijaya, of the eighth-century philosopher-theologian, Shankaracharya. Over one thousand years ago, Shankaracharya set off from his birthplace at the southern tip of India and travelled across the length and breadth of the continent to propagate his philosophy. He established four mathas or monasteries at Badrinath in the Himalayas in the north, Puri in the east, Shringeri in the south and Dwaraka at the western extremity, which are regarded as major sacred foci for pilgrims from all over the subcontinent. Pilgrimage, while connecting the population with sacred centres and reinforcing religious precepts, also conveyed to pilgrims that the subcontinent is inhabited by a diverse and variegated population, with sacred places forming an integrative network. According to historian Shonaleeka Kaul, ‘not only these four centres but the entire itinerary of his peregrinations, his digvijaya, corresponds to the extent of the modern nation, India’, and it is this contemporary reading of the past that forms the kernel of the conception of the Nadabet complex (2019, 542).

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The BSF’s concept is thus threefold: first, border tourism should give people an idea of how the cartographic image of India actually translates on the ground, thereby instilling in them an idea of the vast territory that is India and what its borders look like. Second, it should educate citizens about who secures the country’s borders for them through a glimpse of the life of BSF personnel and the harsh terrain where they spend extended periods of time. And third, it should show how the border is secured through a display of the equipment and armaments used by the force and an experience of the ceremony sanctifying the border. The complex is designed as a day-long outing for tourists starting at daybreak from Ahmedabad, spending the morning at an eleventh-century stepwell and reaching Suigam village after lunch. At Nadabet, the afternoon commences with a visit to the border where, through a barbed-wire fence, visitors can catch a glimpse of Pakistan. The actual zero line is about 150 metres from this point. A ‘selfie point’ has been constructed for tourists to take photographs of themselves with the border fence in the background and Balotra village of Pakistan at the horizon. BSF soldiers, too, cheerfully agree to being photographed. Visitors then return to the Nadabet complex for a screening of a National Geographic film on the BSF (Gautam 2016) and to explore a photo gallery of images depicting the life and activities of the soldiers at the border. In an adjoining area is a display of the equipment and armaments used by BSF personnel. Visitors are encouraged to handle the equipment, and soldiers stand by to answer their questions and pose for photographs with them (Figure 3.2, upper). A souvenir shop (the signboard in Gujarati says ‘Border Memories’) sells mugs with images of soldiers in action, BSF caps and t-shirts. The film screening space, weapons display area and souvenir shop are tent-like structures with walls, canopies and display surfaces liberally covered with khaki, green and brown camouf lage print. Unlike the Attari-Wagah checkpoint, soldiers here are approachable and interactive, and care is taken to create this experience for the visitors. Aware that a tourist coming all the way out to the site needs a variety of experiences, other attractions in the vicinity have also been developed. A popular stop is the temple near Suigam to goddess Nadeshwari, a mother goddess revered by the local pastoral communities. Legend has it that during the 1971 war with Pakistan, some BSF soldiers had inadvertently wandered into Pakistani territory, as the border was not fenced then and demarcations were not clear in the marshland. The goddess appeared and, by the light of the lamp in her shrine, guided the soldiers safely back to their barracks. Another version is that Indian soldiers were planning for a final assault across the border on Tharparkar. The village head advised the commander of the platoon to offer prayers at the shrine of the goddess before commencing the mission, and their victory is ascribed to her grace. Since then, BSF soldiers are devotees of Nadeshwari. In 2015, the BSF renovated her shrine into a large temple complex; the priest is a BSF soldier posted on the job, and all soldiers posted to patrol the area first pay their respects at the temple before joining duty (Yagnik and Chauhan 2019). In

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FIGURE 3.2

Upper. BSF soldiers describing their equipment to visitors at Nadabet Border Outpost. Lower. Beating Retreat ceremony at Nadabet Border Outpost.

Source: Photographs by Nishant Dave, Nishant Ads, Ahmedabad.

local devotional songs and music videos circulating on YouTube, we can see that Nadeshwari has morphed from a deity sacred to the pastoral nomads of the area into a ‘sarhadwali’ or guardian of the border.4 The BSF has also created a centre near the Nadabet complex offering a range of adventure sports such as ziplining, artificial rock climbing, airgun shooting, archery, trampoline, zorbing and high rope crossing. Many of these activities are also common to military training and give visitors a sense of how soldiers build fitness and acquire other skills necessary for their job. The wetlands of

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Nadabet attract many local and migratory birds, and the area is also being popularised as a spot for birdwatching (“Seema Darshan – A gallant affair” n.d., 15). The day concludes with the Retreat Ceremony. The entertainment begins with folk dance performances by invited dance troupes, a parade by the camelmounted patrol of the BSF and a show by younger BSF soldiers dancing in uniform to Bollywood songs. This is the prelude to the formal military ritual. Nadabet is 25 kilometres from the actual zero line, so there is no presence of Pakistani border personnel. Dispensing with the military symbolism of joint f lag-lowering, the ceremony is performed by the Indian side alone, against the backdrop of a wall painted to resemble the seventeenth-century Red Fort in Delhi with viewers seated on stepped viewing galleries (Figure 3.2, lower). At Nadabet, the sense of place and memory have been invoked for tourism; the post-colonial state turned designer of tourist experience whereby citizens are guided towards a subtle Hindu cultural nationalism. At first glance, it appears like the normalisation of the border into a site for entertainment, but a closer look shows that the design of the experience is carried through without there being a border at the site at all. Barbed wire fences, weapons, camouflage prints, friendly soldiers and their guardian goddess create a selective connection to the past by erasing the site’s pre-existing histories and sacred geographies. The Nadabet complex has been phenomenally popular with tourists, and the BSF is now partnering with other state governments to develop similar experiences in ten other border locations where the BSF is stationed.

Design and the production of heritage Heritage can refer to a very distant past, something we inherit, a past made available in the present through the tangible and the intangible, providing some form of identity, inclusion or affiliation. Debates about what heritage is, whose heritage it is and how it is showcased to produce specific narratives that respond to particular imperatives in the present of significance to the future – these are arenas where design becomes complicit, suggesting that heritage is ‘produced’ from the past by design. The preceding examples have explored how the state and its citizens act through the design of rituals and curated didactic events, incorporating multi-layered cultural signifiers invoking the distant and proximate past to respond to questions of nation and belonging. Cultural identities, social affiliations and the sense of place and memory are selectively animated through intentional organisation of spatial configurations, performative practices and visual effects, producing multiple imaginations of national heritage and affiliation through spectatorship and tourism. It is the selective animation, made possible by design, that leads to diverse discursive relations with historical events and experiences. Or, to put it another way, the past is made to matter in the present by design, and it can be made to matter in different ways to different audiences.

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Acknowledgements I thank BSF commandant Kuldip Sharma for explaining the ideas behind the development of the Nadabet complex as the first site for border tourism in India, a model that is proposed to be replicated at other locations. I also thank Vishwesh for local legends about goddess Nadeshwari.

Notes 1 Today, India has international borders on land and sea with ten countries: overland are Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan and China to the west and north; Myanmar and Bangladesh to the east; and maritime borders with Thailand, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Maldives. Overland, most stretches are fenced and patrolled, while others are located in inhospitable terrain that is porous for smuggling, infiltration and out-migration of citizens of neighbouring countries in search of livelihoods. At a few points at the India-Myanmar border and India-Bangladesh border, trade is permitted at border bazaars. 2 The Grand Trunk Road was constructed in the sixteenth century over an earlier subcontinental trade route dating back to the third century BCE. It was submitted in 2015 for recognition as a UNESCO World Heritage Site and, at the time of writing, is on UNESCO’s Tentative List. For details, see https://whc.unesco.org/en/tentativelists/6056/. 3 For a detailed description of the event in December 2002, see Menon (2013, 34–50), and for a glimpse of the Pakistan side of the ceremony, see Murphy (2001, 183–185). 4 A few examples are “He Nadeshwari Maa Rakhone Charnonima – Nadabet Vali Shree Nadeshwari Maa – Gujarati Songs.” YouTube video uploaded by Garvi Gujarat, August 29, 2013. www.youtube.com/watch?v=v69YMx_xXus “Nadeshwari Mata Songs Collection 2016 | Nadeshwari Maa Na Garba | Gujarati Bhajans.” YouTube video uploaded by Garvi Gujarat, February 18, 2016. www.youtube. com/watch?v=53rQIyFV-qc “He halo Nadabet Dhame – Nadabet vali Shree Nadeshwari Maa – Gujarati Devotional Songs.” YouTube video uploaded by Garvi Gujarat, August 29, 2013. www. youtube.com/watch?v=KkgvmahIpCc

References Asif, Manan Ahmed. 2020. The Loss of Hindustan: The Invention of India. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Clémentin-Ojha, Catherine. 2014. “‘India, That Is Bharat .  .  . ’: One Country, Two Names.” South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal 10. Accessed January 8, 2020. https://doi.org/10.4000/samaj.3717 Gautam, Puneet. 2016. “BSF – India’s First Line of Defence.” Documentary by National Geographic Channel Released 15 August 2016. Accessed February 16, 2020. YouTube, Posted by Shailesh Desai. November 4. www.youtube.com/watch?v=ol8sqQzHhaU. Kaul, Shonaleeka. 2019. “Acharya Shankara and the Idea of India: Peregrination as Pedagogy.” Accessed April 24, 2020. Prabuddha Bharata 124, no. 7 ( July): 539–542. Menon, Jisha. 2013. The Performance of Nationalism: India, Pakistan, and the Memory of Partition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mir, Amir. 2010. “Smiles to Replace Glares at Wagah Border.” DNA India, October 31. Accessed December 13, 2019. www.dnaindia.com/india/report-smiles-to-replaceglares-at-wagah-border-1460449. Murphy, Richard. 2001. “Performing Partition in Lahore.” In The Partitions of Memory: The Afterlife of the Division of India, edited by Suvir Kaul, 183–207. Delhi: Permanent Black.

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Nayar, Kuldip. 2004. “Melting of the Wax.” Outlook, September 12. Accessed May 18, 2020. https://magazine.outlookindia.com/story/melting-of-the-wax/225078. Nayar, Kuldip. 2009. “Distortion of History.” The Daily Star, August 21. Accessed May 18, 2020. www.thedailystar.net/news-detail-102410. Nayar, Kuldip. 2010. “People to People Contact.” In Bridging Partition: People’s Initiatives for Peace between India and Pakistan, edited by Smitu Kothari and Zia Mian. Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan. “Now BSF Women Beating Retreat at Wagah Border.” 2010. Outlook, July 22. Accessed March 26, 2020. www.outlookindia.com/newswire/story/now-bsf-women-beatingretreat-at-wagah-border/688214. Partition Museum, Amritsar. n.d. “About Us.” Accessed May 10, 2020. www.partition museum.org/about-us/. Ramaswamy, Sumathi. 2010. The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India. Durham and London: Duke University Press. “Seema Darshan: A Gallant Affair in Nadabet, Gujarat.” n.d. Khushboo Gujarat ki magazine of Tourism Corporation of Gujarat Limited. Accessed September 2, 2020. www. gujarattourism.com/content/dam/gujrattourism/images/home_page/opti/11-2-20/ khushboo_gujarat_ki_e_magazine_1574141744.pdf. “Seema Darshan.” Tourism Information Centre. n.d. Accessed July 31, 2020. https:// touristinformationcenter.net/seema-darshan/. Sen, Gautam. 2017. “Politics of Flags: India’s Largest National Flag on the India-Pakistan Border.” Mainstream 55, no. 14. March 25. Accessed July 22, 2020. https://main streamweekly.net/article7055.html. “Wagah Border Ceremony Aggression Toned Down.” 2010. “BBC News.” BBC. July 22. Accessed December 13, 2019. www.bbc.com/news/world-south-asia-10722514? print=true. “Wagah Ceremony: Pak Agrees to Have Women Guards.” 2012. Outlook, June 30. Accessed March 26, 2020. www.outlookindia.com/newswire/story/Wagah-Ceremony-PakAgrees-to-Have-Women-Guards/767290. Yagnik, Achyut, and Suchitra Sheth. 2005. The Shaping of Modern Gujarat. New Delhi: Penguin India. Yagnik, Bharat, and Ashish Chauhan. 2019. “For BSF Jawans, Nadeshwari Shrine Offers Miracle Shield.” Times of India, March 3. Accessed August 24, 2020. https://times ofindia.indiatimes.com/city/ahmedabad/for-bsf-jawans-nadeshwari-shrine-offersmiracle-shield/articleshow/68237558.cms.

PART II

Landscape, place and visitor experience design

4 INDIGENOUS LIVING [‘HERITAGE’] DESIGNING TENETS Kulin ways of singing, designing, nurturing and nourishing terrains of identity Mandy Nicholson and David S. Jones Acknowledgement to Country1 We wish to acknowledge and pay respects to the Wadawurrung2 Peoples and their Elders, past present and future, and the rich cultural and intrinsic connections they have in their Country3 and those of the Central/Eastern Kulin Nation that Wadawurrung Country and People reside within. We also recognise and acknowledge the contribution and interest of other Aboriginal Peoples and organisations in the management of lands, waters, seas and natural resources of the Kulin Nation.

Introduction Our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander tribes were the first sovereign Nations of the Australian continent and its adjacent islands, and possessed it under our own laws and customs. This our ancestors did, according to the reckoning of our culture, from the Creation, according to the common law from ‘time immemorial’, and according to science more than 60,000 years ago. This sovereignty is a spiritual notion: the ancestral tie between the land, or ‘mother nature’, and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who were born therefrom, remain attached thereto, and must one day return thither to be united with our ancestors. This link is the basis of the ownership of the soil, or better, of sovereignty. It has never been ceded or extinguished, and co-exists with the sovereignty of the Crown.4 ( Referendum Council 2017)

As echoed in the previous extract from the Uluru Statement from the Heart ( Referendum Council 2017), First Nation’s ancestral ties are central to First Nation’s5 communities in Australia using their knowledge for looking after their land and sea Country. Their knowledge is current, relevant, dynamic and adaptable. They use it today, as they did in the past, to look after Country our way, their way. DOI: 10.4324/9781003096146-7

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Accordingly, designing projects in Australia’s First Nation’s arena is fraught with many theoretical, philosophical and applied complexities. Such complexities are evident across and throughout Australia’s lands and seas wherein its First Nation’s peoples have never ceded their sovereignty to British colonisers and no Treaty or equivalent has been forthcoming, being the only Commonwealth country not to have one with its First Peoples. So topics of sovereignty, empathy of displacement, colonisation and decolonisation, copyright and intellectual property rights, kinship, self-journey, Country, forceful and biological invasion, human and biogeographical epidemics and carnage, respect/disrespect and listening/ill-listening are prevalent in all relationship-building and designmaking with First Nation’s corporations, communities and community members before one even gets to talking about designing and entertaining design-making ( Jones 2021). This chapter surveys several of these topics in translating the issues, offering insights and guidelines to the reader. The core example is the Mirambeek Murrup/North Gardens project landscape on the shores of Lake Wendouree in Ballaarat/Ballarat on Wadawurrung Country that has been subject to several peer awards recently ( Nicholson et al. 2020). Respecting these protocols, we sought consent from Wadawurrung Traditional Owners (TOs) and the Wadawurrung Traditional Owners Aboriginal Corporation (WTOAC) to enter and undertake this project on their Country (Powell et al. 2019; WTOAC 2020a). As co-authors, one of Wurundjeri descent and the other of non-First Nation descent, of this chapter, we again pay our respects to the Wadawurrung for this discussion. As Mandy Nicholson (2020, 508) explains from her personal cultural perspective in her Woiwurrung voice: I would like to acknowledge the Wadawurrung people who are the Traditional Custodians of this Country of Ballaarat that is the venue for the Mirambeek Murrup project, but also I would like to acknowledge the Wurundjeri people who are the Traditional Custodians of my Country of Narrm (Melbourne). Together we would also like to pay our respects to the Elders of yesterday, today and tomorrow. Marramb-ik Wurundjeri-wilam baggarrook, Wurundjeri-baluk-ut, Dja Dja wurrung, Ngurai illum wurrung, German and Irish, dhumba-njan Woiwurrung. Wurundjeri mundagat Narrm-djak. Mundani-njan murrup galada Birrarung, ba Liwik-bulok-nugel-ik, Lalal ba Gugung nugel-ik. Mundanai-njan buladu-djak wurru-wurru, ba buladu-djak biik-al, Narrm-u, ba bubup narrkwarren-ik, ba kirripik. Mundani-njan Biik-ut, Biik-dui, Baanj Biik, Murnmut Biik, Wurru wurru Biik ba Tharangalk Biik-Bunjil-al Wilam-u. Ngoon godgin Gulinj-marramngada. Buladu ngoon godgin meymet ba kirrip-bulok nugel-ik ba kirrip-ik David. I am, Mandy Nicholson, a Wurundjeri-wilam woman within the Wurundjeribaluk patriline, Dja Dja wurrung, Ngurai illum wurrung, German and Irish and I speak Woiwurrung. Wurundjeri are the Traditional Custodians of greater Melbourne. I embrace the Spirit River, Birrarung, and my many

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grandfathers and grandmothers (Elders). I embrace the huge sky and the huge Country of Melbourne and my family and friends. I embrace the Below Country, On Country, Water Country, Wind Country, Sky Country and Bunjil’s6 home, the Forest Country above the clouds. I thank my people of the Gulinj (Kulin). I thank much non-Kulin and my many friends and my friend David. Thus, protocols always need to be respected and voiced; one needs to understand one’s standing in First Nation society, and, importantly, one needs to understand and respect one’s own Country and Language as well as the Country one is visiting.

Aboriginal, Country and language In navigating First Nation Australia, a comprehension of the terms ‘Aboriginal’ and ‘Country’ is essential, as is recognition that ‘Language’ cannot be dislocated from Country. ‘Aboriginal’, ‘First Nation’ and ‘Indigenous’ are three terms of reference that have been given to the First People of the Australian continent; none of these are self-identifying. Therefore, to define an identity that has been given by others and that includes many proves difficult in a Western sense. Many today identify by their Language Group name when identifying on an individual level but on a general level as any of the three. The term ‘Aborigine’ is principally a noun in English grammar (OED Online 2021a; OED Online [1961] 2021b). Derived etymologically from the Latin aborīginēs, in plural, it was originally used to describe the ‘original inhabitants of a country (spec. a race of pre-Roman inhabitants of Italy), original founders of a city’ or ‘the people or race which first inhabited Latium in Italy’, and thus the adverb ab orīgine. Its use proliferated extensively and generically across the Australian continent by British colonialists in the early 19th century, and the term has now become common parlance in ‘Australian’ use in deference to understanding that there are over 250 separate First Nation communities and Country’s in Australia, each with its own Country-specific cultural protocols, language or dialects, design iconography, land use planning, management regimes and so on. Thus, in this chapter, we respect the Wadawurrung and Wurundjeri Country’s, the Central/ Eastern Kulin Nation and all Australian First Nation individuals and communities in our use of words and terms, and this is an important point for the reader to understand, as it decolonises colonial labels and terms and recognises sovereignty and thus is a stepping-stone towards a successful engagement with First Nation’s peoples in Australia. First Nation’s Australia is a vast landscape of lands and seas in which over 250 Language Groups have resided and looked after their respective Country from time immemorial. While archaeologists will talk about ‘Aboriginals arriving’ on this continent via the Nusantara land bridge some 60,000–100,000 year ago,

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representing the oldest continuous civilisation on planet Earth, in First Nation’s eyes they are the custodians of their Country since time immemorial caring for Country in anticipation of the return of their Ancestors. In this context, history is never-ending and past/present/future, Country is four-dimensional and talks as a Noun with a capital ‘C’ and one is a ‘custodian’ and not a ‘land owner’ in Western definitions. The Western words ‘Dreaming’ and ‘Songlines’ have the same colonialisation issues. Non-First Nation anthropologist Deborah Rose (1996) has written that ‘Country, to use the philosopher’s term, is a “nourishing terrain”.’ She drew inspiration for this term from French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas’ writings in Totalité et Infini ( Levinas 1961). Thus, ‘Country is a place that gives and receives life. Not just imagined or represented, it is lived in and lived with.’ People talk about country in the same way that they would talk about a person: they speak to country, sing to country, visit country, worry about country, feel sorry for country, and long for country. People say that country knows, hears, smells, takes notice, takes care, is sorry or happy. . . . Because of this richness, country is home, and peace; nourishment for body, mind, and spirit; heart’s ease. (Rose 1996, 7) This evocative quotation is perhaps the tract most often cited in Australian academia in explaining the term Country. More recently, Budawang/Yuin woman Daniéle Hromek (2020, 1) has written that Country soars high into the atmosphere, deep into the planet crust and far into the oceans. Country incorporates both the tangible and the intangible, for instance, all the knowledges and cultural practices associated with land. People are part of Country, and their/our identity is derived in a large way in relation to Country. Their/our belonging, nurturing and reciprocal relationships come through our connection to Country. In this way Country is key to our health and wellbeing. Thus, Country is a place + identity + Indigenous knowledge + language + responsibility/obligation. You can see the same evocation in Nicholson’s words previously. Country is one’s physical, spiritual and socio-emotional wellbeing and thus self-meaning. But terrestrial Country is also translucent, has texture and voice, and it is part of an intricate mosaic of spaces laced by Songlines (Chatwin 1987). The latter enable communication, ritual, trade and self-maturation and tie together narratives about Country crafting and creation. Country has horizontal layers or sub-Country’s: Biik-ut (Below Country) Biik-dui (On Country), Baanj Biik (Water Country), Murnmut Biik (Wind Country), Wurru wurru Biik (Sky Country) and Tharangalk Biik (Forest Country above the clouds) (Nicholson and Jones

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2020).7 Therefore, it is not simply one Country expanse but also vertical Country layers that are told as biogeographical abstractions like ‘Stony Country’, ‘Forest Country’, ‘Grassland plains’, ‘River Forest Country’, ‘Sea Country’ and so on (Framlingham Aboriginal Trust and Winda Mara Aboriginal Corporation 2004; Powell et al. 2019; Parks Victoria, Gunditj Mirring Traditional Owners Aboriginal Corporation (GMTOAC), and Winda Mara Aboriginal Corporation (WMAC) 2015; WTOAC 2020a). Again, you can see the same evocation in Nicholson’s words whereby she respectfully embraces her ‘Below Country, On Country, Water Country, Wind Country, Sky Country and Bunjil’s home, the Forest Country above the clouds.’ Indigenous Knowledge is located in the being that is Country. But one needs to understand that the concept of Country cannot be comprehensively translated as an ‘environment’ in Western terminology. Thus, while Country may be an area of land that is overseen and managed by a First Nation group, like the Wadawurrung people, with Country-specific Creation Beings having divested culture and language, the relationship between Wadawurrung people and their Country extends beyond our Western sense of time. In First Nation society, time is sung, time is the singing and the endless act of that singing, time is the stories embodied in and specific to Country that embody the spiritual source of knowledge essential to Wadawurrung past present future generations. As stated by Rose and Hromek, Country is alive and intelligent and provides everything that Wadawurrung people need. So, while Country exists physically ‘outside’, as a living place that the Wadawurrung (and animals and Creation Beings) inhabit, it is also a place or void through which one learns culture and respects being human in a proper and respectful way. As expressed by Wurundjeri Elder Aunty Di Kerr, ‘if you care for Country it will in turn care for you’ (2021). Thus, if one lets Country become unhealthy, you and all its inhabitants become unhealthy. Language is integral to Country. In First Nation society, language is Country. It explains, narrates, speaks and sings, and it gives meaning to the oral words and interactions of humans, animals, avifauna, the stars, the vegetation, the waters rights down to their ripples. Language is a catalogue of resources. It gives meaning to self and purpose to all life and is not a simply oral/text communication medium as used in Western society. Thus, language is inside and of Country, and one needs to respect, listen to and engage with this language’s narrating and understand its nuances as precursor to and during and after the act of designing. As explained by Wadawurrung Elder Uncle Bryon Powell (Powell et al. 2019, 64): The Wadawurrung language is dynamic. In our eyes ‘Wadawurrung’ is Englishwritten as ‘Wadawurrung’ and not ‘Wada wurrung’ or ‘Wathaurong’. It is our meaning, it is our library of law and ‘history’, it explains or identifies place(s) or resources, or enables daily communication. It is, however, not a written static language that can be bound into a single dictionary.

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Wadawurrung language is intertwined with our Country, and culturally cannot be separated. To speak or sing our language is to respect and nurture and celebrate our Country. The Wadawurrung Country Plan (2020) has also been expressed in voice (WTOAC 2020b), which for a non-written language is the culturally correct way of conveying information and narratives. With this intellectual setting, let us venture into Wadawurrung Country and the Mirambeek Murrup project.

Wadawurrung Country In the beginning, our Country was created by our Creation Being who left their mark of this landscape. The following story demonstrates the link that First Nation people maintain with the land, sentient and non-sentient beings, and the cosmos. My story of this beginning starts when . . . Bunjil (Wedge-tailed Eagle (Aquila audax)) summoned six men to assist him in the creation of the land, the people and all living things and to pass on his teachings and knowledge to all men and women. After Bunjil made the Country and all the living things in it, he taught the people how to use their tools and the rules of social behaviour. (Powell et al. 2019, 45–46)

Wadawurrung Country consists of the lands and waters stretching from the settlements Beaufort to Ballaarat (‘resting place’ or ‘bended elbow’)/Ballarat to Djilang (‘tongue’)/Geelong to Werribee (‘spine’ on the Iramoo plains) to Kuaka-dorla/Anglesea and includes the Bellarine Peninsula (Powell 2015b, 2015c; Powell et al. 2019; Withers 1887, 13–14). As explained in the introduction, within and interconnecting Wadawurrung Country, and all Country’s, are Songlines (Chatwin 1987). Songlines are the pathways that our Ancestors travelled along in creating the overall landscape and Country and are recalled and celebrated in our narratives and songs. The Songlines can be either site or Country specific; Nation level, traversing across our Country and one or more neighbouring Country’s; or regional level, traversing across several Country’s across (principally) south-eastern Australia. Songlines can also traverse the sea, such as the Whale Dreaming of Māori (see Lennon 2006), First Nation Australians and Native Americans (Neale 2017). Within Wadawurrung Country, Songlines may be individual points, may be a ‘line’ that connects two or more points in the landscape, may be a ‘line’ that exits or enters this Country and ceases there or may be a ‘line’ that is part of an invisible highway network interconnecting multiple points within and external to Wadawurrung Country. The ‘line’ is narrated and has historically been narrated in language repeatedly through story, song and dance and remains a-temporal, dynamic and conscious and unconscious echolalia. And, despite its repetitiveness

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and multi-genre of mode, it retains its integrity in First Nation society, though possessing layers of complexity to enable its simple tenets to be remembered by children to far more complex versions as one matures and or accepts higher levels of cultural responsibility.

Design tenets Narratives are landscapes. For the Wadawurrung, they possess sites, accretions of history; possess patterns and sequences; and engage with and respond to attributes/qualities and the processes of landscape formation and change (Powell et al. 2019; Powell and Jones 2018). In this sense, stories, narratives, explanations, text, song, story and voice mean ‘narrate’ whether in an oral or non-oral mode(s) or via voice or non-voice that is computed to Western language and text. Landscape narratives (Potteiger and Purinton 1998) embody a responsive relationship and engagement between place + human + animal + time. Landscape designs, or master plans, textual histories and so on are all dependent upon a ‘reading’ of place and its resources, its contextualisation. ‘Reading’ or rather ‘reading [the] Country’ (Benterrak et al. 1996) is a very apt explanation of the four-dimensional immersion one needs to partake to understand, listen to, talk to, feel empathy with, embrace, walk through and reside upon and gather foods within and that explains a First Nation’s relationship to the Western word ‘narrative’ as echoed by Rose (1996, 7) previously. Thus, as humans, whether Western or Wadawurrung, ‘write’ narratives (whether fiction or non-fiction), stories, songs and myths, we use these to locate ourselves in time, place, community and meaning. In this sense, as Roland Barthes (1977, 79) explains, ‘The narratives of the world are numberless.’ They can be carried by articulated language, spoken or written, fixed or moving images, gestures, and the ordered mixture of all these substances; narrative is present in myth, legend, fable, tale, novella, epic, history, tragedy, drama, comedy, mime, painting, stained glass windows, cinema, comics, news item, conversation, cultural backgrounds. Caring nothing for the division between good and bad literature, narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself. If we position such a typology in Aboriginal thought, then contemporary Australian architecture, landscape design and landscape architecture practice is witnessing Aboriginal culture, or Country-specific culture, being ‘designed’ or ‘re-designed’ through one of more of the following themes, including: Animals (Tangible/Intangible/Distinctions geographically and culturally); Creation Beings (Narratives/Characters); Genetic memory themes (Spirituality/ Deep Time/Past, Present, Future); Geographical Features; Land Custodianship/ Healing (Different perceptions of ‘ownership’ and responsibilities thereunder);

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Life Culture (Living, Dynamic, Unique); Names/Nomenclature (Cultural knowledge found in language); Night landscape/Stars (Cultural connections and Narratives found therein); Place (Ceremonial/Secret/Gendered); Place (Non-Ceremonial/Whole of landscape, not only specific site); Reminiscences (Histories/Events/Incidents); Seasons (link to Weather, Animals and Ceremony); Strength and Resilience (Self Determination); Symbols (Art/Iconography/ Differences between First Nation Culture and Symbologies) of which Stories, Creation Being Myths, Animals, Symbols, Geographical Features and Place are the primary design narrative inspirations; Night landscape/Stars, Names/ Nomenclature and Seasons are the secondary design narration inspirations; and Life Culture and Land Custodianship/Healing are the tertiary or use applied/ explored design narration spiritual inspirations. Historically, approaches to design by Australian architecture, landscape design and landscape architecture practitioners for Aboriginal clients have predominantly focused upon unravelling and expressing a primary Aboriginal design narrative. Such a narrative has drawn inspiration(s) from a client culture and what that client orally (tells) [and graphically] articulates (story) to the consultant(s) or what inspiration that emerges from the preliminary (and successive) listening and discussion processes. Such a design inspiration strategy has had a tendency to draw reference or inspiration from a single ‘actor’, from one or several story-telling voices and/or from a graphic reference or image. The ‘actor’ can be location specific; can be variable in location or dynamic in journey mode; or can also be plural in ‘actors’, recalling the intersections of ‘actors’ and locations. The secondary design inspiration strategy has tended to be derived from a process of living in a culture. It tells of the process of living, a segment or segments of that process or the art of living that process. Rare is the tertiary design inspiration strategy that considers the culture as a system within its own ‘scientific’ lens ( Jones 2021). The elements of these primary inspiration(s) strategies are designs that draw reference from: a) the spirituality of place, be it the entire landscape or specific site, where it falls into the local narrative (a common mistake is using narratives, language and artistic expression from other Language Groups’ cultures); b) geographical features, being a point in the location that hosts a feature like a hill, rock, cave, billabong, stream watercourse, waterfall, coastal cliff (how they feature in the local narrative); c) a narrative, or a segment of that narrative, that can also be a Songline or a segment of that Songline; d) a place, being a point of reference in a narrative, that does not necessarily have to be a geographical feature nor have a defined scale; e) a star, or a set of stars that envelope a narrative; f ) a narrative, or a segment of that narrative (these differ from Language Group to Language Group); and/or g) an animal, being a moiety character or an actor in a narrative or even seen as a Creator Spirit. In these options, note the ‘and/or’, as we are not saying all must be included, but one strategy is more often the best avenue to pursue to both better narrate the strategy and, second, to maintain the integrity

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and depth of that strategy or, to use architectural ‘language’, one narrative, and not multiple narratives. Secondary are: i) a celebratory place, being both the place as well as the event as well as the act of ‘singing’ the land and the event (some of these ‘sites’ may also be negative or taboo and to be avoided); ii) a seasonal calendar; and/or iii) a thematic approach linked to food harvesting and/or the artefact construction/ fabrication to enable food harvesting (not only in past tense). A subtle characteristic, little discussed, is the temporality of the design inspiration strategy. The assumption taken in many First Nation-responsive designs, and the way they are presented to the visitor audience, is that the primary and secondary are specific in time, content and environment (vegetation, micro-climate, etc.) and thus static as distinct from dynamic, simply a ‘snapshot’ of a preferred way of seeing by the architect. This is ironic because First Nation culture is dynamic, positioned in past present future, and has no defined end point; it is f luid and does not move in a straight line like Western time. Thus, contemporary architecture, landscape design and landscape architecture ‘designs’ need to embrace primary or secondary themes to be dynamic; they are not just now, as in 2021, or postEuropean invasion or pre-European invasion. Instead, they should be dynamic, adaptive and resilient, as well as being pliable. They should be respectful of a long historical time (now back to 40,000 or 60,000 years) outside the limitations of scientific dating, ‘time-immemorial’ should preferably be considered; recent in historical time (the last 200 years), and/or sketch a historical time into the future to honour First Nation participation throughout the entire timeline. The complexity of the foregoing critique lies in the notion of Country. Country is a Western term used by First Nation communities to express their interpretation of place in a Western world, but many express it as Mother.

Design at Mirrambook Murrup/North Gardens This project involves the Wadawurrung people (‘the red soil people’), Wadawurrung Country, Wadawurrung Indigenous knowledge systems and environmental knowledge and, accordingly, their collaboration (Powell 2015a). The project aim was to formulate a Landscape Design Master Plan for the North Gardens precinct of Lake Wendouree ‘to guide the future development of a sculpture park featuring the work of Aboriginal artists’ in a manner respectful to Wadawurrung culture and their Country (City of Ballarat 2017, 3). For the North Gardens Wetlands, the consultant team sought to listen to both the Wadawurrung community and to the place: the Country. The former involved listening to the art of storytelling, the nature of narrating; listening to the moral protocols quietly embedded in these narratives; and watching for the non-expressed and expressed stress points and subtle points embedded in the narratives. The latter has involved a set of interpretative and experiential on-site wanderings to quietly navigate through the place to appreciate its intangible narratives, modes, visual connections and opportunities.

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A clear thread in the listening process is to not latch onto and be philosophically structured by conventional or identifiable Wadawurrung/First Nation design themes (stories, characters, animals, etc.). Instead, a clear theme that cascaded from the listening process with the Wadawurrung was to comprehend the geo-biological context of North Gardens as a sequence of a ‘series of food-ponds’ in a ‘Living Station’, to articulate their traditional seasonal movement systems and their spatial sequences and particularly to heal the place to bring it back to the ‘living supermarket’ it once was. This is encapsulated in Figure 4.1, which explains the seasonal movements of the Keelup baluk clan of the Wadawurrung being linked to potable water + available plant and animal food resource harvesting capabilities. Accordingly, the unfolding North Gardens Wetlands design narrative is one of a cultural responsibility of healing, primarily. Thus, urban habitat renewal is essential, but the renewal and design strategy need to link to the ‘series of foodponds’. Secondary are the modifications of the place to accommodate Wadawurrung and First Nation events and cultural activities; to host sculpture (permanent ephemeral, temporary); and to scaffold species, plant use and gathering, visual connectivities and an opportunity to participate in traditional agricultural and ceremonial practices and activities. Tertiary is any formal ‘celebration’ of Wadawurrung culture and environmental knowledge and practice through tangible, tactile, physical means, including signage. The threads in those listenings cast aside different thematic responses to the place and identified a proffered

FIGURE 4.1

Keelup baluk clan Country seasonal movement patterns.

Source: Reproduced with permission of the authors.

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design strategy thematically upon ‘Caring for Country’ or ongoing healing, notionally characterised by the ‘series of food-ponds’ narrative. Through this process, the traditional design themes of narrative, animals, season, name, visual connectivity and so on that architects, planners and/or landscape architects latch onto as their design inspiration(s) were all progressively directly or indirectly canvassed in the listenings and wanderings. But it was a theme about the contextual position of the place of the North Gardens Wetlands and its relationships to Lake Learmonth, Lake Burrumbeet, Mullawallah Wetlands, Flaxman’s Swamp, Reedy Creek Waterholes, Lake Wendouree (in its pre-embankment days) and Yarrowee River as a ‘series of food-ponds’, of interconnected places to being the quality potable permanent water that hosted a rich habitat and food supermarket to both humans and animals alike. Instead, it was the ‘heart’ or djarra of this ‘series of food-chains’ both as a place interconnected as well as a place in its own right of the Keelup baluk clan Country, and their living relationship to this place, that continuously threaded the quiet tone of the listenings, wanderings and discussions.

Nourishing Country A ‘healthy’ or ‘good’ Country is one where all the tangible and intangible elements act respectfully and in harmony. Harmony equals the ‘nourishment’. Rose (1996, 10) observes that: because there is no site, no position, from which the interest of one can be disengaged from the interests of others in the long term. Self-interest and the interest of all of the other living components of country (the selfinterest of kangaroos, barramundi, eels and so on), cannot exist independently of each other in the long term. The interdependence of all life within country constitutes a hard but essential lesson. Change one variable in the interdependence, like removing a natural predator, constructing a roadway or planting an incorrect plant species and one changes the interdependence and ‘nourishment’ process and its continuum. ‘Destroy’ one component or layer of Country and you ultimately destroy yourself and Country, as they all rely on each other for survival. Not understanding any of this, you will fail in engaging with First Nation’s communities in Australia in a design and/or planning project if you do not ‘Ask First’ (AHC 2002). Asking is one thing, but expect that an answer will not be immediately forthcoming but rather provide time for a ‘journey’ that tests your values and rhetoric and commitment to respecting First Nation’s values, explores design pertinent to the project and has no conventional understanding of Western heritage in this journey. Also, communicating and collaborating with more than just an Elder can steer away from tokenistic gestures of consultation as they hold specific sets of knowledge, while others in their community hold other knowledges that can assist in creating a complete picture of their narrative and culture.

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Academic and cultural protocols This research has been subject to an approved human research ethics consent by Deakin University Human Research Ethics Committee (DUHREC) dated 08 March 2018, coded DUHREC 2018–013. This research, entitled ‘North Garden Sculpture Park Landscape Masterplan’, has been subject to an approved Cultural Heritage Permit WAC-P0031 issued by the Wathaurung Aboriginal Corporation in accordance with s.36(1) of the Victorian Aboriginal Heritage Act 2006 dated 28 August 2019, and is now subject to the current Cultural Heritage Permit WTOAC-P0046 issued by WTOAC in accordance with s.36(1) of the Victorian Aboriginal Heritage Act 2006 dated 6 October 2020–6 October 2025.

Notes 1 An ‘Acknowledgement to Country’ is a respectful commencement in conversations with First Nation’s Peoples in Australia and is expected in both voice conversation as well as in text/articles, thus its inclusion here preceding the chapter contents. See also: Nicholson and Jones (2017). 2 Italics are used in this article to highlight First Nation’s Languages. 3 Linguistically the word ‘Country’ is both a noun and an adjective in Australia when discussing tangible and intangible landscapes (often called land/lands), waters, skies and so on. Country is also uppercase where it refers to the specific or generic Traditional lands, seas, skies and so on (territories) of First Nation’s Peoples in Australia, and the words ‘Country’ and ‘Country’s’ are used interchangeably to denote plural, negating the English grammatical use of ‘Countries’. 4 Italics and punctuation are faithful to the original. 5 For the purposes of this chapter, we will use the term First Nation’s rather than Indigenous or the colonial term ‘Aboriginal’. 6 Please note that there are different spellings of the word Bunjil across different Country’s. To Nicholson, it is post-colonisation spelt Bunjil; to post-colonisation Wadawurrung Country, it is spelt Bundjil; and the reader will note the change of spelling according to who is talking in this chapter. 7 Note, words in italics in this sentence are in Woiwurrung tongue, the language of the Wurundjeri People, and are not of Wadawurrung tongue.

References Australian Heritage Commission (AHC). 2002. “Ask First: A Guide to Respecting Indigenous Heritage Places and Values.” Canberra, Commonwealth of Australia. Accessed February 2020. www.nrm.wa.gov.au/media/86488/askfirst.pdf. Barthes, Roland. 1977. “An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative.” In Image-Music-Text, edited by Roland Barthes, translated by Stephen Heath, 79–124. New York: Hill and Wang. Benterrak, Krim, Stephen Muecke, Paddy Roe, Ray Keogh, Butcher ( Joe) Nangan, and E. M. Lohe. 1996. Reading the Country. Fremantle, WA: Fremantle Arts Centre Press. Chatwin, Bruce. 1987. The Songlines. London: Franklin Press.

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City of Ballarat. 2017. North Gardens Indigenous Sculpture Park, Lake Wendouree, Ballarat. Ballarat, Vic: City of Ballarat. Framlingham Aboriginal Trust and Winda Mara Aboriginal Corporation. 2004. Kooyang Sea Country Plan. Warrnambool, Vic: FAT & WMAC. Hromek, Danièle. 2020. “Defining Country” In Designing with Country, edited by NSW Government Architect, 6. Sydney, NSW: NSW Government Architect. Jones, David S. ed. 2021. Learning Country in Landscape Architecture Indigenous Knowledge Systems, Respect and Appreciation. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Kerr, Diane. 2021. “Deadly Story.” Accessed January 16, 2021. www.deadlystory.com/ page/culture/my-stories/NAIDOC-week/The_Matriarchs_in_my_life/Aunty_ Diane_Kerr. Lennon, Julian. 2006. “Julian Lennon Presents WHALE DREAMERS” [film]. www. youtube.com/watch?v=1pMK78lGUuc. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1961. Totalité et Infini: Essais sur l’Extériorité, Phænomenologica 8. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Neale, Margo. 2017. Songlines. Canberra, ACT: National Museum of Australia. Nicholson, Mandy, and David S. Jones. 2017. “Ngoon-godgin buladu-biik: The Essence of ‘Country’ Acknowledgements and Paying Respect,” Presented at Whose Land Is It Anyway? Symposium, Centre for Urban Research, RMIT University, November 14–16. www.whoseland2017.com/. Nicholson, Mandy, and David S. Jones. 2020. “Wurundjeri-al Biik-u (Wurundjeri Country), Mag-golee (Place), Murrup (Spirit) and Ker-up-non (People).” In Routledge Handbook on Historic Urban Landscapes of the Asia-Pacific, edited by Kapila D. Silva, 508–525. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Nicholson, Mandy, Glenn Romanis, Isobel Paton, David S Jones, Kate Gerritsen, and Gareth Powell. 2020. “Unnamed as Yet.” UNESCO Observatory E-Journal MultiDisciplinary Research in the Arts 6, no. 1: vii–viii, 1–19. OED Online. 2021a. aborigine, n. and adj. OED Online. Oxford University Press, December 2020. Web. January 17. OED Online. (1961) 2021b. aboriginal, adj. and n. OED Online. Oxford University Press, December 2020. Web. January 17. Parks Victoria, Gunditj Mirring Traditional Owners Aboriginal Corporation (GMTOAC) and Winda Mara Aboriginal Corporation (WMAC). 2015. Ngootyoong Gunditj Ngootyoong Mara South West Management Plan. Melbourne, Vic: PV. Potteiger, Matthew, and Jamie Purinton. 1998. Landscape Narratives. New York: J. Wiley. Powell, Bryon. 2015a. “Wadawurrung Language: Bonan Youang.” Open ABC. Accessed January 1, 2018. https://open.abc.net.au/explore/86782. Powell, Bryon. 2015b. “Wadawurrung Language: Wurdi Youang.” Open ABC. Accessed January 1, 2018. https://open.abc.net.au/explore/86719. Powell, Bryon. 2015c. “Wadawurrung Language: Kuarka-dora.” Open ABC. Accessed January 1, 2018. https://open.abc.net.au/explore/86721. Powell, Bryon, David Tournier, David S. Jones, and Phillip B. Roös. 2019. “Welcome to Wadawurrung Country.” In Geelong’s Changing Landscape, edited by David S. Jones and Phillip B. Roös, 44–84. Melbourne, Vic: CSIRO. Powell, Gareth, and David S. Jones. 2018. “Kim-barne Wadawurrung Tabayl.” Kerb 26: 22–25. ISSN 1324–8049. Referendum Council. 2017. “Uluru Statement from the Heart.” www.referendumcouncil. org.au/event/uluru-statement-from-the-heart.

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Rose, Deborah Bird. 1996. Nourishing Terrains. Canberra, ACT: Australian Heritage Commission. Wadawurrung Traditional Owners Aboriginal Corporation (WTOAC). 2020a. Paleert Tjaara Dja. Ballarat, Vic: WTOAC. Wadawurrung Traditional Owners Aboriginal Corporation (WTOAC). 2020b. “Paleert Tjaara Dja: Video.” www.wadawurrung.org.au/healthy-country-plan-video. Withers, Walter B. 1887. “Place Names in Ballarat.” In The History of Ballarat from the First Pastoral Settlement to the Present Time (2nd ed.), 13–14. Ballarat: FW Niven & C.

5 HOPI HOUSE AND THE DESIGN OF HERITAGE AT GRAND CANYON NATIONAL PARK Rebecca Houze

Hopi House is a souvenir shop and tourist museum at Grand Canyon National Park. Located in Arizona, in the American Southwest, it was designed in 1905 by architect Mary Elizabeth Jane Colter (1869–1958) for the Fred Harvey Company, a concessionaire that partnered with the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe (AT&SF) Railway to provide comfortable dining and lodging for train passengers. The unassuming structure is near the canyon’s South Rim, which offers a panoramic view of the spectacular Colorado River gorge. Purposefully reminiscent of Ancestral Puebloan ruins in the region while also evoking the traditional dwellings of present-day Hopi people, its rectangular terraces of unevenly shaped sandstone bricks have a warm, rich texture that ref lects the red and gold layers of the rocky canyon. Outside its entrance, a painted sign on a slab of stone announces ‘HOPI HOUSE’ in decorative geometric lettering: ‘HISTORIC LANDMARK. NATIVE AMERICAN ARTS & CRAFTS. NAVAJO RUGS.’ Two symbols that recall traditional Hopi visual imagery, a stylized raincloud and Tawa, or sun spirit, are depicted in turquoise and terra cotta (Figure 5.1). The images connect the visitor to an idea of the natural world and its mythology, and promise an experience that will be exotic, artistic, authentic, stylish, friendly, and accessible. Colter designed several buildings along the Grand Canyon’s South Rim, which together were designated as a National Historic Landmark District in 1975 (Chappell 1975). A decade later, they were also listed on the National Register of Historic Places (Harrison 1987). The Grand Canyon itself was designated much earlier, in 1908, as a US National Monument and in 1919 as a US National Park (“Grand Canyon National Monument” 1908; An Act To establish the Grand Canyon National Park 1919). In 1979, it became a UNESCO World Heritage site (“Grand Canyon National Park” n.d.). But whose history and cultural heritage do these multiple designations safeguard? This chapter argues that the complex DOI: 10.4324/9781003096146-8

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FIGURE 5.1

Hopi House, Grand Canyon National Park.

Source: Photograph by Rebecca Houze, taken in 2016, reproduced with permission of the author.

experience of heritage at Hopi House raises challenging questions about belonging, which were designed into the architecture, landscape, and promotion of the park and its built environment.

A sense of history Mary Colter’s work is not widely known among architecture and design historians even today. Just two full-length accounts of her life and career have been published (Berke 2002; Grattan 1992). She was raised in St. Paul, Minnesota, where she later taught classes at Mechanic Arts High School. She studied at the California School of Design in Oakland, California, where she was introduced to progressive architectural currents on the West Coast. She was never licensed as an architect, however, and has been remembered more often as a decorator and designer of interior spaces rather than of buildings. It is remarkable, therefore, that Colter’s buildings at the Grand Canyon are designated today in the United States as National Historic Landmarks. In light of the violent history of conf lict between settlers and Indigenous people in the United States, however, Colter’s contributions to American cultural heritage are problematic. In what ways, if any, was Hopi cultural heritage ref lected, represented, or experienced at Hopi House when it was first built? Leah Dilworth (1996), Marta Weigle and Kathleen Howard (1996) and Howard and Diana Pardue (1996) have demonstrated how the AT&SF and Fred Harvey

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Company promoted the myth of the ‘vanishing Indian’ in illustrated brochures, theatrical hotels, and collectible souvenirs for travellers who were eager to explore the exotic Southwest. Mary Colter’s Hopi House was at the centre of this new impulse, which Hal Rothman described as, ‘the combination of nationalism and exhilaration tinged with self-doubt that so affected the privileged of the age’ (1998, 53). The Fred Harvey Company’s remarkable success in establishing a tourist market for Southwest arts and crafts, in collaboration with the Santa Fe Railway, relied on a romantic image of the pre-industrial Indian that had been popularized in art and literature throughout the nineteenth century and which increased with the completion of the first transcontinental railroad in the 1860s. The acceleration of westward expansion and industrialization provoked new anxieties among white settlers who were eager to construct a uniquely American cultural identity, with its own history, monuments, and antiquities. European-American explorers found these treasures in the land itself, which they claimed, named, and represented visually in paintings and photographs. By extension, the native peoples of the land, both past and present, were to them more distinctive – and more interesting – than the cultural monuments and antiquities of their European heritage. The increasing calls to preserve undeveloped lands and native arts and crafts traditions among white settlers who romanticized and mythologized the Indian at the end of the nineteenth century were a paradoxical response to official efforts to eradicate the Indigenous population, through war, forced resettlement, redistribution of land, and assimilation (Padget 2004). In her 1987 nomination of Mary Colter’s buildings at the Grand Canyon as a National Historic Landmark, Laura Soulliere Harrison provided the justification for their status: ‘Colter’s place in American architecture is important because of the concern for archeology and a sense of history conveyed by her buildings, and the feelings she created in those spaces’ (1987, 3). It is significant that Harrison identifies the buildings not as archaeological objects or historical artefacts but rather as evidence of a ‘concern’ for archaeology and a ‘sense’ of history, drawing attention to the subjective nature of the tourist experience. Depending on their personal circumstances, it is plausible that Mary Colter’s Hopi House might evoke for its visitors feelings of pleasure; nostalgia; national pride; an aesthetic appreciation of the land and admiration of the traditional material culture of its Indigenous inhabitants; a desire for acquisition; or a sense of loss, tragedy, anger, or outrage. Laurajane Smith and Gary Campbell write, museums and heritage sites are places where people go to feel . . . to not only feel particular emotions, but to work out or explore how those emotions may reinforce, provide insight, or otherwise engage with aspects of the past and its meaning for the present. (2016, 445)

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The design of Hopi House, including its physical structure and furnishings, the activities performed around it, the commodities exhibited and sold within it, its directed pathways, its landscaping, and its promotion in signage and printed ephemera contributes to the subjective experience of heritage. Kjetil Fallan and Grace Lees-Maffei propose that we understand the subjective experience of design as not merely relative but rather ‘relational,’ an approach that they describe as ‘rigorous subjectivity’ (Fallan and Lees-Maffei 2015, 14). The visitor’s subjective experience of Hopi House is thus complexly constructed and mediated through a range of encounters with the designed spaces of the building and park.

America’s antiquities When the US Congress designated the Grand Canyon a National Park in 1919, the area had already been a thriving tourist destination for 20 years. About 300 miles away from the Grand Canyon, ancient ruins had been discovered at Mesa Verde in southwest Colorado, which soon became sites for archaeological excavation, as well as for looting and vandalism. Anthropologists wanted to better understand the relationship of the old stone buildings, which had been abandoned hundreds of years ago, to the present-day Pueblo communities along the mesas of Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico. In the late nineteenth century, the AT&SF Railway produced alluring postcards, posters, and brochures to promote the Southwest Pueblo communities, especially those at Acoma, Laguna, Isleta, and Oraibi, which had become tourist attractions for curious travellers and scholars eager to witness the Hopi Snake Dance (Hough 1899; Warburg 1923). The popularization of the ancient ‘cliff dwellers’ homes in photographs, and at the world’s fairs where visitors marvelled at life-sized reconstructions of them (Hinsley 1991; Parezo and Fowler 2007), energized efforts to protect the ancient Native American artefacts and led to the passage in 1906 of the Antiquities Act (An Act for the Preservation of American Antiquities 1906). The law enabled a US president to protect a parcel of land by executive order. Although the law, ‘An Act For the preservation of American antiquities,’ was designed specifically to protect the Southwest Native American Indian artefacts from looters, it has since been used more frequently to protect land that is ecologically unique (“Monuments Protected Under the Antiquities Act” 2017). In 1908, when President Theodore Roosevelt used the Antiquities Act to protect 800,000 acres of the Grand Canyon as a National Monument, he proclaimed, ‘no building of any kind, not a summer cottage, a hotel, should be permitted to mar the wonderful grandeur, the sublimity, the great loneliness, and beauty of the Canyon’ (Rothman 1998, 61). But by then, Hopi House had already been built.

A living museum The idea for Hopi House evolved from one of Mary Colter’s previous projects for the Fred Harvey Company, the interior of the Indian and Mexican Building and

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Museum at the Alvarado Hotel in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Ingeniously situated between the train station and the luxurious hotel, which had been designed by architect Charles Whittelsey in a Spanish Mission Revival style, the Indian and Mexican Building enticed disembarking tourists to view the Fred Harvey Company’s extensive collection of Southwest arts and crafts and to purchase Native American Indian textiles, jewellery, baskets, and pottery as souvenirs while also watching local artisans at work (The Alvarado: A New Hotel at Albuquerque n.d.). The Fred Harvey hotels, restaurants, and gift shops resembled the atmospheric buildings that had been popularized at world’s fairs in the second half of the nineteenth century as living museums of traditional folk culture ( Kaufman 1989; Kirschenblatt-Gimblett 1991). With Hopi House, Colter had the opportunity to expand her vision of an Indian environment to a complete building, for which she was responsible for the exterior construction as well as interior design (Figure 5.2). Working with local ethnographer and Christian missionary Henry Voth, she modelled it on the stone and adobe buildings of Oraibi, a Hopi Pueblo village to the west of the Grand Canyon. Dating at least to the twelfth century, Oraibi is one of the oldest continually inhabited buildings in North America (Weiss 1975). Hopi House

FIGURE 5.2

Ground-f loor sales rooms in Hopi House, showing display of baskets and Navajo blankets, c.1905.

Source: Detroit Photographic Company. Grand Canyon National Park/Creative Commons.

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was constructed using similar materials and techniques to those of the buildings at Oraibi, where Voth had worked since 1892: local Kaibab limestone faced with Coconino sandstone and mortared with clay and sand, peeled logs of local timber for supports, and layers of small branches for the ceilings. Ladders provided access to the employee living quarters on the upper stories, but a more conventional European-American-style first-f loor entrance was built for tourists, and parts of the structure were reinforced with steel AT&SF rails (Berke 2002, 64–65). Its interior spaces and terraced roofs served as stages on which an imagined past era was performed for guests of the nearby El Tovar hotel. Hopi House presented Hopi life in a traditional Pueblo home as an admirable model of domesticity. It demonstrated how pueblos were constructed and furnished, the gender relations and division of labour within Hopi families, and the arts and crafts that enhanced their homes: textiles for clothing and blankets, ceramic pots for carrying water and for cooking, baskets for storing food, and jewellery for personal adornment. Indeed, Barbara Babcock has demonstrated that the Santa Fe Railway and Fred Harvey Company perpetuated an idea of the Hopi as a domesticated, peaceful, productive people, characterized by the feminine beauty of young Hopi women with iconic hair whorls and Hopi decorative arts (Babcock 1996). Colter’s interior decoration of Hopi House enhanced the mythical image of America’s ‘First Families,’ which was promoted in travel literature that also highlighted Southwest arts and crafts (Huckel 1913). The main attraction at both the Indian Building in Albuquerque and at Hopi House was the presence of native artisans. Two women in particular were celebrated members of the Harvey staff. The Hopi-Tewa ceramicist Nampeyo (1859–1942) popularized an earthenware pattern based on fragments of pottery found at the Sikyátki archaeological site on First Mesa dating to the fourteenth century. Asdzaa Lichii’ (1850–1924) also known as Elle of Ganado, was a master Navajo weaver. Their performance of the living history imagined by tourists contributed to a heightened aesthetic experience and likely encouraged their purchase of the arts and crafts for sale in the building. Nampeyo and Elle were frequently photographed, and their names, images, and designs appeared in Fred Harvey Company postcards, booklets, and other printed ephemera. As Leah Dilworth writes, Elle and Nampeyo were in large part ‘famous for being famous’ ( Dilworth 1996, 88).

A selective heritage The traditional Diné (Navajo) dwelling, the hogan, is a round house made of earth and logs. In appearance, it is unlike the rectangular stone or adobe pueblo. At both the Indian Building of the Alvarado Hotel in Albuquerque and at Hopi House, traditional hogans were constructed for the Navajo artisans in residence, but the Fred Harvey Company and Santa Fe Railway did not showcase them in the same way or consider them tourist destinations like Hopi House. The Havasupai, the people who lived year-round in the canyon itself, resided in

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hawas, or jacal homes, made of mud and sticks. By 1928, the National Park Service considered the Havasupai dwellings, many of which were then made of scrap materials, so unsightly that the residents were forcibly removed from the park (Rothman 1998, 75). Hopi House, in its name and design, obscures a long history of strained relations between neighbouring tribes in the Southwest that were set into motion by the 1887 Dawes Act, named for US Senator Henry Laurens Dawes of Massachusetts. The policy called for the redistribution of communally held native lands to individual ownership with the ultimate goal of transferring such land to white settlers (An Act To provide for the Allotment of Lands 1887). It compounded decades of violence against Indigenous people, whose population decreased sharply in the last half of the nineteenth century. In 1863, thousands of Navajo were killed and their homes and livestock destroyed; others were relocated from their ancestral homelands to a small reservation of 40 square miles. Unlike the Hopi, the Diné or Navajo were nomadic people dependent on access to grasslands for their sheep, a fact that made their forced relocation even more devastating. Moreover, in 1882, following the establishment of silver mining in the area, the US government also reduced the expansive Havasupai ancestral home to an area of just 518 acres (Braatz 1998). The Indian reservations in closest proximity to Grand Canyon National Park today are the Havasupai, Hulapai, Navajo, Hopi, and Kaibab, though the canyon is also associated with other Indigenous peoples, including the Paiute, White Mountain Apache, Yavapai Apache, and Zuni. But, as Hal Rothman explains, at the turn of the twentieth century, the Hopi primarily, and the Navajo secondarily, were privileged over other Indigenous groups whose vernacular architecture and material culture was less interesting and picturesque to white settlers and tourists (Rothman 1998, 70). W. H. Simpson, passenger agent for the Santa Fe Railway, praised Hopi homemaking, writing, ‘Go inside and you see how these gentle folk live. The rooms are little and low. Like their small-statured occupants. The f loors and walls are as cleanly [sic] as a Dutch kitchen.’ While admiring the Hopi for their tidy lifestyle, picturesque customs, diminutive size, friendliness, and industriousness, Simpson was more circumspect about the ‘tall, taciturn Navajos – smooth-faced, keeneyed Bedouins – who live in adjacent hogans’ (Simpson 1906). His paternalistic and Orientalized descriptions attributed essential characteristics to the Hopi and Navajo, which were evident, he believed, in their different styles of dwelling. Simpson’s equation of housing type with ethnicity was a trope of late nineteenth-century architecture, which understood building style as a ref lection of climate, race, and nation (Viollet-le-Duc 1876). The objects for sale inside Hopi House – pottery, baskets, rugs, and jewellery – made by Hopi, Navajo, and other local Indigenous artists – represented the cultural diversity of the Southwest. But the building’s architecture showcased the Hopi over others as the preferred sign of American antiquity. In the designed space of the shop, the exotic becomes familiar, approachable, and easy to acquire. The tourist is at home.

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Multiple identities Hopi House was the first of several buildings that Mary Colter would design at the Grand Canyon. Lookout Studio (1914), Hermit’s Rest (1914), and Desert Watchtower (1932) are more imaginative – no longer replicas of ancient ruins but visionary expressions of the canyon itself. Her earliest buildings have been interpreted as precursors to the US National Park Rustic style of lodges, campsites, and trailside museums built of native stone and logs between the First and Second World Wars, an approach with roots in the American Arts and Crafts movement and in the emergence of American landscape design in the nineteenth century (McClelland 1998; Carr 1998; Kaiser 1997). Despite their allusion to Ancestral Puebloan ruins, Colter’s buildings represent the way in which the American landscape has been experienced, imagined, and mythologized by white settlers. They are expressions of the European-American Romantic appreciation for the sublime. By contrast, Old Oraibi, the Pueblo that served as inspiration for Hopi House, is an artefact of Hopi cultural heritage, which also represents the cultural heritage of North America. It was added to the US National Register of Historic Places in 1966. By the mid-twentieth century, outsiders were unwelcome on the Hopi Mesas. In an effort to reclaim and protect the site that had been exploited by tourists, scholars, photographers, and collectors for decades, visitors were prohibited. As a result of the strict regulations imposed by the Hopi Tribe, the 1975 inventory of Old Oraibi filed with the National Register of Historic Places was based on a survey of the building conducted in 1940 (Weiss 1975). Today the Hopi Cultural Center, a private hotel, restaurant, and gift shop on Second Mesa, Arizona, located on the Hopi Reservation, invites tourists to visit villages on guided tours, where photography and other forms of recording are carefully controlled. The National Park Service and the Bureau of Indian Affairs have a closely intertwined history as offices of the US Department of the Interior, but collaboration between US federal and tribal government is relatively recent (Keller and Turek 1998). In 1990, the Tribal Historic Preservation Program, administered by the US National Park Service, was established to help protect sacred and historic structures located on Tribal land in the United States. The Hopi Cultural Preservation Office, likewise established in 1990 as a part of the Hopi Tribal Government, has also used the National Historic Landmark designation to protect tangible landmarks that fall outside Indian reservation borders and to preserve intangible Hopi cultural heritage associated with traditional spiritual practices and mythology (Dongoske et al. 1997; Hopkins et al. 2017). Since 2015, the National Park Service has partnered with multiple organizations to develop preservation plans that are more sensitive to Indigenous history and cultural heritage, including the restoration of murals at Mary Colter’s Desert Watch Tower, which were painted in the 1930s by Hopi artist Fred Kabotie (1900–1986) (“Desert View Tribal Heritage Project” 2018).

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Are experiences of heritage at Old Oraibi different than at Hopi House? Are they different for Indigenous visitors and residents of the area than for nonIndigenous tourists? Whose heritage is at stake in each case? Old Oraibi and Hopi House were both listed on the National Register of Historic Places before the 2007 United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples to their traditional lands, territories, and resources and to their control over the development of their cultural heritage, as well as to reparations (Disko 2016). According to visitor comments on Tripadvisor.com, many tourists at Hopi House appreciate their informal exchanges with Hopi shop attendants and interpreters and regard their presence as evidence of Hopi House’s authenticity. Respondents also admire the high quality of crafts that may be purchased there, suggesting that the tourist experience of Hopi House today is not particularly different from that a century ago (“Hopi House” n.d.). More research is needed, however, to compare these comments to the experience of Hopi House from an Indigenous perspective. The Grand Canyon is designated as both a US National Park and a UNESCO World Heritage site because of its natural beauty and its wealth of information about Earth’s geological history and diverse ecosystems, described as ‘one of the world’s most visually powerful landscapes’ and ‘the most spectacular gorge in the world’ (“Grand Canyon National Park” n.d.). UNESCO asserts in its mission statement, ‘Peace must be built upon the intellectual and moral solidarity of humanity’ (“UNESCO in Brief: Mission and Mandate” n.d.). As an extension of the United Nations, which was established after the Second World War to help promote world peace through collaborative international relations, UNESCO aims to promote ‘cultural heritage and the equal dignity of all cultures’ (“UNESCO in Brief: Mission and Mandate” n.d.). Cultural programming of the National Park Service at the Grand Canyon today is more inclusive than it was a century ago (Balenquah 2016). Indigenous staff and interpretive guides at Hopi House and other venues in the park tell different stories about the region’s Indigenous residents and their history, traditions, and cultural heritage. But for the tourist, an awareness of Hopi or Indigenous heritage likely blends with their own personal sense of heritage, which may be experienced as national, political, and patriotic or as global and environmental. In 1965, at the White House Conference on International Cooperation in Washington, DC, the Committee on Natural Resources Conservation and Development called for a World Heritage Trust to preserve ‘the world’s superb natural and scenic areas and historic sites for the present and the future of the entire world citizenry’ (Stott 2011). The 1972 United Nations Convention Concerning the Protection of the World’s Cultural and Natural Heritage set the criteria for preserving such sites, with the Grand Canyon of Arizona receiving one of the program’s first designations. As a National Park, however, the Grand Canyon is preserved as a place significant to America’s heritage. It must be shared by the American public and handed down from generation to generation of

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Americans. When President Theodore Roosevelt visited the Grand Canyon in 1903, before Hopi House was built, he proclaimed: The Grand Canyon fills me with awe. It is beyond comparison – beyond description; absolutely unparalleled through-out the wide world. . . . Let this great wonder of nature remain as it now is. . . . You cannot improve on it. But what you can do is to keep it for your children, your children’s children, and all who come after you, as the one great sight which every American should see. (“President Passes Through Flagstaff” 1903) For Roosevelt, the Grand Canyon’s importance was as a piece of the American landscape, for its visual majesty and awe-inspiring scale – not for its cultural history as the ancestral homeland of Indigenous peoples of the Southwest but rather as part of the cultural history of the United States as a settler nation. His proprietary gaze was reinforced by the tourist industry that developed around it. In its visual and material connection to the sublime landscape of the Grand Canyon, Hopi House reinforces the feelings of heritage experienced by Roosevelt and many others since, but its explicit references to the Indigenous people of the Southwest introduce another more complex and contradictory element. Colter believed that the architectural building method and visual aesthetic she used at Hopi House preserved the memory of traditional Pueblo architecture, even if only in a staged re-enactment of it. The arts and crafts – ceramic pottery, woven blankets, and silver jewellery – displayed, sold, and produced within Hopi House, like the painted symbols on its signage, remind its visitors of the real people who made them. Does Hopi House signify the presence of the Indian inhabitants of the canyon and surrounding region, or their absence? Such questions may not be foremost on the minds of tourists at the Grand Canyon today as they move through the crowded retail spaces of Hopi House, shopping for souvenirs. Yet as visitors wander away from the shops and showrooms with the treasures they have acquired, they may nevertheless notice the sharp contrast between the busy built environment of the canyon’s rim and the vast emptiness of its natural landscape below. Even though one’s personal experience of heritage at Hopi House may seem to naturally or inevitably follow from a shared appreciation for scenic surroundings, a ‘concern for archeology,’ or a ‘sense of history,’ it is important to remember that such an experience is the result of many careful decisions – from the placement of the roads, trails, and visual markers that lead us through it, to the form and material of architecture in which we inhabit it, to the objects that enable us to remember it. It is an experience that has been designed. To better understand the role of design in the experience of heritage enables us to think more critically about the politics of identity and belonging.

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Acknowledgements This chapter developed in 2017–2018 while I was a visiting researcher with the Theorising Visual Art and Design (TVAD) research group at the School of Creative Arts, University of Hertfordshire, UK. I am grateful to Grace Lees-Maffei, Steven Adams, and the DHeritage (Professional Doctorate in Heritage) students and affiliated faculty at UH for inviting me to participate in the program and for their rich discussions of design and heritage. Versions of this paper were presented in 2018 at the Architecture Media Politics Society conference in London, the International Conference on Design History and Design Studies in Barcelona, and the Textile Society of America conference in Vancouver, BC. The Division of Research and Innovation Partnerships, College of Visual and Performing Arts, and School of Art and Design at Northern Illinois University supported this project.

References An Act for the Preservation of American Antiquities (The Antiquities Act of 1906). 1906. 16 U. S. C. 431–433 §. An Act to establish the Grand Canyon National Park in the State of Arizona, 1919. Pub. L. No. 277, § U. S. Statutes at Large 40, 1175. An Act to Provide for the Allotment of Lands in Severalty to Indians on the Various Reservations (Dawes Act), 1887. § 24 Stat. 388, ch. 119, 25 USCA. The Alvarado: A New Hotel at Albuquerque, New Mexico. n.d. Fred Harvey Company/Santa Fe Railway. Babcock, Barbara A. 1996. “First Families: Gender, Reproduction, and the Mythic Southwest.” In The Great Southwest of the Fred Harvey Company and the Santa Fe Railway, edited by Marta Weigle and Barbara A. Babcock, 207–218. Phoenix: The Heard Museum. Balenquah, Lyle. 2016. “Cultural Connections to the Grand Canyon: A Personal View from [Hopi] Archaeologist Lyle Balenquah.” Canyon Views 23, no. 3 (August): 14–15. Berke, Arnold. 2002. Mary Colter: Architect of the Southwest. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Braatz, Timothy. 1998. “The Question of Regional Bands and Subtribes Among the PreConquest Pai (Hulapai and Havasupai) Indians of Northwestern Arizona.” American Indian Quarterly 22, no. 1–2 (Winter–Spring): 19–30. Carr, Ethan. 1998. Wilderness by Design: Landscape Architecture and the National Park Service. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Chappell, Gordon. 1975. “Grand Canyon Village Historic District.” National Register of Historic Places Inventory/Nomination Form, US National Park Service Western Region, San Francisco, November 20. “Desert View Tribal Heritage Project.” 2018. National Park Service. Updated December 7. Accessed February 6, 2021. www.nps.gov/grca/learn/photosmultimedia/gcid-05dvwt.htm. Dilworth, Leah. 1996. Imagining Indians in the Southwest: Persistent Visions of a Primitive Past. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Disko, Stefan. 2016. “Indigenous Peoples’ Rights and the World Heritage Convention.” In A Companion to Heritage Studies, edited by William Logan, Máiréad Nic Craith, and Ullrich Kockel, 355–372. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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Dongoske, Kurt E., Michael Yeatts, Roger Anyon, and T. J. Ferguson. 1997. “Archeological Cultures and Cultural Affiliation: Hopi and Zuni Perspectives in the American Southwest.” American Antiquity 62, no. 4 (October): 600–608. Fallan, Kjetil, and Grace Lees-Maffei. 2015. “It’s Personal: Subjectivity in Design History.” Design and Culture 7, no. 1 (April): 5–27. “Grand Canyon National Monument, Arizona.” 1908. Presidential Proclamation No. 794, January 11. “Grand Canyon National Park.” n.d. UNESCO World Heritage Centre List. Accessed December 13, 2018. https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/75. Grattan, Virginia L. 1992. Mary Colter: Builder upon the Red Earth. Grand Canyon, Arizona: Grand Canyon Natural History Association. Harrison, Laura Soulliere. 1987. “M. E. J. Colter Buildings.” National Register of Historic Places Inventory/Nomination Form, US National Park Service Southwest Region, Santa Fe, May 28. Hinsley, Curtis M. 1991. “The World as Marketplace: Commodification of the Exotic at the World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893.” In Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, edited by Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine, 344–365. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. “Hopi House.” n.d. Tripadvisor. Accessed February 6, 2021. www.tripadvisor.com/ Attraction_Review-g143028-d279319-Reviews-Hopi_House-Grand_Canyon_ National_Park_Arizona.html#preferences. Hopkins, Maren P., Stuart B. Koyiyumptewa, Saul L. Hedquist, T. J. Ferguson, and Chip Colwell. 2017. “Hopisinmuy Wu’ya’mat Hisat Yang Tupqa’va Yeesiwngwu (Hopi Ancestors Lived in These Canyons).” In Legacies of Space and Intangible Heritage: Archaeology, Ethnohistory, and the Politics of Cultural Continuity in the Americas, edited by Fernando Armstrong-Fumero and Julio Hoil Gutierrez, 33–52. Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado. Hough, Walter. 1899. The Moki Snake Dance: A Popular Account of That Unparalleled Dramatic Pagan Ceremony of the Pueblo Indians of Tusayan, Arizona, with Incidental Mention of Their Life and Customs. Chicago: Passenger Department, Santa Fe Route. Howard, Kathleen L., and Diana F. Pardue. 1996. Inventing the Southwest: The Fred Harvey Company and Native American Art. Phoenix: The Heard Museum. Huckel, J. F. 1913. First Families of the Southwest. Kansas City: Fred Harvey. Kaiser, Harvey H. 1997. Landmarks in the Landscape: Historic Architecture in the National Parks of the West. San Francisco: Chronicle Books. Kaufman, Edward N. 1989. “The Architectural Museum from World’s Fair to Restoration Village.” Assemblage 9 ( June): 20–39. Keller, Robert H., and Michael F. Turek. 1998. American Indians and National Parks. Tuscon: University of Arizona Press. Kirschenblatt-Gimblett. 1991. “Objects of Ethnography.” In Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, edited by Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine, 386–443. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. McClelland, Linda Flint. 1998. Building the National Parks: Historic Landscape Design and Construction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. “Monuments Protected Under the Antiquities Act.” 2017. National Parks Conservation Association. January 13. www.npca.org/resources/2658-monuments-protected-underthe-antiquities-act. Padget, Martin. 2004. Indian Country: Travels in the American Southwest 1840–1935. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

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Parezo, Nancy J., and Don D. Fowler. 2007. Anthropology Goes to the Fair: The 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. “President Passes Through Flagstaff.” 1903. The Coconino Sun 20, no. 19, May 9, 1. Rothman, Hal K. 1998. Devil’s Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth-Century American West. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas. Simpson, W. H. 1906. El Tovar By Fred Harvey: A New Hotel at Grand Canyon of Arizona, 1905. Chicago: Fred Harvey Company. Smith, Laurajane, and Gary Campbell. 2016. “The Elephant in the Room: Heritage, Affect, and Emotion.” In A Companion to Heritage Studies, edited by William Logan, Máiréad Nic Craith, and Ullrich Kockel, 443–460. Chichester, UK: John Wiley and Sons, Inc. Stott, Peter H. 2011. “The World Heritage Convention and the National Park Service, 1962–1972.” The George Wright Forum 28, no. 3: 279–290. “UNESCO in Brief: Mission and Mandate.” n.d. UNESCO. Accessed January 12, 2021. https://en.unesco.org/about-us/introducing-unesco. Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène. 1876. The Habitation of Man in All Ages. Translated by Benjamin Bucknall. Boston: J.R. Osgood and Company. Warburg, Aby. 1998[1923]. “Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America.” In The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, edited by Donald Preziosi, 177–206. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Weigle, Marta, and Kathleen L. Howard. 1996. “‘To experience the real Grand Canyon’: Santa Fe/Harvey Panopticism, 1901–1935.” In The Great Southwest of the Fred Harvey Company and the Santa Fe Railway, edited by Marta Weigle and Barbara A. Babcock, 13–23. Phoenix: The Heard Museum. Weiss, Francine. 1975. Old Oraibi. National Register of Historic Places Inventory/ Nomination Form. Washington, DC: Historic Sites Survey, National Park Service, 9 October.

6 THE DESIGN HERITAGE OF THE WINTERGARDENS AT THE AUCKLAND DOMAIN Spectacular enchantment Jacqueline Naismith

In 1916, New Zealand Building Progress, the leading local industry journal of the time, reported on the forthcoming commencement of the Auckland Domain Wintergardens construction. It was stated that ‘from any point of the winter garden a very pleasant perspective of the whole will be possible, and it is calculated that the garden will present a picture that will be enchanting to the spectator’ ( New Zealand Building Progress 1916, 729). The promised ‘enchanting’ garden represented a new kind of urban development in New Zealand, and as a public interior space designed for botanical display, the wintergarden conservatory was seen by city planners as a desirable amenity, enhancing both urban parks and gardens and civic status (Auckland Council, Wintergardens file #1915; also see Dunlop 2002, 84–86). The glass and steel construction connoted progressive development, and, along with the early Auckland arcades, these modest structures offered early twentieth-century New Zealand citizens a sense of the experience of the vast ‘glassworlds’ (Armstrong 2008) of Victorian Britain.1 They also transferred social codes from late nineteenth-century Britain, where the public wintergarden had assumed a role as a place for civilized promenade and display.2 Three wintergardens were built in New Zealand in the first decades of the twentieth century. The first, the Winter Garden at the Dunedin Botanic Gardens (Heritage New Zealand List No. 4733), was adapted by local practice Mason and Wales from plans by the Edinburgh company McKenzie and Moncur. On opening in 1908, it quickly became a popular visitor destination (Dunlop 2002, 87–88). Over a decade later, the construction of the Auckland Domain Wintergardens, designed by William Henry Gummer and Charles Reginald Ford, began and continued between 1919 and 1931. Cunningham House (formerly Winter Gardens, Heritage New Zealand List No. 1862), designed by Christchurch architectural practice Collins and Harman, opened in 1924. Unlike the British idea of the wintergarden as a large multipurpose interior entertainment DOI: 10.4324/9781003096146-9

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space,3 these were small conservatory structures with a focus on plant displays for public enjoyment and education. Their structures were firmly British inf luenced, while the imported plant species they housed transferred British-defined concepts of the exotic and an interior utopian paradise to New Zealand public gardens. This chapter focuses on the Auckland Domain Wintergardens as a case study of the historical and contemporary significance of the spatial experience of the wintergarden. Awarded a Category 1 Heritage New Zealand listing in 1989 (No. 124), the Domain Wintergardens’ heritage values have been recognized as being of local and national significance in terms of architectural design, garden/ botanical history, education, and leisure (Heritage New Zealand 1989). The complex is a popular and well-cared-for civic asset. Extant research, including the Auckland Domain Wintergardens Conservation Plan (Salmond Reed Architects 2001), the Auckland Domain Fernery Conservation Plan (Bowman and de Lambert 1993), and Heritage New Zealand (1989), has assembled a historical narrative, architectural discussion, and points of cultural heritage significance related to the structures. This research has been of key importance in establishing a programme of conservation to ensure the ongoing viability of the tangible and material elements of the complex. The relationship between the historical material/tangible elements of the design and the enduring, experiential, and atmospheric qualities produced through the process of encountering the spaces, however, is yet to be explored. I propose the term ‘spectacular enchantment’ to describe this continuing affective relationship between heritage architecture, people, and plants. Moments where all participants are presenting at their best were frequently captured, and archival photographs are used as evidence that points to the ‘more than representational’ (Lorimer 2005) qualities of these interactions. These interpretations are supported by the theorizing of affective architectures and heritage experiences advanced by Jacque Micieli-Voutsinas and Angela M. Person (2021). I connect the conservation of a tangible civic asset of historical importance and the endurance of the experiences and encounters that the space enables, thereby advancing discussion of the experiential and intangible values of the New Zealand wintergardens and their relevance and meaning for contemporary and future generations.

The site: Pukekawa Auckland Domain The Domain Wintergardens are situated within Pukekawa, the Auckland Domain, which is a public park of approximately 75 hectares of land purchased by the colonial government from its Māori owners in the 1840s. The park radiates outwards from the volcanic cone of Pukekawa – one of the oldest of many within the Auckland volcanic field. It has an important pre-colonization history and significance for northern Māori. It contains multiple pā (fortified village) sites and was an area rich in natural resources, including mahinga kai (garden,

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cultivation, or food-gathering places), valued weaving species, and abundant spring water (Auckland Council 2016, 21–22). Furthermore, as the site of intertribal musket wars in the early 1800s, in which many lives were lost, it held bitter memories for Māori – a history that is carried forward in one of several interpretations of the meaning of the name Pukekawa as ‘sour hill’ (Mackintosh 2019, 70). Remaining largely unmodified throughout much of the nineteenth century, the site began to change in the late 1860s when the Auckland Acclimatisation Society established the plantings and greenhouses that subsequently became the first Auckland Botanic Gardens (see Sullivan 1998), and sports fields were established. By the second decade of the twentieth century, plans for a significant urban park for the city of Auckland began to be realized. The first stage of the Wintergardens, a key project in the Auckland City Council’s vision,4 was funded by proceeds from the Auckland Industrial and Mining Exhibition held on the Domain site in 1913. This relationship is recorded on the commemorative plaque at the entrance to the complex. Commemoration, as Gentry (2015, 4) has noted, served to establish a past for colonial identities by recording settlement histories. Here the narrative of the achievement of the recent Auckland Industrial and Mining Exhibition is firmly tied to that of the Wintergardens as a subsequent colonial marker on the site. The Exhibition’s primary agenda was to celebrate and affirm industrial progress and economic achievement in New Zealand. Following what Tony Bennett (2017) has termed an ‘exhibitionary complex’, it scripted a narrative of progress, development, and improvement expressed as a national imperative to the significant numbers who attended.5 Combining product displays with entertainment and fun – including the Wonderland City of Amusements – the 1913 Exhibition established a tradition of spectacle and display on the site. To accommodate the temporary exhibition buildings, the topography of Pukekawa, close to the site where the Domain Wintergardens were subsequently constructed, was significantly altered by earthworks to level and drain the ground, including the area on which the Wintergardens were built (Salmond Reed Architects 2001, 7). The development of the Domain as an expansion of public leisure space was contemporaneous with that of other urban park areas – including Myers Park in central Auckland in 1915 – and with a rapidly growing urban population (see Bush 1971). Inscribing a language of late Edwardian conservatory architecture onto the volcanic terrain of Pukekawa, the neo-classical style codes clearly asserted permanence and the signature of the British Empire. This approach was consistent with the overseas-inf luenced styles that characterized new urban buildings of this period (see McCarthy 2017). At the same time, both within its interior and those elements built subsequently (the Courtyard, Tropical House, and Fernery), a new set of relationships between architecture, plants, and place, as well as the exotic and native, was progressively assembled. The ongoing custodianship and care of the Auckland Domain Wintergardens is now the responsibility of the Auckland Council in partnership with

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FIGURE 6.1

The Domain Wintergardens. Looking northwest from Auckland War Memorial Museum ca.1930. Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections 4–8322.

Source: Photographer J. D. Richardson. Reproduced with the permission of the Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections.

mana whenua (the indigenous people, who have historic and territorial rights over the land). This partnership follows the framework of Te Aranga Māori Design, which is laid out in the Auckland Domain Masterplan. In that plan, iwi (tribal groups) and hapū (family groups), as mana whenua, are ‘recognised and respected as a council partner’ and acknowledged ‘as the first peoples of the region and an intimate part of the ecological and cultural fabric of this community’ (Auckland Council 2016, 16–19). This partnership is central to all decision-making processes related to the care and development of the Domain.

Glass, transparency, and plants on display: the wintergarden as concept and idea Like the Dunedin Botanic Garden structure of more than a decade earlier, the idea of the Wintergardens as a civic facility for Auckland city followed precedents established in nineteenth-century British and European cities. The public wintergarden, as Georg Kohlmaier and Barna von Sartory have noted, democratized the experience of the private conservatory of the wealthy elite (1986, 37). Public wintergardens were, however, multipurpose garden interiors – public spaces used for all kinds of social and entertainment activities (Pimlott 2016, 35). The early urban wintergardens dating from the mid-nineteenth century – including Regents Park in London (1842–1846) and Jardin d’Hiver in Paris (1848)  – offered vast interior spaces and were contemporaneous with Joseph Paxton’s colossal ‘Crystal Palace’ (1851) ( Kohlmaier and von Sartory 1986, 37), itself based

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on Paxton’s greenhouse at Chatsworth (1840). The design of these and other mid-nineteenth-century glass and iron structures afforded a new experience of multidirectional interior light and the materiality of glass. As Isobel Armstrong (2008, 1) explains, ‘the gleam and lustre of glass surfaces, ref lecting and refracting the world, created a new glass consciousness and a language of transparency’. This was amplified in the controlled and enclosed garden environment of the wintergarden, especially in the context of the industrialized city; their warm interiors perhaps evoked a utopian sense of paradise. These spaces were protected from extremes of climate, while their light and comfort promoted wellbeing.6 The experience was, for its nineteenth-century European visitors, Kohlmaier and von Sartory suggest, ‘the dream of the entire natural environment of a tropical island enclosed in iron filigree and glass’ (1986, 1). Iconic, large glasshouses for botanical collection, cultivation, and education were also being constructed at this time. Prominent British exemplars included the Palm House (Burton and Turner 1848) and Temperate House (Burton 1862) at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. While these glasshouses and the urban wintergardens shared similarities of materials and construction, the botanical glasshouses were primarily concerned with the science of botany and cultivation, although display was still an important element (Kohlmaier and von Sartory 1986, 40). These structures represented the power and scale of the imperial botanical project, including the collection, categorization, and potential commercialization of exotic species (see Wulf 2009). As Pimlott notes, they expressed ‘the stewardship of Paradise abroad’ (2016, 35). While the New Zealand wintergardens’ focus was on display and public leisure, there was also a collection, botanical/educational, and in the case of the Dunedin Winter Gardens, a commercial imperative associated with their use (Dunlop 2002, 88).7 In this way, they were a hybrid form of the typology adapted for their specific context in a rapidly urbanizing New Zealand.

Structural intervention in a volcanic landscape: Gummer’s design William Gummer’s proposal for the Auckland Domain Wintergardens was determined by the Auckland Council to be preferable to importing a prefabricated glasshouse from England (Auckland Council, Wintergardens file #1915). Gummer was well positioned to offer a plan for the project: he was working on a number of larger-scale office and municipal buildings in Auckland and Wellington at that time and was actively involved in urban planning matters. His training at the British Royal Academy of Arts between 1909 and 1912 and employment in the office of Edwin Lutyens in 1911 had equipped him with comprehensive knowledge of Beaux Arts classicism and its stylistic interpretation in early twentieth-century English architecture (Lochhead 2000, 1). The late Edwardian neo-classical approach he adopted demonstrated a British-inf luenced, local interpretation of a public conservatory structure. His proposal for the complex

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enabled a staged construction process, common in New Zealand at this time when there were issues related to affordability. The construction of the first house, the Cool House, began in the late 1910s; the courtyard and second house, the Tropical House, were not completed until 1928,8 while the Fernery, the final element in the complex, opened in 1930. The overall plan for the complex is based on a symmetrical relationship between two houses, emphasized by the courtyard and pool (see Salmond Reed Architects 2001, 21). The design drew on the structural innovations offered by cast iron and glass together with an approach characterized by restraint and simplicity. The unusual choice of brick piers as the dominant element to support the barrel-vaulted roof adds a significant weight to the scheme and is continued in the courtyard pergola structures.9 The light approach to detailing – including the geometric patterning of mullions, scrolled caps at the top of the piers, and the bas-relief above the entrances – ensures the building’s connection to classical style codes is evident while pointing to the stripped classicism that characterized Gummer’s subsequent work.10 Importantly, like other demonstrations of the classical revival style in early twentieth-century New Zealand, the visual weight of the building asserted status, order, permanence, and the colonial power of the British Empire to reconfigure the environment both physically and socially within these codes. The courtyard component draws on the formal elements of early twentiethcentury English Arts and Crafts garden design. It is of a scale considered domestic within an English garden context and offers modest relatability to the local visitor. The inf luence of the work of Gertrude Jekyll on Gummer’s design has been noted by Salmond Reed Architects (2001, 20), who suggest the scheme was inf luenced by the sunken garden and pool at Marshcourt, selected by Jekyll for her internationally circulated 1914 publication Gardens for Small Country Houses ( Jekyll and Weaver 1913, 154–155). The pergola, a key element in the Wintergardens courtyard composition, plays an important role in separating the courtyard area into a sequence of spaces, or rooms, and while permeable and open to the elements, they read as a continuous engagement with the language of enclosure of the glasshouses. The revival of the pergola, as Ian Bowman and Rachel de Lambert (1993) have noted, was a key feature of Arts and Crafts garden design, one that appeared frequently in collaborations between and Jekyll and Lutyens, which Gummer was likely to have encountered while working in Lutyens’s office. These elements, therefore, assembled in the Wintergardens design, offered the public an experience of classically informed spatial sequences transported from an English context. The completion of the Temperate House in 1921 materialized the first stage of the plan. By 1928, on completion of the Tropical House, twin barrel-vaulted glass roofs exemplified a new spatial language in the Domain landscape. Mediating the exterior environment, the architecture claimed these interior spaces for the production of a staged performance of plants within (Mabey 2017, 8), a primary attraction of the complex.

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The Fernery Within the Fernery, New Zealand native plant species, including a selection of ferns, were showcased in a display structure shaped by the qualities of its site and English Arts and Crafts design inf luences. Entered from the south side of the courtyard, a stately pergola and now-established plantings partly obscure the fact that it is constructed within the cavity of a former scoria quarry, a residue of the earthworks that significantly altered the site’s volcanic terrain. Only a small number of fernery structures from this period remain in New Zealand due to the exposed timber pergola, which was characteristic of the concept (Bowman and De Lambert 1993). That the Auckland example now survives is likely related to Bowman and De Lambert identifying the value of the structure and to subsequent significant conservation work. The Fernery pergola has a clear visual relationship to the pergola/colonnade structure on the north of the courtyard garden and offers aesthetic balance to the composition of the overall scheme. A specific type of English garden structure and display concept, the Fernery transported another Victorian penchant to New Zealand: pteridomania – the collection, cultivation, and display of English ferns. Unlike the exotic species imported for the Cool and Tropical houses, however, native ferns of many species are prolific and abundant in the New Zealand bush. The Fernery at the Wintergardens provided a place for native species to be displayed alongside the exotics in the glasshouses, celebrating the specific character and indigeneity of these species.11 The Fernery was planted in 1929, soon after the inauguration of the New Zealand Horticultural Society Loder Cup Award for the preservation of New Zealand native f lora (Department of Conservation n.d.). The garden included a group of 70 plants that were part of the winning collection of commercially propagated native species (Bowman and de Lambert 1993, 6–8). Notably, this event was contemporaneous with expanding interest in native plant horticulture and the establishment of native gardens elsewhere in New Zealand.12 The Fernery, then, is an important element in the complex, which documents the relationships between the native and the exotic in a constructed leisure garden environment.

Climate, plants, atmosphere Beyond the Fernery, the controlled climatic conditions of the Cool and Tropical Houses enabled the cultivation of a wide range of exotic species. The Cool House offered temperate climate conditions; however, unlike the temperate but frequently inclement conditions outside, plants were protected from the weather so that idealized and pristine displays could be staged. Mass colour, colour contrast, and scented and spectacular blooms were all part of the display aesthetic associated with the wintergarden as a visitor attraction. The species selected included long-f lowering exotic annuals and perennials, such as begonias and

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pelargoniums, along with many others from the English domestic garden and herbaceous border repertoire, and, from the outset, exotic orchids of all kinds. Emphasized by bright, even light, the spatial rhythm of the mullioned glass roof encloses the staged display, relationally positioning plants and visitors as performing entities in the arrangement. In these environments, the living processes of people and plants – respiration and photosynthesis – all interact. Dense habitation intensifies these interactions alongside temperature, humidity, odour, and the energy of light and colour, co-producing an atmosphere specific to the spatial and material qualities of Gummer’s design. The Cool House, while still distinctly a place apart from everyday life, retains a connection to an idealized domestic garden in which the plants are familiar but perfect and dramatic in their abundance. A photograph taken by an Auckland City Council photographer in 1968 is one of many images in the public archive, alongside those in personal collections, that document displays and visitors at the Wintergardens (Figure 6.2). Here in the Cool House, the visitors are clearly on a social outing and dressed for the occasion. While this image tells us much about the design of plant displays, species selection, and dress from the late 1960s, the affective qualities of the experience that it points to are of particular interest. The immersion of the visitors

FIGURE 6.2

Display in the Cool House at the Auckland Domain Wintergardens, 1968. Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections 1337–24.

Source: Photographer: Stephen Fleay, November 1968. Reproduced with the permission of the Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections.

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in plant vitality and vibrancy, amplified by enclosure and proximity, elevates this moment beyond the ordinary. The photograph documents a multisensory affective experience – an embodied memory of social and community value  – conditioned by the specific material and atmospheric qualities of the Wintergardens’ heritage architecture. This follows Micieli-Voutsinas and Person’s understanding of heritage spaces as affective, offering visitors an embodied experience: ‘affectious spaces constitute a lexicon of more-than-representational gestures recorded in both material and immaterial registries, forged throughout spatial design, including structure, scale, materiality, texture, touch, lighting, sound, smell, enclosure, egress, and exposure’ (2021, 3). The multi-sensory experience is amplified further in the Tropical House. The dense and lush plantings, higher temperatures and humidity increase proximity between elements and intensify the smell of earthy growing medium and scented f lowers. The repertoire of plantings included the exotic species selected for their spectacular display qualities and popularized by the Kew collections.13 Key features of the Tropical House are the palm species, in particular the centrally placed giant banana palms, and the large pond at the northern end, which has consistently featured the giant waterlily Victoria amazonica. Favoured by Paxton in the mid-nineteenth century, and described by Tatiana Holway (2013) as the ‘Flower of Empire’, this has become a signature plant of many tropical or palm houses globally. The species grown in the Tropical House have now become synonymous with an imperial vision of the exotic, one that has been both replicated and subsequently revised and critiqued in (former) colonial contexts (see Beattie, Melillo, and O’Gorman 2014). This experience of the exotic as both a set of botanical attributes and discourse is dramatically amplified by the specific qualities of the spaces themselves, embedded in Gummer’s design. Another element of the atmosphere of both houses relates to the relationship between design and communal experience. Armstrong notes that for nineteenth-century conservatory designer John Claudius Loudon, ‘the conservatory is a lyrical space for communality and community’ (2008, 179). This communal centring thematically relates to the form of the dome structures that characterized Loudon’s style. Gummer’s hemispherical vaulted roof aligns with Loudon’s approach to assemble an intimate space of social and interspecies communality. Mark Dorrian extends this idea by suggesting that Loudon was concerned with the concept of ‘meteorological unification’ (2014, 196). This is consistent with Gernot Böhme’s theory in which atmosphere is understood as a co-production between subject and object (1993, 113–126). The nuances of atmosphere result from a specific combination of conditions/climates or elements, including light, temperature, humidity, air movement, and smell/scent, along with their perception by the sensing subject.14 Atmosphere in the Wintergardens can therefore be understood as a communal experience between visitors and plants and the affective encounter an embodied memory. This is recorded and activated as a cultural memory for communities and generations though repeat visits and photographs.

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Plants, performance, and the plant event The taste for the spectacular and curious enjoyed in Victorian entertainment cultures remained popular in twentieth-century wintergarden displays. As Mabey has noted, popular species included orchids, ferns, air plants, bromeliads, strelitzia, and, significantly, giant waterlilies and arums (2017, 258–279). Notable species included the Victoria amazonica mentioned previously and, perhaps most significant due to considerable twenty-first-century interest, Amorphophallus titanum, whose first f lowering at Kew in 1889 created great interest and was reported in local New Zealand newspapers. Recent f lowerings in New Zealand include those at the Domain Wintergardens between 2013 and 2020 and at the Dunedin Wintergarden in 2018. These f lowering performances are part of New Zealand’s British colonial heritage, embedded in these spaces, and the intangible heritage of the tradition, now reiterated in an era of entertainment spectacle. Visitors queued then and now to witness Amorphophallus titanum’s performance of inf lorescence emerge and decline over a two-to-three-day period, while emitting a strong sulphurous odour, which appears simultaneously to attract and repel visitors.15 An exotic and staged exhibit, it performs as a plant curiosity, resonant of the sideshows of the Victorian multi-purpose wintergarden. Now, however, as the species is endangered in the wild, the wintergarden enclosures offer one kind of conservation strategy. Thus, the preservation of the buildings means that they can continue to stage spectacular performances of botanical vitality at a time of heightened human sensitivity to vegetal energy.16

Spectacular enchantment Enchantment at its simplest is an affective encounter that results in positive responses (Cuthbertson 2018, 5; also see Bennett 2001). The concept of enchantment directs attention to the perception of the sensory experience and atmosphere of the space. It is a specific kind of engagement located in the sensory interactions between the subject and object. It is used here to describe the ways that wintergardens as affective environments draw their subjects into a dynamic interaction between plants, architecture, and energy. In this way, it underscores the potential for the experience of an othered reality, a transformed experience of time and space within the wintergarden theatre.17 Spectacular enchantment, as a summation of the enduring experiential values of the wintergarden, draws enchantment together with the spectacular as a produced and consumed visual world. I have developed the term from the early twentieth-century reportage, quoted previously, that promised the Domain Wintergardens would be ‘enchanting to the spectator’ (New Zealand Building Progress 1916, 729). This concept encases the affective qualities of the display and co-production of atmosphere with people in the space and its use in botany and horticulture to describe impressive qualities of plant elements, especially inf lorescence. Both are qualities long associated with the wintergarden idea, shaping

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its earlier interpretation as staged utopia. While contemporary visions of utopia may be shifting, it would seem that wintergardens retain the capacity to enchant and re-enchant. This affective encounter occurs through the spatial and material specificity of its historical design and the interspecies connections that the interior atmosphere supports. This now takes place alongside engagement with pressing issues related to ecological wellbeing and species preservation (see Kellert 2018).

Enduring significance While the Domain Wintergardens heritage listing was awarded in the 1980s, it was not until the significant preservation carried out by Salmond Reed Architects in 2001 (and further earthquake strengthening in 2017) that the ongoing viability and condition of the structures was addressed. The Conservation Plan recommended an approach whereby the comprehensive work involved adhered closely to the original conception and crafting of the structures (Salmond Reed Architects 2001). Therefore, while plant displays have gone through multiple cycles of renewal, the affective experience of the buildings remains close to that which visitors in the 1920s might have had. This is a directly perceived (following Gibson 1966) affective experience of heritage that needs little textual interpretation. The Auckland Domain Masterplan (Auckland Council 2016) proposes the Wintergardens ‘maintain [an] all-year-round high-quality horticultural display that features rare plants, plants of interest and has the general feel of a Victorian pleasance garden’. It also proposes that they further ‘showcase traditional horticultural skills and complement events in the Domain and exhibitions in the Auckland War Memorial Museum’. Thus, it would seem that the heritage values related to the Wintergarden’s architectural and botanical histories remain a priority for the Auckland Council and continue to connect a contemporary experience to its historical context. As a historical artefact documenting New Zealand’s early twentieth-century identity, the Wintergardens offer material evidence of the interwoven design and botanical connections between New Zealand and Britain at that time. This chapter has situated these histories and contextualized them in terms of the contemporary experiences the complex continues to offer as a heritage-listed public leisure space. The colonial heritage significance of the Domain Wintergardens’ tangible elements has been well established, and their conservation has ensured its survival as an intact twenty-first-century asset. These tangible elements don’t, however, fully account for their ongoing popularity. Rather, the Domain Wintergardens has experiential relevance as a site of engagement between humans and plants that extends well beyond its status as an example of British colonial architecture. The display spaces of the Wintergardens facilitate an amplified leisure and educational experience of both introduced and native plant species that has been repeated and remembered across generations of locals and sought out by international visitors. It is thus the experience of their specific architectural atmosphere, community memory, and plant vitality,

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encapsulated in the concept of spectacular enchantment, that I suggest connects the historic Domain Wintergardens to the present moment and explains their ongoing relevance and appeal. More broadly, the themes discussed in this chapter have implications for the futures of both design and heritage in the wider context of the Anthropocene. At a time when human connection to and care for nonhuman species has become increasingly important, the multi-layered heritage experience of the Wintergardens offers a valuable reference point for contemporary and future practices.

Notes 1 The Strand Arcade (1910), Queens Arcade (1920s), and St Kevin’s Arcade (1920s). 2 However, as Penny Sparke (2020) has noted, this was aspired to but not always achieved. 3 The term wintergarden was used to describe both the large public structure and an interior garden within other similar kinds of structures (Sparke 2020, 248). 4 In 2010, the Auckland City Council amalgamated with six other city and district councils to become the Auckland Council. 5 Yarwood (1986) states 870,000 people attended over a five-month period. 6 Sadar (2012) further discusses the relationship between the body, sunlight, glass, and wellness in early twentieth-century health and marketing discourse. 7 For discussion of the imperial anthropocene, see Coughlin and Gephart (2019) and Ibbotson (2019). 8 The Auckland Domain Wintergardens were a costly project, and the completion of the second building was only made possible with considerable private donation (Auckland Council, Wintergardens file #1920–25). 9 Bowman and de Lambert (1993) suggest the buildings are similar to Lutyens’s orangery (1904–1909) at Hestercombe. Salmond Reed Architects suggest the single-vault structure shares similarities with the Oxford University Botanic Gardens greenhouses (2001, 17). 10 As seen in the Dominion Museum Building, Wellington, 1936; see Lochhead (2000). 11 It should be noted, however, that parts of the Domain/Pukekawa site, prior to the nineteenth-century clearance, had dense areas of native ferns growing in better-suited conditions than those offered by the former quarry site. 12 Importantly, there was a concurrent imperative towards the collection and display of native plants: botanist Leonard Cockayne established the Otari Native Garden collection in Wellington in 1926. Also see Cockayne (1912) and Cockayne (2011). 13 These included a range of palm species, cycads, giant strelitzias, bananas, orchids, and bromeliads, among many others. 14 See, for example, Anderson (2009), Pallasmaa (2012), Sumartojo and Pink (2019), and Griffero (2017) for explication of theories of atmosphere and spatial experience. Sadar (2018) further expands discussion of atmospheric conditions, quasi materials, and interior space. 15 See Desmarais (2018) for further discussion of scent and odour in relation to the history of conservatories. 16 Principles of interconnectedness of the human and non-human have been advanced by Timothy Morton (2010). For the concept of vegetal thinking, see Marder (2013) and Gibson (2018). Maura Coughlin and Emily Gephart (2019) assert that an understanding of non-hierarchical species connection is critical in the current state of environmental crisis. 17 The experience of the wintergarden has also been positioned as magical (Pringle 2013) and as a utopia, paradise, and Garden of Eden (Kohlmaier and von Sartory 1986, 7–12). Zumthor (2006) used the phrase ‘the magic of the real’ to define atmosphere as an interior quality. This also relates to the idea of enchantment.

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References Anderson, Ben. 2009. “Affective Atmospheres.” Emotion, Space and Society 2, no. 2: 77–81. Armstrong, Isobel. 2008. Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination 1830– 1880. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Auckland Council. Wintergardens file #1915. Auckland Council Archive. Auckland Council. Wintergardens file #1920–25. Auckland Council Archive. Auckland Council. 2016. Auckland Domain Masterplan. www.aucklandcouncil.govt.nz/ plans-projects-policies-reports-bylaws/our-plans-strategies/place-based-plans/ docsaucklandmasterplan/auckland-domain-master-plan-part-one.pdf. Beattie, James, Edward Melillo, and Emily O’Gorman. 2014. “Rethinking the British Empire through Eco-Cultural Networks: Materialist-Cultural Environmental History, Relational Connections and Agency.” Environment and History 20, no. 4: 561–575. Bennett, Jane. 2001. The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bennett, Tony. 2017. Museums, Power, Knowledge: Selected Essays. London: Routledge. Böhme, Gernot. 1993. “Atmosphere as the Fundamental Concept of a New Aesthetics.” Thesis Eleven 36, no. 1: 113–126. Bowman, I., and R. De Lambert. 1993. Auckland Domain Fernery Conservation Plan. Unpublished report prepared for the Auckland City Council. Ref R//002581 Auckland Council Archives. Bush, Graham William Arthur. 1971. Decently and in Order: The Government of the City of Auckland 1840–1971: The Centennial History of the Auckland City Council. Auckland: Collins for the Auckland City Council. Cockayne, L. 1912. “Some Noteworthy New Zealand Ferns.” The Plant World 15, no. 3: 49–59. Cockayne, L. 2011[1928]. The Vegetation of New Zealand (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Coughlin, Maura, and Emily Gephart, eds. 2019 Ecocriticism and the Anthropocene in Nineteenth-Century Art and Visual Culture. New York: Routledge. Cuthbertson, Ian Alexander. 2018. “The Problem of Enchantment.” Religion Compass 12, no. 9: 11–18. Department of Conservation. n.d. “All Loder Cup Winners from 1929.” www.doc.govt. nz/news/events/awards/loder-cup-award/all-winners-from-1929/#1940. Desmarais, Jane. 2018. Monsters under Glass: A Cultural History of Hothouse Flowers from 1850 to the Present. London: Reaktion Books. Dorrian, Mark. 2014. “Museum Atmospheres: Notes on Aura, Distance and Affect.” Journal of Architecture 19, no. 2: 187–201. Dunlop, Eric. 2002. The Story of the Dunedin Botanic Garden: New Zealand’s First. Dunedin: Friends of the Dunedin Botanic Garden. Gentry, Kynan. 2015. History, Heritage, and Colonialism: Historical Consciousness, Britishness, and Cultural Identity in New Zealand, 1870–1940. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Gibson, J. J. 1966. The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems. Boston: Houghton Miff lin. Gibson, Prudence. 2018. Covert Plants: Vegetal Consciousness and Agency in an Anthropocentric World. Santa Barbara, CA: Punctum Books. Griffero, Tonino. 2017. Quasi-Things: The Paradigm of Atmospheres. New York: SUNY. Heritage New Zealand/Te Pouere Taonga. 1989. Domain Wintergardens, List number 124. Wellington: Heritage New Zealand. Holway, Tatiana M. 2013. The Flower of Empire: An Amazonian Water Lily, the Quest to Make It Bloom, and the World It Created. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Ibbotson, Rosie. 2019. “Crafting ‘Nature’ Ecocriticism, Environmental Violence and the Transnational Arts and Crafts Movement.” In Ecocriticism and the Anthropocene in Nineteenth-Century Art and Visual Culture, edited by Maura Coughlin and Emily Gephart, 32–48 London: Routledge. Jekyll, Gertrude, and Lawrence Weaver. 1913. Gardens for Small Country Houses. London: Country Life. Kellert, Stephen R. 2018. Nature by Design: The Practice of Biophilic Design. New Haven: Yale University Press. Kohlmaier, Georg, and Barna von Sartory. 1986. Houses of Glass: A Nineteenth-Century Building Type. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lochhead, Ian. 2000. “Gummer, William Henry.” In Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, edited by C. Orange. Auckland: Auckland University Press/Department Internal Affairs. Lorimer, Hayden. 2005. “Cultural Geography: The Busyness of Being ‘More-ThanRepresentational’.” Progress in Human Geography 29, no. 1: 83–94. Mabey, Richard. 2017. The Cabaret of Plants: Forty Thousand Years of Plant Life and the Human Imagination. New York: W.W. Norton. Mackintosh, Lucy. 2019. “Shifting Grounds: History, Memory and Materiality in Auckland Landscapes c.1350–2018.” PhD diss., Auckland, New Zealand: University of Auckland. Marder, Michael. 2013. Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. New York: Columbia University Press. McCarthy, Christine, ed. 2017. “Nothing to be Ashamed of in a Good Nail”: New Zealand Architecture in the 1910s: A One-Day Symposium. Wellington: Victoria University Te Whare Wananga o te Upoko o te Ika Maui. Micieli-Voutsinas, Jacque, and Angela M. Person, eds. 2021. Affective Architectures: MoreThan-Representational Geographies of Heritage. London: Routledge. Morton, Timothy. 2010. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. New Zealand Building Progress. 1916. “Editorial, Building Notes: Auckland.” New Zealand Building Progress, September, 729. Pallasmaa, Juhani. 2012. The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses (3rd ed.). Chichester: Wiley. Pimlott, Mark. 2016. The Public Interior as Idea and Project. Heijningen: Jap Sam Books. Pringle, P. 2013. “The Wintergarden.” Interiors: Design, Architecture, Culture 4, no. 1: 75–92. Sadar, John Stanislav. 2012. “Vita Glass and the Discourse of Modern Culture.” In Writing Design: Words and Objects, edited by Grace Lees-Maffei, 101–115. London: Berg. Sadar, John Stanislav. 2018. “Quasi-Materials and the Making of Interior Atmospheres.” Interiority 1, no. 1: 49–63. Salmond Reed Architects. 2001. Winter Gardens: The Auckland Domain, Auckland, Conservation Plan. Unpublished report prepared for the Auckland City Council. Ref R/11005 Auckland Council Archives. Sparke, Penny. 2020. “‘Covered Promenades for Wet Weather’: London’s Winter Gardens and People’s Palaces, 1870–1900.” The London Journal 45, no. 2: 240–269. Sullivan, W. A. 1998. Changing the Face of Eden: A History of Auckland Acclimatisation Societies, 1861–1990. Auckland: Auckland/Waikato Fish & Game Council. Sumartojo, Shanti, and Sarah Pink. 2019. Atmospheres and the Experiential World: Theory and Methods. London: Routledge. Wulf, Andrea. 2009. The Brother Gardeners: Botany, Empire and the Birth of an Obsession. London: Windmill Books. Yarwood, Vaughan. 1986. “The Far Pavilions.” Auckland Metro 5, no. 55: 119–121. Zumthor, P. 2006. Atmospheres: Architectural Environments, Surrounding Objects. Basel: Birkhäuser.

7 TOWARD A TYPOLOGY OF DESIGNED HERITAGE IN SOUTHEAST OHIO Mound, marker, mine Samuel Dodd

Northwest Territory. Midwest. Heartland. Appalachia. Coal Country. Rust Belt. At the place where these regions overlap within the North American spatial imagination, we find an area known colloquially as Southeast Ohio. As an area of migration and resource extraction, Southeast Ohio is full of historical sites associated with Indigenous, Black, and White settlements and the manufacture of iron, coal, and ceramics. Offering a preliminary typology of designed heritage sites and practices, this chapter explores how the regional identity of Southeast Ohio is made material and immaterial through its ongoing engagement with fragmented cultural resources subject to exploitative economic forces. About the region’s industrial past, Elizabeth Dodd (2018) (no relation) writes, It’s all the same story. For centuries, white men armed with capital – and mostly living elsewhere – have treated these hills and hollows as a colony, a land-locked province of extraction pried open first with canals, and then with rails laid on cross-ties cut from those hardwood forests. Dodd describes a ‘legacy of chronic, sometimes crushing poverty’ as the ‘social layer laid across the land’s transformation’. Bike trails run alongside decommissioned railroads, roadways follow old game trails, and parades march past empty storefronts. As with other post-industrial regions, where histories of investment and disinvestment have created imbalances in the spatial and material record, Southeast Ohio is continually subject to heritage claims. One prevailing claim is that Southeast Ohio represents the Appalachian part of the state. Since 1965, the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) has drawn the boundaries of Appalachia as a cultural region within the United States. Some counties resist the designation due to Appalachia’s deeply embedded associations with poverty, lack of education, regional isolation, addiction, and related DOI: 10.4324/9781003096146-10

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stereotypes. Other municipalities pursue Appalachian status because, according to one state representative, ‘the designation will make the counties eligible for greater federal funding for economic development projects’ (Office of Tim Ryan 2007). As of 2020, Ohio contained 32 ARC-recognized counties, most of which were located along the foothills of the Appalachian mountain range running through the state’s southeastern edge and along the river that forms their southern borders. However, as the ARC adds new counties, Appalachian Ohio grows northward toward the Great Lakes. Just as American conceptions of the ‘frontier’ crept farther westward during the nineteenth century to satisfy the insatiable economic interests of White settler colonialism, contemporary Appalachia’s shifting borders attest to the mutability of seemingly stable political imaginaries and demonstrate how narratives of regional heritage become implicated in larger bids for resources. In Southeast Ohio, ‘the past is a renewable resource, growing larger every year’ ( Dodd 2018). Community stakeholders respond to the exigencies of securing favour within an underfunded public cultural sector by selectively constructing (and deconstructing) regional identities. In general, histories reinforcing narratives of economic progress are mined and reassembled in order to gain access to public and private funding. Evidence of such efforts can be found across the region: historical markers and memorials; murals painted over brick buildings; festivals, art tours, and parades. While economically beneficial for distressed regions, many heritage projects have the capacity to erase local histories, especially of times and people from before Appalachian status was officially granted. Word of mouth led me to one such site a few years ago. The Ohio River valley is home to some of North America’s largest Indigenous earthworks constructed by various societies over thousands of years. In Southeast Ohio, the Adena (ca. 1000 BCE–200 CE) and Hopewell (ca. 200 BCE–500 CE) built circle and square enclosures and mounds, most of which have been demolished or covered over with new buildings. After I moved to Athens County to begin teaching at Ohio University, I became curious about the mounds that remained. How had they become naturalized into the landscape, and how were they tied to the intensifying push to (re) define Southeast Ohio’s regional identity? I was told of an extant mound in The Plains, a small town about five miles north of where I lived in Athens. Turning onto the aptly named Mound Street, I encountered a 40-foot-tall earthen mound rising above a row of modest ranch houses (Figure 7.1). The first time I drove by the structure, a man was using a string trimmer to cut back the thick grass cover. A historical marker installed nearby informed me: ‘Mound owned by The Hartman Family’. I later read a 2018 interview with the landowner, Ralph Hartman, who explained that the site called ‘Hartman Mound’ sits on acreage his grandfather purchased. According to Hartman, ‘I’ve always seen the mound. It’s always belonged to us’ (Flynn 2018, 20). Are three generations of land ownership enough to reconstitute a 2,000-year-old landmark as the property of one family? This chapter questions how history comes to belong to some people but not others. It charts the layering of heritage claims at sites like the Hartman Mound and offers a framework for revealing the material and symbolic assemblages that construct regional identity.

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FIGURE 7.1

Mound Street in The Plains, Ohio, with view of the Hartman Mound and two informational markers positioned nearby.

Source: Photograph courtesy of Lindsey Martin, 2020.

Henri Lefebvre, in describing the various ways ‘social spaces interpenetrate one another and/or superimpose themselves upon one another’, offered a compelling framework in the mille-feuille pastry (Lefebvre 1974, 86). The dessert’s name (French for ‘thousand-sheets’) refers to its layers of cream and puff pastry. The latter is produced through a process known as lamination, wherein dough is repeatedly folded and rolled with cold butter to create paper-thin, brittle layers when baked. Pastry stacked with cream and sometimes fruit, nuts, cocoa, and icing, the mille-feuille offers a variable topography of material densities, thicknesses, colours, and f lavours. The stratified composition is best examined in cross-section. Lefebvre suggests the pastry’s structure as an apt metaphor for social space in that it too contains ‘a great diversity of objects, both natural and social, including the networks and pathways which facilitate the exchange of material things and information’ (77). I argue that the image of Lefebvre’s mille-feuille productively calls on the field of heritage to interrogate the cross-sections of regional identity by revealing how heritage itself is layered with intricate claims to and struggles over cultural resources. ‘Whether in state-sponsored museums or local heritage centers’, writes Glenn Hooper, ‘heritage is made rather than simply identified’ (2018, 3, emphasis original). Bella Dicks agrees, calling heritage a ‘social valuing practice’ that ‘points

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out a piece of the infinite available canvas of the past and makes it an object of the gaze, a stop on the itinerary, a photo on a postcard, an item in a catalogue’ (2018, 11). All this is to say that the making of heritage is far from natural. To reveal the layers of heritage claims and assess their specific configurations, I turn to an analytical method long favoured within architecture and planning – the typology. By interrogating how regional identity is designed through the production of sitespecific interfaces that simultaneously make present and f latten history, caches that assemble and archive remnants of the past, and performances that dramatize human activity, my typology organizes a critical assessment of heritage. In 1978, Spanish architect Rafael Moneo described typology as ‘the act of thinking in groups’, or rather as an ordering process ‘fundamentally based on the possibility of grouping objects by certain inherent structural similarities’ (1978, 23). Moneo’s essay was one of several inf luential writings during the 1960s and 1970s encouraging designers to expand the nineteenth-century typological tradition of sorting building types according to formal qualities by also accounting for the social and cultural conditions that act upon a type over time (Rossi 1966; Vidler 1977). Within this expanded view, the ‘inherent structural similarities’ that characterize a type might result from an accumulation of socio-spatial practices made visible as traces and fragments in the material record. ‘The design process’, Moneo writes, ‘is a way of bringing the elements of a typology into a precise state that characterizes the single work’ (1978, 23). For those critical of typology as a method that ‘denies change and emphasizes an almost automatic repetition’ or that reifies a set of privileged examples, Moneo emphasizes how ‘architecture . . . is not only described by types, it is also produced through them’ (1978, 23, emphasis original). For example, a typological analysis of Lefebvre’s mille-feuille would account not only for its ingredients but also its material compositions, logics of assembly, protocols of display and consumption, and social f luctuations regarding taste. As a preliminary typology of designed heritage, this chapter identifies three types, which I describe as the interface, the cache, and the performance. Heritage workers encounter and employ all three types to emplace a distant moment as present, either by making it visible, storing it, or embodying it. The ways in which a single site, such as the Hartman Mound, might function as one or more of these types over time can reveal historical shifts in economic and cultural values. By offering a typological study anchored in my analysis of heritage sites in Southeast Ohio, I hope to demonstrate how we might craft an interdisciplinary line of inquiry – drawing on histories of design and architecture, new materialism, and cultural geography – to parse out the visual, material, and spatial practices implicated when making heritage.

Interface By interface, I refer to a type of designed heritage site at which history is made thin and accessible. Like a skin, the interface functions as the place of interaction between two conditions: here and there, now and then, us and them. Heritage

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interfaces are often two-dimensional surfaces coded using the tools of graphic design and visual communication and decoded using the tools of semiotics and representational theory. As one of the more frequently used interfaces, historical markers become an illustrative example of the type. Anyone who has stopped to read a marker by the side of a road, in front of a building, in a park, or at some such site has experienced the emplacement of history through an interface. This process involves three components. The first we might call the user – the person who has directed their attention toward the marker. The user represents the I/here/now for whom history is being made accessible. The second component is the you/there/then, or rather the history as it has been selected from what Dicks describes as ‘the infinite available canvas of the past’ and presented to the user. The third component is that presentation, materialized as a marker but also involving any stakeholders and their social practices for selecting, designing, and installing the marker. Where physical evidence of the history in question still exists but is likely to be overlooked or misunderstood, as in the case of a building that has changed in appearance or function, the marker intervenes and calls attention. Where the history in question is no longer physically present, the marker conjures a site in the user’s mind. If the marker has been installed as part of Ohio’s Historical Markers program, it will take the form of a rectangular, aluminium sign mounted on a seven-foot post. The rectangle will be topped with a crest in the shape of Ohio (where other markers feature circles or stars) f lanked by clusters of leaves and nuts from the Ohio Buckeye tree. As one of 1,800 similar markers installed state-wide since the program started in 1957, it will have been placed by a local organization that funded its production and installation at a minimum cost of $3,180 (as of 2020). The program’s mission, as stated on its website, is to help Ohioans ‘tell the unique stories of the people, places, things, or events that helped shaped individual communities as well as Ohio and the nation’. Approved stories must address the following themes: history, architecture, culture, archaeology, natural history, or folklore (Ohio History Connection 2020). The program limits text to 65–120 words per side of the marker. Maybe this is a fitting form for official state histories to take: dispersed, fragmented, and incomplete; authored by the fortunate; incomprehensible as a single, linear story. There are no official state markers devoted to the Indigenous earthworks of Southeast Ohio. Instead, at the Hartman Mound sit two markers installed in 2017 by a local Eagle Scout. Constructed of metal plates affixed to wooden planks, the markers function as a makeshift interface between the ordinary street and the monumental earthwork. In crafting the text for the two markers, the scout followed official conventions. One marker presents a ‘History of the Adena People and their Mounds’, describing the ‘Pre-Columbian Native American culture’ as ‘Athens County’s first Known residents’ [sic]. The other marker features a map locating 13 Adena earthworks in the area. To orient the user, the map includes present-day street names and sites, including the high school and shopping plaza. Text below the map explains the Hartman Mound is ‘one of the few remaining

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mounds whose shape and size has not been altered’. The provisional construction of the markers – their screws have rusted and the metal plates started to buckle – seems fitting in this place and time, however unintentional it might have been for the scout. Instead of an official history as it would have appeared under the Ohio-themed cartouche of the state-sponsored marker program, these rickety markers show the mapping of American history for what it is: a ‘zone of awkward engagement’ (Tsing 2005). Through her material explorations, artist Quinn Hunter reinscribes Black American histories where they have been excluded or unmapped from the official record. After arriving in Athens to study for her graduate degree at Ohio University, Hunter came across the story of Christopher Davis, a Black man who had been lynched in November 1881 at an unmarked location nearby. In a personal letter, Hunter explained to me how she came across the site: I found the story of Christopher Davis three weeks after moving to Athens when I was search[ing] for a way to find a connection in such a white place. Having had heard rumors that the town was connected to the Underground Railroad, I thought finding information on that would help me settle in a bit easier. Instead I found Davis’s story tucked away in a couple of news articles. ( Hunter 2019) Hunter here describes her attunement to what art theorist Lucy Lippard calls the ‘lure of the local’, or rather the ‘pull of place that operates on each of us, exposing our politics and our spiritual legacies’ (Lippard 1997, 6). For Hunter, this opened a search for truth and reconciliation: I didn’t know what to do with such heavy information. I sat with it for months trying to decide. I didn’t want to be the face of a rally or lead the charge to demand the university do something, because this place where he died is right in the heart of campus. . . . I wanted him and what happened to him to be remembered, in a town that had forgotten. ( Hunter 2019) The forgetting of Christopher Davis had gone hand in hand with a slow displacing of his murder. News reports from 1881 explained how a mob of local men hanged Davis from an Athens bridge spanning the Hocking River and tracks for the Marietta and Cincinnati Railroad. By 2018, when Hunter encountered Davis’s story, she also encountered a site that would have been unrecognizable to Davis and his contemporaries, one with new ownership claims and daily functions. A new bridge had been built during the 1930s; the railroad had become disused and its tracks removed by the 1990s; as the university expanded, it eventually acquired the property, and in so doing subsumed the site into its ‘heart’. Even the river had moved by 1971, when the Army Corps of Engineers rerouted

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it to stop f looding of the campus. The land and its stories had been destabilized over time. In response, Hunter used the university foundry to fabricate a bronze plaque (approximately 3 × 5 inches) with three lines of raised-lettering text: On November 20, 1881 Christopher Davis, A Black man, was Lynched here. The artist intended her marker to present ‘just the facts and not the story, because the story doesn’t matter. The facts are that Christopher Davis was a black man, unconvicted of a crime, and that he [was] lynched in that spot’ (Hunter 2019). She installed it at the proximal location where Davis had been lynched. Hunter’s act of counter-monumentalism, conducted outside of official university channels, rejected the authoritative impulse behind most place-naming that occurs along the thin surface of the heritage interface. The marker’s material production and custom lettering suggest its thoughtful origins. Hunter’s project also demonstrates the degree to which interfaces are not simply objects. Rather, they are what Alexander R. Galloway describes as ‘zones of interaction that mediate between different realities’ (2012, viii). In light of this, two modes of inquiry become important when questioning how interfaces function as heritage types. The first considers their material conditions, including issues of production, construction, and site-specificity, and the second considers their social and cultural effects, including the means through which interfaces accrue representational force.

Cache Part storehouse and part archives, the heritage cache contains an accumulation of materials often concealed from or with limited accessibility to the general public. The significance of a cache is embedded into its collective materiality and will shift depending on changing value systems over time. As the type most related to the ruin, cache sites concern the affective qualities of material as it collects along generational or even geological temporalities. Cache sites might go unnoticed or undisturbed for long periods of time; slow temporal conditions make caches particularly vulnerable to the naturalization process Roland Barthes described as central to myth making. Oftentimes, a cache becomes naturalized into its location – hidden away in historical societies, house museums, and municipal archives – or, in the case of Ohio’s mounds, treated like common dirt. For Euro-American settlers moving westward, earthen mounds dotting the landscape presented a material culture entirely separate from their own, creating an intellectual dilemma Steven Conn refers to as a ‘problem of history’ (2004). The first written account of the mounds in Southeast Ohio is found in Samuel Brown’s 1817 book, The Western Gazetteer, or Emigrant’s Directory. ‘Mounds and embankments are to be seen in every part’, Brown writes in his entry on Athens

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County, noting that he ‘opened several; but found nothing except stone axes, arrows, and bones; at the bottoms there was uniformly a stratum of ashes, coals, and brands, intermixed with fragments of calcined bones’ (Brown 1817, 309). Despite his claim to have ‘found nothing’, Brown’s excavations unearthed (and ignored) a great deal of information from the mound, including evidence of architectural, cultural, and social practices all made illegible by Brown’s worldview. Due to their nature as cached heritage sites, mounds exerted an ‘unrelenting source of pressure’ onto the ‘European thinking’ of Brown and other settlers ( Brown 2008, 57). ‘The mound as a mound exists by denying access to whatever it contains’, writes cultural studies scholar Tony C. Brown, ‘It hides its contents from view such that one cannot tell . . . whether it contains anything more than mere earth’ (2008, 42, emphasis original). One way to learn what the mound contained was to destroy it in the name of progress. In his passage about Ross County, also in Southeast Ohio, Brown describes the fate of a 30-foot-tall conical mound: ‘It has lately been levelled with the earth, to make room for a fine brick house’ (1817, 307). During the 1850s, mound dirt was used to construct the pilings for Ohio’s new railroads (Mann 2008, 445). In 1930, a building materials advertisement in the Athens Messenger offered ‘rich dirt – at 20c a load, loaded free at Indian mound excavation’ in The Plains (Athens Messenger 1930). Newspapers also reported on locals opening mounds in search of metalwork, jewellery, and other artefacts (Athens Messenger 1896, 6; 1923, 8; 1950, 18). Objects gleaned from informal raids ended up in private home collections or on display in local schools and community centres. By 1936, one Athens County doctor boasted a home collection of more than 4,000 pieces ‘gathered from mounds and former Indian campus sites in Ohio’ ( Bush Snyder 1936, 5). By destroying mounds and absorbing their contents into the colonizing matrix of speculation and exhibition, settlers returned them ‘to history and therefore to the disciplinary frameworks of archaeology and historiography’ (Brown 2008, 58). Concomitant with the transformation of mounds into dirt was the crafting of a mythology to explain their origins. During the nineteenth century, written and visual accounts by Euro-Americans depicted mound builders as a semi-civilized, agrarian, Pre-Columbian society that had been annihilated by the Indians found living on the land by White settlers (Miller 1994). According to Brown in 1817, settlers had ‘obtained ample testimony that these masses of earth were formed by a savage people. Yet, doubtless possessing a greater degree of civilization than the present race of Indians’ (57, emphasis original). The US government used this ‘American version of the Romans and the Goths’ to justify policies violently dispossessing Native Americans of their territory (Hay 2015, 485). Well into the twentieth century, residents of Southeast Ohio promoted the myth of the mound builders. In the 1905 Centennial Atlas of Athens County, Ohio, local historian Clarence Matheny inscribed it into the county’s history: ‘From all indications [the mounds] were built many centuries ago by a race of people who had attained to some degree of civilization, at least, they were far beyond the American Indian,

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found inhabiting this continent when European adventurers first placed foot on this soil’ (Matheny 1904, 81). In 1950, the Athens Messenger described a mound in The Plains as having been ‘built by a race of people who worked much harder than the American Indians’ ( Harris 1950, 7). The mound-builder myth was one of many ways Americans absorbed the mounds into their imperialist conceptions of nature, reconstituting them as allegory, antiquity, property, or just dirt. In recent years, archaeologists have looked to the dirt to glean insight into the mounds as designed sites. Sarah C. Sherwood and Tristram R. Kidder conducted field studies at earthwork sites in the Mississippi Valley ‘using some of the assumptions we apply to other elements of material culture’ (2011, 69). Based on their study of lithostratigraphic units, mineralogy, geomorphology, and soil development, Sherwood and Kidder argue that mound construction was ‘not solely a means to an end’ but was ‘an art and a science requiring considerable knowledge, skill and planning, hard work, and impressive aesthetic and symbolic expression’ (2011, 84). Constructing a mound required mastery of site planning and preparation; the sourcing and transportation of various soil types as building materials; the allocation of labour; and the design of resilient compressive structural systems, including the use of sod blocks, soil blocks, various fill types, and prepared veneers. Mound builders paid careful attention to matters of soil colour and texture for both ‘symbolic and practical’ purposes. For example, they used ‘symbolically charged colors in Indian mythology and cosmology’ (Sherwood and Kidder 2011, 84) when constructing visible veneers and developed different soil configurations to repel rainwater and resist structural failures such as faulting, slumping, and def lection. What appears to some as a pile of dirt was in reality a sophisticated design project rivalling in complexity many American building projects today. The mounds demonstrate how cached heritage sites are vulnerable to revaluation unless equitable safeguards for stewardship can be put into place. It was only after a delegation from the Shawnee nation lobbied for legal protections of Indigenous sites that Ohio passed a law in 1976 protecting mounds from desecration. Precisely because cache sites deny access to the full scope of their contents, they are likely to be handled with speculation and incursion. When it appears that a cache has been left alone or untouched, it has become naturalized into the material culture of the dominating social order, where it inherits new metrics for value.

Performance By performance, I refer to a type of designed heritage site where history is dramatized through theatricality, enactment, or embodiment. Common examples of this type include festivals, parades, historical re-enactments, and pageants (Bartie et al. 2020; de Groot 2009). Spectacular performances contribute to modern society’s ‘endless exhibition’ (Adorno 1942) designed ‘to cause a world that is no longer directly perceptible to be seen’ (Debord 1994, 17, emphasis original). In her

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book The Archive and the Repertoire, Diana Taylor theorizes performance as ‘a system of learning, storing, and transmitting knowledge’ that is capable of building up oppressive power regimes but also forging new, alternative cultural expressions (2003, 16). Spectacle and stereotype are likely to occur when performance-based heritage speaks without permission on behalf of communities rendered invisible by exploitative social systems. This has been the case whenever Ohio’s mounds were used as backdrops for performances of modern statehood. In August 1912, nearly half a million visitors attended such a performance at the Ohio-Columbus Centennial in the capital city. While there, they had opportunity to witness The Story of the State, a parade featuring 26 horse-drawn f loats adorned with thousands of performers enacting scenes from Ohio’s history. The parade took place three times over the course of the weeklong event. A souvenir booklet also available for purchase showed colour reproductions of each f loat based on drawings made by Van Horn & Son, the Philadelphia designers responsible for creating all the tableaux and costumes. The story’s opening f loat was called ‘The Moundbuilders’. On it were shown eight actors – their skin rendered as brown in the reproductions was likely cosmetically darkened for the parade – gathered around a small platform mound to witness the re-enactment of a human sacrifice. Three male actors stood near the mound wearing animal skins and holding a stone axe, spear, and wooden club. Three actresses offered baskets of vegetation in supplication before the mound, on top of which another woman lay on a stone altar. A male figure standing next to the altar on the mound held a knife above the woman’s body in a frozen gesture of suspense. According to the souvenir booklet, the excavation of altars and burnt remains from some mounds ‘would seem to indicate that human sacrifice was not unknown to that mysterious people’ (The Story of the State 1912, 6). The parade organizers could have selected any number of historical tales to open their story. A scene showing the construction of a mound would have showcased mound builders’ social and cultural organization. Instead, rendered as ‘mysterious people’ engaged in a spectacular (and speculative) ritual display, the mound builders became a foil for the successive White, Christian protagonists displayed in the parade. The third f loat attributed ‘the honor of discovering the Ohio River’ to Chevalier de LaSalle, shown wearing armour and holding a light blue f lag adorned with f leur-de-lis and orange fringe. A man in Indigenous costume standing nearby with his hands crossed embodied the ‘noble savage’ character stereotype. LaSalle posed with his sword pointed towards two other Indigenous men sitting in a canoe in a gesture of ascendency over the land and its occupants. Any parallel between the Frenchman’s gesture and that of the mound builder was likely to have been inadvertent. Subsequent f loats interlaced additional symbols – Native American headdresses and tipis, Christian missionaries, crowned allegorical female figures, US f lags – to construct a progress narrative of White settlement and moral superiority toward statehood. The final f loat was called ‘Ohio Triumphant’. More than a century later, a similar tableau of stereotypes can be found in public ceremonies involving Ohio residents. In a reversal of the nineteenth-century

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myth that pitted mound-building societies against later Native Americans, recent celebrations conf late Indigenous identities into Ohio’s single premodern ‘other’. This can be found at the Indian Mound Festival hosted annually in The Plains since 1984. Festivalgoers can participate in a range of activities, including spear-throwing contests, archery tournaments, crafts fairs, magic shows, tractor pulls, and baby beauty contests. Photographs from the event’s Mound Festival Queen pageant show young, predominately White women in gowns, sashes, and crowns; they stand triumphant in front of a confused tableau of tipis, canoes, and American f lags. Organizers have explained how the annual event helps boost morale and bring tourism money into the impoverished area. It is now common to find exploitative heritage performances taking place within communities which themselves have become vulnerable to economic and cultural precarity. Artist Brian Harnetty confronts the exploitation of Southeast Ohio’s residents in his efforts recovering one of their most intangible historical records: sound. Harnetty, who has a master’s degree from the Royal Academy of Music in London and a PhD in interdisciplinary arts from Ohio University, merges music composition with archival and ethnographic fieldwork to create new sonic environments. For his 2016 album Shawnee, Ohio, Harnetty attuned himself to a former coal-mining town where some of his ancestors had settled as part of a migration of Welsh miners during the 1870s. His album features 11 ‘aural portraits’ crafted by mixing new music with archival recordings and oral histories. When performed live, as the artist has done in Shawnee and at arts centres in the United States, he accompanies the audio with video footage of new and archival photos. As a result, the listening experience becomes both personal and communal. The past and present shift imperceptibly, and connections between time and space thicken. ‘I began to understand that I was not only performing my own music’, Harnetty said of his process in an interview from 2018, ‘but performing the whole archive like a giant instrument, and my contribution was just one small part among many’. Harnetty’s method for performing the archive is visible in his self-published score for Shawnee, Ohio. The artist interlaces his sheet music with archival photographs, excerpted transcripts from oral histories, and fieldwork notes (Figure 7.2). Whenever culture workers use the stories, sounds, images, or materials of communities, ethical questions emerge. Speaking about his art, Harnetty acknowledges that when done indiscriminately and ‘with privilege and power, it can become a damaging cultural appropriation’ (2018). His response has been to design a research process based on deep and slow immersion, interaction, and contextualization: ‘I started to work with specific sound archives over long periods of time, and interacting with the people and communities connected to the recordings’. Harnetty’s work demonstrates how site specificity and a durational commitment to place can safeguard performance against its affinities for spectacle and stereotype. ‘Shawnee is made brief ly strange to outsiders like myself ’, describes Peter Tabor (2019) in a review of Harnetty’s album, ‘no one performs any particular version of Appalachian-ness, but people simply go about living’.

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Excerpt from Brian Harnetty’s published score for Shawnee, Ohio (2016), which demonstrates the artist’s interlacing of sheet music, oral history transcripts, and archival photographs.

Source: Photograph courtesy of Brian Harnetty.

Toward an integrated heritage Regions like Southeast Ohio, where histories of economic investment and disinvestment based on extraction have created asymmetries in power, present heritage workers with strategic and representational challenges. There are multiple Southeastern Ohios, comprising complex and often competing historical imaginations, the fragments of which are stored in archives, databases, artworks, monuments, and public memory. By way of a conclusion, I return to Mound Street and the Hartman Mound, where I am reminded that at various points throughout their history Ohio’s earthworks have functioned as all three of the heritage types discussed previously (and doubtless several more yet to be identified). The makings and unmakings of the mounds demonstrate how there is nothing natural about heritage; it is a process and a product of design, of construction, and of maintenance. As such, it is susceptible to shifting value-making forces affiliated with institutional power and capital. Heritage is especially vulnerable to gentrification, described by Sarah Schulman as a replacement process ‘affecting people who did not have rights, who were not represented, who did not have power or even consciousness about the reality of their own condition’ (2012, 4). As claims build up over time, the risk increases that heritage itself becomes the very mechanism of replacement. At that point, it becomes another social tool used to deem peoples and places disposable.

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Heritage scholars and practitioners who are interested in equitable approaches to place-making must reckon with the limitations of heritage work, especially while the conditions of marginalization continue to shift and fall victim to spectacular modes of commemoration and economy-driven metrics of valuation. In particular, heritage work that engages only one type of site – interface, cache, or performance – will strain under the exploitative pressures of place-making. Due to his awareness that singular designations will always fail to account for the multiplicities of social space, Lefebvre conjured the mille-feuille. In the social practices of contemporary artists like Quinn Hunter and Brian Harnetty, we find grounded methods for working across and against single heritage types toward an integrated practice. Community-driven approaches help to thicken histories of place that have been made thin through dubious heritage claims. Herein lies the value of a typological approach to critical heritage studies which is attentive to the ways in which heritage is designed: it holds before us the very structures of heritage for scrutiny. What Rafael Moneo wrote of architecture (1978, 23), we can amend for our purposes: to raise the question of typology in [heritage] is to raise a question of the nature of the [heritage] work itself. To answer it means, for each generation, a redefinition of the essence of [heritage] and an explanation of all its attendant problems.

References Adorno, Theodor. 1991[1942]. “The Schema of Mass Culture.” In The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, edited by J. M. Bernstein, 61–97. London, UK: Routledge. Athens Messenger. 1896. “Mound Builders’ Relics.” December 3. Athens Messenger. 1923. “Rich Gems Found in Indian Mound.” February 18. Athens Messenger. 1930. “Classified Advertising.” July 28. Athens Messenger. 1950. “Five-Mile Hike Taken by Scouts.” April 27. Bartie, Angela, Linda Fleming, Mark Freeman, Alexander Hutton, and Paul Readman, eds. 2020. Restaging the Past: Historical Pageants, Culture and Society in Modern Britain. London: University College London Press. Brown, Samuel. 1817. The Western Gazetteer; or Emigrant’s Directory. Auburn, NY: H.C. Southwick. Brown, Tony C. 2008. “The Barrows of History.” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 37, no. 1: 41–65. Conn, Steven. 2004. History’s Shadow: Native Americans and Historical Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Debord, Guy. 1994. Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York, NY: Zone Books. de Groot, Jerome. 2009. Consuming History: Historians and Heritage in Contemporary Popular Culture. London: Routledge. Dicks, Bella. 2018. “Heritage as Social Practice.” In Heritage at the Interface: Interpretation and Identity, edited by Glenn Hooper, 11–24. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Dodd, Elizabeth. 2018. “Mitigations.” Places Journal, June. https://doi.org/10.22269/ 180619.

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Flynn, Ryan. 2018. “Buried History.” The Backdrop Magazine 11, no. 4 (Spring). Galloway, Alexander R. 2012. The Interface Effect. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Harnetty, Brian. 2018. “Interview: Brian Harnetty on ‘Shawnee Ohio’ with Mark Mazullo.” Liquid Music, February 21. www.liquidmusic.org/blog//interview-brian-harnettyon-shawnee-ohiowith-mark-mazullo-annrg. Harris, C. H. 1950. “Work of Mound Builders.” Athens Messenger, 30 October. Hay, John. 2015. “A Poet of the Land: William Cullen Bryant and Moundbuilder Ecology.” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 61, no. 3: 475–511. Hooper, Glenn. 2018. “Introduction.” In Heritage at the Interface: Interpretation and Identity, edited by Glenn Hooper, 1–10. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida. Hunter, Quinn. 2019. Email with the Author. February 2. Lefebvre, Henri. 1974[1991]. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald NicholsonSmith. Oxford, IK: Blackwell Publishing. Lippard, Lucy R. 1997. The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society. New York, NY: The New Press. Mann, Barbara Alice. 2008. “Ohio Valley Mound Culture.” In Encyclopedia of American Indian History (vol. 1), edited by Bruce E. Johnson and Barry M. Pritzker, 444–448. Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio. Matheny, Clarence. 1904. The Centennial Atlas of Athens County, Ohio. Athens, OH: The Centennial Atlas Association Publishers. Miller, Angela. 1994. “‘The Soil of an Unknown America’: New World Lost Empires and the Debate over Cultural Origins.” American Art 8, nos. 3/4 (Summer/Autumn): 8–27. Moneo, Rafael. 1978. “On Typology.” Oppositions: A Journal for Ideas and Criticism in Architecture 13 (Summer): 22–45. Office of Tim Ryan. 2007. “July 17, 2007: House Passes Bill Adding Ashtabula, Trumbull & Mahoning Counties to Appalachian Region.” July 17. https://timryan.house.gov/ press-release/july-17-2007house-passes-bill-adding-ashtabula-trumbull-mahoningcounties-appalachian. Ohio History Connection. 2020. “The Ohio Historical Marker Program.” https:// remarkableohio.org/. Rossi, Aldo. 1966. L’architettura della Città. Padova, IT: Marsilio. Schulman, Sarah. 2012. Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Sherwood, Sarah C., and Tristram R. Kidder. 2011. “The DaVincis of Dirt: Geoarchaeological Perspectives on Native American Mound Building in the Mississippi River Basin.” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 30, no. 1 (March): 69–87. Snyder, Marian Bush. 1936. “Chauncey Physician Has Fine Collection of Indian Relics.” Athens Messenger, August 25. The Story of the State. 1912. Columbus, Ohio: Ohio-Columbus Centennial Commission. Tabor, Peter, and Justin Coer-Lake. 2019. “Brian Harnetty–Shawnee, Ohio (Karl).” Dusted Magazine, May 1. Taylor, Diana. 2003. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2005. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Vidler, Anthony. 1977. “The Third Typology.” Oppositions: A Journal for Ideas and Criticism in Architecture 7 (Winter).

PART III

Craft and industrial design

8 DÜRER, GOETHE, AND THE POETICS OF RICHARD RIEMERSCHMID’S MODERN WOODEN FURNITURE Freyja Hartzell

Machine furniture: a new German art ‘Once we had poets of words’, wrote the progressive German politician and art critic Friedrich Naumann in 1906, ‘but now we have poets of wood. And just as the printing press revolutionized the dissemination of poetry, today’s mechanized production makes it especially worthwhile to make “wood poetry”, since so many people can benefit from it’ (Naumann 1906 II, 34). Naumann’s essay, titled ‘Art and Industry’, written for the catalogue of the 1906 Third German Applied Arts Exhibition in Dresden, proposes the industrial production of artist-designed furniture as the way to deliver modern German art into the hands of ‘many (German) people’ (Naumann 1906 II, 34). At the forefront of this ‘industrialized carpentry’ was a new line of furniture designed by the Munich artist Richard Riemerschmid for the local Dresdner Werkstätten (Dresden Workshops), run by his close friend and soon-to-be brother-in-law, Karl Schmidt – a man affectionately known as the ‘Goethe of Wood’ (Wüllenkemper 2009, 111).1 Riemerschmid’s ‘Machine Furniture’, sparsely and efficiently constructed from serially produced, standardized components fabricated with the aid of newly available machine tools, was intended – through a wide range of designs, materials, configurations, and suites – to provide Germans in various socioeconomic brackets from the working class to the upper-middle class with simple, well-designed, and affordable modern furniture (Figure 8.1). But for Naumann, Riemerschmid was not just a democratizer of ‘good design’, he was a true ‘wood poet’: he perceived – and revealed – the soul of wood. This chapter suggests that bound up with an ultra-modern, democratic German art of the machine was a deeply rooted sense of German cultural heritage projecting back more than 400 years. Throughout the imagery and literature surrounding the 1906 Dresden exhibition, invocations of and comparisons with DOI: 10.4324/9781003096146-12

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FIGURE 8.1

Richard Riemerschmid, Machine Furniture: living room (spruce with brass fittings), installed at Third German Applied Arts Exhibition, Dresden, summer 1906.

Source: In Direktorium der Ausstellung, ed., Das Deutsche Kunstgewerbe 1906: Die Dritte Kunstgewerbe Ausstellung Dresden 1906 (Munich: Verlagsanstalt F. Bruckmann, 1906), 162.

two historic colossi of German culture – Romantic poet and philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer – signal a need to sanction the progressive German art of industrial design with the icons of a collectively constructed past. The Third German Applied Arts Exhibition, which took place between May and October 1906 in the historic cultural capital of Dresden, was, for Germany, a first. Brand-new designs for furniture and household objects, celebrating the extensive use of machine technology, took centre stage. Handcrafted products and interiors designed in historical styles, which had occupied positions of honour at previous applied arts exhibitions, were brushed aside to make room for modern Kunstgewerbe: literally, ‘Art-Industry’, or industrially produced appliedarts objects. The Dresden exhibition was a first for Riemerschmid, too – it was here that his new ‘Machine Furniture’ was first displayed before the German public. His Machine Chair promised not simply to democratize artistic furniture but simultaneously to open a new chapter in the history of German art. The simple chair modelled a pared-down, straightforward, modernist engagement of surface with substance: the round, polished heads of its pegs signalled its construction, while its inherent, natural patterning demonstrated the seamless relation of material and decoration – of woodgrain and wood. Its sparse, straightforward structure of slatted backrest supported by supple f lexed legs, terminating

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in the upturned toes of staunchly planted feet, merged practical purpose with expressive disposition. Riemerschmid’s Machine Chair compressed decoration into form and collapsed form into function – reducing the concept of ‘chair’ to its primal elements: material and purpose. The economically designed, functional, unornamented Machine Chair has served historians ever since as one of modern design’s points of departure. Missing from history, however, is what looks like an entirely antithetical approach to furnishing the domestic interior, which Riemerschmid presented alongside his Machine Furniture at the very same exhibition in 1906. This was a gentleman’s study – literally a ‘man’s room’, or Herrenzimmer (Figure 8.2). Riemerschmid’s Herrenzimmer seems to champion everything that the modern Dresden exhibition was attempting to reject: the emphasis on traditional woodwork appears to glorify handicraft, and its stylistic leanings towards nineteenth-century historicism are unmistakable. Its dark wood panelling and coffered ceiling suggest a nineteenth-century Renaissance-style dining room, and its chairs would have felt at home in a rustic German family living room, or Wohnstube. Like the stamp on an official decree, a portrait of Richard Wagner – celebrated nineteenthcentury composer and originator of the Gesamtkunstwerk or ‘total-artwork’

FIGURE 8.2

Richard Riemerschmid, Herrenzimmer installed at Third German Applied Arts Exhibition, Dresden, summer 1906.

Source: In Direktorium der Ausstellung, ed., Das Deutsche Kunstgewerbe 1906: Die Dritte Kunstgewerbe Ausstellung Dresden 1906 (Munich: Verlagsanstalt F. Bruckmann, 1906), 159.

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paradigm – hangs to the left of a large wooden cupboard, certifying the room’s historical reference. But a second picture, to Wagner’s right, digs more deeply into the young nation’s root system, and penetrates more pointedly into the collective German psyche: hanging against the wooden wall is a lithographic reproduction of Albrecht Dürer’s Self-Portrait from the year 1500. What was this 400-year-old image of a Renaissance artist doing in a modern interior designed by the inventor of Machine Furniture, and why was its manufacturer nicknamed after the early nineteenth-century Romantic poet and nature philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe? Naumann prophesied that Riemerschmid’s furniture, animated by the spirit or mind of the machine, would ‘rebuild the world of Albrecht Dürer, from the inside out’ (1906 I, 6). But he also argued that while printing Goethe’s inimitable poetry was an ‘atrocity’, Goethe himself had wished it to be widely published (Naumann 1906 II, 32). As early as 1797, Goethe had railed against the mechanized production of fashionable applied arts objects, touting instead the ‘eternal value’ of simple, everyday things that resulted from the craftsman’s sensitive engagement with his materials (150–151). Naumann’s argument (poetic in its own right) addressed Goethe’s reverence for the ‘hand’: it suggested that perhaps the ‘eternal value’ of his handwritten poetry – the indexical evidence of f leshly contact with the now ‘eternal’ poet himself – should never have been sullied by the soulless mechanism of the printing press. But, as Naumann and his contemporaries knew full well, Goethe’s poems had been printed – in their author’s own time and with his blessing; in fact, this was the only way that his genius could have reached the German Volk (people) for whom it was intended. It was, then, this productive paradox of mechanized yet ‘eternal’ applied art to which Naumann aspired. ‘Reproduction’, Naumann insisted, was ‘the keynote of industrial art’ (1906 II, 32). Dürer and Goethe – two icons of German cultural heritage, neither of whom, however, had themselves created everyday, designed objects – were appropriated by twentieth-century design reformers to frame modern design as the new German art and, further, to sanction the technological reproduction of that art, making it accessible – for the first time – to the German Volk. The workroom or ‘study’ was the quintessential expression of this impulse: a space where spiritual intellectualism and material pragmatism collaborated in the creation of ‘art’. For Karl Schmidt and Richard Riemerschmid, it was (ironically) the reproduction of modern furniture that preserved the heritage of German art – and German life – through the poetics of wood.

Dürer turns 400: the old-German Renaissance in the new age of the founders Riemerschmid was born in 1868 into an atmosphere of fierce nationalism and intense international competition, which came to a head in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. As a result of pan-German collaboration and victory in the war, the German states unified in 1871. Germany’s unification was marked at the outset

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by wild speculation. This was the Gründerzeit, or ‘age of the founders’, named for the so-called ‘Gründer’ – the speculators who founded the many new companies that sprouted up on the heels of unification. Underpinning the initial sense of euphoric optimism regarding German endeavour was the very real availability of capital facilitated by the French indemnity payment of five million francs, as well as the German annexation of Alsace and Lorraine, French territories known for their industrial resources. Economic expansion led to a building boom and an increased demand for everyday objects of all kinds, especially luxury goods to adorn the lavish new dwellings of the nouveau riche Gründer (Laufer and Ottomeyer 2008). Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, when Albrecht Dürer’s halftimbered house in Nuremberg was first opened to the public, the age in which he lived (around the turn of the sixteenth century) had suggested itself as the right epoch for culture-conscious Germans to replicate in their domestic interiors. During the 1850s and 60s, Germans welcomed the revival of unpretentious, middle-class altdeutsche (old-German) décor and decorative objects. These things opposed the fashionable elegance of their French competitors by celebrating that which seemed inherent, enduring, and uncontrived in German culture. Unification had fuelled the pre-existing desire for a national style, and financial instability stimulated it even further. As the French recovered from war and began to reclaim their position in the luxury market, the British continued to pose a threat to a German applied-arts industry now weakened by financial downturn. For many Germans, unification had signified not simply the triumph of German military power but also the ascendency of German cultural values at the expense of their French counterparts. Those with a stake in the fate of German culture began to scan the past more deeply than ever for a way to re-establish German identity in a modern, industrial world. Germany celebrated 1871 not just as the year of unification but also as the 400th anniversary of Dürer’s birth.2 Fascination with the artist’s era – the ‘German’ Renaissance – intensified after unification but also quickly relaxed into something much more f lexible and liveable than any slavish devotion to a historical style. The sixteenth century seemed to present a number of parallels with the 1870s Gründerzeit: Dürer’s time glowed in cultural retrospect as a golden age of art, culture, and comfort – not only for aristocratic arts patrons, but in the simpler homes of merchants as well. Although German cultural scholars acknowledged the beauty and elegance of Italian Renaissance art and décor, they believed the German Renaissance to have been more intimate – cosy, or gemütlich. This view of a German Renaissance characterized, in the words of the nineteenth-century architectural historian Wilhelm Lübke, at once by ‘original ability, even native genius, individual freedom’, and ‘a familiar warmth and liveliness’ elasticized the ‘German Renaissance’, expanding it to encompass already favoured ‘oldGerman’ medieval and vernacular attributes (Lübke 1873, 967–968). Before long, instead of referring merely to the ‘German Renaissance’, decorators employed the hybridized term ‘old-German Renaissance’ to describe a composite yet still thoroughly German style of décor.

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Dürer was not just the artistic hero of this German golden age, however; he was also a man – a man whose half-timbered house in Nuremberg one could visit and a man whose lifestyle one could emulate. Nuremberg itself had become a centre of old-Germanness: a medieval cityscape apparently untouched by time. In Riemerschmid’s birth year of 1868, Nuremberg’s old-German vernacular of noble craft guilds and colourful peasants became the subject of Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk opera, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. But this romantic idyll was founded in part on new research into the social history of the city’s indigenous inhabitants and those of the other German lands. Nuremberg’s Germanisches Nationalmuseum, founded in 1852, was the first museum to study and display the historical material culture of everyday German life. This stimulated a new ethnographic – and popular – interest in Germany’s cultural heritage through the lens of ‘ordinary’ things. The study or Schreibstube (writing room) in Dürer’s Nuremberg house became a particular attraction for the public in the 1870s and 80s. A late nineteenthcentury photograph of the staged study models old-German comfort starting with the wooden f loor and progressing through the wooden walls and ceiling; the bottle-glass windows; the built-in wooden benches; and the scant, modest furnishings, also of wood, as well as a bow-legged ‘Luther chair’ and a heavy, sparingly carved writing table. A pewter hand-washing basin mounted on the wall with a pewter kettle hanging above, along with a candle chandelier constructed from antlers and carved wood that dangled from the ceiling, marked the study as a space of both practical purpose and intellectual refinement – the place where the artist could wash his hands of the outside world and engage in interior pursuits. Munich journalist and publisher Georg Hirth (1841–1916), a major proponent of the old-German Renaissance style, wrote in his immensely popular manual on interior décor, The German Room of the Renaissance: Hints on the Domestic Cultivation of Art (1880), that Renaissance rooms like Dürer’s study, with its bottle-glass windows, pewter cauldron, and ubiquitous wood surfaces, were perfect models for the outfitting of late nineteenth-century interiors, because the Renaissance had been a time when the smallest everyday things were alive with an artistic spirit, and materials had been honoured ‘for their own sake’, just as Hirth believed they should be in his own ‘modern’ age (1880, 15). Hirth insisted that wood was the material of the German people, who were ‘at home in the forest’ and loved wood’s natural f laws: annual rings, knots, and grain (1880, 65). In its wood-panelled walls and sturdy wood furnishings, Riemerschmid’s early twentieth-century study echoed the wood-lined interior of Dürer’s Renaissance writing room some 400 years earlier. The 1906 Herrenzimmer’s built-in cabinetry and bookshelves grew out of f loor-to-ceiling panelling in larch pine; the large wooden Renaissance-style desk abutted one wooden wall, while a broad, heavy wooden cupboard stood against the adjacent wall where Dürer’s portrait hung (Figure 8.2). The Herrenzimmer materialized Hirth’s image of the wood-loving, forest-dwelling German: it was here, as Naumann observed, that the German forest seemed to have ‘moved into the German living room’ (Umbach 2009, 57).

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Dürer’s meticulous rendering of the pine ceiling panels in his 1514 etching St. Jerome in His Study bears an uncanny resemblance to the grained pine wall panels in the 1906 photograph of Riemerschmid’s modern study. Riemerschmid’s massive work desk, too, seems to derive its form from the desk at which the industrious saint is bent over his wooden lectern. Both Dürer and Riemerschmid revelled in the visible texture and characteristic roughness of wood as the material of the German interior. ‘Here’, wrote the Nuremberg art historian Paul Rée, ‘Riemerschmid shows his poetic sensibility, which has much in common with what is alive in our folk songs. Like an old folk song, it calls us home’ (1906, 298). The lively, sensuous texture of Riemerschmid’s study room was due not simply to the presence of its primary material, wood, but to the way that wood was worked. As in the case of Riemerschmid’s Machine Furniture, electric-powered tools were used in combination with handcraft to produce furniture that, despite its simple, regular contours, showcased the natural character of its material. An electric-powered surface planer ensured the f lat planes and neat corners of the chair seats and backs, while the stylized multiple-ball turnings on the chair legs were crafted with the aid of an electric-powered lathe (Menke 1990, 71). But the study’s robust, brawny cupboard, with four prominent bosses protruding unabashedly from double-panelled doors, modelled an eye-catching effect of modern machine-assisted carpentry, for which Riemerschmid received significant attention in the press surrounding the 1906 exhibition. Reviews described the cupboard’s pine surfaces – along with the room’s other furniture and woodpanelled walls – as having been ‘brushed’, so that the wood’s soft, smooth surface was scoured away and the denser, deeply textured woodgrain beneath stood out in raw relief. Though the result was similar to that of sandblasting or etching, the visual impact of this new ‘brushed’ wood was antique. To contemporary eyes, it looked like a ‘weathered signpost’ (Menke 1990, 67). The Leipzig Illustrated Newspaper noted how this modern technique exposed the expressive ‘soul’ of the wood, drawing from it ‘all of the charms and idiosyncrasies that Nature has given it and exploiting them to artistic effect. It coaxes decoration out of the material itself, while at the same time laying bare its internal structure’ (Menke 1990, 67). Another review of the Herrenzimmer highlighted Riemerschmid’s original approach to tackling a specific ‘technical problem’ – that of revealing the light, natural notes of the pine wood and the softness of its grain by ‘undressing’ it with machines (Haenel 1906, 505). Riemerschmid’s modern revival of the nineteenthcentury Renaissance-revival room had elicited an unmistakably modernist response: modern design had dispensed with ‘dressing up’ and was instead in the process of undressing – revealing itself in the stark, wordless poetry of wood.

From Goethe of words to ‘Goethe of Wood’ The inf luential Prussian architect and design reformer Hermann Muthesius hailed Riemerschmid’s interiors and furniture in 1904 as ‘simple and German’, which, for him, made them worthy of the title Volkskunst – folk art, or the art of

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the people (283). This new simple, egalitarian art was bound to the German tradition of wood. In fact, the only censure Riemerschmid received at Dresden was for his choice of a f lashy brass ceiling in the study: One critic noted that the brass ceiling ‘introduces an ostentatious tone into the hearty music of this otherwise healthy space’ (Haenel 1906, 505). Both Dürer’s own study, and his fantasy for Saint Jerome’s – each in its own way conveying a powerful, palpable woodiness – communicated a humbler sensibility of the industrious, practical, yet undeniably comfortable burgher. But if Dürer had laid the foundation for a simple, middleclass culture of wood, it was the more recent example of Goethe – and the house in Weimar where he lived with his family from 1782 to his death in 1832 – that provided the platform upon which design reformers constructed an image of modern German domesticity.3 Goethe’s age extended a model for cultured yet modest middle-class living. At the time of the 1906 Dresden exhibition, the architect Paul Mebes was preparing a lavishly illustrated two-volume publication entitled Around 1800: Architecture and Craft in the Last Century of Its Traditional Development. Mebes’s images of architecture and interiors dating from the Biedermeier era – the Central European cultural and stylistic period stretching from about 1815, in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, to the European Revolutions of 1848 – created an overall picture of an early nineteenth-century German domesticity characterized by rational, restrained, yet lovingly crafted and high-quality furnishings. Sparingly designed, solidly constructed, trustworthy tables, bookcases, sofas, and chairs displaying broad expanses of natural wood and wood veneer glorified the naturally ornamental qualities of indigenous, local woods. Identified not by artist, craftsperson, or owner but more generally by city or region, these domestic objects together portrayed and proposed a pan-German cultural legacy for the modern age. For Mebes, Goethe’s modest house in Weimar, packed with simple wooden furniture intended to provide rest to the body while stimulating the mind, was a ‘home’ made with ‘simple means and materials . . . that still resonate as a model for a comfortable, modern, middle-class house’ (1908 II, 17). ‘To teach people how to arrange their rooms decently’, Muthesius proposed in a landmark lecture of 1907, ‘is to educate their character, by doing away with the parvenu pretentiousness that gives rise to current fashions in décor’ (187).4 Muthesius saw the new twentieth century as a profoundly ‘middle-class cultural epoch’, meaning that it was around 1900, for the first time, that middle-class Germans (not their aristocratic betters) had become the arbiters of the national style – and taste. He warned, however, that this new role placed a heavy cultural burden on the shoulders of the Bildungsbürger, or educated middle class: How could they avoid the snares of modern fashion? How could they steer clear of ‘parvenu pretentiousness’ – the gaudiness of the nouveau riche? And if they succeeded in skirting these pitfalls, where might they look for a model for their motives and choices as they went about their task of outfitting a modern Germany? In place of cheaply made imitations of aristocratic furnishings – or fashionable Art Nouveau-style kitsch – Muthesius proffered Goethe’s wood-rich apartments

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as tools for the cultivation of the German middle class he referred to as ‘the new spiritual and intellectual aristocracy’. Every room in Goethe’s house in Weimar, he argued, from the most public to the most intimate, demonstrated ‘the utmost decency and restraint’; Goethe’s furniture concretized for Muthesius ‘the unvarnished bourgeois spirit’ (1907, 186). Muthesius’s invocation of Goethe as a kind of taste mascot in 1907 was neither serendipitous nor new. In April of 1904 (the same month and year that he published a glowing retrospective article on Richard Riemerschmid’s early career), Muthesius published an essay entitled, ‘Culture and Art: Observations on German Applied Art’, in which he quoted the father of modern German culture, Goethe himself: ‘being surrounded by comfortable, tasteful furniture elevates my thinking and puts me in a calm and cozy state of mind . . . opulent rooms and elegant housewares are for people who have no thoughts – and don’t want any’ (1904 II, 74). Goethe’s curiously materialized intellectualism – or intellectual materialism, as the case may have been – remained a strong inf luence on German design reforms throughout the pre-war years. In 1910, Austrian design theorist Joseph August Lux invoked Goethe’s domestic environment in the former’s City Dwelling: How to Furnish [Your Apartment] Practically, Beautifully, and Economically. Curiously, Lux deploys Goethe’s apartments to suggest a mode of modern dwelling that would seem almost antithetical to the ‘calm and cozy’ sensibility Goethe himself enjoyed. Lux writes that ‘grand buildings and rooms are for princes and rich men. If you live in them, you feel soothed; you are at peace and you want nothing further. My nature is entirely against this. In apartments like this I become inactive and lazy’. Instead, Lux insists, he prefers apartments that are ‘a bit disorderly, a bit gypsy-like’, where he can give his nature full freedom to be active, where he can ‘create something original’ ( Lux and Warnatsch 1910, 41). One would think, Lux muses, that such a ‘great mind’ as Goethe’s would require a ‘great house’. But one would be wrong. For Lux, Goethe’s study in Weimar – with its sparse yet functional Biedermeier furniture, never ostentatious but cheerfully, quietly celebrating the aesthetic character of its natural wood surfaces – was an example of such an intellectually bracing room; it was not an ‘artistic’ studio, but a simple, relaxed yet still uncluttered space where a man could concentrate, where a man could work ( Lux and Warnatsch 1910, 41). ‘The revolution began with chairs!’ Lux exclaims in City Dwelling, referring not to any political uprising, historical or contemporary, but to the design reforms of the German Art-Industry Movement. ‘It began to be understood’, he chronicles satirically, that the chair should actually conform to the construction of and aid the comfort of the human body. This was also understood in Goethe’s time (and probably in Moses’) but seems to have been forgotten for the past 70 years or so. (Lux and Warnatsch 1910, 54)

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A poorly designed chair might be just as distracting from the inner life of the mind as a pretentious, cluttered study. But around 1900, the ‘Goethe of Wood’, Karl Schmidt, came to Lux’s rescue, beginning to produce tasteful, restrained, and comfortable furniture to nurture the body and free the mind. Schmidt’s Dresden Workshops embodied the Biedermeier virtues of Goethe’s day in their modest, reliable furnishings that offered as their sole yet abundant ornament the natural aesthetic ‘charms’ of wood. Schmidt seemed to dovetail all that was finest in German intellectual culture with the newest developments in modern manufacture, allaying any scepticism towards the reproduction of ‘wood poetry’ with his conviction that its reproducibility was the key to elevating the character of the German Volk: all those who could afford to purchase Goethe’s books could now also afford to buy rationalized furniture that would (ostensibly) have met with his approval. ‘Soon’, wrote Friedrich Naumann in his essay in the 1906 Dresden exhibition catalogue, ‘the machine itself will become the educator of taste’ (1906 II, 35).

A forest in the living room Naumann’s excitement about the machine’s collaboration in the outfitting of the cultured, artistic interior was inspired by new technologies in furniture making and their implications for German culture as a whole. He wrote that while small household objects had been mass-produced for over a century, it was mass-produced furniture – the ‘industrialization of carpentry’ – that was already in 1906 changing the face of design. ‘The highest art is often simply the most pleasing combination of mechanized production processes’, he enthused, ‘today, the designer can play with prefabricated elements in a room like keys on a piano’ (Naumann 1906 II, 35). Riemerschmid’s Machine Furniture, designed for Schmidt’s Dresden Workshops and fabricated by its technicians, realized Naumann’s desire that the development of mechanized manufacture be guided by an artist who understood the machine’s ‘mind’. Machine Furniture was the first industrial furnishing program in Germany, and it was intended to demonstrate the potential of the machine in the fabrication of high-quality, artistic furniture. It accomplished two previously unachievable goals: it brought lofty ‘art’ furniture down to earth and into the working-class living room, and it proved that the machine could be more than the enabler of cheap kitsch – it, like the press that printed Goethe’s poetry, was a tool of cultural masseducation. The Machine Furniture’s standardized parts were produced in a serial process fuelled by the most modern power tools, including an electric-powered band saw for cutting profiles and an electric-powered surface planer to achieve a consistently uniform thickness in all components of a particular piece of furniture. Although band saws and planers had been in use in larger furniture manufactories since the 1870s, the application of electric power was new in the early twentieth century. New, too, was the notion that a relatively small-scale manufacturer could use such advanced machinery in the production of ‘art furniture’.5

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The Dresden Workshops boasted their own large pavilion at the 1906 exhibition in their home town. There, visitors encountered 14 displays of interiors featuring the machine furniture arranged in domestic ensembles, as well as a fully functioning workshop, where they witnessed the new electric-powered woodworking machines in action, as the component parts were fabricated, assembled, and painted in rapid succession. Disassembly procedures – important both to industrial commerce and to increasingly itinerant modern lifestyles – were also demonstrated: a sturdily built cupboard could be dismantled and packed for shipping in five minutes. However, the machine furniture also reflected the interdependent relationship of human skill and mechanized technology that defined the state of the applied arts at Dresden in 1906: While it relied upon mechanical processes for cutting and profiling, each chair, table, cupboard, and bookcase had to be assembled and finished by hand. Riemerschmid designed three different lines of Machine Furniture to accommodate varied income levels, from factory worker to industrialist. The most affordable suites were made from spruce stained in cheerful ‘old-German’ Renaissance colours of red, blue, and green. Riemerschmid was singled out during this period for his identifiably ‘German’ palette. Muthesius referred to Riemerschmid’s ‘strong but never brash’ colours as ‘hearty home-cooking’, in contrast to the ‘tender, broken tones of the modern aesthetes’ – code for French art nouveau designers like Georges de Feure (Muthesius 1904 I, 256). While colourful wood and rustic iron fittings suggested a rural vernacular, standardized manufacturing techniques ensured that all surfaces were smooth and regular, making them practical for work and easy to clean. The next line-up, aimed at the solidly middleclass household, employed more sophisticated materials and finishes: natural pine, grey lacquer, mahogany, and brass. At the top tier, for the Bildungsbürgertum or ‘cultured’ middle class, stains and lacquers were absent. Its cultivated suites – including a gentleman’s study – were executed in oak with iron hardware and mahogany with bronze. While channelling the mind of the machine, Riemerschmid revealed the souls of his materials: the crisp frugality of pine, the mellow gravity of oak, and the dark exoticism of mahogany – the poetics of wood. In his modern Machine Furniture study, the cultivated modern man might contemplate the intelligence of the machine in the charms of nature. The grained wood surface, with all of its natural idiosyncrasies, personalized the standardized Machine Furniture by uncovering the personality of each piece of wood. The Bavarian Paul Rée recognized in his countryman Riemerschmid’s wooden furniture the same ‘complexion’ and personality that he found in Dürer’s artworks. ‘We sense that that which was old has renewed itself here’, Rée muses, ‘and is now forever young’ (1906, 298). Ref lecting on Riemerschmid’s more luxurious study, with its Renaissance details and carefully chosen lithographs, the German Carpenter’s Journal invoked the image of Dürer as final proof against the mechanical, the prosaic: One has become used to thinking of Riemerschmid as a modern, middleclass architect, whose work has no place in the Crown of Art, where the

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wondrous dreams of the ‘Thousand and One Nights’ live; but in this study he delivers sufficient proof that his art transcends sheer material beauty and technique. Despite all fitness for purpose, comfort, and coziness, the room’s ultimate effect is one of richness and ease. The suggestively hung likenesses of Richard Wagner and Dürer confirm above all that we find ourselves here in an Arcadia of music, painting, and science. ( Deutsche Tischlerzeitung 1912, 404, quoted in Hartzell 2014) The Renaissance image was a symbol of cultural rebirth, ripe for appropriation by twentieth-century German designers, who wanted to re-form the world of their forefathers. Its irresistible appeal to these adamantly modernist thinkers demonstrates the richness, complexity, and memory of early twentieth-century modernism. Contrary to both popular and scholarly assumptions about modernism’s ruthless, amnesiac contemporaneity, these designers – these wood-poets – show that in 1906, modern consciousness was still broad enough to accommodate nostalgia while devoting its youthful energies to the present. This self-aware yet historically minded conception of one’s own time offers a model for a more inclusive approach to the history of modernism and, conversely, a more expansive vision of the concept of ‘heritage’ itself. Dürer peered out from the wood-panelled wall, as if overseeing the reconstruction of his world, ‘from the inside out’, as Naumann expressed it. For Naumann, this rebuilding was not the perfunctory resuscitation of dead, historical forms but an organic, internal rekindling of the creative impulse that had sparked transcendence in German artists throughout time. What was this ‘inside’ but the inner life of the creative mind, emblematized in Germany at the turn of the twentieth century by the figures of Dürer and Goethe? Riemerschmid believed that to honour this inner life was to lose oneself: Whether by immersing oneself in nature, or in the words of Goethe – in this loss of self, one approached the intuitive, creative state of the natural artist (Riemerschmid 1908, 34–35). And the product of this creative mediation – the work of art – was in Dürer’s words, ‘a new creature, which one creates in his heart, in the form of a thing’ (Hirth 1880, 30). By 1906, modern reproductive technology had committed the altruistic atrocity of disseminating Goethe’s poems and hanging colour lithographs of Dürer’s self-portrait in exhibition halls and living rooms across Germany. But it was in the hearts of Dresden’s modern-day poets, who communed with the mind of the machine, that ‘old creatures’ truly became new ones – in the form of wood.

Notes 1 In her monograph on designer Richard Riemerschmid, art historian Maria Wüllenkemper (2009) notes that Schmidt was dubbed “Holz-Goethe” by the Munich architect Theodor Heuss in 1907. 2 Dürer’s house in Nuremberg became a full-fledged museum in 1871, and the city’s Germanisches Nationalmuseum mounted a major exhibition on the artist’s life and work.

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3 For an illustrated overview of decorative arts in the Biedermeier period, see Ottomeyer, Schröder, and Winters (2006). 4 Muthesius’s ‘The Significance of Applied Art: Introductory Remarks for Lectures on Modern Applied Arts to the Berlin Trade Academy’ was subsequently published in the Munich applied arts journal Dekorative Kunst in February of 1907. It was these lectures, in conjunction with the modern, industrially manufactured objects that had been displayed at the Dresden exhibition in 1906, that prompted the founding in October 1907 of the German Werkbund: the organization comprising artists, designers, architects, cultural theorists, merchants, museum professionals, and many others who believed that the redesign of the built environment was the key to modernizing German culture and strengthening the German economy. For more on the Werkbund in English, see Campbell (1978) and Schwartz (1996). 5 I am indebted here to Edward S. Cooke, Jr. for sharing with me his expertise in the history of woodworking and furniture production techniques in conjunction with my research on the Dresdner Werkstätten’s production process.

References Campbell, Joan. 1978. The German Werkbund: The Politics of Reform in the Applied Arts. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Deutsche Tischlerzeitung. 1912. 51: 404. Quoted in Hartzell, Freyja. 2014. “A Renovated Renaissance: Richard Riemerschmid’s Modern Interiors for the Thieme House in Munich.” Interiors: Design/Architecture/Culture 5, no. 1: 5–35 Direktorium der Ausstellung, ed. 1906. Das Deutsche Kunstgewerbe 1906: Die Dritte Kunstgewerbe Ausstellung Dresden 1906. Munich: Verlagsanstalt F. Bruckmann. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. 1797. “Art and Handicraft.” In The Theory of Decorative Art: An Anthology of European & American Writings, 1750–1940, edited by Isabelle Frank with translations by David Britt, 150–151. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. Haenel, Erich. 1906. “Die Dritte Deutsche Kunstgewerbe-Ausstellung Dresden 1906.” Dekorative Kunst 9, nos. 10–12 ( July): 393–511. Hirth, Georg. 1880. Das deutsche Zimmer der Renaissance: Anregungen zu Häuslicher Kunstpflege. Munich: G. Hirths Verlag. Laufer, Ulrike, and Hans Ottomeyer, eds. 2008. Gründerzeit 1848–1871. Industrie & Lebensträume zwischen Vormärz und Kaiserreich. Dresden: Sandstein Verlag. Lübke, Wilhelm. 1873. Geschichte der deutschen Renaissance, vol. 5 of Geschichte der Baukunst, originally edited by F. Krüger. Stuttgart: Ebner & Seubert. Lux, Joseph August, and Max Warnatsch. 1910. Die Stadtwohnung. Wie Man sich Praktisch, Schön und Preiswert Einrichtet und Gut Erhält. Berlin: Verlag für Angewandte Kunst. Mebes, Paul. 1908. Um 1800: Architektur und Handwerk im Letzten Jahrhundert ihrer Traditionellen Entwicklung (2 vols.). Munich: F. Bruckmann A. G. Menke, Beate. 1990. Die Riemerschmid-Innenausstattung des Hauses Thieme Georgenstraße 7. Munich: Tuduv Verlag. Muthesius, Hermann. 1904 I. “Die Kunst Richard Riemerschmids.” Dekorative Kunst 7, no. 7 (April): 249–283. Muthesius, Hermann. 1904 II. “Kultur und Kunst: Betrachtungen über das deutsche Kunstgewerbe.” Deutsche Monatsschrift für das gesamte Leben der Gegenwart 3, no. 7 (April): 74–87. Muthesius, Hermann. 1907. “Die Bedeutung des Kunstgewerbes. Eröffnungsrede zu den Vorlesungen über modernes Kunstgewerbe an der Handelhochschule in Berlin.” Dekorative Kunst 10, no. 5 (February): 177–192.

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Naumann, Friedrich. 1906 I. “Der Geist im Hausgestühl.” In Preisbuch Dresdner Hausgerät. Dresden: Dresdner Werkstätten für Handwerkskunst. Naumann, Friedrich. 1906 II. “Kunst und Industrie.” In Das Deutsche Kunstgewerbe 1906: Die Dritte Deutsche Kunstgewerbe Ausstellung Dresden 1906, 32–35. Munich: Verlagsanstalt F. Bruckmann. Ottomeyer, Hans, Klaus Albrecht Schröder, and Laurie Winters, eds. 2006. Biedermeier: The Invention of Simplicity. Milwaukee: The Milwaukee Art Museum and Hatje Cantz. Rée, Paul Johannes. 1906. “Richard Riemerschmid.” Dekorative Kunst 9, no. 7 (April): 265–303. Riemerschmid, Richard. 1908. Diskussion der Verhandlung des Deutschen Werkbundes zu München am 11. und 12. Juli 1908. Leipzig: R. Voigtländer Verlag. Schwartz, Frederic J. 1996. The Werkbund: Design Theory & Mass Culture before the First World War. London: Yale University Press. Umbach, Maiken. 2009. German Cities and Bourgeois Modernism, 1890–1924. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wüllenkemper, Maria. 2009. Richard Riemerschmid (1868–1957): ‘Nicht die Kunst schafft den Stil, das Leben schafft ihn.’ Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner.

9 ROYAL COPENHAGEN VS. PORSGRUND Negotiating ceramic design heritage in the age of copyright Peder Valle

Introduction Contemporary design abounds with references to design heritage. Though seldom recognised, the impact of heritage on the shaping of modern designs and their legacies, as well as the shaping of brand identities, suggests a strong awareness of the delicate but powerful economies of legitimacy that underlie the heritage rhetoric. Mediating the past through allusion or reference has proved a potent and progressive way of promoting new products. Still, this process has largely escaped academic analysis in design history and heritage studies alike. In this case study, I recount the story of two contemporary blue-and-white tableware designs whose conscious play with ceramic tradition and heritage turned out to be not only a key to commercial success but also a source of great concern, ultimately triggering a lawsuit. The claim that was filed on behalf of the renowned Danish porcelain manufacturer Royal Copenhagen in December 2014 sought to protect from infringement the copyright of their best-selling design Blue Fluted Mega (Figure 9.1, left).1 It addressed a recent attempt by the Norwegian porcelain manufacturer Porsgrunds Porselænsfabrik to introduce their Maxistrå tableware (Figure 9.1, right) to the Danish market. Since the launch of Maxistrå on the Norwegian home market ten years earlier, in 2004, Royal Copenhagen had approached Porsgrund on several occasions, demanding that the production and marketing of Maxistrå be stopped and threatening legal steps. For ten years, however, no action was taken. The dormant conf lict eventually reignited when one of Porsgrund’s salesmen made a contract with a shop in Denmark to stock Maxistrå tableware. Despite Porsgrund’s rapid retreat and denunciation of any further plans to sell Maxistrå in Denmark, it was too late: Within months, the threat of a lawsuit was made real. Having caught Porsgrund trespassing on their home market, Royal Copenhagen was now free to DOI: 10.4324/9781003096146-13

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FIGURE 9.1

Left. Plate, Blue Fluted Mega, Royal Copenhagen, 2000. Right. Plate, Maxistrå, Porsgrunds Porselænsfabrik, 2004.

Source: Image courtesy of the producers.

subject Maxistrå to Danish copyright law. As a result, in June 2016, Porsgrund was called before the Copenhagen Maritime and Commercial Court. Using the lawsuit as my lens, I will explore the identity of the designs and uncover their roots in the centuries-old tradition of blue-and-white ceramics. Looking to the court proceedings, I will also argue that modern copyright is ill suited to address issues of appropriation and heritage in design. First, however, I will take a closer look at the two designs in question.

Something borrowed The success of Royal Copenhagen’s Blue Fluted Mega was unanticipated when it was launched in 2000 to coincide with the company’s 225-year anniversary. The design was based on the exam project of the young Danish designer Karen Kjældgård-Larsen (b. 1974), graduating from the Danish School of Design. She proposed a new tableware design that consisted of blown-up cut-outs from Royal Copenhagen’s iconic Blue Fluted pattern, famously the company’s oldest pattern and a personal favourite of Kjældgård-Larsen’s. The enlarged cut-outs were carefully positioned over the face of the plate, giving the new design a distinct look of mechanical projection. The pattern details appear randomly cropped, free of any obligation to the actual shape of the plate, whilst carefully retaining the integral logic of the original Blue Fluted pattern. The overall look is one of playfulness and surprise, leaving the spectator with the impression that the age-old pattern has broken free from the confines of its frame and is continuing to grow and to f lower beyond the scope of the dish. Kjældgård-Larsen has recalled how she was encouraged to present her ideas to Royal Copenhagen’s chief designer (Suhr 2010). Her proposal for a renewed

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take on the company’s trademark product came at a critical time for the age-old brand. To start with, a series of six different plates was launched as an experiment. The pattern quickly caught on with the public, and Blue Fluted Mega was expanded to a complete tableware range, each new part neatly following Kjældgård-Larsen’s original idea. The ultimate mark of approval came when the Mega series was featured on the official gift list of Danish Crown Prince Frederik’s wedding to Mary Donaldson in 2004. Literally putting the ‘Royal’ in ‘Copenhagen’, this neatly underscored the company’s role of royal purveyor and also alluded to the close ties that once existed between the Danish monarchy and the manufactory in its early years. By borrowing from Danish tableware heritage, Karen Kjældgård-Larsen had created something that was neither old nor completely new. On the contrary, Blue Fluted Mega capitalized on both, claiming the potency of the new as well as the authority of the old. A modern classic, so it seemed, had been born (Figure 9.2).

FIGURE 9.2

Advertising photo showing Blue Fluted Mega combined with Blue Fluted.

Source: Image courtesy of Royal Copenhagen.

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Meanwhile, in the autumn of 2004, Porsgrund launched their Maxistrå design, originally part of a twin series with its sibling pattern, MiniStrå. Like its Danish counterpart, Maxistrå borrowed from company tradition, picking isolated elements from the hand-painted Straw pattern (Norwegian: Stråmønster), a classic to Porsgrund’s repertoire since the company’s beginnings in the 1880s. Designing Maxistrå, Porsgrund designers Trond Hansen (b. 1959) and Ragnhild Wik (b. 1969) started off with the hand-painted strawf lower motif, an integral part of the original pattern composition. Next, the strawf lower was enlarged and placed in random-looking ways on the surface, always cropped by the edge of the plate. This way, Porsgrund’s design may look simpler or more clean-cut than Royal Copenhagen’s, isolating a single motif and making up new compositions using this motif as its only component. Blue Fluted Mega, on the other hand, isolates views rather than singular elements, zooming in on the original pattern composition without actually changing it. Despite the different approach, the designs unite in their playful appropriation of the old patterns and in the use of their characteristic features as aesthetic raw material. Returning to the court case, it is striking to note how the appropriation of pattern, whilst being fundamental to both designs, also becomes part of the problem. The prosecution maintained, firmly, that the Blue Fluted Mega decoration was a completely original design and a reinterpretation of Royal Copenhagen’s old Blue Fluted pattern. However, they also argued that Porsgrund’s Maxistrå was infringing on the copyrights of Blue Fluted Mega due to the substantial visual likeness between the two designs. In other words, while Blue Fluted Mega was claimed to be ‘original’ in its re-caption of an old pattern, Maxistrå was not, because it merely sought to imitate the look of Blue Fluted Mega. In their first letter to Porsgrund in 2004, Royal Copenhagen had even accused them of using their (i.e. Royal Copenhagen’s) design, something that is arguably untrue. Porsgrund, on the other hand, never objected to the originality of the Blue Fluted Mega decoration. On the contrary, they claimed that Maxistrå was also an original design, for the exact same reasons: In their view, Maxistrå was a new creation built on the re-use (and re-arrangement) of motifs from an old in-house pattern, the Straw pattern. The idea of enlarging and re-using elements from one’s own history, they claimed, is by no way exclusive to Royal Copenhagen. This last argument is neatly illustrated by the presence of similar products from other companies: In 2004, the German Meissen factory, renowned for being Europe’s first maker of true porcelain, launched a design called Zwiebelmuster Style (English: Onion Pattern Style), in which the trademark Blue Onion pattern reappears as isolated motifs, enlarged, distorted, and arranged in new ways. Similarly, in 2005, Wedgwood introduced a twin tableware series titled After Willow and After Landscape, designed by ceramic artist Robert Dawson. Echoing his studio work on the traditional blue Willow pattern, to which I will return later, Dawson’s designs recalled the British heritage for transfer-printed ceramics. Around the same time, the Swedish company Rörstrand launched an enlarged version of their trademark pattern Ostindia from 1932, aptly naming it

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Ostindia+. Though it can rightfully be argued that Blue Fluted Mega predates all the examples mentioned here, it nevertheless shows that Maxistrå was by no means an isolated case. On the contrary, it seems like the launch of Blue Fluted Mega may have inspired other companies to reinterpret their heritage, like Porsgrund did. How, then, do we separate inspiration from infringement? In court, Royal Copenhagen’s main argument centred on pointing out the great visual likeness between the two designs, maintaining that the overall similarity indicated a clear intention to imitate Blue Fluted Mega. Using products and packaging, the similarities were meticulously pointed out by comparing Maxistrå with the Danish design. Of particular interest to the prosecution was the similar use and placement of the motifs, whether cropped, tilted, or distorted. To their defence, Porsgrund pointed out that their approach was wholly different, and besides, that the Blue Fluted Mega design contained more elements, like f lowers, branches and palmettes, whereas the Maxistrå design was made up of only a single motif. In other words, the perceived visual likeness depended greatly on what products you chose to compare and how you compared them. Interestingly, the defence also pointed to the patterns’ common roots in ceramic history, reminding the court that the esteemed ‘original’ patterns of both companies were in fact related a priori: they are, essentially, the same 18th-century pattern. This piece of historical information reveals the crux of the problem: Is the observed similarity a result of intentional imitation? Or is it simply a consequence of borrowing from a common source in ceramic history? To answer these questions, we must explore the historical background a bit further.

Something blue Understanding the complex heritage of these patterns means to uncover their roots in the broader history of Western ceramics. The pattern that we know as ‘Blue Fluted’ or ‘Straw pattern’ originated in the early days of the Meissen factory as a faithful attempt at imitating the highly acclaimed blue-and-white Chinese porcelain. Known to wealthy Europeans through trade, blue-and-white Chinese porcelain can trace its manufacture back to the early 14th century, when Chinese potters began making export wares for the Persian market using imported Persian cobalt (Carswell 2000, 11–18). Whilst neatly underscoring the entrepreneurial origins of blue-and-white porcelain, this also hints at the innate transnationalism that permeates its history. Over the course of 400 years, Chinese blue-and-white porcelain became the most widely traded ware in world history, its popularity spanning continents. As Anne Gerritsen puts it, Chinese blue-andwhites ‘were and remain a design with global appeal’ (Gerritsen 2011, 31). When trying to explain the unparalleled popularity of the blue-and-white, we must take into account how porcelain shaped perceptions of China and vice versa. It is no coincidence that the name given to porcelain in Europe was ‘china (ware)’. Gerritsen notes: ‘Whether the designs contained Dutch tulips,

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inscriptions in Arabic, or Chinese symbols of long life, the overall “brand” of blue-and-white still remained clearly visible’ (Gerritsen 2011, 31). Capitalizing on the innate exoticism, blue-and-white porcelain quickly became the object of vigorous imitation. From Portuguese azulejos2 to Dutch Delftware and French faïence, the distinct duochromatic of the blue-and-white spawned a wealth of ceramic innovation. Therefore, it is no wonder that the blue-and-white style is present in all early attempts at making European porcelain, such as the short-lived Medici factory in Florence (1575–1587), the French manufactories at Rouen (1673–1696) and Saint-Cloud (1693–1766), and finally the aforementioned Meissen factory (1710) in Saxony. By the 1720s, Meissen was successfully producing blue-and-white porcelain (Röntgen 1984, 200). Among the creations conceived at Meissen were two blue-and-white patterns, mistakenly named ‘Zwiebelmuster’ and ‘Strohblumenmuster’ after the German misreading of the Chinese plant motifs as ‘onions’ and ‘strawf lowers’, respectively. Created shortly before 1740, the patterns quickly spread to other European factories, greatly increasing their popularity (Röntgen 1984, 233, 255). Picking up on the trend, the Royal Danish Porcelain Factory (later Royal Copenhagen) famously chose the ‘Strohblumenmuster’ as their ‘No. 1’ pattern when starting in Copenhagen in 1775, later naming it ‘Blue Fluted’ (Danish: Musselmalet). Originally conveying the heritage from Meissen, it was gradually reinterpreted as Danish and eventually revamped into three distinct varieties by Arnold Krog in the 1880s.3 Meanwhile, to the north, Norway had separated from Denmark in 1814, ending 400 years of Danish rule. Starting in 1887, the newly founded Porsgrunds Porselænsfabrik (Porsgrund Porcelain Factory) added both the ‘Zwiebelmuster’ and the ‘Strohblumenmuster’ to their repertoire, openly advertising them as ‘Meissen and Copenhagen decorations’ in their 1888 catalogue. To this day, the ‘Strohblumenmuster’ or ‘Straw pattern’ has been in continuous production and is still being hand-painted at the Porsgrund factory in Norway. The dissemination of blue-and-white ceramics that followed in the wake of industrialism contributed greatly to the genre’s popularity. Fuelled by japonism, exoticism, and historicism, the Western cult for blue-and-white grew with its aesthetic ‘rediscovery’ by artists and intellectuals in the 19th century. Prominent among these were the members of the London-based Aesthetic Movement, whose affinity for ‘blue china’ was lovingly ridiculed by George Du Maurier in his satirical ‘chinamania’ cartoons in the 1870s and 1880s (Gere 2010, 51–53, 63). Around the same time, American critic Clarence Cook wrote in The House Beautiful that ‘[blue china] can never go out of fashion entirely, for its pleasingness is something substantial, not a mere skin-deep good look; but good color, good form’ (1995, 243). In more recent years, the popular cult of blue-and-white has inspired a range of creative and artistic work that takes the blue-and-white tradition as a point of reference, using ceramics and patterns as ‘objets trouvés’, or readymades – as raw material for artistic appropriation. In the 1960s, American ceramicist Howard Kottler (1930–1989) pioneered the use of blue-and-white patterns in ceramic art when he superimposed the image of Leonardo da Vinci’s

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Last Supper onto a plate decorated with the traditional Willow pattern (Bull 2015, 41). Following in Kottler’s wake, artists like Paul Scott (b. 1953) and Robert Dawson (b. 1953) have also made use of the Willow pattern, carefully manipulating its familiar imagery in their ceramic art. In 1996, Dawson made a series of plates in which the Willow pattern was projected as enlarged cut-outs, often cropped, tilted, or distorted, anticipating Karen Kjældgård-Larsen’s design for Blue Fluted Mega some years later. Herself an exchange student at the Glasgow School of Art in the late 1990s, Kjældgård-Larsen may well have been aware of Dawson’s work (Suhr 2010).4 Similar to Blue Fluted Mega and Maxistrå, Dawson isolates meaningful elements and detached details from an iconic pattern that resonates with the cultural hallmarks of the blue-and-white tradition. Whether enlarged, erased, tilted, or in other ways set apart from the expected, the real magic of these patterns lies in the stencil-like character of their image. Due to their strong presence in a shared visual culture, any small detail or cut-out of the original pattern is sufficient to recall the complete image. Commenting on Dawson’s work, Jorunn Veiteberg observes that ‘[e]ven if the only thing visible is a willow tree or a pair of birds . . . we nonetheless read it as the willow pattern. We see a lot more than the image actually shows, because our memory fills in the blanks’ (Veiteberg 2011, 84). It is tempting to point out that our ability to ‘fill in the blanks’ is no doubt conditioned by the persistent imagery of the blue-and-white tradition. When faced with tilted pagodas or distorted strawf lowers, heritage helps us to complete the picture.

Something old By far the most striking aspect of Blue Fluted Mega and Maxistrå is their overt dependence on what we could call a ‘heritage aesthetic’: the ability of a new design to recall and connect in meaningful ways with perceived historical antecedents. Feasting on pedigree, these designs add to the myth surrounding their alleged ancestry by reaffirming the very heritage that facilitated them. David Lowenthal famously maintains that ‘[t]he past validates the present’, but he also hints at that past being a modern construction, stating that ‘[t]he past we depend on to make sense of the present is, however, mostly recent’ (Lowenthal 1985, 40). As for Blue Fluted Mega, not only does the design evoke the overall feel of the old Blue Fluted pattern, it also sources its motifs directly from it. The motifs are handpainted using the same colour and technique and on the same shape. Through advertising, Blue Fluted Mega is portrayed as the direct descendant and natural heir to Royal Copenhagen’s heritage, embodying the next generation and hence a ‘natural’ development of the old pattern, as is shown in this text from Royal Copenhagen’s website: Blue Fluted Mega is both comfortingly familiar and surprisingly refreshing. In this unusual reinterpretation of the blue f luted pattern, selected

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details have been enlarged but are still painted by hand, preserving the original and unique vivid blue effect. . . . The Blue Fluted Mega pattern was created by the young design student Karen Kjældgård-Larsen in 2000, signalled [sic] the beginning of a new adventure. The famous hand-painted pattern has become a household name again, expressing both its historical authenticity and creative, innovative thinking. (Royal Copenhagen n.d.) Bordering on what Eric Hobsbawm famously termed ‘the invention of tradition’, Royal Copenhagen’s seductive storytelling constitutes an appealing mix of fact and poetry, expertly tailored to fit the purpose: Using one heritage product to create another. Perhaps surprisingly, Porsgrund offers a less sanguine description of their Maxistrå pattern: ‘Maxistrå is a modernized version of Porsgrund’s oldest pattern Bogstad Strå from 1887. Maxistrå consists of enlarged elements from our own hand-painted Straw pattern’ (Porsgrunds Porselænsfabrik n.d.). The message nevertheless remains the same: ‘We have invested our ceramic design heritage in the making of a new product that echoes and embodies our tradition’. The effect is twofold: Underpinning the continued relevance of the old patterns whilst at the same time providing the newcomers with a priceless pedigree. Either way, heritage is the card being played. As this case demonstrates, however, it matters greatly whose heritage you appropriate. It is noteworthy that both companies insist on linking their new, enlarged design to their own heritage and their own old pattern to escape accusations of plagiarism. As my historical survey has shown, the travelling nature of the blue-and-white tradition leaves little room for claiming ownership, whether of patterns or motifs, and determining origins and creators can often be a futile task. Still, the Danish court was convinced that Royal Copenhagen’s Blue Fluted pattern represented a true Danish ‘original’, regardless of its place in a common ceramic history. To a Norwegian audience, the situation would probably be different, as suggested by the market surveys that both parties presented in court.5 The historical fact that Norway spent four centuries under Danish rule also looms large in the background, arguably adding a colonial dimension to the question of authorship. Would it at all have been possible to convince the Danish court that Maxistrå was indeed a reinterpretation of a Norwegian pattern? It seems that the carefully curated heritage stories of both companies leave little room anyone other than the protagonists. Recently, Royal Copenhagen has added further to the cult of its own history with the launch of the two series Blomst (2018) and Hav (2019), each a reinterpretation of an old in-house pattern.6 Like a strange play on identity politics, it would seem that the logic of modern branding has put heritage at the mercy of ownership. Ref lecting further on branding, it is interesting to note how the companies have consciously constructed not only their respective brands but also the legacies that surround their products. From just being an old blue-and-white pattern, Porsgrund’s Straw pattern was notably revitalized in the 1960s when it was applied

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to a reintroduced 1890s dinnerware shape and thoroughly ‘rethought’ as the company’s heritage line par excellence (Valle 2012, 29–32).7 Similarly, following Blue Fluted Mega’s successful launch in 2000, Royal Copenhagen went through a ‘blue f luted’ metamorphosis with their new visual identity, putting the distinctive blue branches, f lowers, and palmettes on everything from packaging and wrapping paper to carrier bags, catalogues, and website graphics. Almost like a new logo, the motifs were utilized for their strong association with the company heritage, hereby reinforcing the identity of the brand in ways already established with the consumer. The signature product thus became the signature of the company itself, each reinforcing the other in a circular play on consumer psychology. Though successfully promoting the brand and its heritage, this strategy is nevertheless notable for privileging ownership and signifying authorship whilst consciously downplaying the blue-and-white patterns’ non-indigenous history of continuous appropriation and reinvention. With the advent of Blue Fluted Mega and Maxistrå, the story takes on meta meanings. Echoing the mother patterns, these new designs live off the heritage cult that facilitates them whilst simultaneously adding to its upkeep. Like a play on Platonic idealism, the raison d’être of both designs resides in their relation to a ‘higher idea’, in this case the respective ‘originals’ or, more correctly, the originals in their heritage incarnations. In turn, providing the new designs with a heritage alibi also serves to reaffirm the status of the old patterns, suggesting that questions of authorship in this case are inherently problematic. It is tempting to describe Blue Fluted Mega and Maxistrå as depictions of pattern heritage rather than just patterns in their own right. Though clearly at odds with modern concepts of autonomy and originality, the idea that a design ‘hinges’ on another is not alien to ceramic history. Indeed, it is a defining trait of the blue-and-white tradition, as well as the key to understanding its cultural capital. Rethinking blue is nothing new.

Something new? And yet, something is new: The rethinking of ceramic design heritage that we see in Blue Fluted Mega and Maxistrå goes beyond mere veneration of tradition. It is a comment on modern perceptions of the blue-and-white as a potent cultural icon, instantly recognizable yet inherently f lexible in its adaptability to different contexts. Interacting with tradition, it strikes a decidedly postmodern note, earning its meaning through the quotation of past images and modern myths. Pointing to the inf lux of appropriation and upcycling practices in recent years, Alison Britton notes that ‘[a]llusion, quotation and reference have appeared across all art forms in the postmodern era and reward a knowing audience with a frisson of recognition’ (Britton 2011, 33). Illustrating Britton’s point is the relaunch of iconic compact cars such as the Volkswagen New Beetle (1998) as well as Philippe Starck’s ambiguous plastic chair Louis Ghost (2002). Rather than ‘remakes’, these designs are better identified as quotations, being invested with new meaning through the

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re-inscription of their domesticated originals. Commenting on the compact cars, Kjetil Fallan suggests that they aspire to be ‘trend icons, not people’s cars’, having ‘little or nothing in common with the originals, except for stylistic resemblances’ (Fallan 2010, 94).8 Ref lecting on the postmodern obsession with the past, Fredric Jameson observes that ‘we seem condemned to seek the historical past through our own pop images and stereotypes about that past, which itself remains forever out of reach’ ( Jameson 1988, 20). Whether denoting compact cars or blue-andwhite tableware patterns, Jameson’s ‘pop images and stereotypes’ recall how the transformation of heritage into new products, packaging, and brand identities can easily obscure our access to the historical original. When it comes to reading an original, it seems that our view is often quite new. Hillel Schwartz has eloquently observed that ‘[o]nly in a culture of the copy  .  .  . do we assign such motive force to the Original’ (2014, 115). Tracing the roots of modern copyright, Stina Teilmann-Lock points to 19th-century debates on authenticity in art, literature, and philosophy that gave rise to the modern dichotomy of the ‘copy’ and the ‘original’. She notes that this new polarity ‘provided a conceptual framework within which copyright law could establish a distinction between an “authentic” original and an “inauthentic” copy’ (Teilmann-Lock 2016, 119–121). This relationship, as Teilmann-Lock reminds us, ‘is mutually defined. . . . Originals define copies and copies define originals’ (2016, 7). The inclusion of design into this paradigm has no doubt increased professional recognition by providing the designer with the necessary tools to protect his work. On the other hand, it has imposed on design the inf luential dialectics of the copy as well as the cult of the ‘original’, thus creating powerful economies of authenticity onto which the logos of modern copyright law has been built. Exploring the history of Danish copyright, Teilmann-Lock has previously shown how the protection of design in Denmark evolved from that of the fine arts, furthering established concepts of authorship and originality (2012, 46–47). As it happens, the Blue Fluted pattern has a history with the Danish courts, having twice before been the object of copyright feuds, in 1907 and 1926. TeilmannLock explains how Royal Copenhagen’s loss in 1907 prompted important changes to the law that in 1926 led to the successful protection of Arnold Krog’s designs (2012, 36–38, 40–41). The verdict by the Danish Supreme Court was notable for stressing the importance of Krog’s original contribution, hereby signalling that the pattern itself was found to be outside the scope of copyright protection (Danish Supreme Court 1926). The Blue Fluted pattern was thus declared a common cultural property (Grandjean 1950, 28; Dorenfeldt 2000, 51). Similarly, also in 1926, the German Supreme Court ruled that the name ‘Meissen Zwiebelmuster’ (Meissen Onion pattern) was a generic name belonging to the public domain; hence, it could not be protected by copyright (Röntgen 1984, 240). Both cases are noteworthy for acknowledging the old patterns’ status and heritage but also for heralding a new era for copyright, closing the door on past practices. Returning to the case, then, it may come as a surprise to learn that parts of the Blue Fluted pattern have in fact recently been copyrighted. In 2012, Royal Copenhagen succeeded in registering three versions of the distinctive straw

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f lower as EU trademarks. In court, Porsgrund contested the validity of these trademarks, rightfully arguing that the f lowers are integral to the old pattern, itself predating modern copyright by centuries. Strikingly, the court ruled in Royal Copenhagen’s favour, supporting the trademarks’ validity by pointing to the company’s extensive use of the motifs in their products. The court further remarked that the f lower motifs in question were strongly identified with the Royal Copenhagen brand, pointing to the finds of the Danish market surveys. In my view, this line of reasoning is particularly weak because it cuts both ways: The same arguments could easily be used in support of the defence. However, by far the most problematic aspect of the court’s decision is still the question of how elements from an age-old pattern, fundamentally international in origin and predating copyright, can be annexed by a private company and registered in the 21st century as EU trademarks. Remembering that this very pattern was once identified as a common cultural heritage, with the Danish Supreme Court suggesting it should be exempt from modern copyright, only makes the current ruling of Copenhagen’s Maritime and Commercial Court all the more astonishing.

The silver sixpence in her shoe Ultimately, the court ruled in Royal Copenhagen’s favour, stating that the marketing of Porsgrund’s Maxistrå in Denmark was an infringement on the rights of Blue Fluted Mega. Discontented, Porsgrund was left with a fine, the court costs, and a ban preventing the future marketing of Maxistrå products on the Danish market. The ruling is problematic in several ways. First, it must be described as conservative in the way that it privileges the indigenous actor: Royal Copenhagen. It seems likely from the arguments presented in court that the strong position of Royal Copenhagen on the home market and internationally, as well as its position in Danish cultural history, has greatly inf luenced the court’s views on the question of ownership of the historical patterns and their heritage. The character of Denmark and Norway’s colonial past only serves to further complicate the matter to Porsgrund’s disadvantage. Second, though the ruling may in fact be correct from the point of view of Danish copyright law, it is still a powerful reminder that the modern conceptions of copyright fail to acknowledge postmodern practices of quotation and appropriation, as remarked upon by Carys J. Craig in her defence of a relational theory of copyright: Craig argues that the present situation [i]s a copyright regime which propertises and over-protects the works of some authors while dismissing others as copiers and trespassers; which encourages some kinds of creativity while condemning others as unlawful appropriation; which values so-called original contributions but silences responses in the cultural conversation. (Craig 2011, 26) Remembering that neither the strawflower motifs nor the pattern from which they are sourced, nor the idea of isolating and enlarging views or elements, are unique

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to Royal Copenhagen, it is striking to note how the Danish court, aided by Danish copyright law, unequivocally supported the Danish prosecutor’s claims. Keeping in mind that legislation is generally national, it seems legitimate to ask whether a ruling by any other country’s court would give the same, let alone the opposite, result. Applying the design historian’s and curator’s viewpoint, my ambition in this chapter has been to expose the underlying economies of legitimacy and authenticity that affect and define how we think about heritage and design. Though essentially a copyright quarrel, the case of Royal Copenhagen vs. Porsgrund clearly illustrates the inadequacy of the modern dichotomy of the copy and the original whilst at the same time testifying to the impact of heritage on the shaping of product legacies and brand identities. Embodying the meaningful quotation, Maxistrå and Blue Fluted Mega raise important questions about the nature of design heritage as well as the relevance of existing copyright regimes to postmodern design practices in general and to appropriations in particular. Alison Britton asks: ‘Could we be looking at the advance of cliché and nostalgia?’ and she adds, rhetorically: ‘[I]s that a problem? In the digital age, when every image and fact is so accessibly replicable, is regurgitation of the past more, or less, likely?’ (Britton 2011, 34). As I believe this case has shown, the authority of the past is still a force to be reckoned with. However, when studying design heritage, we need to keep in mind that our perception of the past is in itself always a thing of the present.

Notes 1 The law report is available online, in Danish (Danish Maritime and Commercial Court 2016). I owe it to my readers to explain that I was called by the defense as a witness in the case. 2 Tin-glazed ceramic tiles with blue decoration, traditionally made in Spain or Portugal. 3 The three varieties are called Plain, Half Lace, and Full Lace and are still being made today (2021). 4 From private communication with Robert Dawson, it is the author’s view that KjældgårdLarsen based her idea on Dawson’s work. 5 Royal Copenhagen presented a survey executed in Denmark; Porsgrund presented a survey from Norway. Both surveys confirmed that the majority of respondents wrongly identified the opponent’s products, which only serves to confirm the strong position of each company in their home markets. Porsgrund’s survey showed a less clear-cut picture, presumably owing to the companies’ long-time coexistence on the Norwegian market. 6 Blomst is a reinterpretation of the old ‘Blue Flower’ pattern from 1779, whereas Hav denotes the popular Seagull pattern that was a customer favourite for many years. Interestingly, the Seagull pattern was originally made by the Bing & Grøndahl company that merged with Royal Copenhagen in 1987. No mention of this is made in relation to the advertising of Hav. 7 In 1965, the Straw pattern was applied to a neo-rococo dinnerware shape from the 1890s that was rebranded and named after a well-known country house outside Oslo, ‘Bogstad’. This allowed for a new reading of the pattern as a ‘heritage pattern’. 8 Fallan also mentions the New Mini by BMW (2001) and the Fiat Nuova 500 (2007).

References Britton, Alison. 2011. “Old Stuff, New Life, Still Life: The Lure of Junk.” In Thing Tang Trash: Upcycling in Contemporary Ceramics, edited by Jorunn Veiteberg, 28–37. Bergen: Kunsthøgskolen i Bergen.

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Bull, Knut A. 2015. “New Paths into Old Landscapes: The Blue-and-White Tradition and Contemporary Ceramics.” In Horizon: Transferware and Contemporary Ceramics, edited by Paul Scott and Knut A. Bull, 34–49. Stuttgart: Arnoldsche. Carswell, John. 2000. Blue and White: Chinese Porcelain around the World. Chicago: Art Media Resources. Cook, Clarence. 1995. The House Beautiful. First published 1877. New York: Dover. Craig, Carys J. 2011. Copyright, Communication and Culture: Towards a Relational Theory of Copyright Law. Cheltenham and Northampton: Edward Elgar Publishing. Dorenfeldt, Lauritz G. 2000. Kongelig Dansk 2. Blåmalt porselen fra Den kongelige Porcelainsfabrik 1820–1923. Oslo: Huitfeldt. Fallan, Kjetil. 2010. Design History: Understanding Theory and Method. Oxford: Berg. Gere, Charlotte. 2010. Artistic Circles: Design & Decoration in the Aesthetic Movement. London: V&A. Gerritsen, Anne. 2011. “Global Design in Jingdezhen: Local Production and Global Connections.” In Global Design History, edited by Glenn Adamson, Giorgio Riello, and Sarah Teasley, 25–33. London: Routledge. Grandjean, Bredo L. 1950. Det musselmalede Stel. København: Berlingske. Jameson, Fredric. 1988. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.” In Postmodernism and Its Discontents: Theories, Practices, edited by Ann E. Kaplan, 13–29. London and New York: Verso. Lowenthal, David. 1985. The Past Is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Porsgrunds Porselænsfabrik. n.d. “Maxistrå – Tallerken f lat 28 cm.” www.porsgrund. com/tallerken-f lat-28-cm-a42877tf l27600. Röntgen, Robert E. 1984. The Book of Meissen. Exton: Schiffer. Royal Copenhagen. n.d. “Blue Fluted Mega: Plate 22 cm.” www.royalcopenhagen.com/ Series/Plate-22-cm/p/1017365. Schwartz, Hillel. 2014. The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles. New York: Zone Books. Suhr, Annette. 2010. “Mega-mussel succes ved et tilfælde.” Berlingske Tidende, March 15. www.berlingske.dk/bolig/mega-mussel-succes-ved-et-tilfaelde. Teilmann-Lock, Stina. 2012. “‘What’s Worth Copying Is Worth Protecting’: Applied Art and the Evolution of Danish Copyright Law.” In Scandinavian Design: Alternative Histories, edited by Kjetil Fallan, 35–47. London and New York: Berg. Teilmann-Lock, Stina. 2016. The Object of Copyright: A Conceptual History of Originals and Copies in Literature, Art and Design. London and New York: Routledge. Danish Supreme Court. 1926. U.1926.251H. Ugeskrift for Retsvæsen, 251–253. København. Danish Maritime and Commercial Court. 2016. Law report V-92–14. https://domstol. fe1.tangora.com/media/-300011/files/V0092001.pdf. Valle, Peder. 2012. “Blått på hvitt. Fleksible fortolkninger av blå-hvit dekortradisjon i servisedesign for Porsgrunds Porselænsfabrik.” Master thesis, Oslo: University of Oslo. Veiteberg, Jorunn. 2011. “Artist Presentation: Robert Dawson.” In Thing Tang Trash: Upcycling in Contemporary Ceramics, edited by Jorunn Veiteberg, 84. Bergen: Kunsthøgskolen i Bergen.

10 LIFESTYLE BRANDING, NOSTALGIA AND HONG KONG’S CONTESTED HERITAGE Daniel J. Huppatz

Introduction Hong Kong’s overnight transition from a colonial British port-city to a Chinese Special Economic Region (SAR) on June 30, 1997, had significant ramifications for both its design and heritage industries. Beginning in the late 1980s, various Hong Kong cultural producers – from filmmakers to fashion designers – produced and reproduced distinctively local images, symbols and forms in a nostalgic mode (Abbas 1997; Huppatz 2009). Designers borrowed from Cantonese, Shanghainese and European sources, as well as vernacular culture, in a nostalgic blend that sought to assert the city’s unique culture before it (potentially) disappeared. By analyzing the rise and subsequent fate of two prominent Hong Kong brands, fashion house Shanghai Tang and lifestyle brand G.O.D., this chapter examines how designers sought to differentiate their products utilizing nostalgia. While 1997 was a momentous year for Hong Kong, two earlier phenomena also had a lasting impact on the city’s design culture: China’s Open Door Policy and the Sino-British Joint Declaration. In 1978, Chinese Premier Deng Xiaoping’s Open Door Policy began China’s gradual change from a state-planned, locally focused economy to a global, market-driven one by designating new Special Economic Zones, such as Shenzhen, immediately adjacent to Hong Kong. Hong Kong’s sizable industrial manufacturing base, built up in the decades following World War II, shrank dramatically during the 1980s and 1990s as Hong Kong-based industries moved their production facilities across the border to take advantage of cheaper labour costs. As industrial production decreased, Hong Kong increasingly specialized in financial, logistic and other advanced services, including design. The other phenomenon was a political event, the 1984 signing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration, which set a path for the city’s transition from British colonial to DOI: 10.4324/9781003096146-14

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Chinese administration. The countdown to this historic change produced considerable anxiety as well as renewed interest in local identity, culture and history. Although always a predominantly Chinese population composed mainly of refugees and migrants, colonial Hong Kong had developed a unique culture comprising southern Chinese, Shanghainese, European, American and Japanese influences. However, with the handover in 1997, Hong Kong became a Special Administrative Region of China: paradoxically within yet outside mainland China. Not surprisingly, heritage became a hot topic in Hong Kong in both the lead-up to, and aftermath of, the 1997 transition. Destruction of the city’s varied heritage buildings was a contentious issue due to not only changing political conditions but also pressure from real estate development, a situation famously characterized by Ackbar Abbas as Hong Kong’s ‘culture of disappearance’ (1997). While scholars of Hong Kong heritage have focused on the conservation and preservation of the built environment (Lu 2009) or governance and policy (Chan and Lee 2017), they have not addressed the role of designed artefacts. The type of products discussed here do not typically figure in heritage debates, and such ephemeral culture rarely features in museum or art gallery collections. The changing political and economic climate and the end of British colonial rule brought not only political anxiety but apprehension about the (potential) loss of Hong Kong’s culture. Designers such as Alan Chan (Huppatz 2009) and filmmakers such as Wong Kar-Wai and Stanley Kwan (Chan 2000) began utilizing nostalgic references to the disappearance of Hong Kong’s history and collective memories as early as the mid-1980s. While potentially easy to dismiss as superficial kitsch, in the Hong Kong context, nostalgia was also linked to the politics of local identity and heritage, which is, as we will see, never far from politics. Distinct from both the former colonial and Chinese mainland cultural products, the designed objects produced by brands such as Shanghai Tang and G.O.D. had the potential to manifest the city’s collective imagination, and nostalgia’s role in this was subtle and f lexible.

Nostalgia A combination of the Greek words nostos (to return home) and algia (a painful condition), the term ‘nostalgia’ was coined by Swiss physician Johannes Hofer in the late seventeenth century to describe extreme homesickness among Swiss mercenaries fighting in distant lands (Hofer 1934). Doctors considered it a medical condition, the symptoms of which included despondency, melancholia, mood swings, weeping, anorexia and suicide attempts. Nostalgia remained a medical or psychological disease until the twentieth century, after which the term lost this usage and its core referent, ‘homesickness’, but retained some sense of ‘home-like’ sentiments as it was assimilated into Western popular culture after World War II. Here, nostalgia’s appeals to continuity of (personal or collective) identity proved successful in the face of the discontinuity inherent in modernization’s program of rapid change.

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In his seminal work on this modern manifestation of nostalgia, Fred Davis wrote: The nagging sense of the absence of a future undercuts what is perhaps the chief unspoken aim of nostalgia’s exercise, that is, to assuage apprehension of the future by retrieving the worth of the past. (1979, 71) This ‘apprehension of the future’ was precisely the situation of late-colonial Hong Kong, with only the certainty being significant change after 30 June 1997. The uncertain future related not only to politics but all aspects of social and cultural life with Hong Kong’s imminent transition from a British colonial to a Chinese city. It is in this context that Hong Kong’s nostalgia fever of the 1980s and 1990s arose – cultural products from film and literature to advertising and design – that tapped into anxiety and apprehension about the future. Yet this appeal to nostalgia could be seen as a global phenomenon. Cultural theorists such as Fredric Jameson, Arjun Appadurai and Roland Robertson argued that nostalgia was common to late twentieth-century, postmodern culture ( Jameson 1991; Robertson 1992; Appadurai 1996). A symptom of progress, rapid change and uncertainty, during the 1980s and 1990s, nostalgia in popular culture was common across Europe (Duyvendak 2011) and the United States (Cross 2015), particularly in cultural products that tapped into childhood memories and the pleasant emotions that accompanied them. Nostalgic imagery also formed part of a global tendency in late twentieth-century design (Woodham 1997, 205–219), particularly in the 1980s and 1990s, when it was also referred to as ‘retro’ design (Guffey 2006). With regard to the Hong Kong situation at this time, Ackbar Abbas read Hong Kong’s nostalgia fever in terms of preservation, a ‘memory without pain’ in which history becomes a kind of surface decoration (1997; see also Lowenthal 1985). For Abbas, ‘It is surely not accidental that so many of the examples of preservation end up implicitly giving us history as decoration, as nostalgia’ (1997, 83). In this understanding of nostalgic representation – as with the previous cultural theorists – the past disappears in a series of pop images, and the facts of history disappear in the generalized nostalgic spirit. According to this narrative, Hong Kongers, impotent in the face of imminent change and apprehensive of the future, turned to nostalgic images of a safe, stable past. Adding a further dimension to Hong Kong nostalgia, Dai Jinhua noted the parallel fashion for nostalgia in 1990s mainland China: ‘Nostalgic atmosphere’, she argued, ‘in embellishing the vacuum of memory and in creating personal identities within the span of historical imagination, simultaneously accomplishes a representation of consumerism, as well as a consumerism of representation’ (Dai 2000, 211). Given the decline of revolutionary communism in the 1980s and 1990s and the shift to a market-driven economy, the question of Chinese collective representation was also up for grabs. But in mainland China, Dai

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argues, nostalgia was an expression of consumer desire, that is, an individual rather than collective expression. All of these understandings are at odds with Davis’s account of nostalgia in which ‘there is some common experiential base to which the word points’ (Davis 1979, 7). For Davis, nostalgia’s material is not merely a general past but ‘the past which is the object of nostalgia must in some fashion be a personally experienced past’ (1979, 8). Furthermore, the generalized, postmodern approaches to nostalgia tend to assume the audience as passive rather than actively making cultural meaning. This is particularly worth noting in regard to the following examples, which, as cultural products generated by commercial design firms, depend on a receptive, active audience. In an alternative – and more positive – understanding of nostalgia, Pickering and Keightley propose the following: we should perhaps reconfigure it in terms of a distinction between the desire to return to an earlier state or idealized past, and the desire not to return but to recognize aspects of the past as the basis for renewal and satisfaction in the future. (2006, 921) Beyond simply the negative connotations of a desire to return to the past or sentimental representations of an idealized past (negative dismissals of nostalgia as surface style, kitsch or pastiche), this understanding of how nostalgia operates offers a foundation for ‘renewal’. The relationship between mediated representations of the past and collective identities of the present is a subtle one that we will return to subsequently. In heritage studies, as with the postmodern readings of nostalgia, scholars have tended to rely on a hierarchical ranking of history, memory and nostalgia ( Lowenthal 1989). The distinctions made in criticism of the ‘heritage industry’ between nostalgia and history reference an implicit scale in which history is portrayed as authentic, factual and true, while at the other end of the scale, nostalgia is portrayed as inauthentic, emotional and sentimental. This is something I aim to avoid in my analysis of nostalgic design products, focusing instead on the idea of nostalgic design utilizing the ‘past as the basis for renewal and satisfaction in the future’ (Pickering and Keightley 2006, 921). Hong Kong’s situation both just before, and just after, 1997 was unique, and the examples of Shanghai Tang and G.O.D. discussed in the following reveal the subtleties of nostalgia as utilized by designers. Their cultural products not only were designed for local consumption in their exploitation of particular local histories but also provided exotic Asian imagery for a Western tourist and export market. Thus they provide an insight into the nostalgic formation of Hong Kong identity at that time and its connections to a global imaginary. Significantly, both brands continued to expand after the 1997 handover, suggesting that, while the local context of Hong Kong’s nostalgia fever was a starting point, their global

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appeal means that a careful consideration of Hong Kong in an international context also is crucial. Far from a clichéd ‘East meets West’ figuration so often applied to Hong Kong culture, the city’s cultural mix was always already hybrid. For Rey Chow (1998), Hong Kong’s cultural identity was always hybrid and impure, as was its design culture. Turner (1994) argues, for example, that the 1960s was a turning point in the city’s design culture due to the threat posed by the Chinese Cultural Revolution which resulted in the colonial government reshaping Hong Kong into an image of a modern consumer city. The modern popular culture that developed in this period was a mix of British culture, Shanghainese cosmopolitan style and the American lifestyles brought about by trade, as well as anti-communist propaganda, communism (itself a westernizing form of modernization) and the inf luence of nationalist images of modernity from Taiwan. Importantly, the designers who rose to prominence in the 1980s and 90s built upon this existing cosmopolitan foundation and the numerous heritage narratives within it.

Shanghai Tang: branding Chineseness David Tang, the founder of Shanghai Tang, was a f lamboyant cultural entrepreneur. Educated in Britain from the age of 13, Tang studied philosophy and law at the University of London. A contemporary ‘dandy’ famous for his upper-class English accent, love of Cuban cigars and wide-reaching social network, Tang founded cultural ventures aimed at a luxury market. These included not only the fashion brand Shanghai Tang but also the exclusive China Club and the Hong Kong art gallery Hanart TZ, well known for its promotion of mainland Chinese avant-garde art. A year before he died in 2017, Tang published a ‘sartorial advice’ book, a witty compendium spanning contemporary fashion and etiquette that summed up both his attitude to life and his various cultural projects (Tang 2016). His first major project, the China Club, opened in 1991 on the top f loor of Hong Kong’s old Bank of China building. The club, designed in style evocative of Shanghai in the 1920s and 1930s, included a dining room, bar, smoking room (particularly for cigars) and library of rare books. The walls were filled with a variety of Chinese cultural references – from kitsch Maoist posters and art to contemporary avant-garde mainland art, including Wang Guangyi and Yu Youhan’s playful appropriation of Maoist propaganda. Tang’s mix of the luxurious decadence of Shanghai-modern and the now-def lated seriousness of Maoist propaganda appealed to Hong Kong’s political and business elite. Tang’s other significant cultural venture, the upmarket department store Shanghai Tang, opened its f lagship Pedder Street store in Hong Kong in 1994. Like the China Club, the store sought to recreate the glamorous decadence of prewar Shanghai. The store featured not only men’s, women’s and children’s clothes but shoes, accessories and home furnishings, including cushions, photo frames, towels and teapots. Designers created readymade clothes on variations of traditional Chinese clothing but in vibrant colours and in a variety of luxury fabrics

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such as silk, leather, suede and cashmere, finished with fine traditional details such as Chinese ‘frog’ clasps or knot buttons. Tang noted in an interview that he was ‘shocked China wasn’t marketed to an upscale audience before’ (Skov 2003, 230). In its first decade, Shanghai Tang also offered an ‘Imperial Tailors’ service, which revived ‘the diminishing art of Chinese haute couture’ via a team of ‘traditional Shanghaiese tailors’, some of whom f led Shanghai during the 1960s Cultural Revolution to settle in Hong Kong (Shanghai Tang 2003). The tailoring service offered unique hand-cut and handsewn, made-to-measure fashion in luxurious materials. The emphasis on Shanghai underlined not only nostalgia for the glamorous decadence of the 1930s but also highlighted contemporary Hong Kong’s role as heir to that cosmopolitan port-city. Like Shanghai, Hong Kong was subject to colonial political rule yet liberal trade regulations; it was multilingual, dynamic and global in its outlook. After the brand’s success in Hong Kong, Tang embarked on an expansion campaign, beginning in 1997 with a store on New York’s fashionable Madison Avenue, followed by stores in Singapore, Shanghai, Beijing, London, Bangkok, Honolulu and Paris. With Japanese brands such as Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto and Comme des Garçons, Shanghai Tang hoped to ride global fashion’s ‘Asian wave’ of the 1990s. And initially, at least, this seemed to be the case, as the New York store’s opening generated celebrity interest and fashion magazines soon featured icons and Hollywood celebrities wearing Shanghai Tang. Shanghai Tang’s design aesthetic was all-embracing, extending from the store’s interior to the distinctive staff uniforms, packaging and stationery. The f lagship Pedder Street store included not only recreated Shanghai art deco furniture but also details such as reproductions of two stained-glass panels from Shanghai’s famous luxury hotel of the 1930s, the Cathay Hotel. Even the clothing label, ‘Shanghai Tang: Made by Chinese’, and the logo followed the same aesthetic. The logo featured a pink line drawing of the Pedder Street building on a lime-green background. Stylized Chinese characters (‘Shanghai Tang’) in yellow with pink outlines encircled the building’s top, while below it stood the English words ‘Shanghai Tang’ in lime green on a purple background surrounded by five yellow stars (Figure 10.1). The logo appeared on bags, stationery, clothing labels and brochures in variations of the signature Shanghai Tang colour scheme of purple, bright yellow, lime-green and pink. Although design references from prewar Shanghai dominated, Shanghai Tang also recycled designs from imperial and Maoist China in what Lise Skov describes as ‘a pastiche-like appreciation of the Chinese past’ (Skov, 230). Their ‘Tang Jacket’, for example, was derived from a combination of a late Qing Manchu official jacket and the Ma Hwa hip-length jacket. Featuring low collars and central Chinese ‘frog’ clasps in a range of patterned fabrics, including silk, cotton and linen, both male and female versions were available in various colours, including lime green, orange, fuchsia and red. In Tang’s nostalgic Chinese fashion grab bag, Mandarin collars lost their associations with conservative Confucianism, Mao suits lost their link to the Cultural

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FIGURE 10.1

Shanghai Tang storefront, Pedder Building, Pedder Street, Hong Kong, 18 November 2006.

Source: Photograph by Shing Wong CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php? title=File:HKPedderBuildingShanghaiTangShop.jpg&oldid=477151118

Revolution’s authoritarian discipline and ‘coolie’ pants lost their link to indentured labour. The Maoist and Communist party references also include military jackets, a liberal sprinkling of red stars on promotional material and accessories such as the ‘Waving Mao’ and ‘Waving Deng’ watches (see also Barmé 1996 on

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the Mao revival). These garments, effaced of their political and economic relevance, could be seen as stylized Chinese exoticism for an elite global market. In this way, Shanghai Tang was a Chinese version of Ralph Lauren’s Polo brand that similarly recycled nostalgic styles and iconic clothing from American mythical history (Huppatz 2010). The global appeal of Shanghai Tang’s design language may be explained in terms of its debt to a particularly Western cinematic vision of China. Their ‘Kung Fu’ pants and shirts, for example, evoke Bruce Lee films, while the tightfitting cheongsams are familiar to Westerners from The World of Suzie Wong (1960) or Wong Kar-Wai’s nostalgic cheongsam homage, In the Mood for Love (2000). Shanghai Tang’s peasant clothing references evoke the costume dramas of fifth-generation historical films by directors such as Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige. Not coincidently, Shanghai Tang’s promotional ‘face’ during the late 1990s was actress Gong Li, best known for her lead roles in many of Zhang Yimou’s nostalgic films, including Red Sorghum (1987), Raise the Red Lantern (1992) and Shanghai Triad (1995). As a local phenomenon, Shanghai Tang’s statement of intent reveals the store’s position within Hong Kong’s stereotypical role as the conduit between East and West: Shanghai Tang set out to create the first global Chinese lifestyle brand by revitalizing Chinese designs – interweaving traditional Chinese culture with the dynamism of the twenty-first century. Tang revealed his strategy in an interview: I decided not to call it ‘made by China’, because at the time the reputation of China was growing, but it was still generally negative more than positive. From a clothing point of view, it represented cheapness rather than luxury. So I played with the words and changed it to ‘made by Chinese’. (Nicholson 2010) And following this logic, mainland Chinese workers manufactured the bulk of Shanghai Tang’s ready-to-wear line, while a handful of tailors custom-crafted clothes in Hong Kong. But despite the made by Chinese rhetoric, David Tang sold the brand in 2001 to the Swiss-based luxury brands conglomerate Richemont. The new CEO, Raphael le Masne de Chermont, and creative director, Joanne Ooi, were not Hong Kong locals. Neither were the other head designers, who were trained primarily at London’s Central St. Martin’s College of Art and Design. Ooi noted that while Tang began in Hong Kong and marketed primarily to expats and tourists, when she took over in 2001, she aimed to change the direction: At that point, 80 per cent of the brand’s apparel was traditional Chinese silhouettes, Tang jackets and qipaos, offered in acid bright colours. It was evident that we needed to increase the wearability and relevance of the clothing so anyone could wear it. (Ooi 2019)

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Her focus, particularly on the women’s range, broadened the customer base to include local Chinese and Westerners, as well as some mainland Chinese customers. But the brand’s emphasis remained reviving styles of the Chinese past. Ooi wrote: After I joined Shanghai Tang, my design team started creating seasonal collections based on some of the most significant themes in 5,000 years of Chinese history and culture. This included allusions to the Silk Road, Peking opera, Mongolian nomads and the history of Chinese writing, all captured in advertising campaigns. (Ooi 2019) With the shift to a general ‘Chinese-ness’, Shanghai Tang expanded, then contracted, over the next decade or so. New York real estate proved too expensive, and Americans did not take to the brand as hoped, so the f lagship store closed not long after opening. Stores in Europe also closed, and in 2011, the company lost the Pedder Street f lagship store. Then, in 2017, the Richemont Group sold Shanghai Tang to Italian entrepreneur Alessandro Bastagli, who sold it a year later to Shanghai-based private equity firm Lunar Capital. In a curious full circle, David Tang’s daughter, Victoria Tang-Owen, was appointed its new creative director but resigned after less than a year in the role. At the time of writing (May 2021), Shanghai Tang has only five remaining retail stores: Hong Kong, Shanghai, Singapore, Beijing and Yangon. In the lead-up to the 1997 handover, Shanghai Tang’s designer fashion helped construct a particular Hong Kong identity. While their use of pastiche and appropriation can be seen in the light of global nostalgia, it is important to note that not only were their references specifically local but also that their techniques also were key design strategies in 1920s and 1930s Shanghai design and in 1960s Hong Kong. In the anxious years preceding the mainland’s reclamation of the city, Hong Kong was identified with the particular historical narratives of South China’s port cities and their connection to global trade and capitalism.

G.O.D. Another Hong Kong brand that began in the mid-1990s aimed more specifically at a local audience. Architects Douglas Young and Benjamin Lau launched G.O.D. (‘Goods of Desire’, but also pronounced gee ho dee in Cantonese, meaning ‘to live better’) in 1996 as a brand focused on locally designed homeware, furniture and clothing. Inspired by Hong Kong’s vernacular culture, the founders began by appropriating images from old newspapers and advertisements, photographs of local architecture and the use of bilingual (CantoneseEnglish) puns. Their designers printed this nostalgic imagery on t-shirts and fabrics, as well as designed furniture and homewares for Hong Kong’s cramped interior spaces.

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CEO and spokesperson for G.O.D. Douglas Young related in an interview the effect his personal journey had on conceiving the brand. He was born in Hong Kong in 1965, went to boarding school in England, then attended architectural school at Sheffield University (Young 2015). On his return to the city in 1991, Young stated that he was inspired by the local culture, the densely populated apartment blocks and quirky vernacular objects such as tin letterboxes and makeshift balconies, and it was this everyday material culture that provided the stimulus for G.O.D.’s visual language. Design scholar Hazel Clark described the brand, with its focus on products that reference local places, material culture and practices, as ‘a creative translation of the vernacular; of the tangible and intangible, humble and everyday in Hong Kong’ (2009, 24). Central to the G.O.D. project was to recover and preserve unique aspects of Hong Kong identity. Perhaps the most prominent comprised photos of quirky tin letterboxes, iconic red-white-blue striped carrier bags, neon signs, old newspaper print, advertising signs and bamboo scaffolding. The brand’s repeated Yaumatei image is a typical example. The print comprises a closecropped photograph of a façade from one of Hong Kong’s famously crowded neighbourhoods. This otherwise unremarkable apartment block features metal extensions and tiny balconies extended from each window, filled with potted plants or drying laundry in an idiosyncratic collage of colour and creativity. In contrast, the more generic contemporary apartment blocks are not only newer but uniform and neutral and lack the idiosyncratic additions of these 1950s blocks in Yaumatei. Another popular G.O.D. image is a collage of Nathan Road’s famous neon signs, once an iconic aspect of Hong Kong’s cityscape, now rapidly disappearing. G.O.D.’s design team printed images such as the Yamatei facades and neon signs on fabric for cushion covers, tea towels, bags and t-shirts, as well as on paper for file folders, notebooks and bookmarks and on homewares such as mugs, plates and bathmats. While it is easy to dismiss such imagery as ‘history without pain’ or sentimental kitsch, another reading is in terms of a reinvigoration of a collective community: What something like G.O.D. represents is not a re-possession or recolonization but a reimagined community within Hong Kong, constructing the city as part of the larger, political entity known as the nation-state. (Vukovich 2012, 181) G.O.D.’s line of cultural products also features clothing, much of it inspired by Chinese traditional fashion. Yet their cheongsams, jackets with Chinese collars and shirts with knot buttons are designed in a more subdued range of colours and materials than Shanghai Tang’s. Their fashion offerings are also significantly cheaper and, as suggested by a denim knot-button hoodie, for example, aimed at a younger demographic. Here, a significant difference between Shanghai Tang and G.O.D. is that the latter’s customer base is predominantly

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local. In 2019, Young stated that the brand’s customers were 60% local and 40% overseas (including mainland China). When asked to compare the two brands, Young stated: We have different clienteles; our price points are completely different. I like what they do. I think they’re more mature and maybe so are their customers, I’m targeting locals because, especially with my fun T-Shirts, you’ve got to be local – at least you’ve got to be bilingual – to understand the slogans. (2017) G.O.D. has also profited from high-profile collaborations with other brands, from travel accessories for the airline Cathay Pacific to insulated lunchboxes emblazoned with graphics of Hello Kitty. In its appeal to local nostalgia, their 2009 Starbucks collaboration proved an important precedent. In a Starbucks café in Hong Kong, G.O.D. designers created the ‘Bing Sutt Corner’ based on a Hong Kong-style bing sutt, or tea café from the 1960s (Figure 10.2). This proved successful and led to second collaboration with Starbucks, a more extensively

FIGURE 10.2

“Bing Sutt Corner” at Starbucks on Duddell Street, Hong Kong, 20 June 2009.

Source: Photograph by WiNG – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/ index.php?curid=7081423

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designed café in the bing sutt style that included large-scale wall murals by graphic designer Stanley Wong. These up-market recreations of the past led to the popularization of a more ‘rebellious’ type of bing sutt, such as the more authentic Lo Fung bing sutt. Rather than the Starbucks examples, in the ‘real’ bing sutt, instead of decorating the shop by exoticizing the image of old Hong Kong, putting up props like birdcages, beaded curtains, taped windowpanes and a fake street view, the Lo Fung bing sutt is a place full of dirty local jokes, sentimental messages and political symbols. (Mak 2021, 40) These included retro Chinese political posters and double entendres on the menu only understood by those who speak Cantonese and understand local history. For Young, in an echo of Abbas’ idea about Hong Kong’s ‘culture of disappearance’, a collective sense of loss is a key aspect of the city’s identity: In Hong Kong, old things always get junked. We copy from overseas and we import, we have very little that is left that originated locally, maybe with certain exceptions, such as architecture and our language. I think it’s sad that we are losing our identity. Our real sense of identity is not to do with politics . . . we share our experiences, how we eat, how we dress, that we watched the same television back in the old days. ( Young 2019) While G.O.D.’s architectural examples noted previously seemed politically harmless, their use of language has run afoul of the authorities. In 2007, Hong Kong police arrested Young and 18 staff members over a t-shirt. The graphic featured ‘14K’ written in golden Chinese script, resembling the golden plaques worn by women at Chinese weddings, but the police took it as a reference to the infamous 14K triad crime gang. Perhaps more provocative, in response to the huge pro-democracy protests of 2014, referred to as the Umbrella Movement or Occupy Central, G.O.D. produced a t-shirt with the words ‘I Did It On Harcourt Road’ and an inside label that read ‘I Occupied Central’. The protests, centred on Harcourt Road, Central Hong Kong’s main thoroughfare, were prompted by restrictions to the electoral system, and such protests have been a significant part of life in Hong Kong since the 1997 transfer of power. Finally, in an interesting parallel with Shanghai Tang, G.O.D. also expanded beyond Hong Kong and opened a store in Singapore (2012–15) as well as three stores in Taiwan (2015–17), all of which subsequently closed. Locally, the protests of 2019–20 had a significant impact on the company (Young 2019), resulting in store closures in Hong Kong. Seen by some critics as the end of both Hong Kong’s autonomy within China (Mahtani et al. 2020) and of China’s ‘one country, two systems’ economic and political policy, these protests and the subsequent

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dilution of local political power also seemed a pivotal point in discourse around Hong Kong’s heritage. At the time of writing, there are four remaining G.O.D. stores in Hong Kong, and it remains to be seen how the brand fares within a new political and economic context in which Hong Kong’s autonomy (and perhaps also its heritage) is disappearing.

Conclusion Since the 1997 transition, Hong Kong has increasingly become just another Chinese city. No longer the cosmopolitan global financial hub it was, it remains nevertheless an important city, a Cantonese- and English-speaking city with a distinctive culture that is neither wholly Chinese nor Western yet persists despite pressure to integrate more fully into mainland China. Both Shanghai Tang and G.O.D. bloomed in the context of a city undergoing momentous change and followed a similar trajectory of growth and expansion after 1997, then contracted over the past decade. Interestingly, the mainland Chinese market has not fully embraced either brand and, even within the city, their appeal is limited. In a recent summary of Hong Kong fashion, Wessie Ling suggests that, despite the homegrown success of brands such as Shanghai Tang and G.O.D., ‘the majority of local consumers persist in preferring imported brands’ (Ling 2020, 154). The city’s colonial mentality, that the best culture is imported from elsewhere, remains to some extent. From a heritage perspective, the case of Hong Kong is unusual. Heritage efforts to preserve particular buildings, for example, typically fall into either a Western or Chinese framework and catalogue of styles. Yet the nostalgic imagery reproduced by Shanghai Tang and G.O.D. operates between these two monolithic blocs, drawing from both yet adding their own distinctive local stamp as well. The visual languages developed by Shanghai Tang and G.O.D. are perhaps best characterized by their hybrid nature, a blend of colonial, global and local inf luences that ref lect an alternative means of addressing Asian design and heritage in general (see Huppatz 2018). And their differing appeals to nostalgia ref lect the possibilities of drawing upon the past as a possible foundation for collective renewal in the present as well as the future.

References Abbas, Ackbar. 1997. Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Barmé, Geremie, ed. 1996. Shades of Mao: The Posthumous Cult of a Great Leader. New York: M.E. Sharpe. Chan, Natalia Siu Hung. 2000. “Rewriting History: Hong Kong Nostalgia Cinema and Its Social Practice.” In The Cinema of Hong Kong: History, Arts, Identity, edited by Poshek Fu and David Desser, 252–288. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Chan, Yuk Wah, and Vivian P. Y. Lee. 2017. “Postcolonial Cultural Governance: A Study of Heritage Management in Post-1997 Hong Kong.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 23, no. 3: 275–287. Chow, Rey. 1998. “A Souvenir of Love.” In Ethics after Idealism: Theory, Culture, Ethnicity, Reading, edited by Rey Chow. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Clark, Hazel. 2009. “Back to the Future or Forward?: Hong Kong Design, Image, and Branding.” Design Issues 25, no. 3: 11–29. Cross, Gary. 2015. Consumed Nostalgia: Memory in the Age of Fast Capitalism. New York: Columbia University Press. Dai, Jinhua. 2000. “Imagined Nostalgia.” In Postmodernism & China, edited by Arif Dirlik and Zhang Xundong. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Davis, Fred. 1979. Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia. New York: The Free Press. Duyvendak, Jan Willem, ed. 2011. The Politics of Home: Belonging and Nostalgia in Western Europe and the United States. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Guffey, Elizabeth. 2006. Retro: The Culture of Revival. London: Reaktion Books. Hofer, Johannes. 1934. “Medical Dissertation on Nostalgia.” (Original in Latin, 1688), English translation by Carolyn K. Anspach, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 2: 376–391. Huppatz, D.J. 2009. “Designer Nostalgia in Hong Kong.” Design Issues 25, no. 2: 14–28. Huppatz, D.J. 2010. “Fashion Branding: Ralph Lauren’s Stage.” In The Fashion History Reader: Global Perspectives, edited by Giorgio Riello and Peter McNeil, 553–555. London and New York: Routledge. Huppatz, D.J. 2018. Modern Asian Design. London: Bloomsbury. Jameson, Frederic. 1991. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ling, Wessie. 2020. “Apparel and Fashion Design in Hong Kong.” In Encyclopedia of East Asian Design, edited by Haruhiko Fujita and Christine Guth, 151–154. London: Bloomsbury. Lowenthal, David. 1985. The Past Is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lowenthal, David. 1989. “Nostalgia Tells It Like It Wasn’t.” In The Imagined Past: History and Nostalgia, edited by Christopher Shaw and Malcolm Chase, 18–32. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Lu, Tracey. 2009. “Heritage Conservation in Post-Colonial Hong Kong.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 15, nos. 2–3: 258–272. Mahtani, Shibani, Anna Fifield, Tiffany Liang, and Timothy McLaughlin. 2020. “China to Impose Sweeping Security Law in Hong Kong, Heralding End of City’s Autonomy.” Washington Post, May 22. www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/china-signalsplan-to-take-full-control-of-hong-kong-realigning-citys-status/2020/05/21/2c38 50ee-9b48–11ea-ad79-eef 7cd734641_story.html. Mak, Veronica Sau-Wa. 2021. “The Heritagization of Milk Tea: Cultural Governance and Placemaking in Hong Kong.” Asian Anthropology 20, no. 1: 30–46. Nicholson, Kate. 2010. “BBC World Interview with Sir David Tang.” BBC, March 25. Accessed April 20, 2020. www.campaignasia.com/article/bbc-world-interview-withsir-david-tang-explores-what-to-build-in-china/212932. Ooi, Joanne. 2019. “What Shanghai Tang’s Rise, Fall and Return Means for Luxury Fashion.” Vogue Business, August 21. Accessed April 20, 2020. www.voguebusiness. com/fashion/shanghai-tang-richemont-chinese-luxury-fashion. Pickering, Michael, and Emily Keightley. 2006. “The Modalities of Nostalgia.” Current Sociology 54, no. 6: 919–941.

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Robertson, Roland. 1992. Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture. London: Sage. Shanghai Tang. 2003. “Imperial Tailors.” Promotional brochure. Skov, Lise. 2003. “Fashion-Nation: A Japanese Globalization Experience and a Hong Kong Dilemma.” In Re-Orienting Fashion: The Globalization of Asian Dress, edited by Sandra Niessen, Ann Marie Leshkowich, and Carla Jones. London: Berg. Tang, David. 2016. Rules for Modern Life: A Connoisseur’s Survival Guide. London: Penguin. Turner, Matthew. 1994. Hong Kong Sixties: Designing Identity. Hong Kong: Hong Kong Arts Centre Press. Vukovich, Daniel. 2012. “The End of ‘Re-Colonization’: On Hong Kong, Knowledge, and G.O.D.” Neohelicon 39, no. 1: 167–182. Woodham, Jonathan. 1997. Twentieth Century Design. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Young, Douglas. 2015. “Interview: G.O.D. Founder Douglas Young on Protest and Culture.” Interview by Kris Cheng, Hong Kong Free Press (online), October 3. Accessed April 20, 2020. https://hongkongfp.com/2015/10/03/interview-g-o-d-founder-douglas-youngon-protest-and-culture/. Young, Douglas. 2017. “G.O.D.’s Douglas Young under the Microscope.” Interview by P. Ramakrishnan, Prestige (online journal), September 14. www.prestigeonline.com/ id/pursuits/everything-want-know-g-o-ds-douglas-young/. Young, Douglas. 2019. “Hong Kong Fashion Store Operator Says Situation Is ‘Really Bad’.” Television Interview with Douglas Young, Bloomberg (online), October 23. www. bloomberg.com/news/videos/2019-10-23/hong-kong-fashion-store-operator-sayssituation-is-really-bad-video.

PART IV

Textiles and dress

11 RECLAIMING HERITAGE NARRATIVES Reweaving the story of a royal wedding dress Zoë Hendon

Introduction In 1893, Princess Mary of Teck married the future George V wearing a wedding dress that was entirely designed, woven, and made in Britain (Figure 11.1). Princess Mary was known to her family as ‘May’, and the design of what have become known as the ‘May Silks’ is the focus of this chapter.1 The surviving evidence for these is now shared between three institutions, each of which has a different understanding of the definition and importance of ‘heritage’. Focusing on the design and production of the wedding dress from a previously overlooked design historical point of view problematizes traditional narratives of British heritage and demonstrates how public history operates within a highly politicized environment. The attention paid by academic historians to the material world grew out of an interest in local and social history in the 1970s, and here my concern is partly to provide a wider social history context through an object-based approach to what might be considered a purely ‘elite’ royal garment. However, I am interested not only in the object itself but in the work it did in the past and continues to do in the present. This reconsideration of Arthur Silver’s designs for the May Silks was prompted by two twenty-first-century royal weddings: Prince William and Kate Middleton (April 29, 2011) and Prince Harry and Meghan Markle (May 19, 2018), and a subsequent revival of interest in the Silver Studio’s involvement in the designs for the silk of the wedding dress of 1893. This chapter begins with a brief discussion of the context for the wedding, followed by consideration of the design of the dress fabric, and moves to an examination of the way in which the wedding was represented in the press and its ‘consumption’ by the public at the time. The wedding dress and trousseau were intended to be symbolic of the ‘four kingdoms’, meaning England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, and thus to make a contribution DOI: 10.4324/9781003096146-16

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FIGURE 11.1

The bride’s procession in St. James’s Palace. Princess May of Teck (later the Duchess of York, then Queen Mary) (1867–1953) on her wedding day in 1893.

Source: © Illustrated London News/Mary Evans Picture Library.

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to national unity and a statement about Britain’s place in the world. The dress and trousseau are discussed here in the wider context of British trade and industry in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Moving from a discussion of the dress informed by design history to a discussion informed by the dress as heritage raises questions about the nature of the implied ‘contract’ between the British royal family and its subjects in the 1890s and in turn raises further questions about how this dress functions as part of the continuance of this contract, building on notions of national and royal heritage in the present. The wedding dress continues to occupy a place within heritage narratives that emphasize the royal family’s pre-eminent position in British society. Within the space of a chapter, it is possible to propose alternative readings of the dress, as will be shown here. But would it be possible, for example, to present the royal wedding dress of 1893 in a public exhibition as anything other than a seemingly uncomplicated part of Britain’s national heritage? In other words, to point to the way in which the dress functioned, and continues to function, as part of the nation’s shared imaginings? To do so would involve navigating complex institutional and political considerations of the ways in which design historical narratives are presented in public, ‘heritage’ contexts. To ask this question is to challenge the authority – including royal authority – by which such heritage narratives are designated and perpetuated. To address these issues, this chapter shifts the focus from the visual appearance of the dress to the public discussion that surrounded it in the 1890s and subsequently. This allows us to move away from the wedding dress as personal garment and from the symbolism of a national event to a consideration of why an entirely British-made wedding dress and trousseau was seen as important in 1893 and of the political messages it was intended to send. Here the emphasis is on one specific object, but reference is also made to other material – designs for the dress silks, newspapers, photographs, and other contemporary evidence – to examine the ways in which the dress worked to constitute and legitimize royal authority at the time. In particular, attention is paid to the ways in which the design and manufacture of the silk for the wedding dress contributed to narratives of nationhood. Equally importantly, I consider how the evidence held in different collections is regarded as heritage in the present. Attention therefore shifts forwards and backwards from the wedding dress as part of historical narrative to consideration of the ways in which it operates as a heritage object today, drawing on the idea of authorized heritage discourse (AHD) proposed by Laurajane Smith (Smith 2006). Smith argues that AHD is the means by which certain artefacts, sites, and memorials come to be recognized as ‘heritage’ and that the mechanisms by which this happen operate to ensure that the process appears natural and inevitable. ‘Within the narrative of the nation’, Smith argues, ‘the heritage discourse also explicitly promotes the experience and values of elite social classes. . . . [AHD works] by the self-referential nature of the discourse which continually legitimizes itself and the values and ideologies on which it is based’ (2006, 30). My approach here is to make visible the means by which the dress played an active role in presentation and legitimization of

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royal authority in the 1890s. I ask whether it would be possible to draw visitors’ attention to the constructed nature of this discourse in the present. If, as Smith asserts, heritage is a process, a performance and participation, then does viewing the royal wedding dress within a heritage context necessarily make the visitor complicit in the re-performance and reinforcement of discourses of nationalism and royal authority that were the original functions of the dress? Or are alternative readings based on a wider definition of heritage also possible?

Context Princess May of Teck was initially engaged to Prince George’s older brother Albert, one of the grandsons of Queen Victoria. However Albert died suddenly in January 1892 just a few months before the planned wedding. Keen to provide a wife for the heir to the throne, Queen Victoria encouraged the betrothal of May to the second son George, and after a brief period of mourning, their wedding was arranged for July 6, 1893. The overtly British symbolism associated with the dress and the wedding trousseau was, as Edwards notes, a subject dear to the heart of Princess May’s mother, the Duchess of Teck: “I am determined”, Princess Mary Adelaide told the press, “that all the silk [in the trousseau] shall come from England, all the f lannel from Wales, all the tweeds from Scotland, and every yard of lace and poplin from Ireland”. ( Edwards 2015, 74) ‘Britain’ by this definition, included the four nations of the United Kingdom, which were represented by the rose, shamrock, thistle, and daffodil – patriotic symbols respectively of England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales – woven into the fabric. This symbolism was already becoming part of royal tradition: as Edwina Ehrman notes, the same motifs (with the exception of the daffodil) were incorporated into the design of the wedding dress of Princess Alexandra when she married Edward Prince of Wales (Queen Victoria’s son) in 1863 ( Ehrman 2014, 77).2 The wedding dress of 1893 can be seen as part of the process by which Britain became an ‘imagined community’, since it was intended to be consumed both visually and in words by the wider newspaper reading public (Anderson 2016). According to Anderson, the spread of print capitalism from the seventeenth century onwards contributed to the ability of nations to imagine themselves as defined by language and national borders. Nationhood thus became distinct from the idea of royal prerogative or divine right and therefore might be seen as antithetical to the suggestion that the monarchy had an important part to play in constructions of national identity. But, as Cannadine suggests, from the late 1870s, the British monarchy began to establish a ceremonial role for itself even as its economic and political power declined. In the context of a stronger parliamentary democracy, industrialization, and social and economic change, the

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monarchy sought to bolster its symbolic importance: ‘In such an age of change, crisis and dislocation, the “preservation of anachronism”, the deliberate, ceremonial presentation of an impotent but venerated monarch as a unifying symbol of permanence and national community became both possible and necessary’ (Cannadine 2012, 122). Events such as royal weddings were the opportunity for exactly this ceremonial and symbolic display. Cannadine draws attention to Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee of 1887, her Diamond Jubilee of 1897, and her funeral in 1901 to argue for the increased contribution of royal pageantry to a sense of nationhood over the course of her reign (Cannadine 2012, 133–134). The royal wedding of 1893 was an equally important public spectacle. It coincided with a greater proliferation of print media in the 1890s, as illustrated newspapers and magazines became more readily available due to new techniques of photomechanical reproduction. Further, the increased availability of print journalism meant a change in content and style of newspapers and magazines, as well as their visual appearance. As Beegan notes: The long descriptive passages, verbatim reports of speeches and detailed political analysis that had been the norm in the established press were now being replaced by short, varied paragraphs of gossip and opinion . . . with an overall emphasis on personality and human interest. (2008, 4–5) Royal weddings offered newspaper editors an irresistible mix of human story and spectacle, while for readers, the act of reading reports of royal occasions in newspapers and magazines may have contributed to their sense of belonging to an ‘imagined community’. Until the Victorian period, royal weddings had been private affairs, involving only a limited number of aristocratic guests, but after 1877, when Queen Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India, royal occasions became better organized and more self-consciously public, demonstrating and relying upon ‘meticulous planning, popular enthusiasm, widespread reporting and unprecedented splendour’ (Cannadine 2012, 134). Royal weddings therefore occupy a significant conceptual space since they are simultaneously private and public.3 As Emily Allen has noted: ‘as unions between states – and heads of state – they belong to the history of nationalist politics and international diplomacy, but under the private logic of domesticity they belong to the family and to the all-powerful narrative of romantic love’ (2003, 469). Royal weddings must be sufficiently different and sufficiently similar to the weddings of the middle classes for the illusion to be maintained. Royal wedding dresses are required to navigate a fine line between high fashion and tradition, between expressing the personality of the bride and being an appropriate expression of the solemnity of the state occasion. The dress and the rest of Princess May’s trousseau were intended to be symbolic of Britain’s textile industry and representative of the four nations of the British Isles, making an important statement about Britain’s pre-eminent place in the world.

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As part of the public spectacle, the wedding and surrounding celebrations were covered extensively in the press, including illustrations of the wedding cake (“Royal Wedding” 1893). Allen argues that the sheer monumentality of royal wedding cakes marked them as different from ordinary wedding cakes, since they were not intended to be eaten but were ‘consumed’ visually by the newspaperbuying public as a symbolic form of participation in, and hence tacit legitimation of, the royal event. As Allen suggests: the viewer of the royal cakes could only hold her peace in the silent witness of reading, and in the act of consuming the page she not only participated in but also performed the wedding ceremony, espousing its ideological assumptions. However passive, looking thus becomes a performative act . . . an act of visual consumption but also of national participation. (2003, 459) We can see the royal wedding dress as fulfilling a similar function to that of the royal wedding cake, since it was also an integral part of the spectacle intended to be symbolically and visually ‘consumed’. Like the majority of wedding dresses since the end of the eighteenth century, the wedding dress of Princess May was white, a brocade woven with the addition of fine silver thread. It is evident from the images published in the press that the finer details of the patriotic motifs woven into the fabric were not clearly visible in reproduction. However, it remained important that they were there in order that they might be described and discussed by journalists: they were part of the visual presence of the event and contributed to a sense of national pride through the participation of the newspaper-reading public. As the Times newspaper reported: Her dress of silver and white brocade with its ingeniously clustered shamrocks, roses and thistles is at once simple and elegant. . . . The bridal veil of fine old Honiton point is caught back off the face, and trails and clusters of orange blossoms, together with the inevitable bouquet of white f lowers carried in her hand, complete the salient points of the bride’s appearance. (“Description of Royal Wedding Dress” 1893) Readers of descriptions of the wedding dress and its design of ‘roses, shamrocks and thistles’ were thus co-opted into a tacit approval of the royal family’s authority to represent the nation.

Arthur Silver and an alternative perspective A further layer of symbolism can be seen in the royal family’s deliberate choice of English firms to produce the wedding dress and the many items that made up the trousseau, a point which was also frequently mentioned in contemporary newspaper accounts (“Dress of the Day” 1893).4 The wedding dress silk was

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woven by Warner & Sons, a company that had originally been based in Spitalfields but which was, by that time, located in Bethnal Green. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the British silk weaving industry was geographically widely spread, from Manchester and Derbyshire to Essex and Norfolk (King 2009, 13). However, Warner & Sons, a London-based firm, was perhaps chosen because it allowed for the further advantage of a publicity opportunity: Princess May and her mother the Duchess of Teck visited the factory in Bethnal Green to see the silk being woven, thus demonstrating their visible support for British industry (“The Silk for the Wedding Dress” 1893). A similar impetus based on location perhaps prompted the choice of Arthur Silver as dress fabric designer. Arthur Silver (1853–1896) is now primarily known as a designer of wallpapers and furnishing textiles: having established the Silver Studio in Hammersmith, West London, in 1880, he produced designs for a variety of clients, with seemingly few other opportunities to design dress silks (Turner 1980). It may have been Silver’s existing relationship with Warner that earned him the commission for this job; the Silver Studio had supplied designs to Warner since the 1880s (Figure 11.2) (Bury 1981; Kramer 2007). It was his status as an English designer

FIGURE 11.2

One of a series of sketch designs for silk brocades featuring a vertical border of roses and thistles, 1893.

Source: Designed by Arthur Silver of the Silver Studio for the wedding dress of Princess May of Teck, 1893. (SD12371) Image courtesy of the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture, Middlesex University, UK.

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that was of most interest to the press, but in a sense his relative anonymity connects him with the many other designers and producers of fabrics for the wedding trousseau, in firms around the country, whose names were never recorded.

‘Made in Britain’ So far the focus has been on the design of the dress fabric and on the wedding day. Yet to focus solely on illustrations and descriptions of the wedding dress in contemporary newspaper coverage is to overlook other discussions about what the wedding was understood to mean at the time and thus why the symbolism was so important. Around the country, councils considered their plans for the wedding day, and their discussions were reported in detail. Much debate centred on the question of public subscriptions to the royal couple: were these to be seen as an expression of loyalty and pride, or effectively a tax on the poor? For example, the Cornish and Devon Post & East Cornwall Times noted with approval that: no stone is being left unturned to furnish the Duke of York and his bride with a national tribute in the shape of innumerable wedding presents, and subscription lists have been opened all over the country . . . all, from the highest to the lowest, are being asked to demonstrate their loyalty by opening their purses. (“Royal Wedding” 1893) However, the paper also expressed concern that subscriptions should not be only in the form of ‘useless jewellery’, since it considered that there were more important matters at stake: Parliament can no longer be approached to provide a subsidy for the Duke of York and his Princess. The Prince of Wales holds a sum in trust for his children, and out of it they each receive a share in proportion on their marriage. But Princess Victoria Mary of Teck is not a millionaire’s daughter, nor has she a Parliamentary grant in her favour, and with all possible respect we should suggest that the county funds be massed together and invested to provide her with a suitable dowry. (“Royal Wedding” 1893) Other press coverage suggested a widespread negative perception of the monarchy among sections of the population, providing an indication as to why the unifying symbolism of the wedding dress was required.5 The wedding day was not designated a public holiday, but some local authorities announced a half-day closing of shops and businesses, while others went so far as to plan street parties and children’s teas in celebration of the day. Yet suggestions of this kind were not universally welcomed. Workers in Lincoln objected to the possibility that the day would be a public holiday, because it would mean the loss of a day’s pay

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(“The Royal Wedding Official Announcements” 1893). Various local councils debated the provision of treats for the poor in celebration of the royal event, with concerns expressed about the misuse of public money (“The Royal Wedding: Meeting at Torquay” 1893). In London, two anarchists were arrested for posting bills protesting against the ‘waste of wealth on these Royal vermin, while the workers are dying of hunger and overwork’ (“‘Anarchists’ and the Royal Wedding” 1893). The concerns raised in some sections of the press provide an indication of why the royal family’s demonstrable support for British industry was considered necessary at this point. Shifting the focus from the visual appearance of the dress to the public discussion surrounding it thus allows us to move away from the wedding dress as personal garment, and from the symbolism of a national event, to a consideration of the political significance of an entirely British-made royal wedding dress and trousseau. The emphasis on the British design and manufacture of the wedding dress and trousseau was a conscious effort to denote the monarchy’s support for British industries and in doing so to encourage reciprocal loyalty of the subjects to the crown. Many regional newspapers published extensive summaries of the preparations for the wedding dress: The materials are to be exclusively English, and even the trimmings are selected with a view to benefiting British trade as much as possible. The looms at Spitalfields are busily employed on silks and brocades for the trousseau. Lacemakers about Exeter and in Buckinghamshire are producing their filmy fabrics with skilful fingers. . . . West of England serges and woollens are also requisitioned. . . . Linens from Belfast and lace from Limerick are included in the orders issued. Even far Shetland feels the wave that has broken over Great Britain, giving an impetus to trade which was badly needed. . . . Straw from Luton, ribbons from Coventry, and embroideries from the skilful cottage workers in the North of Ireland are all being collected and wrought up into fashionable wear. (“The Wedding Dress of Princess May” 1893) Clearly the intention was to express the monarchy’s support for as many British industries, in as many regions, as possible at a time when the nation was facing economic challenges. The article, “The Wedding Dress of Princess May” quoted previously, published in the Coventry Evening Telegraph concluded with the suggestion that: ‘it is hoped that the example thus set of encouraging British trade may possibly be followed by English ladies in general’, implying a deeper underlying economic imperative for this choice. The National Silk Association had been founded in 1887 to promote the interests of British silk weavers in opposition to the threat posed by imports from France and elsewhere (Goodale 1939, 80). Its exclusively male membership was augmented two years later by an ancillary body, the Ladies National Silk Association, with Princess May’s mother, the Duchess of Teck, as

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its first president, a role subsequently taken by May herself. The aims and methods of the Ladies Silk Association were similar to those of Irish and Scottish associations for home industries and textiles, which involved aristocratic women who championed rural textiles industries (Helland 2010, 89–91). The involvement of women was understood to be necessary because of their role as consumers: women could act as authentic advocates for the silk industry since it was within their power to choose an English silk for a dress or to choose a potentially cheaper, though less patriotic, imported one. Princess May’s role as president was highly significant in championing British industry and f lagging her figurehead status. The royal family’s choice of these textiles for Princess May’s trousseau made a particular statement about the meaning of nationhood, trade, and the superiority of British products, representing protectionism against cheaper imports. In the last years of the nineteenth century, Scottish wool, Welsh f lannel, and Irish linen were beginning to play a significant role in Britain’s national heritage stories (Hudson 2018; Anderson 2017; Solar 2005). These textiles were marketed as luxury products, but their origins were in the cottage industries, home-grown fibres, and indigenous technologies of the British Isles. The story of silk is a little different since ‘English silk’ was denoted as silk fabric woven in England but reliant on raw materials from India. The choice of British silk weaving firms for the dress and trousseau represented conscious support for Britain’s colonial relationship, while simultaneously largely omitting to mention India’s contribution either to the wedding dress in particular or to Britain’s position on the world stage more generally.

The wedding dress as heritage Having considered the political context for the decisions concerning the design and production of Princess May’s wedding dress, it is possible to take a closer look at the three institutions that now hold the physical evidence of the dress and the design of the silk fabrics and consider their differing approaches to heritage. The dress is now part of the collection held by the Royal Collection’s Royal Ceremonial Dress Collection, under the auspices of Historic Royal Palaces (HRP). This collection is generally presented as part of an uncomplicated narrative of Britain’s royal family and its court fashions, as HRP’s website states: The Royal Ceremonial Dress Collection contains 10,000 items of historic dress from the 16th century to the present day, providing information about the history of fashion, life at court, British ceremonial traditions, and the lives of key historical figures. Our collection contains items of clothing worn by royalty including George III, Queen Victoria, Princess Margaret, Diana, Princess of Wales and The Queen. (“The Royal Ceremonial Dress Collection” n.d.)

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The wedding dresses thus contribute to narratives of glamorous royal personalities in Britain’s past and to a perspective which emphasises continuity and tradition. For Warner, the May Silks are also part of a long relationship with royalty, borrowing something of this glamour by association (Bury 1981, 23).6 The May Silks are an important part of the story of the company, placing it within a narrative of royal patronage and emphasizing the role of the skilled craftsmen who were employed to weave the silk. ‘Heritage’ in this context, is closely aligned with Britain’s industrial history (Hayward 1996). The Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture has a different approach to the presentation and interpretation of Britain’s heritage than the other two institutions. The Silver Studio was one of a number of independent design firms supplying designs to the British textile and wallpaper industry between the end of the nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth (Hendon 2018). The Silver Studio Collection contains thousands of examples of the Studio’s work, including around a dozen designs and preparatory drawings for the May Silks.7 Definitions of heritage were widened in the 1970s and 1980s to include such things as coal mines, industrial museums, and family histories, as well as the legitimization of interest in histories of the suburban home (Samuel 1999). Since the majority of the Silver Studio’s output comprised wallpapers and textiles for the mass market, it came to be associated with ‘heritage’ in the sense that it represented – and was representative of – a wider segment of the population, telling the stories of ordinary people and non-elite homes as part of Britain’s past. Exhibitions and publications such as Little Palaces ( Turner 1987) and the subsequent series of Style Guides drew on the Silver Studio Collection as evidence of the ways in which ‘ordinary’ people used mass-market wallpapers and textiles to decorate their homes (Arber 2003; Hoskins 2004; Heathcote 2006), thus making a contribution to non-elite heritage narratives by recognizing the domestic interior as a legitimate area of scholarly enquiry. The involvement of Arthur Silver in the design of the May Silks was mentioned in an early publication about the Silver Studio (Turner 1980) but has received less attention subsequently because it seemed at odds with museum’s main focus on histories of homes, of suburbia, and on histories of everyday design.

A speculative case study in exhibitionary practice What would it look like to bring the wedding dress and evidence about the process of its design together in the form of a public exhibition? By opening up a consideration of the role of the royal wedding dress within royal narratives, this chapter has allowed us to widen the focus and thus endow the garment with a broader cultural relevance, allowing for the recognition of its contribution to imperial, national, and industrial histories. The wedding dress could be read as evidence of wider debates about national identity in relation to trade, about the significance of ‘buying British’, and about the reciprocal obligations of royal bounty. This approach points towards a reading of the wedding dress as a richer part of

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Britain’s national heritage than simply a celebratory affirmation of the traditional narrative of the royal family. It suggests there is potential for a much richer and more nuanced history of this royal wedding dress, reinserting industrial and social history into an otherwise sanitized heritage narrative. It has also drawn attention to surviving evidence of the design and production of the wedding dress within three institutions, each of which have widely differing heritage agendas.8 This chapter has demonstrated that the dress functions as one of the components of authorized heritage discourse, representing and constituting nationalism, power, and authority. Therefore, while a different kind of story could be told, it is unlikely that it ever would be. Britain’s royal family is part of the nation’s past, but it continues to have a role in the present, and the approved narrative of royal heritage continues to be of importance in ensuring the nation’s ongoing support for the monarchy. Whether on display in a royal context such as Kensington Palace or described in official guidebooks, the wedding dress continues to support the narratives of national unity and public loyalty that were its original intended messages (Balmer 2011). To repeat the stories of Princess May’s support for the silk industry and the role of the wedding dress in the symbolic representation of the nations of Britain is to re-inscribe these messages on the public imagination and gain the public’s tacit approval once again through the act of ‘consuming’ national heritage. It is difficult to imagine permission being granted for any public exhibition that proposed an alternative reading, since ‘royal heritage’ remains a tightly controlled story, with an emphasis on continuity and tradition. In a sense, this is recognition of its continued power: the royal wedding dress of 1893 – and subsequent royal wedding dresses – still have a part to play in the construction of the ‘imagined community’ of the nation.

Notes 1 Princess Mary of Teck (1867–1953) was daughter of Francis, Duke of Teck, and Princess Mary Adelaide of Cambridge and was thus considered a minor member of the royal family. She became Queen Mary in 1910 when her husband became King George V. 2 The daffodil, for Wales, featured on several designs for the May Silks produced by Arthur Silver, but this national flower was mentioned less frequently in the press. More recently, the symbolic power of flowers in royal public relations has continued with the incorporation of floral motifs representing the 53 countries of the Commonwealth in the wedding train of Meghan Markle (Connor 2019). 3 Souvenirs of royal weddings had been available from the 1850s, but by the 1890s, a range of objects of all prices were available: photographic cartes-de-visite, commemorative medals, and jugs enabled the public to ‘participate’ by proxy. The British Museum has commemorative medals (MG.1456; MG.1457; 2007,4042.10) and an advertisement for a souvenir mug (1902,1011.10535), the V&A’s royal wedding souvenirs of 1893 include two commemorative jugs (4039–1901; 4040–1901), and the Museum of London’s collections include a printed linen handkerchief (60.147/2) 4 The inclusion of patriotic motifs into royal garments was not new, but the insistence that the wedding dress and trousseau should be made within the British Isles seems to have been a deliberate response to political and economic circumstances of the early 1890s. In contrast, Princess Alexandra chose Indian-made textiles for her coronation in 1901 (Strasdin 2012), sending subtly different messages about Britain’s relationship with Empire.

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5 A cartoonist in the satirical newspaper Truth of December 1893 depicted Prince George and Princess May in a carriage surrounded by flunkies grasping for the public’s money, despite the couple’s own indifference to the scene. See ‘A Demonstration of Loyalty (with a collection)’ (Detail). From Truth Christmas Number, December 25, 1893 (Historic Royal Palaces, HRP19298) 6 See also two samples of woven silk in the V&A’s collections: one by Daniel Walters and Sons (a predecessor firm of Warner & Sons) for Buckingham Palace, 1855, featuring rose, shamrock, and thistle (4759A-1859), and another furnishing fabric featuring rose, thistle, leek, and shamrock, Warner & Sons, 1953 (T 193–1953) 7 The Silver Studio Collection was given to Hornsey College of Art in the late 1960s, with the intention that it should be a resource for students. Hornsey College of Art was subsequently absorbed into Middlesex Polytechnic and later became Middlesex University. Along with several other collections, the Silver Studio Collection became known as the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture in the late 1990s. 8 At the time of writing, the consequences of the global COVID-19 pandemic for all the institutions discussed here remain to be seen.

References Allen, Emily. 2003. “Culinary Exhibition: Victorian Wedding Cakes and Royal Spectacle.” Victorian Studies 45, no. 3: 457–484. “‘Anarchists’ and the Royal Wedding.” 1893. London Daily News, July 1. Anderson, Benedict. 2016. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London and New York: Verso. Anderson, Fiona. 2017. Tweed: Textiles That Changed the World. London: Bloomsbury. Arber, Katie. 2003. Thirtiestyle: Home Decoration and Furnishings from the 1930s. London: Museum of Domestic Design & Architecture, Middlesex University. Balmer, John M. T. 2011. “Corporate Heritage Brands and the Precepts of Corporate Heritage Brand Management: Insights from the British Monarchy on the Eve of the Royal Wedding of Prince William (April 2011) and Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee (1952–2012).” Journal of Brand Management 18, no. 8: 517–544. https://doi. org/10.1057/bm.2011.21. Beegan, Gerry. 2008. The Mass Image: A Cultural History of Photomechanical Reproduction in Victorian London. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Bury, Hester. 1981. A Choice of Design, 1850–1980: Fabrics by Warner & Sons Limited. London: Warner & Sons Limited. Cannadine, David. 2012. “The Context, Performance and Meaning of Ritual: The British Monarchy and the ‘Invention of Tradition’, c.1820–1977.” In The Invention of Tradition, edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, 101–164. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Connor, Diana. 2019. “Meghan Markle’s Courtship of a Colonised Commonwealth: Connecting with Aotearoa/New Zealand.” Paper presented at The Cultural Politics of Meghan Markle Symposium, London, November 15. “Description of Royal Wedding Dress Worn by Princess May of Teck.” 1893. The Times, July 8. “Dress of the Day.” 1893. Jarrow Express, July. Edwards, Anne. 2015. Matriarch: Queen Mary and the House of Windsor. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Ehrman, Edwina. 2014. The Wedding Dress: 300 Years of Bridal Fashions. London: V&A Publications. Goodale, E. 1939. “The History and Activities of the Silk Association.” Journal of the Textile Institute Proceedings 30, no. 4: 79–90.

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Hayward, Alexander. 1996. “Technology Museums in the United Kingdom.” Technology and Culture 37, no. 1: 138–146. Heathcote, David. 2006. Seventiestyle: Home Decoration and Furnishings from the 1970s. London: Middlesex University Press. Helland, J. 2010. “Translating Textiles: ‘Private Palaces’ and the Celtic Fringe, 1890– 1910.” In Fashion, Interior Design and the Contours of Modern Identity, edited by A. Myzelev, 85–104. Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Hendon, Zoë. 2018. “Behind the Scenes at the Silver Studio : Rex Silver and the Hidden Mechanisms of Interwar Textile Design.” Architecture and Culture 6, no. 1: 61–80. https://doi.org/10.1080/20507828.2017.1397963. Hoskins, Lesley. 2004. Fiftiestyle: Home Decoration and Furnishings from the 1950s. London: Middlesex University Press. Hudson, Pat. 2018. “Industrial History, Working Lives, Nation and Empire, Viewed through Some Key Welsh Woollen Objects.” In History after Hobsbawm, edited by John H. Arnold, Matthew Hilton, and Jan Ruger, 160–183. Oxford: Oxford University Press. King, Brenda M. 2009. Silk and Empire. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Kramer, Elizabeth. 2007. “From Luxury to Mania: A Case Study of Anglo-Japanese Textile Production at Warner & Ramm, 1870–1890.” Textile History 38, no. 2: 151–164. “The Royal Ceremonial Dress Collection.” n.d. Historic Royal Palaces. Accessed August 4, 2019. www.hrp.org.uk/about-us/conservation-and-collections/royal-ceremonialdress-collection/#gs.dpkpg6. “Royal Wedding.” 1893. Cornish and Devon Post, June 17. “The Royal Wedding: Meeting at Torquay.” 1893. The Western Morning News, June 30. “The Royal Wedding: Official Announcements.” 1893. Reynolds’s Newspaper, June 25. Samuel, Raphael. 1999. “Resurrectionism.” In Representing the Nation, a Reader: Histories, Heritage and Museums, 163–184. London: Routledge. “The Silk for the Wedding Dress: The Revival of Silk Weaving in London.” 1893. The Graphic, July 1. Smith, Laurajane. 2006. Uses of Heritage. London and New York: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. Solar, Peter. 2005. “The Irish Linen Trade, 1852–1914.” Textile History 36, no. 1: 46–68. https://doi.org/10.1179/174329505x37121. Strasdin, Kate. (2012). “Empire Dressing – the Design and Realization of Queen Alexandra’s Coronation Gown”, Journal of Design History, 25(2), pp. 155–170. Turner, Mark. 1980. A London Design Studio 1880–1963: The Silver Studio Collection. London: Lund Humphries for Middlesex Polytechnic. Turner, Mark. 1987. Little Palaces: The Suburban House in North London 1919–1939. London: Middlesex Polytechnic. “The Wedding Dress of Princess May.” 1893. Coventry Evening Telegraph, June 9.

12 A CANADIAN MAPLE LEAF QUILT Design history and natural heritage Vanessa Nicholas

Betsy Adams Dodge (1829–1911) made her Maple Leaf quilt during the last quarter of the nineteenth century in Mainsville, Ontario. This cotton quilt, which features 20 pieced maple leaves with applique stems, can now be found in the Heritage Quilt Collection at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre in Kingston, Ontario (Figure 12.1), and it appears in Ruth McKendry’s survey of Quilts and Other Bed Coverings in the Canadian Tradition (1979) (McKendry 1979, 175). The illustration is annotated with a short declaration of the block pattern’s Canadian origin. This attribution is likely informed by Dorothy Burnham’s catalogue for the Pieced Quilts of Ontario (1975) exhibition at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), which describes the maple leaf block pattern as ‘a genuinely Canadian design’ (Burnham 1975, 42). Neither Burnham nor McKendry support this conclusion with historical evidence, but their instinct is reasonable given the block pattern’s resemblance to the Canadian f lag that was introduced in time for the country’s centenary celebrations in 1967. This chapter will argue that while Dodge’s quilt can be understood simply as an early example of Canadiana, it might also be seen as an expression of her personal and political identification with the sugar maple and its environment. Rather than reinforcing the problematic association of women with nature, this case study suggests that the homecrafts made by Victorian Canadian women represent the complex and often contradictory views of the natural world that were typical of the time. For example, it is possible that Dodge’s motif relates to the conservationist ethic that began to percolate in Ontario during the 1860s, leading to the establishment of its provincial parks, where extraction industries, namely logging, were permitted to operate, while Indigenous people were prohibited from exercising their treaty rights to trap and hunt on Crown land. Dodge’s quilt thus shows that Victorian Canadian women contributed to a visual and material culture that ultimately defined Canada’s natural heritage in settler-colonial terms. DOI: 10.4324/9781003096146-17

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FIGURE 12.1

Betsy Adams Dodge, maple leaf quilt (c. 1875), cotton, 202 × 156 cm. Collection of the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Accession #Q85-003.

Source: Photograph courtesy of the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston, Canada.

This chapter integrates design history with critical heritage studies by showing that design objects may be seen to represent the social attitudes that result in heritage constructions, including preserves or parks. According to Kynan Gentry and Laurajane Smith, critical heritage studies describes ‘a growing body of scholarship that seeks to move beyond the traditional focus of heritage studies on

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technical issues of management and practice, to one emphasizing cultural heritage as a political, cultural, and social phenomenon’ (2019, 1149). They assert that heritage has historically reproduced established social hierarchies and that critical heritage studies is therefore fundamentally concerned with power relations. For example, in History, Heritage, and Colonialism (2015), Gentry shows the ways in which New Zealanders cultivated a distinct national identity in the Victorian period by memorializing the Maori culture that had been destabilized by settler colonialism. He relates New Zealand to other settler colonial states, including Canada, where heritage practices have traditionally served the interests of the British settler populations that overwhelmed and oppressed Indigenous populations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This chapter speculates that Victorian Canadian women participated in such processes by referring to indigenous f lora and fauna in their homecrafts, identifying with land that had been appropriated from Indigenous peoples by the British. These visual and material associations arguably contributed to the social demand for wilderness preserves and parks at the end of the nineteenth century, natural heritage sites that capitalized on the mythology of Indigeneity whilst refusing the stewardship of actual Indigenous people. The histories of art and design may seem distinct from that of natural heritage, in particular, because culture and nature are generally regarded as incompatible or conf licting, but these are false binaries. As Kjetil Fallan explains in his introduction to The Culture of Nature in the History of Design (2019), ‘both as a species and as individuals, humans have designs on nature’ (2). He continues, ‘design is both making and unmaking the environment. Conversely, it might be argued that the environment is both making and unmaking design’ (Fallan 2019, 2). This chapter explores some of these dynamics by considering the possibility that women’s homecrafts in nineteenth-century Ontario were inf luenced by the regional ecology, as well as the possibility that the maple leaf quilt design itself may have been informed by an emergent environmentalism that attributed value to wilderness. Indeed, the preserves or parks that we associate with traditional environmentalism are themselves designed and highly managed spaces. According to environmental historian David Louter, ‘although we conceive of [national parks] as wild lands, they are also products of human design, and so is the wilderness they preserve’ (2003, 251). He argues that we ought to regard parks as idealized landscapes that were fashioned to serve modern human needs rather than as idylls untouched by history. In keeping with Louter’s position, this chapter favours the term ‘ecology’ over ‘nature’ because the latter is largely defined in opposition to culture, making it objectifying and distancing.

The ecology of the maple leaf icon The maple leaf was considered a Canadian icon long before the introduction of the national f lag at the country’s Centenary Celebrations in 1967. In fact, its use as an emblem of Canadian identity predates the Confederation of the Canadian

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colonies into the Dominion of Canada in 1867. According to Heritage Canada, the history of this national icon dates to 1834, when it became an emblem for Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste, a French-Canadian cultural association (2020). The maple leaf subsequently appeared in the visual culture of English-speaking settlers. For example, in 1847, a new literary annual was founded in Toronto entitled The Maple Leaf, or Canadian Annual: A Literary Souvenir, and its early issues have gold maple leaves embossed on their front and back covers. The 1849 issue features a poem by an anonymous author entitled ‘The Lay of the Emblems’, which describes the nostalgia that a settler may feel for the English rose, the Scottish thistle, and the Irish shamrock,1 as well as their passionate new identification with the Canadian maple leaf: “Then hurrah for the Leaf – the Maple Leaf!/Up, Foresters! Heart and hand;/High in heaven’s free air waves your emblem fair –/ The pride of the forest-land!’ (“The Lay of the Emblems” 1849, 3). These cultural artefacts show that the maple leaf was an established Canadian icon by the time Dodge was making her quilt in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The material evidence suggests that the maple leaf quilt pattern employed by Dodge did originate in Canada, confirming its place in the nation’s design history as well as its association with the country’s beloved sugar maple. Besides Dodge’s quilt, there are at least three other maple leaf block-patterned quilts in Canadian collections, all of which are located in Ontario. The earliest of these featured in Burnham’s exhibition at the ROM. This quilt, which was made in Lindsay, Ontario, sometime around 1840, is practically identical to Dodge’s quilt except for the fact that it has an applique vine at its borders. Dodge’s quilt is contemporaneous to the maple leaf quilt in the collection of the Upper Canada Village heritage park, which has been dated to 1872 and is believed to have been made in Ontario. The third surviving example, in the collection of the Black Creek Pioneer Village heritage park, dates to 1900. The only comparable historical American quilt to survive in a museum collection seems to be a Tea Leaf quilt in the International Quilt Study Centre and Museum in Lincoln, Nebraska, which was made by Mary Corrigan in 1897 in West Virginia. Significantly, all of these quilts were made in locations that see sugar maple trees, illustrating that design traditions might define natural heritage ecologically as well as nationally. The surviving textual evidence further substantiates this speculation. The maple leaf block pattern first appeared on October 31, 1913, in an issue of The Weekly Eagle newspaper in Wichita, Kansas (Millison 1913, 4). Two years later, Marie D. Webster accounted for it in her pioneering survey of American quilts ( Webster 1915, 173). The Canadian provenance of the pattern was indicated in a summer 1932 issue of The Detroit Free Press: ‘We would be willing to wager that the design was thought out by some Canadian grandmother . . . the maple leaf is an emblem very dear to Canada’ (“Maple Leaf Quilt Pattern is Favorite” 1932, 5). And in the fall of 1934, The Nancy Page, a national column by Florence La Ganke (1886–1972), features the pattern ‘from Canada’ sent by ‘Miss Lavania Whitelaw of Whitney, Ontario’ (1934, 17). This evidence suggests that the maple leaf block pattern was popular amongst quiltmakers within the geographical range of the

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sugar maple tree itself, an ecosystem that spans Southern Ontario, as well as the Great Lakes and Northeastern regions of the United States. With one exception, all of the historical maple leaf quilts and textual references to the maple leaf block pattern hail from this region, including Webster’s book, which was penned in Indiana and published in New York, and La Ganke’s column, which was issued from Ohio. Therefore, while Canadians have claimed the maple leaf as a symbol of national heritage, the maple leaf emblem crossed national boundaries and found use value throughout the tree’s ecological range. Dodge herself might have associated the maple leaf with its ecology given that the history of her township, Edwardsburgh, would indicate that that she keenly identified with the sugar maple tree and its environment. Edwardsburgh is home to the oldest continuous maple sugar bush operation in Ontario, the Drummond family sugar bush, which began supplying neighbouring families sometime between 1794 and 1803 and began its commercial production of maple sugar and syrup in 1817 (Edwardsburgh Historians 1993, 93). The establishment and expansion of this historical sugar bush thus corresponds to the settler colonial history in the region, where the first English-speaking settlers were United Empire Loyalists who migrated North after the American Revolution and British families who arrived in the years following the Napoleonic Wars (Warren 1997, 13). The longstanding social and community significance of the Drummond family sugar bush is exemplified by its seasonal sugaring off parties, which would have been popular gatherings during Dodge’s lifetime. At these events, kettles full of tree sap boiled over outdoor fires and finished maple syrup was cooled in the snow to make candy. Today, the Drummond’s Sugar Bush operates a seasonal pancake house in this same tradition (Edwardsburgh Historians 1993, 93). It is likely that Dodge attended the Drummond family’s sugaring off parties, forging emotional ties to sugar maples and bodily ties to their foodstuff. Any kinship Dodge may have felt for the sugar maple would have been compounded by the fact that women were historically the chief maple sugar makers in the backwoods (Traill 1854, 141).

Dodge’s quilt as an exercise in natural observation The notion that a Victorian Canadian woman like Dodge would have felt any profound connection to the country’s trees and forests is incompatible with the masculine North American landscape painting tradition that was ascendant in her lifetime. In his landmark survey of Canadian painting (1966), J. Russell Harper credits John A. Fraser (1838–1898), Otto Jacobi (1812–1901), and other European men painting in Canada during the Victorian period for representing ever-wilder terrain with scientific precision, a combination of subject and style that he claims suited the pragmatic materialism and commercialism of a young, vigorous country (1977, 180–181). Harper’s text shows that Canada’s nineteenth-century art tradition has long been celebrated for identifying the country’s landscapes with heroic men. The potency of this gender bias is stressed

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by art historian Marilyn McKay, who writes that artistic women were less likely to produce panoramic views of Canadian land because the form was considered masculine (2011, 58). The gender politics of landscape painting were particularly pronounced in Canada in part because its punishing environment satisfied the desire to define the culture in masculine terms. Canada’s rugged geography and cold climate were seen to counteract the enervating, emasculating effects of modern life, thereby producing a ‘more manly’ population than that of the United States (McKay 2011, 159). Formally, Dodge’s quilt has less in common with landscape painting then than it does with nineteenth-century herbaria, collections of pressed, mounted plant specimens that were produced by men and women alike throughout the nineteenth century. In England, women of the upper and emerging middle classes were sanctioned to gather, order, and study plants as early as the late eighteenth century. Historian Ann B. Shteir attributes this phenomenon to a genre of popular science book written predominately by British women that narrate the impartation of plant knowledge from maternal teachers to young, keen female pupils (1996, 50). For example, An Introduction to Botany, in a Series of Familiar Letters (1796) by Priscilla Wakefield was written as a correspondence between two sisters, one of whom is receiving botany lessons from her governess (2015). Such texts modelled a gendered form of scientific inquiry that was familial and domestic. Nature walks and household study were the appropriate means and methods for satisfying a woman’s scientific curiosity about the natural world (Woodhead 1998, 48). Given the scale and strictures of botanical art and collection, it is easy to see why these activities were designated the polite, feminine counterpoints to the masculine pursuit of landscape views. That said, plant science also provided women with a way to participate in the public sphere. It is possible that Dodge’s quilt imagery is informed by women’s interest in botany, which was transplanted to Canada by British settlers. While the most prominent Canadian female naturalists were the wives of British colonial administrators and landowners living in early nineteenth-century Lower Canada (Quebec), including Ann Mary Perceval (1790–1876) and Countess Dalhousie (1786–1839), botanical science was quick to democratize and ultimately took root on Canada’s farms and homesteads (Huneault 2018, 153). Art historian Kristina Huneault and historian Eileen Woodhead both cite the texts and herbaria left by Catharine Parr Traill (1802–1899) as proof that settler women hailing from England’s middle classes made time for plant science in the backwoods of Upper Canada (Ontario) (Huneault 2018, 153; Woodhead 1998, 37). As children, Traill and her younger sister, Susanna Moodie, were educated in the fields of science, literature, and history by their father, who did not live to see how his daughters applied their knowledge and abilities as settlers in Canada. Traill’s penchant for creating herbaria suggests that she was encouraged to develop natural collections in order to compensate for the fact that she was not as skilled a f lower painter as her sister (Fowler 1982, 56–57). Traill’s surviving herbaria include mosses and tree leaves, showing that botanizing in nineteenth Canada was not exclusive to f lowers. In fact, several maple leaves are pressed into an herbarium that Traill

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made for her grandson, Willie Traill, in the 1890s, which is now in the collection of the Peterborough Museum and Archive in Peterborough, Ontario. Catharine Parr Traill’s texts provide the best evidence that Dodge may have either actively participated in plant science or closely observed the natural world under its cultural inf luence. For example, in the introduction to her pioneering Studies of Plant Life in Canada (1885), Traill attributes her keen appreciation for the natural world to her relocating from England to Upper Canada in 1830 – within a year of Dodge’s birth in the region – and she casts her natural observations as a means for familiarity and attachment: ‘Every f lower and shrub and forest tree awakened an interest in my mind, so that I began to thirst for more intimate knowledge of them’ (Traill 1885, 2). In addition to prescribing close looking as the means for cultivating a relationship with one’s surroundings, Traill signals that British Canadian women in Upper Canada were jointly invested in studying the regional f lora when she thanks the wives of the region’s oldest settlers and her Indigenous neighbours for imparting their plant lore to her (Traill 1885, 3). In addition to expressing a positive recognition of the traditional knowledge held by the Indigenous peoples, Traill makes a positive correspondence between settler women and nature here. She specifically thanks her friend Frances Stewart, an older Irish settler in the region, for lending her a copy of Frederick Pursh’s North American Flora (1814) (Traill 1885, 2). Stewart and Traill’s shared interest in this text indicates that British women were as invested in questions of land and nature as their male counterparts in nineteenth century Canada.

Dodge’s quilt and the settler colonial landscape Dodge may have been engaging with such questions in her quilt top, as the local significance of her maple leaf design would have had broader political meaning in late nineteenth-century Ontario. While the collection and study of plants by settler women in colonial Canada might have been initially an extension of their British education or habituation to North America, the institution of the Dominion of Canada in 1867 infused this women’s work with new public meaning. According to Huneault, women’s herbaria and other botanical collections and activities contributed to the symbolic work of translating settlers into so-called native Canadians, ‘the legitimate holders of a land they increasingly thought of as uniquely theirs’ (Huneault 2018, 166). Given that Canada’s northernmost border in 1867 essentially corresponded to the northernmost edge of the sugar maple’s habitat, which we previously mapped onto the geographic range of the maple leaf block pattern, it becomes more difficult to parse the difference between the ecological and national meaning of Dodge’s quilt design. What’s more, if Dodge’s maple leaves are at all informed by European plant science and classification systems, then it could be argued that her homecraft represented a threat to traditional Indigenous epistemologies (Huneault 2018, 163). Dodge’s quilt has further settler-colonial consequence if we understand her imagery in relation to Ontario’s parklands, institutionalized natural heritage sites

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where commercial interests superseded the treaty rights of Indigenous people. Well before the establishment of provincial parks, Upper Canada’s first settlers were antagonistic towards trees and forests, which they regarded as obstacles to prosperity at best and menacing at worst (Smith 1990, 74). Significantly, the establishment of Western agriculture in the region required that vast areas of woodland be cleared, a process that including felling and burning countless trees. Some communities worked collaboratively to deforest the land (Russell 1989, 134). The threatening aspect of the forest may simply have derived from its unfamiliarity. This is articulated by Ann Langton (1804–1893), an English woman who settled in Upper Canada in the 1830s, who appreciated the aesthetic beauty of the forest but regarded it with trepidation: ‘I am aware of the liability there is of getting entangled in the forest if you venture far, and am very cautious’ (1904, 87). The perceived danger posed by trees and forests arguably accounts for the regional popularity of the log cabin quilt design in mid-nineteenth century as its abstract motif typically builds from a red or yellow square that represents the glowing hearth and relative security of the indoors. Once many of the region’s woodlands had been cleared for roads, railways, farms, towns, and cities, the anxiety that had been caused by their vastness and fixedness was replaced by worry for their scarcity and vulnerability, and Dodge’s maple leaf quilt may express her desire to see Ontario’s natural heritage protected (Smith 1990, 74). According to historian Alan Smith, the sense that Ontario’s wilderness was at risk of disappearing began percolating in the 1860s, and new sentiment for the region’s forests found form in conservationist movements in the 1880s (1990, 74). Traill expresses conservationist sentiment and anticipates the ongoing climate change debates in her Studies of Plant Life in Canada: It seems now to be an established fact that the climate of many countries has been materially affected by the total destruction of its native forests [and] it behoves the legislators of this country to devise laws to protect future generations from similar evils, by preventing the entire destruction of the native trees. (1885, 152–153) Of the four maple leaf quilts that survive in Ontario museum collections, three date to between the mid-1870s and 1900s, perhaps indicating that the pattern corresponds to the shift in attitude towards the region’s trees and forests that ultimately led to the establishment of provincial parks in the 1890s. Recent case studies show that Indigenous women and settler Canadian women have historically expressed concerns regarding cultural and environmental sustainability in their material cultures. For example, art historian Jolene Rickard has studied the organic imagery beaded at the edge of the skirt Caroline G. Parker (1828–1892) wears in a daguerreotype dating to the 1840s. Rickard argues that Parker, who belonged to the Tonawanda Band of the Seneca Nation in the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, employed beadwork to maintain the cosmological

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ties to her ancestral homelands that had been upset by American expansion: ‘The intricate role women play as guardians of the earth is represented on the border of [her] traditional skirt’ (2015, 119). Similarly, Ellen Easton McLeod’s history of the Canadian Handicraft Guild (1999) casts its founders, Alice Peck (1855–1943) and May Phillips (1856–1937), as shrewd Victorian women determined to protect Canada’s culture of self-sufficiency from the ascendant industrial economy and eager to legitimize the cultural contributions of women and Indigenous people. To these ends, they recovered and preserved historical recipes and techniques for vegetable dyeing using natural materials (McLeod 1999, 298). These examples suggest that common historical homecrafts, like Dodge’s quilt, may have been made with social and political causes in mind. Whatever noble principles Dodge’s quilt might represent are complicated by her identity politics and her materials. Dodge and other Victorian Canadians would have regarded Ontario’s first park, Algonquin Provincial Park, as their pristine wilderness, ignoring the fact that its name refers to the Indigenous peoples whose hunting, fishing, and trapping rights were curtailed by the provincial government as part of the parkland’s institution in 1893 (Hodgins and Cannon 1998, 53, 58). The history of Indigenous civilizations on Canada’s lands and waterways conf licts with the settler-colonial ideal of nature as static and untouched. This fantasy allowed for Indigenous people living in passive harmony with their surroundings but only historically, as the demise of Indigenous populations was an integral part of North America’s settler-colonial imaginary and its need for parks. As writer Thomas King wryly describes it, ‘spend your evening at Dead Indian campground, and in the morning cycle across Dead Indian Meadows on your way to Dead Indian Peak’ (2012, 56). Conservation ethics were therefore not extended to Indigenous communities and were in fact wielded to justify the restriction or annulment of the land claims that living Algonquin people had on Canada’s parklands. The fact that commercial logging was permitted in Algonquin Park from its beginning underlines that Canada’s concept of natural heritage and the designs that support it have long caused harm to Indigenous peoples and bolstered extraction industries (Hodgins and Cannon, 59). The imported, industrially produced materials that Dodge used to make her quilt further undermine any romantic reading of its motif. Significantly, Dodge’s quilt is made of cotton. North America, including British North America, accounted for over half of England’s cotton exports by 1795, and historian Douglas McCalla has found that cotton was one of the most frequently purchased goods at Ontario’s country general stores during the colonial period (2015, 115, 153). The cotton in Dodge’s quilt presumably dates to after the American Civil War, which ended slavery in the United States and forced England’s cotton mills to diversify their supply chains. As such, the English cotton stocked by Dodge’s general store would have been made from raw cotton produced by sharecroppers in the United States, Egypt, South America, or India (Beckert 2004, 1424). Dodge’s dyestuffs were also made from imported, store-bought materials, further connecting her

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quilt to a global economy and distancing it from the local ecology. Early Canadian women did not necessarily make dye from local plants alone even before the first synthetic dyes appeared in 1856. Indeed, the 20 pieced maple leaves on Dodge’s quilt that now read as brown were originally a bright shade of green, the recipe for which would have required goldenrod, which grows abundantly in Ontario, and indigo, a blue dye historically made from the leaves of tropical plants (Traill 1854, 176). Indigo was largely sourced in India and available at general stores (McCalla 2015, 173). As a product of the industrial revolution and global trade, Dodge’s quilt resists being read as a demonstration of ecological and social sustainability.

Conclusion The instability of Dodge’s green dye has resulted in fading, a material transformation that mimics the depletion of chlorophyll in maple leaves during the autumn season. This poetic material transformation exemplifies the relationship between Canadian design and nature that this chapter attempts to outline. As we have seen, Dodge’s quilt figures in a design history forged by Canadian and American women whose homecrafts were informed by their natural surroundings, indicating that the designs historically produced by women for the home might contribute to ecological identities as well as national ones. Ecological and national ideals fuse in Dodge’s maple leaf quilt, which was made at a time when Ontarians were developing both feelings of empathy and a sense of entitlement towards wild nature. These seemingly conf licting impulses find form in the province’s first parklands, which enshrined forests as natural heritage in the interest of settler culture. The personal and political dimensions of Dodge’s quilt stress that homecraft can carry the weight of context, entreating us to afford historical women’s work the same historical gravitas that it has afforded Canada’s masculine landscape painting tradition. Barred from taking a heroic posture in visual culture, settler Canadian women represented their romantic views of the natural world using deceptively simple designs that persist in today’s popular imagination. The maple leaf motif that repeats on this quilt duly contains the complex and often contradictory views of the natural world that were typical in the second half of the nineteenth century and arguably reinforces the settler-colonial worldview that was imposed upon Canada’s Indigenous landscapes and people during this period.

Note 1 On the rose, thistle, and shamrock, see the chapter in this volume by Zoë Hendon, p. 174–6.

References Beckert, Sven. 2004. “Emancipation and Empire: Reconstructing the Worldwide Web of Cotton Production in the American Civil War.” The American History Review 109, no. 5 (December): 1405–1438. Burnham, Dorothy. 1975. Pieced Quilts of Ontario. Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum.

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Edwardsburgh Historians. 1993. Edwardsburgh: Township History. Brockville: Henderson Printing. Fallan, Kjetil. 2019. “Introduction.” In The Culture of Nature in the History of Design, edited by Kjetil Fallan, 1–16. London: Routledge. Fowler, Marian. 1982. The Embroidered Tent: Five Gentlewomen in Early Canada. Toronto: Anansi. Gentry, Kynan. 2015. History, Heritage, and Colonialism: Historical Consciousness, Britishness, and Cultural Identity in New Zealand, 1870–1940. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Gentry, Kynan, and Laurajane Smith. 2019. “Critical Heritage Studies and the Legacies of the Late Twentieth Century Heritage Canon.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 25, no. 11: 1148–1168. Harper, J. Russell. 1977[1966]. Painting in Canada: A History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Heritage Canada. 2020. Timeline: The Maple Leaf. www.canada.ca/content/dam/pch/ documents/services/unofficial-symbols-canada/Timeline_MapleLeaf_EN.pdf. Hodgins, Bruce W., and Kerry A. Cannon. 1998. “The Aboriginal Presence in Ontario Parks and Other Protected Places.” In Changing Parks: The History, Future and Cultural Context of Parks and Heritage Landscapes, edited by John Marsh and Bruce W. Hodgins, 50–76. Toronto: Dundurn. Huneault, Kristina. 2018. I’m Not Myself at All: Women, Art, and Subjectivity in Canada. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. King, Thomas. 2012. The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America. Toronto: Anchor Canada. La Ganke, Florence. 1934. “It’s the Maple Leaf from Canada.” The Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), October 30. Langton, Anne. 1904. Langton Records: Journals and Letters from Canada, 1837–1846. Edinburgh: R & R Clark. “The Lay of the Emblems.” 1849. In The Maple Leaf or Canadian Annual: A Souvenir for 1849, edited by John McCaul, 3. Toronto: Henry Rowsell. Louter, David. 2003. “National Parks and the Wilderness Ideal.” Ecological Restoration 21, no. 4 (December): 251–253. “Maple Leaf Quilt Pattern Is Favorite.” 1932. Detroit Free Press (Detroit, MI), July 25. McCalla, Douglas. 2015. Consumers in the Bush: Shopping in Rural Upper Canada. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Mckay, Marylin J. 2011. Picturing the Land: Narrating Territories in Canadian Landscape Art 1500–1950. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. McKendry, Ruth. 1979. Quilts and Other Bed Coverings in the Canadian Tradition. Toronto: Van Nostrand Reinhold. McLeod, Ellen Easton. 1999. In Good Hands: The Women of the Canadian Handicrafts Guild. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Millison, Esther. 1913. “In Our Fancy Work Department: The Maple Leaf Block Quilt.” The Weekly Eagle (Wichita, KS), October 31. Rickard, Jolene. 2015. “Case Study: Arts of Dispossession.” In Picturing the Americas: Landscape Painting from Tierra del Fuego to the Arctic, edited by Peter John Brownlee, Valeria Piccoli, and Georgina Uhlyarik, 115–119. New Haven: Yale University Press. Russell, Peter A. 1989. “Forests into Farmland: Upper Canadian Clearing Rates, 1822– 1839.” In Historical Essays on Upper Canada: New Perspectives, edited by J. K. Johnson and Bruce G. Wilson, 131–149. Ottawa: Carelton University Press.

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Shteir, Ann B. 1996. Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Smith, Alan. 1990. “Farms, Forests and Cities: The Image of the Land and the Rise of the Metropolis in Ontario, 1860–1914.” In Old Ontario: Essays in Honor of J.M.S. Careless, edited by David Keane and Colin Read, 71–94. Toronto: Dundurn Press. Traill, Catharine Parr. 1854. The Female Emigrants Guide, and Hints on Canadian Housekeeping. Toronto: Maclear and Company. Traill, Catharine Parr. 1885. Studies of Plant Life in Canada. Ottawa: A.S. Wooburn, Printer and Publisher. Wakefield, Priscilla. 2015[1796]. An Introduction to Botany, in a Series of Familiar Letters with Illustrative Engravings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Warren, Susan. 1997. Hub of the Rideau: A History of South Crosby Township. Township of South Crosby: Local Architectural Conservation Advisory Committee. Webster, Marie D. 1948[1915]. Quilts: Their Story and How to Make Them. New York: Tudor Publishing Company. Woodhead, Eileen. 1998. Early Canadian Gardening: An 1827 Nursery Catalogue. Montreal and Kingston: McGill Queen’s University Press.

13 DESIGN, POLITICS, AND CROATIAN FOLK HERITAGE Gingerbread and lace Heidi A. Cook

In 2003, UNESCO adopted the Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage. Despite having a population of about 4 million, the country of Croatia has registered 17 expressions of intangible heritage since the list was begun, including many items linked to folk culture. Only a handful of much more populous countries has surpassed Croatia in terms of the number of registered cultural expressions. This chapter compares recent graphic designs and discourse surrounding Croatian folk heritage with that of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the Habsburg monarchy and the interwar Kingdom of Yugoslavia. In contrast to the discourse surrounding Croatian folk heritage in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which was focused on financially benefitting rural communities, today’s intangible heritage designation seeks to lend legitimacy to the distinctiveness of Croatia’s national identity from the identity of the former Yugoslavia.

Two seljakinje1 In 2013, in Zagreb, Croatia, I attended a performance by a group that has been collecting and performing folk dances from the various regions of Croatia, with their corresponding folk dress and song, for over 70 years. The National Folk Dance Ensemble of Croatia LADO regularly performs a roster of folk dances in polished, beautiful presentations for national and international audiences. Dances, ceremonies, and types of singing from every region of the present-day country of Croatia are brought together in their performances to present a seamless representation of the nation’s culture. This includes, among other acts, the silent kolo (circle dance) performed in the Dalmatian Hinterlands, a type of twopart singing done on the Istrian peninsula, a staging of the annual pageant of carnival bell ringers from the area in and around the town of Kastav, and a DOI: 10.4324/9781003096146-18

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re-enactment of the procession of the cross that takes place every year for the duration of the night before Good Friday on the island of Hvar. These types of dancing, singing, and ceremonies also have in common the fact that they have been registered by Croatia with UNESCO as intangible cultural heritage. In all, LADO officially incorporates at least nine registered items of ICH into their performances, more if you include types of craft registered as ICH and featured in the performance: wooden painted children’s toys from Hrvatsko Zagorje, rediced gingerbread hearts, and handcrafted lace. What I found remarkable about the performance was the way that LADO repackaged centuries-old traditional folk culture as something fresh and contemporary. Nowhere was this more apparent than the brochure for their 2013 performance, designed by the innovative Zagreb design firm Bruketa&Žinić (now Bruketa&Žinić&Grey). ‘LADO’ tumbles across the upper-right portion of the brochure cover, playfully ascending in size and then diminishing (Figure 13.1). In the remaining space, a woman in folk dress asserts her presence. Above the waist, she appears in monochromatic black and white, dressed in a white blouse with a simple, plain bodice, hair braided up onto her head and right arm held aloft as if marking the end of a performance. But below the waist, she has a monumentally large and lively skirt that occupies the remaining space of the cover. A colourful amalgamation of collaged photographs of woven and embroidered folk-dress ornamentation crisscross this mountain of a skirt. The designer has played with scale such that embroidered ribbons appear to be at the same scale as the woman’s torso. It brings together folk textiles from a number of Croatian regions. The assemblage of the skirt indicates both the variety of folk culture and, at the same time, the distinctiveness of the folk traditions on which LADO bases its performances. This collage dazzles the eye, but it also raises the question: does this postmodern appropriative design help Croatians understand their relationship to heritage? I could not avoid seeing parallels between the design of this LADO brochure and an early twentieth-century poster that I had encountered in the archive of Croatian painter Maksimilijan Vanka (1889–1964). In 1928, Vanka designed a poster together with Zdenka Sertić (1899–1986) advertising a special Exhibition of Folk Handicraft (Izložba narodnih radova) hosted in conjunction with the tenth annual Zagreb Trade Fair (Zagrebački Zbor) (Figure 13.2). In this poster, the two artists also centralized and enlarged the figure of a woman in folk dress. The published articles surrounding this exhibition repeatedly emphasized the importance of the seljakinja – female peasant or village dweller – in creating and preserving folk art. Sertić herself referred to the seljakinja in her published review of the exhibition (Sertić 1928). Vanka and Sertić’s central female peasant figure looms over the line of figures which parade behind her: women with brimming baskets on their heads, a man with a scythe for harvest, and strong cattle. It is a festive atmosphere filled with banners in red, white, and blue. This seljakinja holds aloft two wreaths each encircling a Z – the double Z being the trademark of the Zagreb Trade Fair.

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FIGURE 13.1

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Bruketa&Žinić&Grey, National Folk Dance Ensemble of Croatia LADO performance brochure, 2013, inkjet print, 30 × 11 cm.

Source: Courtesy of National Folk Dance Ensemble of Croatia LADO.

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FIGURE 13.2

Maksimilijan Vanka and Zdenka Sertić, Poster for the X. Zagreb Trade Exhibition, 1928, lithograph, 26.7 × 21.7 cm.

Source: Courtesy of Vanka-Brasko Family Archive, Rushland, Pennsylvania.

A quick glance suggests there is much connecting how these two designs, almost a century apart, attempt to communicate the richness of Croatian folk heritage to audiences both domestic and international. In this chapter, I situate twentyfirst-century presentations of Croatian folk heritage in a longer history of the promotion of folk culture and folk art in the Croatian regions beginning as early as the late nineteenth century. By comparing past and present in the Croatian

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context, this research seeks to examine the roles of Croatian institutions in shaping the discourse surrounding folk heritage and contemplates how that discourse affects visual representations of heritage. As the following will show, the idea of ‘vanishing’ folk culture and a focus on economic gain from the heritage industry emerged as early as the late nineteenth century. However, the identities being represented through Croatian folk heritage have changed over time, as have the purposes of sharing folk culture. This Croatian case study can help us understand the nuanced ways that design can manipulate heritage into a variety of shifting national identities. In this chapter, I observe how this twenty-first-century depiction of heritage reinforces the monumental identity of a sovereign Croatian nation, whereas the early twentieth-century design instrumentalized heritage to financially benefit rural communities and towns in a fight for economic equality. These presentations of Croatian folk heritage are best understood with reference to the country’s past. The contemporary Croatian state claims its origins in a tenth-century medieval triune kingdom that united the regions that constitute Croatia today – Central Croatia, Slavonia, and Dalmatia. These regions became part of the Kingdom of Hungary and were eventually divided under Hungarian and Austrian rule in the Habsburg monarchy, which provided protection just as it threatened Hungarian cultural hegemony. When the First World War ended with the collapse of Austria-Hungary, Croatian politicians and intellectuals fought for the creation of a South Slav (Yugoslav) state. The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes was a constitutional monarchy with a Serbian king. During the Second World War, Nazi Germany, with the urging of Mussolini, placed a group of Croatian fascists in control of a violent Croatian state. The Allied powers supported Josip Broz Tito’s Yugoslav Partisan forces during the war and his creation of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. After Tito’s death in 1980, Croatia declared independence in 1991, helping initiate the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, resulting in conf lict with ethnic Serbs on both sides of the country’s borders. This brief history shows how nationalism in Croatia took a variety of forms over the decades. Historians of this region remain occupied with questions about the relationship of Yugoslav identity to the ethnic identities of Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Bosniaks, and others in the former Yugoslavia (Djokić 2003). Despite changing political alliances and modernization, localized folk heritage has largely remained embedded in the same villages and regions, but its documentation, repackaging, and promotion have come to stand in for a variety of collective imperial, national, ethnic, and regional identities over the last 200 years. The two designs examined in this chapter – created before and after Croatian nationhood – show remarkably similar depictions of heritage despite the shifting political grounds. In Southeast Europe, where many cultural practices are shared across borders, the question that arises often in relation to elements of folk culture is one of ownership. Whose heritage is this? In the early twentieth century, Croatian institutions used exhibitions and promotions of folk culture to foster a local identity but one that was careful not to compete too forcefully

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with imperial identities of the Habsburg monarchy and the interwar Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Now, Croatians no longer hesitate to use heritage in the name of a distinctly Croatian national identity, with the implicit underlying message often being that this nation could never have been fully subsumed into the ‘failed project’ of the former Yugoslavia. While older nations may be able to take their heritage for granted, Croatia is a relatively young state. Without evidence of sovereign nationhood in recent centuries, folk culture has, and continues to be, leveraged in its place and infused with political expectations. This chapter explores the intersections of heritage studies and design history – an intersection that is a paradox of sorts. Heritage studies focus on the preservation and presentation of traditional cultural objects and practices that have been passed down over generations. Design history, by contrast, is more often concerned with the modern moment when the process of design began to separate from the process of manufacture. To look at the intersections of these fields is to look at a moment when tradition and modernization collide. But I would argue that modernity and tradition have always been deeply intertwined in the Croatian regions and in many other locations in Central and Eastern Europe where industry was late to bloom. This conf lation of modernity and tradition stemmed in no small part from the fact that to participate in the modern world required a national identity with which to engage in international discourse, and Croatia’s national identity required folk culture to legitimize itself. Examining the intersections of heritage and design can help to illuminate the varied experiences of modernities outside the region traditionally understood as the West. In places that were not heavily industrialized, modernity still quickly took hold very often through design; printed journals, magazines, newspapers, films, tourism, and debates around design at the new museums of applied arts were prevalent throughout the Habsburg monarchy. This chapter addresses design on two levels. I consider how graphic design, like the examples discussed previously, presents folk heritage while also ref lecting on the history of Croatian folk textiles, which were manufactured for local and international consumption in the period of the late Habsburg monarchy and the interwar Kingdom of Yugoslavia. This chapter provides a brief overview – rather than a complete picture – of those attempts to produce and make visible traditional folk craft.

From economic to ethnographic: late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century displays of Croatian folk culture Izidor Kršnjavi and the Museum of Arts and Crafts In front of the irresistible power of the great spinning machine, which works with more than a thousand spindles, the portable distaff and the simple spindle are disappearing; in front of the products of the steam-powered loom the beautiful weavings of the primitive are disappearing; the chemistry displaces the simple empiricism of the art of dyeing, the simplest considerations of the national

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economy cannot approve that the whole youth of a village leads an idyllic shepherd’s life, at the same time embroidering, singing glorious songs, and drawing beautiful dried gourds. (Kršnjavi 1882, 137)2

These words about the Slavic cottage industry (Hausindustrie) were written in 1882 by Izidor Kršnjavi (1845–1927), one of the first trained art historians in the Croatian regions, who became the founding director of Zagreb’s Museum of Arts and Crafts (Muzej za umjetnost i obrt). The serious exhibition of Croatian folk arts domestically began with Kršnjavi. Already in the late nineteenth century, his words show how a discourse of folk culture vanishing under the wheels of modernization had been ingrained in the presentation and promotion of folk heritage. Kršnjavi’s writings also reveal how textiles were the focus of traditional applied arts in the Croatian regions from the late nineteenth century onwards, enduring to the present. It is notable that in Vanka and Sertić’s (1928) poster, the two columns of ornamentation framing the central figure recall the type of Croatian folk ornamentation carved into wooden distaffs which held f lax, wool, or other material as it was spun. The Museum of Arts and Crafts in Zagreb was founded in 1880 following the model of similar institutions that had recently been established in the capitals of the Habsburg monarchy – Vienna and Budapest (Galić and Gašparović 2011). These Central European museums of applied art were themselves modelled on the South Kensington Museum in London. In 1882, a school of applied arts was opened in Zagreb that later merged with the Museum of Arts and Crafts, and both were taken over by the provincial government in 1886. Historians of art and design have generally agreed that late nineteenth-century presentations of folk heritage in applied arts museums and exhibitions in Austria-Hungary had two main aims. First, design reformers attempted to use folk art to improve the aesthetics of manufactured products and, with it, to improve middle-class taste. In the face of an increasing number of mass-produced goods and under the guidance of some of the earliest art historians, new museums and schools of applied arts aimed to teach proper stylistic taste both to craftsmen through free courses and to the middle class through lectures, exhibitions, and social events. Second, applied arts museums figured into imperial propaganda, which aimed to appropriate folk culture from the various ends of the monarchy, including the Croatian regions, into a diverse but unified imperial imaginary (Houze 2008; Rampley 2012; Cordileone 2000). In the Croatian regions, folk crafts were seen not only as something of better taste but also as a financial asset. Kršnjavi understood folk art as a profitable and distinctly Croatian economic product. It is clear from exhibition reviews and from Kršnjavi’s own presentation in Vienna on Slavic Hausindustrie that Kršnjavi and his contemporaries were searching for the most financially and materially viable cottage industry through which to build the economy of the Croatian

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lands. Through comparisons to Russian and Bulgarian industry, Kršnjavi saw the textile industry as best option for Croatians and Serbians. The museum, in his vision, would create an educational collection with which to train young artisans, among them embroiders, who were, at least in part, reviving traditional Croatian textile practices. Kršnjavi believed the new museum would protect and develop cottage industry in the face of the threats of international industry, the decline of the communal household, and the introduction of Western culture and reforms.

Salamon Berger, Vladimir Tkalcˇic´, and the Ethnographic Museum At the turn of the century, Salamon Berger (1858–1934) and his collection of folk textiles played an important role in a newly founded Museum of Commerce and Craft (Trgovačko-obrtni muzej) in Zagreb that eventually became the Ethnographic Museum (Etnografski muzej) at the end of the First World War. In 1885, Berger, a Jewish industrialist and merchant originally from Slovakia, started procuring cottage industry products in Croatia to exhibit and sell abroad (Bušić 2009). His orders grew so large that, with support from the Croatian provincial government, he opened a school of weaving in 1902 where women made new textile products using designs and techniques from historic folk works. In 1904, the Chamber of Commerce and Craft (Trgovačko-obrtnička komora) built a new headquarters together with an adjoining museum. The goal of the new museum was to help modernize the region’s economy by aiding in the transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy ( Kolar-Dimitrijević 1992). However, from the outset, it faltered. Its mission overlapped with that of the Museum of Arts and Craft and the new Zagreb Trade Fair. In addition, at the centre of the new museum’s collection, installed in the rotunda on the first f loor in the architectural heart of the new museum space, was a collection of folk textiles from Berger. These handmade objects carefully produced by rural agricultural communities seemed to contradict the museum’s goal to create an industrial economy, but among the museum’s collections, it drew the most public attention. After many years of attempts to found an ethnographic museum, the Museum of Commerce was converted to the Ethnographic Department of the Croatian National Museum in 1919 and opened to the public in 1922 (Muraj 2006). The fact that these two institutions – a museum of commerce and a museum of ethnography – were so closely connected speaks volumes both to the agricultural nature of the Croatian economy at the time and the mindset that heritage could be utilized for economic gain. Berger was the founding director of the Ethnographic Museum until his retirement in 1925, but Vladimir Tkalčić (1881–1971), the museum’s first curator and later second director, was the defining force in shaping the new institution’s approach to folk culture. He had studied history, archaeology, and art history in Zagreb and Paris (Bušić 2009, 305). Under his guidance, the museum moved towards documenting only traditional ‘pure’ forms of peasant culture.

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If Kršnjavi had lamented that folk culture was fading in the wake of industry in 1882, Tkalčić raised the spectre of its very extinction: We need to make up for the missed opportunities in the past. Because traditional spirit ( – part of our national being, carrier of our own most beautiful characteristics, which we need to place as our most beautiful gift at the altar of the progress of our culture – ), harmonious spirit, with which our popular creations were made until now, that spirit is vanishing day by day in front of all of us. (quoted in Bonifačić 1996, 242) Tkalčić makes clear in this 1922 mission statement that the urgent purpose of the new museum was to record, classify, and preserve folk culture before it disappeared completely. This contrasted with Kršnjavi’s and Berger’s applied arts view of folk craft as living culture that needed to be revitalized for the benefit of the local economy. Tkalčić also stated openly that the motivation of this new ethnographic approach was to define the characteristics of a distinct national identity. He did so in a way that would not have been possible under the Habsburg monarchy, where the celebration of national identities was often suppressed in favour of an imperial unity. However, within the context of the newly founded Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, Tkalčić was purposely ambiguous about whether he was referring to the Croatian nation or the Yugoslav nation. In a set of guidelines for the new museum from later in 1922, Tkalčić skilfully manoeuvred between using ‘our nation’ to refer to Croatian culture and using ‘our nation’ to refer to the greater Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. Tkalčić wrote, ‘The goal of the Ethnographic department of the Croatian National Museum is to represent all life and culture of our nation, above all peasants, who to this day have best preserved our national characteristics’ (1922, 347). Here ‘our nation’ obviously refers to the Croatian nation, as the vast majority of the Ethnographic Museum’s collection and research was dedicated to the folk culture of regions traditionally considered by Croats as belonging to Croatia – Central Croatia, Slavonia, Dalmatia, and parts of Bosnia. Tkalčić continues that the museum’s collections are to be aimed especially at foreigners and ‘other parts of our nation, who for centuries were prevented by barriers from getting to know each other’ (1922, 347). In this second quotation, ‘our nation’ refers to the new state and the various South Slavic regions that have been politically divided for centuries. In both instances, he uses the same word – naš narod – to refer to ‘our nation’. This complicated juggling reveals that the new Ethnographic Museum was a more explicit site for building Croatian national identity through folk culture than the Museum of Arts and Crafts. However, like the applied arts museums before it, the new museum still had to operate within the confines of a larger state identity. Berger’s approach to collecting and displaying folk culture was at odds with the increasingly scientific ethnographic approach taken after the First World War

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that aimed to locate those specific qualities of the Croatian nation in folk culture. In the interwar period, the Ethnographic Museum in Zagreb instituted new professional, scientific approaches to collecting and displaying folk culture, which would eventually lay the groundwork for the documentation of folk practices as intangible heritage. After the First World War, folk culture was treated as living culture less frequently. Croatian nationalists stepped up their efforts to systematically record and classify the national qualities of ‘authentic’ peasant culture in ethnographic displays and museums before it disappeared forever. This transition from the applied arts approach that saw folk culture as economic good to the ethnographic approach that saw folk culture as nationalist symbol took place unevenly in Croatia’s largely rural and unindustrialized regions. This applied arts approach to folk art lingered well into the interwar period, overlapping with the development of the new Ethnographic Museum.

1928 Exhibition of Folk Handicraft poster It is not necessary to ask the already familiar question about the decline and extinction of folk art and folk works. It is more important to ask the question, can that, which still lives in our nation, still be saved and in what way [?] Folk art is a lively and integral part of our folk culture and national history. (Sertić 1928, n.p.)

This transition from an economic to an ethnographic approach to folk heritage was the context in which Maksimilijan Vanka and Zdenka Sertić designed their poster for the 1928 Exhibition of Folk Handicraft to take place at the Zagreb Trade Fair that year. Vanka taught at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb from 1920 to 1934, was known by this time for his paintings of folk culture, and had accompanied a research trip for the Ethnographic Museum. Sertić was an artist and educator working with the Ethnographic Museum who would go on to publish a number of illustrated books on Croatian folk culture. Their poster, like many promotions of folk art that came before and after, was aimed at bringing both domestic and international audiences to the fair to examine the folk heritage on display. In order to advertise throughout the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, the poster was printed in Serbo-Croatian in both the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets and translated into Slovenian. To advertise abroad, it was printed in French, German, and English. The Zagreb Trade Fair was an important Yugoslav economic space in the decades leading up to the Second World War and enduring through the initial years of the war. Vanka not only helped design the poster, he was also on the organizing committee for the exhibition, headed by Salamon Berger and consisting of prominent Zagreb museum directors and society women. The exhibition filled 20 rooms of a newly built economic-commercial school just across from the fair grounds. The exhibition was divided into two parts, neither of which represented new, scientific

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approaches to ethnographic collecting. The first section was composed of private collections and an exhibition put together by Berger for the 1925 Paris International Exhibition. This section included mostly historic embroidered and woven textiles such as folk dress and carpets. The second section was the work of the Women’s Association for the Preservation and Promotion of Croatian Peasant Art and Domestic Craft in Zagreb and Petrinjska (Ženska udruga za očuvanje i promicanje hrvatske seljačke umjetnosti i kućnoga obrta) and was meant to encapsulate living folk art. The woven textiles, embroidery, pottery, and jewellery on display in this section were for sale, and practicing rural craftswomen were invited to demonstrate their crafts in person. The historic exhibition was meant to educate the public – both domestic and foreign – about the handicraft of the Yugoslav peasant in order to encourage them to work towards its rejuvenation and preservation. This went hand in hand with what I would argue was seen as the main purpose of the exhibition for the women’s groups, Vanka, and Sertić: to bring the rural craftswoman into contact with an urban market and thus improve her socio-economic standing. Vanka and Sertić’s folkloric design for the poster was in line with the growing prominence of folk motifs in the late 20s and early 30s in the Zagreb Trade Fair posters and on the covers of popular Croatian magazines, including Svijet (World) and Ženski List (Women’s Paper). Folk motifs were even integrated into popular fashions of the time. For their poster, these two artists associated with the ethnographic museum transformed folk dress into something fantastical. It includes exaggerated elements of folk dress from several regions of Croatia and perhaps even Serbia rather than any one specific location. The wedding headdress is based on that worn around the town of Bistra in the Zagorje region north of Zagreb. The f loral pattern is based on folk dress in the Pokuplje region around Sisak and Moslavina. The black bodice is rarely seen in Croatian folk dress, though sometimes in the Pokuplje region, but it figures prominently in Serbian folk dress. This aligns with the fact that the exhibition did not aim to be a scientific display of distinct Croatian folk culture and actually contained handicrafts from Croatia, Serbia, and Bosnia. The poster certainly does not record, classify, and preserve folk culture in the way that Vanka and Sertić’s colleague Tkalčić promoted and which the two artists practised in the context of the museum research. These early Zagreb Trade Fair posters never use the word Croatian – hrvatski – and only sometimes the ambiguous word narodni – meaning ‘folk’ or ‘national’. Words like narodni or naš (meaning our) are ambiguous enough to be read as folk, Croatian, or Yugoslavian. In a similar way, the woman’s ribbons in red, white, and blue – echoed in the f lags – could be read as Yugoslav or Croatian. They purposefully present an ambiguous patriotism. It is noteworthy that both the twenty-first-century design for the National Folk Dance Ensemble of Croatia LADO performance and this early twentieth-century design rely on vaguely fantastical or composite folk dress that allows the figures to stand in as the bearers of traditional culture – feminine allegories of the nation. My observations are not intended to dispute what constitutes authentic folk dress but instead to probe the constructed nature of national allegories.

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Vanka and Sertić’s approach to folk culture in this exhibition and in their poster closely aligned with an applied arts view of folk culture as living culture, which is emphasized by Sertić in her comment on the exhibition. However, if applied arts museums had used this approach to push imperial unity and improve middle-class taste and if Berger used it for economic and social advancements, Vanka and Sertić had a different motivation. In their poster, the massive seljakinja’s billowing skirt serves almost as a shield for the parade of peasant men and women at her feet. It was for these rural lower classes that Vanka and Sertić made a political statement about the economic plight of the peasant by participating in an exhibition that carried on Kršnjavi’s view of folk art as a profitable and distinctly Croatian economic product. That year’s Zagreb Trade Fair also contained a display by agricultural professor Oto Frangeš (1870–1945) about muchneeded agricultural reform. It informed viewers that the 1 to 4 hectares received by the average Croatian settler was much smaller than the average minimum of other European countries and indeed too small to create an economically strong peasantry. Many saw the fact that Croatian peasants owned only small plots of land as the root of Croatian impoverishment. These small tracts of land could not produce enough to pay the taxes, debt, and church dues owed regularly by rural peasants. The Zagreb Trade Fair became a venue in which to secure political rights for rural populations within Yugoslavia, and Vanka and Sertić’s poster helped make a case for this strong, empowered peasant.

Celebrating and criticizing the intangible: promoting Croatian folk culture in the twenty-first century In 2003, UNESCO adopted the Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH). This new convention was formulated to encourage states to make policies to protect, promote, and pass down several types of ‘living’ cultural heritage from generation to generation. By April 2006, 30 countries had adopted the convention, including Croatia, which ratified it with enthusiasm in June 2005. By 2014, 142 countries had ratified it, making it one of UNESCO’s most quickly adopted conventions. Despite having a population of only 4 million, Croatia has registered 17 ‘elements’ of ICH since the list was begun. Croatia’s list of ICH is dominated by the type of ephemeral and performative practices and festivities that LADO incorporates in its performances – singing, dancing, rituals, and social practices – but states can also register types of traditional craftsmanship. Only a handful of countries in Asia and Western Europe – much more populous countries – have surpassed Croatia in terms of the number of registered elements of ICH. There is little doubt that Croatia has a rich variety of musical, visual, sartorial, performative, and culinary traditions, but, as Croatian folklorist Marijana Hameršak and ethnologist Iva Pleše have also noted, UNESCO intangible heritage listings are not evidence that Croatia has inherently richer or more diverse traditions than other countries. The UNESCO system relies on the willingness and enthusiasm of ethnographers, folklorists, bureaucrats, and the communities practicing traditional culture in a country to

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document traditional practices and apply for the special UNESCO designation (Hameršak and Pleše 2018). As Hameršak and Pleše note, academics in Croatia are pressured to produce ‘useful’ knowledge. UNESCO’s tidy packaging of intangible cultural practices serves the state by making culture easily marketable for international tourism. This is not new: institutions in Croatia have attempted to profit from heritage for over a century. Croatia’s enthusiasm for ICH highlights some of the complexity of the relationship between intangible heritage and UNESCO’s earlier world heritage designation that predates ICH by three decades. The 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage is often seen as a reaction to, or broadening of, the 1972 UNESCO Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage – a convention which moved to protect buildings and monuments as well as natural sites of major significance. Despite being quickly ratified by a number of countries, the ICH convention has not been signed by several economically advanced Western nations, including the United Kingdom, Australia, and the United States. Heritage scholar Laurajane Smith argues that the notion of intangible heritage presents a challenge to traditional Western notions of heritage often based in monumental, tangible architecture and sites that confirm rather than complicate accepted historical narratives (Smith 2006). Intangible heritage, on the other hand, lends itself better to the way that many cultures, especially outside what is traditionally considered the West, produce and transmit culturally significant knowledge and practices (Smith 2006). Croatia has ten sites of registered world and cultural heritage and is not among the nations with the most registered sites as it is with ICH. Croatia’s split emphasis on tangible and intangible heritage could be seen as revealing how Croatia and other areas of Southeast Europe were inf luenced by the traditional West but also by interactions with the Ottoman Empire and Russia. Many of Croatia’s world heritage sites are historically linked to Western Europe, including Ancient Rome and the Republic of Venice. However, Southeast Europe is also a region that has traditionally been ‘orientalized’ by Western Europe, elevating and romanticizing its folk culture in the eyes of Western Europeans ( Bakić-Hayden and Hayden 1992). The intangible cultural heritage designations help promote an orientalized vision of Croatia. Many ethnographers and cultural commentators have noted problems with UNESCO’s ICH listings including the aura of ownership that they appear to bestow. This is especially problematic in Southeast Europe where ethnic identity is largely defined by religion, but many cultural practices are shared across ethnic and national borders. Long before the inauguration of UNESCO’s ICH convention, cultural critic Danilo Kiš noted disputes in the former Yugoslavia over ownership of heritage practices. ‘Nationalism is also kitsch. In its Serbo-Croat variant, for instance, it is the controversy over the ethnic origin of our gingerbread hearts’ (Kiš 1983, 17, originally from Čas anatomije, 1978). Kiš labelled such claims to folk heritage in the name of nationalist politics as nationalist kitsch, and certainly such fights have at their core the desire to bolster distinct national identities. Registering folk culture with UNESCO as ICH both helped legitimize

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Croatia’s identity as separate from Yugoslavia and also reaffirmed those distinctions as Croatia entered into the European Union in July 2013. Croatian politicians are using intangible heritage as a political competition. One deputy of the Croatian Ministry of Culture commented on Croatia’s ICH designations, ‘Number four in the world, number one in Europe’ (Hameršak and Pleše 2018, 143). Other former Yugoslavian nations have not displayed as much enthusiasm for the convention as Croatia despite sharing many of the same cultural practices. Serbia has registered three elements of intangible heritage, Slovenia four, and Bosnia three. In Croatia, intangible heritage is used to reinforce nationalist narratives, even by laying claim to traditions shared with its erstwhile combatants.

Revealing the politics of heritage What can we learn from this comparison of past and present in the Croatian context that may help us understand how design can shape the way that folk heritage is presented? This chapter has explored the context of two designs that publicized Croatian heritage separated by 85 years. They display visual similarities that reveal the perceived centrality of women as the producers and bearers of Croatian heritage and that visual constructions of identity often rely on composite, imagined constructions of folk culture. Despite these continuities, these two designs work towards different aims. Since the late Habsburg monarchy, Croatian folk culture has been leveraged for the economic benefit of the nation. I argue that Vanka and Sertić followed this model, ennobling the image of the peasant woman in order to raise the economic status of the rural poor. On the other hand, Croatia’s twenty-first-century desire to register elements of ICH focuses on a narrowing of Croatian national identity that divides rather than unifies. It benefits the producers of culture less directly and often denies the fact that those outside the arbitrary boundaries of the nation in the former Yugoslavia share similar cultural practices. In my experience, one of the most troubling aspects of heritage sites and heritage performances is a frequent denial that heritage is utilized for political ambitions. This chapter has demonstrated that heritage objects and practices were political in their historical contexts and continue to be political today. At sites of Croatian heritage in both the United States and in Croatia, I see wellintentioned guides or interpretive materials avoid discussing nationalism and with it the Balkan Wars of the 1990s. They assume that politics devalue heritage, when in fact they can only provide a necessary, richer sense of history.

Notes 1 Some material in this chapter derives from my dissertation: Heidi A. Cook, ‘Picturing Peasants: Maksimilijan Vanka’s Folkloric Paintings and the “Croatian Question”’ (PhD dissertation, University of Pittsburgh, 2016). I am grateful to those who provided comments on this research in my dissertation and on drafts of this chapter. Special thanks to Barbara McCloskey, Christopher Drew Armstrong, Josh Ellenbogen, Andy Konitzer, and

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Aaron Fine. And many thanks for the helpful guidance and comments from our editors, Rebecca and Grace, and the other authors in this volume. 2 Translations from German and Croatian are the author’s own unless otherwise noted.

References Bakić-Hayden, Milica, and Robert M. Hayden. 1992. “Orientalist Variations on the Theme ‘Balkans’: Symbolic Geography in Recent Yugoslav Cultural Politics.” Slavic Review 52, no. 1 (Spring): 1–15. Bonifačić, Vjera. 1996. “Ethnological Research in Croatia, 1919–1940.” Narodna Umjetnost 33, no. 2: 239–263. Bušić, Katarina. 2009. “Salamon Berger and the Beginnings of the Exhibition Activity of the Ethnographic Museum in Zagreb.” Ethnological Researches 1, no. 14 (December): 301–319. Cordileone, Diana Reynolds. 2000. “The Austrian Museum for Art and Industry: Historicism and National Identity in Vienna 1863–1900.” In Kunst und Industrie: Die Anfänge des Museums für angewandte Kunst Wien, edited by Peter Noever, 125–126. Ostfildern-Ruit: MAK Vienna/Hatje Cantz Verlag. Djokić, Dejan, ed. 2003. Yugoslavism: Histories of a Failed Idea, 1918–1992. London: Hurst. Galić, Anđelka, and Miroslav Gašparović, eds. 2011. Museum of Arts and Crafts Zagreb: 1880–2010, Guide. Zagreb: Muzej za umjetnost i obrt. Hameršak, Marijana, and Iva Pleše. 2018. “Heritage on Demand: UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage Initiative in Croatian Context.” Folklore: Electronic Journal of Folklore 74: 129–152. Houze, Rebecca. 2008. “At the Forefront of a Newly Emerging Profession? Ethnography, Education and the Exhibition of Women’s Needlework in Austria-Hungary in the Late Nineteenth Century.” Journal of Design History 21, no. 1: 19–40. Kiš, Danilo. 1983. Homo Poeticus: Essays and Interview, edited by Susan Sontag. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kolar-Dimitrijević, Mira. 1992. “Kako se Trgovačko-obrtni Muzej u Zagrebu pretvorio u Etnografski Muzej.” Radovi Instituta za povijest umjetnosti 25: 57–72. Kršnjavi, Izidor. 1882. “Die slavische Hausindustrie.” Mittheilungen des k. k. Oesterreich. Museums für Kunst und Industrie 17, no. 198 (March 1): 57–61; 17, no. 201 (June 2): 134–137. Muraj, Aleksandra. 2006. “Zamisli Velimira Deželića st. o osnivanju Etnograskog muzeja u Zagrebu.” Etnološka tribina 36: 7–21. Rampley, Matthew. 2012. “Introduction: Museology in Central Europe.” Centropa 12, no. 2: 107–112. Sertić, Zdenka. 1928. “Osvrt na izložbu narodnih radova na Zagrebačkom Zboru.” Jutarnji List, September 11. Smith, Laurajane. 2006. Uses of Heritage. New York: Routledge. Tkalčić, Vladimir. 1922. “Naputak za povjerenike Etnografskog Muzeja u Zagrebu.” Narodna starina 2, no. 3: 347–352.

PART V

Graphic design, information design and typography

14 SOUTH AFRICAN HERITAGE POSTCARDS The same old story? Jeanne van Eeden

Introduction In this chapter, I examine selected aspects of South African ‘heritage’ through the prism of the visual discourse of postcards. Apart from their link with tourism, postcards were an important means of swift communication worldwide from the last decades of the nineteenth century. Space does not allow a comprehensive history of postcards or their myriad uses, but the last century of postcard production and consumption ref lects changes in South Africa from a colonial past to a post-colonial present. Although postcard production has declined as a result of the instant communication afforded by social media platforms, the postcard retains a semblance of its former claim to presenting a ‘view’ of a country. Until the mid-1980s, postcards were considered too inconsequential for academic scrutiny, but under the inf luence of cultural studies and its recognition that culture itself is the site of struggle for social meanings, postcard studies (deltiology) has become an important interdisciplinary field. As practitioners of cultural studies believe that the world is constituted by representations that operate from positions of power and that texts are never neutral nor transparent, the images and texts on postcards ‘operate across boundaries of class, gender, nationality, and race, and bring into question notions of authority . . . and power’ ( Prochaska and Mendelson 2010, xi). From the appearance of postcards in South Africa in 1896, they were an intrinsic part of the circuit of culture that helped to both construct and ref lect South African discourses regarding, for example, landscape, place, belonging, race, class, nationhood, and identity. This means that as designed products, the content of postcards is never arbitrary but rather offers ideological, symbolic, and metaphoric visualisations or constructions that encompass both manifest and latent meanings (Albers and James 1988, 141–149). Patricia Albers and William DOI: 10.4324/9781003096146-20

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James (1988, 150–155) point out that one has to ask whose interests postcards serve or which ideologies they support; they are therefore signifiers of what a culture deems to be of value. So, for example, for a large part of the twentieth century in South Africa, postcards operated from government-sponsored platforms that spoke to a white audience. During the last 25 years, however, more inclusive representations of tangible and intangible heritage have appeared, yet many still display continuities with embedded manners of representation. Even though policies and dispensations change, the visual regime of postcards does not necessarily keep pace, mainly as a result of tourist expectations and the necessarily long shelf life of postcards. To start the chapter, I give a brief historical contextualisation that forms the backdrop for the discussion of changing understandings of heritage. I subsequently investigate heritage in South Africa by focusing on the colonial/apartheid moment in comparison with post-colonial views of heritage. In my discussion, I refer brief ly to the notions of nationhood, nationalism, identity, and invented traditions but do not engage in exhaustive discussions. Nor do I look at all the heritage sites or practices in South Africa but rather only at a small selection based on what has been depicted on postcards. I comment on two postcards that express diverging views of what constitutes heritage and demonstrate how they participate in the circuit of culture in order to structure meaning/s. I conclude by making some observations regarding the differences and/or similarities between the two postcards and what they reveal about South Africa.

Historical context In order to understand the complexity of what constitutes multicultural South African ‘heritage’ today, it is instructive to remember that before the onset of democracy, the history of South Africa was written as a colonial history. This dated from the white settlement of the Cape Colony in 1652 by the Dutch East India Company. What was meant to be mainly a refreshment post for ships trading with Asia soon attracted settlers from various European countries. Apart from a brief period at the end of the eighteenth century, the Dutch had control of the Cape until 1815 when Britain became the dominant imperial power that extended its authority throughout the country. In opposition to this, groups of Dutch-speaking people, known as the ‘boers’, travelled to the interior of the country during the Great Trek of 1838, establishing settlements in the Transvaal and Orange Free State. Disputes arising from the exploitation of the gold and diamond resources of the country by the British and the desire for political independence by the boers led to the South African War of 1899 to 1902. The appalling consequences of the war nonetheless paved the way for unity of the four erstwhile colonies, leading to the declaration of the Union of South Africa in 1910 as an independent dominion within the British Empire. During the early decades of the twentieth century, there was a sense of solidarity between white English and Afrikaans-speaking South Africans, but the rise of an articulate Afrikaner nationalism during the 1930s signalled the inf luence

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of a new generation of urbanised, middle-class Afrikaner leaders and intellectuals (Foster 2008, 250). The subsequent victory by the National Party in 1948 led to the apartheid era, in which Afrikaners sought to establish dominance of the country. South Africa declared independence from Britain in 1961, thereby attaining status as a Republic. Although segregationist policies had been enacted previously by the British, formal apartheid was entrenched comprehensively in all forms of social, economic, and political life until the end of apartheid in 1994 when the African National Congress (ANC) assumed power. South Africa is now a post-colonial country and has, accordingly, become more concerned in the last couple of decades with recuperating lost histories and heritages.

Heritage in South Africa Based on the previous brief contextualisation, it is clear that there are bound to be ‘conf licting interpretations of what constitutes South African nationhood’ ( Tomaselli, Shepperson, and Mpofu 1996, 50), and this naturally also applies to what constitutes heritage. Heritage and history have been reworked throughout the last century in accordance with changing ideologies and dispensations, reminding us that heritage is constructed by societies and is therefore the product of systems of representation and interpretation (Witcomb and Buckley 2013, 575). Heritage sites and practices are an integral part of creating national cohesion and identity, and they participate in creating ‘legitimising ideology[ies]’ (Hughes 2007, 268) that are usually nationalist and selective by nature (Kristiansen 2015, 47). In common with many other white settler countries, South Africa has therefore shifted from an almost exclusive focus on the heritage of white settlers to a more inclusive heritage practice that seemingly strives for social cohesion while still recognising cultural diversity (Witcomb and Buckley 2013, 575). The burning question in South Africa has revolved around, and continues to be guided by, what is deemed worthy of preserving and commemorating: in other words, whose heritage should be represented (Hughes 2007, 285). There have been substantial shifts in perceptions regarding tangible and intangible heritage in South Africa, but the definition of heritage as ‘elaborations of artefacts, practices and ideas of the past’ (Kristiansen 2015, 47; my emphasis) helps to identify a common thread in colonial/apartheid as well as post-apartheid thinking about heritage. Accordingly, heritage has been invoked to express continuity with the past – whether this be prehistoric, pre-colonial, or colonial – to create a sense of belonging based on a retroactive narrative of the ‘nation’. According to Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1995, 369–370), ‘heritage produces something new in the present that has recourse to the past’; as I shall suggest in my discussion of the two selected postcards, heritage can also be invented to resonate with the past.

Colonial/apartheid heritage As noted previously, the history of South Africa up to the 1990s has been the narrative of white colonial conquest and domination. From the time of British

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occupation of the Cape in 1815 until the victory of the Afrikaner Nationalist party in 1948, monuments and heritage practices ‘ref lected the achievements of British colonial control’ (Tomaselli, Shepperson, and Mpofu 1996, 50). The Union Government of South Africa instituted the Historical Monuments Commission (HMC) as the body tasked with conserving the national heritage in 1923. This led to the promulgation of the Natural and Historical Monuments Act of 1923, which was replaced by the Natural and Historical Monuments, Relics and Antiques Act in 1934. Although these Acts proclaimed sites as national monuments or archaeological or anthropological materials as relics and placed them under protection, they tended to ‘marginalize and down-play the heritage of non-white South Africans . . . [and] provided limited protection for heritage related to living communities and mostly concentrated on prehistoric archaeological sites and artefacts’ (Meskell and Scheermeyer 2008, 155). This limited protection was perpetuated by the promulgation of The National Monuments Act, No. 28 of 1969, which was intended to preserve and protect the historical and cultural heritage, to encourage and to promote the preservation and protection of that heritage . . . in order that monuments and cultural treasures will be retained as tokens of the past and may serve as an inspiration for the future. When the National Party assumed power in 1948, it ‘left the monuments of the previous era intact . . . [which] possibly ref lected the need to forge a unity among whites beyond the narrow identity of Afrikanerdom’ (Tomaselli, Shepperson, and Mpofu 1996, 52). Despite this seemingly conciliatory move, there was a strong desire by nationalists to forge a sense of an Afrikaner-led ‘nation’ and ‘national identity’ (Tomaselli, Shepperson, and Mpofu 1996, 52). The need for an official (visual) discourse already dated from the earlier twentieth century, when it was managed by the Publicity and Travel Department of the South African Railways from 1919 onwards, and this was continued by the South African Tourist Corporation from 1947. These state-sponsored bodies produced visual imagery, including huge numbers of postcards that encouraged international and domestic tourism, investment, and settlement. An important postcard trope centred on topographical scenes that established the notion of a land populated by and possessed by white people – postcards acted as place-makers that ref lected the landscapes, monuments, practices, and buildings that bound white people together. These postcards also instituted and perpetuated the typical foundational myths of settler colonies that equated white progress and power with modernity. Emblematic postcards hence depicted both nature and culture, but always nature as mediated by and imprinted by white presence: Cape Town’s Table Mountain and Rhodes Memorial, the Natal Drakensberg Mountains, statues of Afrikaner heroes like Paul Kruger, Afrikaner volkspele (folk dancers), the government Union Buildings and Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria, vibrant industries, and bustling modern cities, to name but a few types. The postcards

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offer an exclusively white, primarily Afrikaner, view of settlement, heritage, culture, and entitlement. In all these postcards, white people are the active performers or carriers of identity, culture, heritage, and nationhood; if black people were depicted under colonial or apartheid rule, it was as servants or workers but not as equal participants in ‘white’ heritage. From the beginning of the twentieth century, tourism in South Africa had been structured around its natural beauty and wildlife and tourists’ desires to experience its supposed primitive tribal life. Consequently, innumerable South African postcards featured popular representations of the so-called exotic indigenous peoples, there only as objects of the tourist gaze. Throughout the twentieth century, building on the visual discourse already established by colonialism, black people were depicted stereotypically as being close to nature, merging with the landscape in ‘ethnoscapes’ that literally present them as scenery, devoid of individuality: traditional, unthreatening, and altogether other (Thurlow, Jaworski, and Ylänne-McEwen 2005, 6, 8). These ethnographic images showed cultural signifiers such as blankets, baskets, or huts that mark the people as exotic, primitive, sensual, static, uncivilised, servile, inferior ‘types’ in order to establish absolute difference. By representing black people in a subservient manner as the opposite of vibrant western modernity, only performing ‘their’ culture and heritage, postcards worked metaphorically to ingrain the social and spatial hierarchies that were the corollary of apartheid ideology.

‘Folk dancers at the residence of the State President, Pretoria’ In order to illustrate the previous observations, I now discuss a colour postcard dating from 1968 with the text in English and Afrikaans: ‘Folk dancers at the residence of the State President, Pretoria’ (Figure 14.1). This postcard shows about 30 white couples engaged in Afrikaner folk dancing on the lawn in front of Brynterion, the imposing residence in Pretoria designed by Herbert Baker in 1902 and completed in 1906. It first served as the official residence of the British governor-general of the Transvaal Colony, but after 1961, it became the home of the state president of South Africa. There are a number of signifiers in this image that confer a metaphorical level to a seemingly straightforward depiction of an enactment of intangible cultural heritage. The volkspele (folk games/dances) movement in South Africa was initiated by Dr S.H. Pellissier after a visit to Nääs in Sweden in June 1912, where he was ‘inspired by the Swedish folkdances and folksongs’ to encourage and preserve neglected South African dances and songs dating from Dutch settlement of the Cape (Macnab 1962, 82–83). Listening to the Swedish folksongs and dances, he ‘was reminded of the old boermusiek [folk music] and of the old games and picnic dances that had survived from the days of the [Great] Trek but about which no one cared much in South Africa’ (Macnab 1962, 82–83). According to Pellissier, in 1912, ‘there was no interest in our cultural possessions’, and he translated some Swedish folksongs into Afrikaans until the Afrikaans ones were

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FIGURE 14.1

‘Folk Dancers at the Residence of the State President, Pretoria’.

Source: Reproduced with permission from Johan de Beer, Deputy Chair/Secretary of the Volkspele Movement (Volkspelebeweging).

popularised (Macnab 1962, 82–84). The volkspele thus descended from European examples. The first formal South African volkspele were held in 1914, and they played an important symbolic role in events such as the inauguration of the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria in 1949, the tercentenary of the landing of Jan Van Riebeeck at the Cape in 1952, the 50th anniversary of the Union of South Africa, and Republic Day festivals. The volkspele movement centred on the culture of white Afrikaans-speaking people and worked to develop an Afrikaner cultural heritage. In reality, ‘there had never really been a widely established tradition of dance among the white Dutch/Afrikaans-speaking population’, and the volkspele movement was part of the wider Afrikaner nationalist strategy of the earlier twentieth century that endeavoured to ‘establish an identity for the emerging “Afrikaner nation”’ (Dance 2010). The dancing takes place on an immaculate lawn, itself the signifier of a colonial attitude towards nature as something to be groomed and controlled, as lawns are not endemic to the harsh, dry Highveld climate of Pretoria. The Cape Dutch architecture, with its prominent gables, is also a potent signifier of an identity derived from Europe, not Africa. This Cape architectural style was elevated during the early decades of the twentieth century to an iconic ‘national style’ based on a putatively shared white, European heritage (Foster 2008, 17, 58). Accordingly, important government buildings and stately private residences throughout

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the country embraced the style, projecting ‘a hegemonic official discourse of nationalism’, with gables becoming ‘emblematic of an idealised and romanticised history’ (Coetzer 2007, 174). The ability of the Cape Dutch style to inspire national pride since the 1930s, and its association with Afrikaner nationalism, meant that this style became a key ‘place of memory’ (Fransen 2011, 95, 96) in the creation of a social imaginary of white South Africa. Another important signifier in the postcard is the clothing worn by the dancers. Under the inf luence of Pellissier, it was derived from the original Voortrekker dress of around 1836. Volkspele women wore long, colourful dresses, sometimes with bonnets, and men wore woollen trousers and embroidered waistcoats (Macnab 1962, 82–85). The Voortrekker clothing locates the folk dancers in the foundational myth of the Voortrekkers and the Great Trek of 1838 but was also bolstered by the legitimising links with Swedish and other folk cultures. The language of the Voortrekkers was also used to organise the volkspele dancers into laers (camps) and saamtrekke (gatherings) to create a sense of solidarity (Dance 2010). It is tempting to identify the volkspele as an invented tradition. According to Eric Hobsbawm (1983, 1): ‘Traditions’ which appear or claim to be old are often quite recent in origin and sometimes invented. . . . ‘Invented tradition’ is taken to mean a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past. Hobsbawm (1983, 9) identifies the late nineteenth century in Europe as the time when invented traditions arose as a response to rapid social change and the need for new myths and symbols of nationhood. In taking the invented tradition notion further, Mike Crang (1999, 449) points out that Sweden itself was the centre of a retroactive fashioning of folk life, including folk music and the design of a new national costume in 1905 by the artists Gustav Ankarcrona and Carl Larsson. Hence, social narratives, invented traditions, and national myths ‘do not f loat free but are embedded, recreated and sustained through specific practices and milieux’ (Crang 1999, 448).

Post-apartheid heritage The transition to a democratic dispensation in South Africa was finalised in 1994 when the ANC replaced the Nationalist Party. Changes to most aspects of life ensued, and it was to be expected that history, symbols, monuments, and heritage would come under scrutiny. But shifting the emphasis to the histories and heritage of previously marginalised communities was not unproblematic, and deliberations concerning whose heritage had a right to be preserved and

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represented prompted intense discussions, indicating that ‘The past occupies an ambivalent role in post-apartheid South Africa’ (Meskell and Scheermeyer 2008, 154). The definition of heritage has broadened to be therapeutic and educational ‘about what is best remembered and what is best to forget’, but this means that aspects of the colonial and apartheid past have been neglected to the detriment of public memory (Meskell and Scheermeyer 2008, 156). There are two official bodies that deal with heritage, the National Heritage Council (NHC) of South Africa and the South African Heritage Resources Agency (SAHRA), and the principal heritage legislation is the National Heritage Resources Act no. 25 of 1999. As a statutory organisation established under the previously mentioned Act, the NHC has been responsible for the preservation of the country’s heritage since 2004.1 The NHC oversees the work of SAHRA and is mainly concerned with education about heritage and funding projects (Hughes 2007, 274). The NHC focuses on heritage as a vehicle for nation building and national identity and declares National Heritage Sites, which include the Castle of Good Hope, the Cradle of Humankind, Robben Island, Mapungubwe Cultural Landscape, the Voortrekker Monument, and the Union Buildings (Stoltz 2018). SAHRA is tasked with the protection of both cultural and natural heritage, with a specific focus on living or intangible heritage, including oral traditions, which were neglected under the former National Monuments Act of 1969. According to Lynn Meskell and Colette Scheermeyer (2008, 155), South Africa is a ‘trauma culture’, resonating with the notion of ‘“difficult heritage” – that is, a past that is recognised as meaningful in the present but that is also contested and awkward for public reconciliation with a positive, affirming contemporary identity’ (Macdonald 2009, 1). Consequently, compromises regarding how heritage is represented have been necessary, and a number of older heritage sites have been resilient in adapting to the post-apartheid landscape (Hughes 2007, 266, 272, 284). So, for instance, the Voortrekker Monument and the Union Buildings continue to feature on postcards and are popular tourist destinations, possibly showing the ability of heritage signifiers to be malleable. Simultaneously, new heritage sites and memorials ‘alter, and sometimes dismantle, earlier ones that legitimated the apartheid regime’ (Macdonald 2009, 5).2 The state in South Africa has scripted an official version of what heritage is post-1994, and the Freedom struggle is an important part of sanctioned heritage discourse (Hughes 2007, 276). New heritage sites include Robben Island, where people such as Nelson Mandela were imprisoned; the Apartheid Museum and Old Fort Museum at Constitution Hill in Johannesburg; and the Slave Lodge in Cape Town, which ‘keep alive the memory of the suffering that was endured en route to the new South Africa’ (Macdonald 2009, 5). As part of the post-apartheid project of nation-building, a new South African f lag and other symbols were designed, and the former national anthem was adapted to make it more inclusive; all of these feature on current postcards produced by commercial publishers (Art Publishers 2020).

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Under the African Renaissance ideology of President Thabo Mbeki (1999– 2008), hominid origins and neglected ancient black cultures were recuperated at sites such as the Cradle of Humankind and Mapungubwe, asserting a genealogy of African cultures (Hughes 2007, 278) instead of colonial histories. The archaeological and pre-colonial past was now ‘up for grabs’ in South Africa and was used to ‘employ heritage for empowerment, restitution, and social justice’ (Meskell and Scheermeyer 2008, 154). South Africa currently has five cultural World Heritage sites, including the aforementioned Robben Island, Mapungubwe Cultural Landscape, and various fossil hominoid sites around the Cradle of Humankind that are featured on postcards, but, tellingly, none date from the colonial/apartheid eras. Moreover, a discernible shift in post-apartheid tourism indicates that more than half of tourists now visit South Africa to see ‘heritage and culture . . . [in addition] to climate and wildlife’ (Schutte 2003, 476). As previously suggested, colonial/apartheid postcards were bland and conventional but established a visual discourse that has been hard to dismantle. Consequently, many post-apartheid postcards are disappointingly nondescript, again focusing on South Africa’s f lora and fauna, with wild animals taking precedence over landscapes. What is notable, however, is that white people have been wholly elided from postcards, in contrast with the previous era. Indigenous people continue to be depicted as exotic visual spectacles, virtually unchanged in terms of iconography and modes of representation since the colonial/apartheid era. So-called ‘tribal’ people are shown predominantly as participants in static, essentialised heritage practices, often enacted at cultural villages that ‘represent fictional and idealized re-creations of “tribal” lifestyles and activities’ (Schutte 2003, 473–474; Art Publishers 2020).

‘Welcome to Africa’ As an example of a current depiction of heritage, I now discuss a glossy, digitally altered postcard bearing the text ‘Welcome to Africa’ (Figure 14.2). It shows two rows of brightly coloured, f lat-roofed terrace houses fronting on to a narrow pavement, with a tar road in the middle on which a large African elephant walks towards the viewer. Only familiarity with the scene identifies it as the famous Bo-Kaap district of Cape Town, as there is no anchoring device. I have deliberately not selected a postcard with an ‘obvious’ heritage theme such as a site related to the struggle against apartheid or the Cradle of Humankind, but, as with the volkspele postcard, it becomes apparent that the signifiers nonetheless encapsulate a number of metaphorical propositions about heritage, history, and identity. The Bo-Kaap (literally, ‘Upper Cape’) is a small residential area broadly associated with Muslim Cape Malay heritage that nestles on the slopes of Signal Hill in Cape Town. It is centrally situated, is unique in having survived apartheid urban destruction, and is currently home to more than 6,000 people. As previously mentioned, the Cape was under Dutch control from 1652, when much of its

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FIGURE 14.2

‘Welcome to Africa’ postcard.

Source: Reproduced with permission from Chesney Medell, Managing Director, Art Publishers, Cape Town.

population was drawn from Europe, but from 1658 onwards, the ancestors of the majority of the Muslim population arrived in the form of 63,000 slaves; highranking political exiles; and convicts from East Africa, India, Madagascar, and South East Asia. ‘Malay’ thus came to designate ‘roots in slavery but no actual ethnic significance’ (Todeschini and Japha 2003, 189). Links with Islam existed from the early years, and by the first half of the twentieth century, ‘Malay’ was ‘a self-descriptive term used by many Afrikaans-speaking Muslims with free-black or slave roots’ (Todeschini and Japha 2003, 189–190). Under apartheid, the identity of the Cape Malays as a cohesive ethnic and cultural community living in the Cape Malay Quarter was firmly established (Steyn and Spencer 2016, 481, 486). The Bo-Kaap developed quickly from 1763 onwards when modest rental dwellings were built by Jan de Waal, but until the 1920s, it was actually a racially mixed area for working-class people, and Muslims were not in the majority. Gradually the myth arose that the area belonged to the Malays, and in a drive to ensure an ‘ethnically pure neighbourhood’ and the ‘preservation of Malay architecture’, many Africans and other non-Malays were resettled (Todeschini and Japha 2003, 197–198). From the 1930s to the 1960s, there were various bids to demolish the so-called slums of the Bo-Kaap, but the apartheid government decided, strategically, that the discrete identity of the Cape Malay was ‘sufficiently exotic to be thought able to show’ that apartheid encouraged ‘an

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own culture’; in 1957, it was proclaimed a ‘Malay Group Area’, and only designated Malay people could own property there (Todeschini and Japha 2003, 189, 193). From the 1940s onwards, there were attempts to preserve and restore the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century terraces, and after 1965, agreement was reached to reconstruct ‘the environment to represent this “Malay” community with a supposedly typical “Malay” architectural setting’ (Todeschini and Japha 2003, 193, 196). Ironically, however, there was no ‘typical’ Bo-Kaap architecture: during the eighteenth century, f lat roofs and single stories were used throughout Cape Town, and neoclassical, rococo, Georgian, and Victorian styles co-existed in the Bo-Kaap (Todeschini and Japha 2003, 199–200). The restoration and preservation process, however, privileged the whitepainted, f lat-roofed house with ‘its supposedly Eastern character, to capture an idealized image of Malay exoticism’ (Todeschini and Japha 2003, 201). Consequently, homogeneity prescribed which houses were restored to represent an ideal ‘type’ of Malay houses. This Malay identity was firmly entrenched by 1995, when residents were already concerned about ‘the protection of what they all saw as their religious, cultural, and architectural heritage’ (Todeschini and Japha 2003, 205–206). Finally, in 2019, the Bo-Kaap was declared a National Heritage site by SAHRA, comprising more than 600 privately owned properties that are now protected by law. The postcard of the Bo-Kaap offers a simplistic view of ‘Africa’ wherein neither the identity of Cape Town nor South Africa is explicitly referenced. Although possibly intended to be humorous, the postcard positions Africa as a generic, exotic place where wild animals roam in the streets. In contrast with the volkspele postcard, there are no people performing their heritage, nor is there a specific indication of the identity of the inhabitants of the colourful dwellings (the houses were only painted brightly in the last two decades). Postcards of the Bo-Kaap generally used to include local people, cars, and other signs of life, which are manifestly absent here. The architecture itself acts as the signifier of tangible cultural heritage, but denuding it of specificity sets up the houses merely as a colourful backdrop – indeed, the cobbled streets and quaint houses have been used in countless advertisements and films to add interesting atmosphere. 3 Hence, as with the volkspele postcard, architecture serves an important metaphorical function, but in a sense, it can be read as an invented tradition. In actual fact, no specific ‘house type’ was originally associated with any cultural group in Cape Town, and the distinctive f lat-roofed architectural style that now characterises the Bo-Kaap bears little evidence of a slave (‘Malay’) heritage (Todeschini and Japha 2003, 188). A Malay identity was essentially a construct to designate (Muslim) people who lived in the ‘semi-Eastern environment’ of the Bo-Kaap, which was fashioned into a ‘South African Orientalist constitution of an exotic other’ in accordance with apartheid notions of separate ethnic development ( Todeschini and Japha 2003, 188, 191). The myth of the Bo-Kaap as an exotic mono-culture has been propelled by tourism-driven gentrification, which has turned the area into a tourist attraction

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(Steyn and Spencer 2016, 481). Under post-apartheid, ‘the quaint charm’ of the Bo-Kaap made it a ‘prime target for gentrification, attractive to wealthy buyers, many of whom are not Muslim’ (Todeschini and Japha 2003, 205), leading to intense debates about ‘Malay’ identity and who rightly ‘belongs’ in the Bo-Kaap. Tourist-driven gentrification led to a general upgrading and renewal in the BoKaap and neighbouring trendy De Waterkant area (Steyn and Spencer 2016, 482), but ironically, although many houses were restored, many of the ‘typical’ houses are entirely new, constructed to ‘match the rewritten social history’ of a homogenous Malay architectural style (Todeschini and Japha 2003, 198). Tourists seem to be attracted to the charm of the houses rather than to Muslim culture as such – they seem to relish the pseudo-authenticity of the dwellings rather than exploring the culture and heritage of the people who inhabit them (Steyn and Spencer 2016, 482, 486).

Conclusion The two postcards represent divergent conceptions of tangible and intangible heritage but nonetheless bear similarities. They both play into the myth of a mono-culture or of cultural/ethnic homogeneity that originated in distinctive constructions of identity and belonging. Both are in essence idealistic fabrications: the volkspele of Afrikaner identity and the Bo-Kaap of an exotic Eastern identity, but ironically, both emanated from white (minority) politics. Equally, in both examples, the architecture that helps to anchor or establish identity is not endemic but rather imported and adapted in accordance with ideological concerns around identity. In both postcards, a selective rendering of the past imparts identity and perhaps also prerogatives that are exclusive of others. The idea of the performativity of a living cultural practice and the ritual enactment of identity and heritage is ref lected in the volkspele postcard. Moreover, the recourse to Voortrekker imagery possibly reveals a nostalgia for a simpler, pre-industrial past. But it also enacts a gesture of Afrikaner nationalism; ritual repetition is important for Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983, 4, 12–13), as it provides continuity with the past while promoting the project of nationalism. This postcard is revealing because it shows how an intangible cultural practice helped to construct and stage a shared narrative of heritage of white Afrikaners that is rooted in Europe – it literally depicts a ‘new’ tradition in the old garb of the Voortrekkers. Whilst the volkspele postcard bears no reference to Africa at all, the Bo-Kaap postcard highlights the word ‘Africa’ as the primary signifier, which is echoed by the image of the elephant – which is, ironically, not endemic to Cape Town. The elephant has several functions in this image: it acts as a metonym for the absent indigenous people, it consigns Africa to the sphere of nature, and it subscribes to the cliché of wild animals in the streets of African cities. But the identity of Africa that is created here is stereotypical and ambiguous: it serves no function other than to establish otherness and exoticism. Although the postcard depicts

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an example of tangible heritage of an ethnic group that was often previously marginalised, this identity is not expressed explicitly here in any other manner. The Bo-Kaap has been reworked and commodified for tourist consumption; by inventing a tradition of brightly coloured, exotic houses inhabited by picturesque ‘others’, the past has not been recuperated but rather fabricated. South Africa is not unique in creating images that serve the heritage and tourism industries, but what is problematic is the lack of critical self-representation that ref lects the broader realities of contemporary identity, culture, and heritage. The scrutiny of difficult heritage and the balanced representation of contentious histories must continue, but the production of postcards by independent or noncommercial publishers is not lucrative. Until then, postcards unfortunately offer very few alternative views.

Notes 1 The government instituted a new public holiday on 24 September 1995 to celebrate its diverse heritage and to honour the resistance to ‘apartheid and new ideal of the South African nation’ (Jethro 2019, 133). Known as Heritage Day, it segued, not unproblematically, into National Braai (barbeque) Day. For more on this, see Jethro (2019). 2 During the transition to democratic rule, while ‘reconciling . . . entwined histories . . . [there was] no removal of statues’ (Meskell and Scheermeyer 2008, 154), but at the time of writing, the dismantling of problematic colonial symbols and figures such as Cecil Rhodes is ongoing. 3 The Bo-Kaap was frequently painted by the South African artist Gregoire Boonzaier from the 1930s onwards, and these works show the houses and streets far more naturalistically.

References Albers, Patricia C., and William R. James. 1988. “Travel Photography: A Methodological Approach.” Annals of Tourism Research 15: 134–158. Art Publishers. 2020. Accessed July 23, 2020. www.artpublishers.co.za. Coetzer, Nic. 2007. “A Common Heritage/An Appropriated History: The Cape Dutch Preservation and Revival Movement as Nation and Empire Builder.” South African Journal of Art History 22, no. 2: 150–178. Crang, Mike. 1999. “Nation, Region and Homeland: History and Tradition in Dalarna, Sweden.” Ecumene 6, no. 4: 447–470. “Dance.” 2010. ESAT: Encyclopaedia of South African Theatre, Film, Media and Performance. Accessed July 5 2020. https://esat.sun.ac.za/index.php/Dance#Volkspele. Foster, J. 2008. Washed with Sun: Landscape and the Making of White South Africa. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Fransen, Hans. 2011. “Glorious Gables.” In Reshaping Remembrance: Critical Essays on Afrikaans Places of Memory, edited by Albert Grundlingh and Siegfried Huigen, 89–97. Amsterdam: Rozenberg Publishers. Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger, eds. 1983. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hughes, Heather. 2007. “Rainbow, Renaissance, Tribes and Townships: Tourism and Heritage in South Africa since 1994.” In State of the Nation: South Africa, edited by Sakhela Buhlungu, John Daniel, Roger Southall, and Jessica Lutchman, 266–288. Pretoria: HSRC Press.

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Jethro, Duane. 2019. Heritage Formation and the Senses in Post-Apartheid South Africa: Aesthetics of Power. London: Routledge. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. 1995. “Theorizing Heritage.” Ethnomusicology 39, no. 3: 367–380. Kristiansen, Kristian. 2015. “From the Preservation of Cultural Heritage to Critical Heritage Studies.” In Fernweh: Crossing Borders and Connecting People in Archaeological Heritage Management: Essays in Honour of Prof Willem J. H. Willems, edited by Monique H. van den Dries, Sjoerd J. van der Linde, and Amy Strecker, 47–50. Leiden: Sidestone Press. Macdonald, Sharon. 2009. Difficult Heritage: Negotiating the Nazi Past in Nuremberg and Beyond. London and New York: Routledge. Macnab, Roy. 1962. Journey into Yesterday: South Africa Milestones in Europe. Cape Town: Howard Timmins. Meskell, Lynn, and Colette Scheermeyer. 2008. “Heritage as Therapy: Set Pieces from the New South Africa.” Journal of Material Culture, 153–173. https://doi.org/10.1177 %2F1359183508090899. National Monuments Act no. 28 of 1969. “Statutes of the Republic of South Africa.” http://extwprlegs1.fao.org/docs/pdf/nam126830.pdf. Prochaska, David, and Jordana Mendelson J. 2010. “Introduction.” In Postcards: Ephemeral Histories of Modernity, edited by David Prochaska and Jordana Mendelson, xi–xix. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Schutte, Gerhard. 2003. “Tourists and Tribes in the ‘New’ South Africa.” Ethnohistory 50, no. 3: 473–487. Steyn, J. N., and J. P Spencer. 2016. “Tourism Driven Gentrification in the Bo-Kaap versus Cultural Heritage Objectives.” African Journal for Physical Activity and Health Sciences 22, no. 2:1: 481–491. Stoltz, Jacques. 2018. “A Nation in 66 Places: The National Heritage Sites of South Africa.” www.theheritageportal.co.za/article/nation-66-places-national-heritage-sitessouth-africa. Thurlow, Crispin, Adam Jaworski, and Virpi Ylänne-McEwen, V. 2005. “‘Half-Hearted Tokens of Transparent Love’? ‘Ethnic’ Postcards and the Visual Mediation of HostTourist Communication.” Tourism, Culture & Communication 5: 1–12. Todeschini, Fabio, and Derek Japha. 2003. “Cultural Identity and Architectural Image in Bo-Kaap, Cape Town.” In The End of Tradition?, edited by Nexar Alsayyad. London: Taylor and Francis Ebook. Tomaselli, Keyan, Arnold Shepperson, and Alum Mpofu. 1996. “National Symbols: Cultural Negotiation and Policy Beyond Apartheid.” Communicatio 22, no. 1: 50–54. Witcomb, Andrea, and A. M. Kristal Buckley. 2013. “Engaging with the Future of ‘Critical Heritage Studies’: Looking Back in Order to Look Forward.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 19, no. 6: 562–578.

15 MODERNIST GRAPHICS, NEW TYPOGRAPHY, AND THE DESIGN OF IDENTITY IN THE FIRST CZECHOSLOVAK REPUBLIC Benjamin Benus

Introduction In 1935, the Czechoslovak State Publishing House produced a uniquely designed textbook for use in Czech-language primary schools, titled Little Homeland Reader [Malá vlastivěda] (Sutnar, Mendl, and Tschinkel 1935). A collaboration between historian Bedřich Mendl (1892–1940) and designers Ladislav Sutnar (1897–1976) and Augustin Tschinkel (1905–1983), this remarkable publication employed inventive and visually dynamic combinations of maps and charts to provide students with a social, historical, and geographical overview of the young Czechoslovak Republic. As its title suggested, the textbook encouraged its young readers to regard the modern state’s geographical territory as their ‘homeland’ [vlast]. But cultivating a sense of belonging and attachment to a state whose boundaries had only recently been established required more than a description of the geography’s natural features or its demographic and economic characteristics; such sentiments had also to be rooted in students’ feelings of ownership of a past that preceded the modern state’s creation. To this end, the Czechoslovak Republic’s founders constructed and promoted a distinctly Czechoslovak national heritage, which, in large part, shaped the Little Homeland Reader’s narrative structure and content. Meanwhile, the textbook’s design incorporated a variety of modernist graphic features, which Sutnar and Tschinkel had previously developed through exchanges and collaborations with international networks of avant-garde artists and designers. The result was a book that, even decades later, the two designers continued to invoke as an exemplary model of visual education. By examining how Sutnar and Tschinkel adapted modernist artistic strategies to serve the requirements of the Czechoslovak state educational system, this chapter highlights the roles that designers have played in shaping and mediating the visual expression of national identity and heritage. DOI: 10.4324/9781003096146-21

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Heritage and identity in the first Czechoslovak Republic It is important to note at the outset that the Little Homeland Reader’s use of the terms state and nation carried important distinctions in the Central European context. The state, in this case, referred to the First Czechoslovak Republic, created in 1918 from several territories of the former Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. These included Bohemia and Moravia in the west (the majority Czech-speaking lands, formerly administered by the Austrian monarchy) and Slovakia and Carpathian Ruthenia in the east (previously governed by the Kingdom of Hungary). By contrast, the Little Homeland Reader’s invocation of the Czechoslovak nation proposed a much older, ethnolinguistically defined community, whose Czech and Slovak-speaking members now made up a considerable part of the modern state’s citizenry. While their combined numbers gave Czechs and Slovaks the political advantage of a statistical majority in the new state, the territories that made up the First Republic had also long been home to a number of other ethnic and linguistically defined ‘nations’, including Germans, Hungarians, and Ruthenians, as well as smaller enclaves of Poles and Romanians. As with several of the other successor states that emerged from the disintegration of multinational empires in the wake of the First World War, Czechoslovakia faced challenges to its legitimacy from the start, rooted in boundary disputes with neighbouring states, as well as in political divisions within and between its component territories and populations (Rothschild 1974; Sayer 1998). From the perspective of the diplomats negotiating Europe’s post-war political boundaries at the Paris Peace Conference, the legitimacy of a state’s claims to political independence and self-determination largely rested on its ability to demonstrate that a distinct national identity united the majority of the population within a proposed state’s territory (Rothschild 1974). For proponents of an independent Czechoslovak state, the advancement of a common Slavic identity, ostensibly shared by the region’s Czech and Slovak speakers, served to cement their claims. To this end, symbols of Czechoslovak heritage served an important, legitimizing function, presenting the creation of the modern state as the historically inevitable outcome of a natural, evolutionary process. Given, however, that the Czechoslovak Republic incorporated populations representing several ‘nationalities’ within its newly formed borders, such symbols were bound to be contested. Indeed, the notion of a shared Czechoslovak heritage proved controversial even for Czechs and Slovaks, given that the two groups spoke separate (though closely related) languages and, prior to their political unification in 1918, possessed distinct histories and cultural traditions (Bakke 2004). While the citizens who constituted Czechoslovakia’s legally recognized ‘minority nationalities’ enjoyed the same basic political and civil rights as their fellow Czech and Slovak citizens, the new government’s decision to define its official national culture in purely ethnolinguistic terms alienated a considerable proportion of its citizenry from the start. Moreover, such linguistic definitions of belonging contained considerable ambiguities. Whether through marriage or

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simply by virtue of living and working in close proximity to other linguistic communities, many of the republic’s citizens had multiple ‘national’ affiliations. Pressures to define identity exclusively in linguistic terms – beginning in the later nineteenth century and increasing after the establishment of the Czechoslovak Republic – ran counter to other notions of belonging based on locality, religion, profession, or class that had historically prevailed throughout the region (King 2005; Zahra 2008). Recognizing the citizenry’s pluralistic composition, some of the more progressive voices among the republic’s political elites argued for a more expansive and inclusive understanding of national heritage – one that highlighted Slavic contributions to the Western intellectual tradition and equated the Czechoslovak struggle for political independence with the Enlightenment project’s promotion of universal rights and democracy (Orzoff 2009). It was in service to this progressive and universalizing version of Czechoslovak heritage that the Little Homeland Reader’s three Bohemian-born creators (whose own cultural backgrounds and intellectual networks were far too pluralistic to fit comfortably within any narrowly conceived, ethnolinguistic notion of national identity) opted to pursue careers within the republic’s state-run institutions. Thus, Bedřich Mendl, the principal author of the Reader’s text, had overseen the efforts of the newly created Czechoslovak State Historical Institute to survey and preserve the written records of historic Bohemian estates dating back to the medieval and early modern periods (Rajzlová 2011). Ladislav Sutnar and Augustin Tschinkel, through their graphic design work for the State Publishing House and the State Graphic Art School in Prague, helped to modernize the state school system’s instructional materials ( Jánaková 2003). As the Little Homeland Reader demonstrates, their textbook designs not only served to make content engaging and accessible to young readers; they also visualized a modern and progressive identity for the young republic.

The ‘homeland’ in maps and charts Comprising thirty pages of maps, charts, and text, the Little Homeland Reader’s narrative progressed through five separate sections, each presenting the Czechoslovak state through a different thematic lens. The first section provided an overview of the republic’s geography, presenting in a series of maps the territory’s location in relation to its European neighbours, its natural features (mountains, rivers, forests, springs), infrastructural development (railways and connections), and its linguistic regions (described as ‘nationalities’). The Reader’s second section, devoted to Czechoslovakia’s ‘past’, presented the geographical formation of the modern state’s territory as a thousand-year process, unfolding over the course of seven maps and tracing the shifting boundaries of the successive Slavic kingdoms, which together constituted key components of Czechoslovakia’s national heritage. The third (and at ten pages, the longest) section returned to the ‘present

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day’, where, in a series of maps and statistical charts, the book presented a demographic and economic analysis of the republic, showing relative population numbers in a variety of categories (for ethnolinguistic groups, religious affiliations, professions) as well as breakdowns of the state’s budget, principal industries, distribution of mineral resources and livestock, exports, imports, and automobile ownership. The narrative concluded with two short sections devoted to the cultural, historical, and political roles of the republic’s cities and the numbers and locations of Czechoslovaks living abroad. In constructing a portrait of the contemporary state through a sequence of geographical and statistical presentations, the Little Homeland Reader followed the examples that publishers of national atlases had established in a number of newly formed and nascent states in the preceding decades (Omerling 2015). But the publication also differed from many of its national atlas counterparts in providing a central place to historical geography. Half of the Little Homeland Reader’s maps treated what may be described as the modern republic’s ‘prehistory’, portraying the 17-year-old state’s creation as the realization of a centuries-old national project. In this historical account, advanced by the First Republic’s founders and officially codified in the state school curricula by the Czechoslovak Ministry of Education and National Enlightenment [Ministerstvo školství a národní osvěty], the short-lived period of Czech and Slovak political unity under the ninth-century Great Moravian Empire served as the basis for the twentieth-century state’s claims (Sayer 1998; Magocsi 2002). In support of this narrative, the Little Homeland Reader’s sequence of historical maps portrayed the thousand years separating Great Moravia’s collapse in 906 and the Czechoslovak Republic’s founding in 1918 as though they followed an organic development, with the intervening centuries of political fragmentation and colonization under Hungarian and German rule figuring as mere interruptions in an otherwise cohesive path to the political reunification and self-rule of the Czech and Slovak people. In contrast to this historical account, which interpreted the modern state’s territorial configuration on the basis of an ethnically defined national heritage, the Little Homeland Reader portrayed contemporary Czechoslovak national identity in more inclusive and culturally pluralistic terms – a point that Bedřich Mendl attributed to the Czechoslovak nation’s geographical location ‘on the border of two areas of language, Slavic and Germanic, and two areas of European culture, Western and Eastern’. The ‘republic’s peculiar configuration’, Mendl remarked, with ‘its wider quadrilateral shape in the west and its narrower form in the east’, ref lected ‘the state’s unique character and nature’ as ‘a transition and a bridge between two worlds’, linking Europe’s ‘industrial west and its agricultural east’ (Sutnar, Mendl, and Tschinkel 1935, 2). This geographical reading, which connected Czechoslovakia to its neighbouring states, in turn shaped the Little Homeland Reader’s account of the state’s demography and economy. In treating these themes, the Reader’s maps and charts highlighted the population’s ethnolinguistic diversity while emphasizing the state’s recognition of minority groups’ rights and enumerating the social amenities that the citizenry collectively enjoyed. The cumulative picture that

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emerged from the book’s various sections thus visualized a modern, democratic, and ethnically diverse state while at the same time advancing an official national culture that was exclusively Slavic (and mostly Czech). Although critics and opponents of the new state – as well as some of the republic’s most militant nationalists – questioned the compatibility of these positions (Orzoff 2009), the designers of the Little Homeland Reader devised a variety of ingenious techniques to fuse these potentially contradictory visions into a visually harmonious totality.

New typography and ‘visual continuity’ While the Little Homeland Reader’s narrative concept drew on the general examples that other national atlases offered as well as the specific guidelines that the Czechoslovak Ministry of Education and National Enlightenment had stipulated for history instruction in state schools, its visual appearance had little in common with either the educational publications that Czech-language schools had used in the era of Habsburg rule or those produced in the first years of the republic. Embracing models and sources entirely outside those print traditions that until this point had shaped the design of atlases and school textbooks, the Little Homeland Reader’s designers instead drew inspiration from the experimental journals, exhibition catalogues, technical manuals, advertisements, and posters which they and their avant-garde colleagues had produced during the preceding decade. Grouped together under the rubric of the ‘New Typography’, the design approaches that characterized these works followed an ostensibly functionalist set of typographic principles, intended to facilitate reading and accelerate comprehension (Burke 2008; Stirton 2019). In their writings, the New Typography’s proponents frequently distinguished their avant-garde publications from traditionally designed works by means of a set of oppositions and contrasts ( Tschichold 1995). Often this meant organizing information in asymmetrical page layouts, rather than in the centred, symmetrical arrangements that prevailed in ‘traditional’ typography and printing, or adopting a single, consistent (usually sans-serif ) typeface for both headings and main text, instead of employing a variety of typefaces. For extra-textual components, advocates of the New Typography advised against hand-drawn illustrations and elaborate ornamentation; instead, they embraced photographic images, geometric abstraction (with a preference for f lat, bold, graphic forms), and minimally adorned pages in which empty spaces functioned as active elements in the overall design. Above all, they promoted standardization and modularity in every aspect of their work, from type design to paper sizes to book formats. The principles of the New Typography are at work throughout the entirety of the Little Homeland Reader – in Augustin Tschinkel’s maps and charts, as well as in the overall typographic layouts into which Ladislav Sutnar integrated these illustrations. They are in evidence from the very start in the book’s cover design (Figure 15.1). In its bold but limited colour scheme, for example, which principally employs red, black, and white; in its modular format, which divides the

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FIGURE 15.1

Cover of Little Homeland Reader (Prague: Státní nakladatelství, 1935).

Source: Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University Libraries.

page horizontally and vertically into thirds in order to create an underlying structure for the columns of text as well as the charts and maps; and in its standardized typographic and illustrative features, which include diagonally oriented place names and geometrically rendered figures and symbols. Ref lecting years later on the Little Homeland Reader’s design, Sutnar (1961, c/6) noted that the features of the New Typography were ‘especially suitable for educational books’. In addition to facilitating quicker comprehension, the New Typography’s ‘[l]ogical visual organization’, its ‘functional layout and typography’, and its embrace of ‘[p]ictographs, simplified maps and other new techniques’ had, in Sutnar’s estimation, helped to make schoolbooks like the Little Homeland Reader ‘more inviting to read’ (Sutnar 1961, c/6). Through their cumulative effects, these recurring features effectively communicated the book’s content not only by fusing together a diverse assortment of different types of information in a consistent and continuous visual system but also by imparting a dynamic and lively character to the book’s narrative. The maps in the Little Homeland Reader’s historical section are exemplary in this regard, using visually striking combinations of blank space, asymmetrically composed columns of text, diagonally oriented placenames, bold red shapes (to chart the successive territorial configurations of the Kingdom

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of Bohemia under Czech rule in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries), and graphic sequences that expressed unity and visual continuity over the course of successive pages. Through their visual suggestion of movement and action, these designs invested the maps with a sense of energy and excitement that school children might not have otherwise readily associated with the potentially dry and remote subject of medieval Bohemian history. It is important to note, moreover, that while these maps’ graphic features drew on strategies originating in other contexts (in Russian Suprematists’ abstract paintings of the late 1910s, for example, or in Constructivists’ posters and book designs of the 1920s), they took on culturally specific meanings in the Little Homeland Reader’s historical maps. The book’s dominant red-and-white colour scheme, for example, used to mark out territories under Czech rule in the pre-Habsburg era, carried distinct national symbolism, invoking both the heraldic f lags of Bohemia’s medieval rulers as well as the f lag later adopted by supporters of the nineteenth-century Czech national revival. By the same token, the diagonal orientation of text, which had so often worked in Constructivist posters to capture attention and convey urgency by means of visual contrast and dynamic sensation, acquired mnemonic and associative functions in the Reader’s maps. In visually echoing the contours of several prominent sections of the state’s boundaries (in particular, its north-western border with Germany and a large part of its southern border with Hungary, which follows a roughly parallel angle), the diagonally set placenames imparted a geometric order and legibility to the territory’s otherwise complex and irregular set of forms, transforming the map into a memorable symbol, akin to an emblem or trademark. In combination with the repetition of the state map in the same location within the pages’ modular layout, these typographical features could assist in imprinting the complex geographical shape of the recently formed territory in young readers’ minds. The coordination of the placenames’ orientation and the territory’s distinctive angular forms may even be understood to have performed an ideological function, serving – by virtue of the resulting expression of harmony and order – as a visual reinforcement for the claim that Czechoslovakia’s ‘historical frontier’ had been ‘dictated by the natural formation of the country’ (Mackenzie 1946, 44). After all, the diamond shape of the state’s western borders – an ever-present feature within the sequence of maps tracing the modern state’s political precursors – also corresponded to mountain ranges and other natural, physiographic features of the landscape. By the time of the Little Homeland Reader’s publication in 1935, as nationalists in neighbouring Germany had become increasingly aggressive in agitating for the annexation of Czechoslovakia’s predominantly German-speaking regions in the west, arguments for the immutability of the state’s western borders had taken on increased urgency. The design principles that structured these map sequences, for which Ladislav Sutnar later coined the term ‘visual continuity’, further illustrate how techniques employed in other contexts served culturally specific narratives in the Reader. Developed to provide ‘a smooth visual f low for fast reading and comprehension’,

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Sutnar’s principle of visual continuity involved the extension of ‘the basic pattern’ of the individual page layouts to the ‘integrated design of the whole’, where, through the judicious alternation between ‘visual interest and simplicity’, the overall narrative sequence acquired a distinctive ‘tempo’, ‘rhythm’, and ‘climax’ (Sutnar 1961, a/3). The efficacy of these principles is again apparent in the historical sequences, where the dynamic impressions created by the first four maps of medieval Czech-ruled kingdoms gives way to a comparatively static expression in the map devoted to the successive four centuries of Habsburg rule from 1526. Abandoning the red colour scheme associated with the politically independent medieval Bohemian Kingdom, this map set the outline of the future Czechoslovak state against the black-and-yellow-coloured territories of Austria-Hungary, referencing the traditional colours of the f lag of the Habsburg monarchy. In its inconsistencies with the preceding and successive maps of Czech self-rule, the Austria-Hungary map suggested an aberration within an otherwise cohesive and organic Czechoslovak heritage – an impression that Tschinkel amplified in the historical section’s final map devoted to the establishment of the Czechoslovak Republic in 1918, where the revival of the dynamic typographic and compositional features of the pre-Habsburg maps linked the modern state with its medieval Czech past.

The Vienna Method in Prague The narrative devices that served to bridge the discontinuities of 400 years of Habsburg rule are also at work in the Little Homeland Reader’s penultimate section on cities, for which Tschinkel designed side-by-side maps and charts comparing Prague’s geographical area and population numbers in the fifteenth and twentieth centuries. In these and other pages, Tschinkel drew on an approach to information design which the Austrian social scientist Otto Neurath had spearheaded several years earlier at the Social and Economic Museum [Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum] in Vienna. Seeking to make specialized information across a variety of (mostly social-scientific) disciplines broadly accessible to general audiences, Neurath and his collaborators at the museum developed a set of design principles known as the ‘Vienna Method of Pictorial Statistics’ [Wiener Methode der Bildstatistik], which they employed in the institution’s displays and publications (Burke, Kindel, and Walker 2013). Along with the implementation of a consistent and reduced graphic vocabulary (conceived with the aim of eliminating unnecessary details and communicating only that information considered essential to the topic of the presentation), the use of standardized, countable pictograms – arranged in columns and rows in order to facilitate quantitative comparisons – constituted the Vienna Method’s most immediately recognizable feature. Tschinkel, who travelled to Vienna in 1929 at Neurath’s invitation, worked in the museum’s graphics department for two years, where he assisted with the design of the museum’s acclaimed 1930 ‘atlas’, Gesellschaft und Wirtschaft [Society and Economy]. He also began promoting the Vienna Method in Czechoslovakia

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during this period. In Czech-language articles publicizing the museum’s work, Tschinkel helped to persuade Czechoslovak educators and designers of the method’s promise as an instructional tool (Tschinkel 1930a). Bedřich Mendl was particularly optimistic about the method’s potential educational applications. Writing to Otto Neurath in 1935, Mendl described himself as ‘a committed proponent of the Neurath method’ (Mendl 1935) and discussed the possibility of finding a Czech publisher for a planned book series by Neurath – though plans for these publications ultimately failed to materialize. The Little Homeland Reader, which appeared that same year, remains the most elaborate and fully realized implementation of the Vienna Method in Czech-language publications of the period. Along with the pages visualizing Prague’s growth in area and population, for which Tschinkel closely emulated maps and charts in the 1930 Society and Economy atlas, Tschinkel also drew on the earlier publication’s examples in presenting information related to a variety of other subjects in the Reader, including imports, exports, livestock, mineral resources, transportation, and government spending. The pictograms that Tschinkel designed for these charts, however, were considerably more abstract and schematic than those he had produced in collaboration with the team at the Vienna museum. Constructed exclusively from circles and rectangles, their geometric forms originated in Tschinkel’s earlier typographic experiments, where he had composed figures out of dashes, rules, punctuation, and other metal type components, as well as in the seemingly depersonalized and schematic forms of his ‘figurative-constructivist’ paintings and prints – features he described in his writings of the period as expressions of modern life’s industrialized conditions and collective character (Tschinkel 1930b, 1931a, 1931b; Benus 2013). While the severe, geometric uniformity of the pictograms in Tschinkel’s Prague population chart may have suggested a uniform populace whose identities were collectively shaped by the shared experience of industrialization and urbanization, his pictographic figures served in several other instances to differentiate members of the population from one another. In the map comparing population numbers for Czechoslovakia’s different ‘nationalities’ (Figure 15.2), colours alerted readers to the separate groups’ numerical strengths. With each pictogram signifying 500,000 citizens, Czechoslovaks (indicated in red) dominated three of the nation’s four administrative states, followed by Germans (in blue), Hungarians (yellow), and Ruthenians (pink). The scheme also featured an additional category, coloured grey, to indicate the various ‘other groups’ (among them Jews, Poles, and Roma), whose numbers were too few to register individually within the pictograms’ 500,000-unit increments. Where population numbers could not be comfortably rounded to this increment, the chart displayed smaller quantities by halving and quartering of the pictograms, as well as by colouring separate segments within the pictograms. Although the Reader’s text framed the ‘nationalities’ map as a celebration of the republic’s diversity and its enlightened, democratic policies (which afforded full political participation to the state’s nationally recognized minority groups), the

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FIGURE 15.2

‘Population by Nationality’, in Little Homeland Reader (Prague: Státní nakladatelství, 1935), 17.

Source: Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University Libraries.

map’s colour-coded presentation of difference also served to make an argument for the state’s fundamentally Slavic national character. By presenting Czechs and Slovaks together in a single category (by means of the same red colour), the chart created the impression that there actually existed a unified ethnic group, constituting a two-thirds majority of the total population. Counted separately, Czechs constituted approximately half of the state’s population. Slovaks, by contrast, at approximately 15% of the total population, were considerably fewer in number than their fellow German citizens, who (at nearly a quarter of the total population) represented the state’s second-largest group. In this way, the conf lation of Czechs and Slovaks in the ‘nationalities’ map also served to visually diminish the position that Germans occupied relative to the total population. At the same time, there are ways in which this map, by classifying identity in such straightforward and mutually exclusive terms, highlighted the ambiguities that such classifications entailed. Indeed, rather than organizing the population into clearly defined groups, the pictographic figures’ occasional fragmentation into multi-coloured segments seems at times to disrupt the classificatory scheme, pointing to inherent tensions at work in categories of national identity. Tschinkel only amplified these tensions in his Prague population chart. Here, the same red

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pictograms that had previously signified ethnically distinct Czechoslovaks served instead as universal human symbols, fusing together Prague’s diverse population as an undifferentiated mass. Through the cumulative effect of these maps and charts, the pictographic symbols thus acquired a contingent and shifting set of significations, suggesting aspects of identity that the Little Homeland Reader’s Prague-based author and designers would have likely recognized.

Conclusion The First Czechoslovak Republic lasted just under 20 years. Dissolved by the Munich Agreement in September 1938, which ceded Czechoslovakia’s majority German-speaking regions to Germany, the Czechoslovak state survived as a geographically diminished territory under a new government for an additional half-year. In March 1939, Germany invaded the remaining territory and placed the states of Bohemia and Moravia under a Protectorate government, which they administered until the end of the Second World War. Following Germany’s defeat, Czechoslovakia’s borders were largely restored to their earlier configuration under the First Republic (with the exception of Ruthenia, which the Soviet Union absorbed into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic). Ultimately, none of the creators of the Little Homeland Reader would have a place in the state’s postwar incarnation. Sutnar left for the United States in April 1939, ostensibly to carry out the Protectorate government’s orders to shut down the ongoing preparations for the Czechoslovak national pavilion at the upcoming World’s Fair in New York ( Jánaková 2003). Choosing instead to complete the pavilion’s installation and open its exhibits to the public, he remained in New York and subsequently became an American citizen. Mendl, on account of his Jewish ancestry, had considerably fewer options than Sutnar. In January 1939, the government of the short-lived Second Czechoslovak Republic (under pressure from Germany to coordinate its own racial policies with those that now held sway in former First Republic’s Nazi-occupied regions) terminated Mendl’s position as director of the State Historical Institute and subsequently stripped him of his long-held professorship at Prague’s Charles University. Barred from engaging in any public or professional activity after the Nazi occupation of Bohemia and Moravia, Mendl took his own life in September 1940. By contrast, Tschinkel’s ability to provide documentation of his German-Aryan ancestry secured his continued employment as a designer at the Protectorate-controlled publishing house and as a teacher at the School of Graphic Arts, providing German-language instruction at the latter institution. However, the revelation of his wife’s Jewish ancestry (a violation of the Protectorate’s marriage laws) led to his termination from both positions in 1941. Nonetheless, his self-identification as a German during war years sealed his fate and precluded any possibility of remaining in the restored Czechoslovak Republic after the war. Deported in the forced population transfers of 1946–1947, which cleansed Czechoslovakia of its approximately 3 million

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‘Germans’, Tschinkel eventually settled in Salzburg. There, as an ‘old Austrian’ – the designation given to so-called Volksdeutsche (or ethnic Germans) born in the Austrian monarchy’s former territories – Tschinkel obtained citizenship in the post-war Austrian Republic. Working in their respective adoptive nations, Sutnar and Tschinkel continued to develop the techniques they had previously employed in the Little Homeland Reader, though neither had an opportunity to apply these principles again to quite the same extent in the service of school children’s education. In this, the publication stands as a highwater mark in their efforts to reconceive the character of school textbooks. But, beyond the Little Homeland Reader’s technical and aesthetic achievements, its significance also rests in its demonstration of how design has functioned in the service of identity formation. A close examination of this work offers a compelling model for the study of how designers have employed graphic techniques to shape political, geographical, and national identities more widely. In this instance, modernist design principles provided Sutnar and Tschinkel with tools to impose a combination of visual order, drama, and continuity on the disparate types of information that the Czechoslovak Ministry of Education had stipulated for classroom instruction. Using strategies associated with the internationalizing projects of the New Typography and the Vienna Method of Pictorial Statistics, Sutnar and Tschinkel presented readers with an historical and geographical account of the ‘homeland’ that was not only aesthetically compelling but which appeared to visually resolve tensions and contradictions that the First Republic was never able to reconcile in practice. While this portrayal served to advance the state’s official narrative, the work’s design – by virtue of its modernist graphic techniques – produced an expression that both called attention to the constructed character of that narrative as well as to the active roles that its creators played in its construction. In this respect, the Little Homeland Reader offered more than a pioneering model for textbook design. Its imaginative and inventive methods hinted at the possibility of visualizing a more layered and complex national identity – one that acknowledged the functional and contingent character of heritage and more closely corresponded to the lived experiences of its creators.

References Bakke, Elisabeth. 2004. “The Making of Czechoslovakism in the First Czechoslovak Republic.” In Loyalitäten in der Tschechoslowakischen Republik, 1918–1938. Politische, nationale und kulturelle Zugehörigkeiten, edited by Martin Schulze Wessel, 23–44. Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag. Benus, Benjamin. 2013. “Figurative Constructivism and Sociological Graphics.” In Isotype: Design and Contexts, 1925–1971, edited by Christopher Burke, Eric Kindel, and Sue Walker, 217–248. London: Hyphen Press. Burke, Christopher. 2008. Active Literature: Jan Tschichold and New Typography. London: Hyphen Press. Burke, Christopher, Eric Kindel, and Sue Walker, eds. 2013. Isotype: Design and Contexts, 1925–1971. London: Hyphen Press.

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Jánaková, Iva. 2003. Ladislav Sutnar: Prague-New York-Design in Action. Prague: Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague and Argo Publishers. King, Jeremy. 2005. Budweisers into Czechs and Germans: A Local History of Bohemian Politics, 1848–1948. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mackenzie, Compton. 1946. “Beneš: Symbol of Democracy.” In The Stage is Set, edited by Marjorie Bruce Milne, 40–46. Vol. 2 of Future Books: Industry, Government, Science, Arts. New York: Chantecleer Press. Magocsi, Paul Robert. 2002. Historical Atlas of Central Europe (Vol. 1). Edited by Peter F. Sugar and Donald W. Treadgold. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Mendl, Bedřich. 1935. Letter to Otto Neurath, 16 July. Nachlaß Otto and Marie Neurath, Department of Manuscripts and Rare Books, Austrian National Library, Vienna. Omerling, Ferjan. 2015. “National Atlas.” In The History of Cartography, Volume 6: Cartography in the Twentieth Century, edited by Mark Monmonier, 96–101. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Orzoff, Andrea. 2009. Battle for the Castle: The Myth of Czechoslovakia, 1914–1948. New York: Oxford University Press. Rajzlová, Eva. 2011. Bedřich Mendl (1892–1940). V obraze své rodinné korespondence. Prague: Charles University. Rothschild, Joseph. 1974. East Central Europe between the Two World Wars. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Sayer, Derek. 1998. The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Stirton, Paul. 2019. Jan Tschichold and the New Typography: Graphic Design between the World Wars. New Haven: Yale University Press. Sutnar, Ladislav. 1961. Ladislav Sutnar: Visual Design in Action: Principles, Purposes. New York: Hastings House. Sutnar, Ladislav, Bedřich Mendl, and Augustin Tschinkel. 1935.  Malá vlastivěda  [Little Homeland Reader]. Prague: Státní nakladatelství. Tschichold, Jan. 1995. The New Typography: A Handbook for Modern Designers. Translated by Ruari McLean. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tschinkel, Augustin. 1930a. “Práce sociologického a hospodářského musea ve Vídni.” Výtvarné Snahy 11, no. 5: 78–82. Tschinkel, Augustin. 1930b. “Tendenz und Form.” a bis z, no. 12 (November): 45. Tschinkel, Augustin. 1931a. “Uměni století stroje.” naše cesta 2, no. 8: 99–100. Tschinkel, Augustin. 1931b. “Statistik und Kollektivform.” a bis z, no. 13 ( January): 51. Zahra, Tara. 2008. Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900–1948. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

16 TYPOGRAPHY AND LETTERING AS DESIGN HERITAGE IN BRAZIL Priscila Farias

Introduction Letters and numbers, the building blocks of typography and lettering, are important elements of the public domain and of the configuration of public and private documents. They are used for materializing verbal language in general, in printed and written artefacts and also for naming places, indicating routes, celebrating memory and signalling dissent. The relevance of letters and numbers as historical vestiges and evidence is well established for research fields concerned with public manifestations of verbal language and the social interactions that those manifestations entail, such as archaeology, philology, epigraphy and palaeography (e.g. Petrucci 1993). They are also a central issue for design studies and practices, in particular for graphic or communication design. For graphic design scholars and practitioners, letters and numbers are not abstract manifestations of verbal language but rather concrete and visible manifestations thereof, whose structure and form have as much communicative power as the verbal language they convey (e.g. Carter, Day, and Meggs 2007). In heritage contexts, such as heritage policies, letters and numbers are most usually treated as verbal elements (such as in inscriptions or in printed artefacts, where their form tends to be considered of marginal interest or even detrimental to built heritage when appended to it) or as architectonic elements (in which case their form is somehow taken into consideration as long as part of the building, albeit as minor complements). The adverse effects, for cultural heritage, of a lack of sensibility or knowledge regarding the visual aspects of letterforms can be exemplified by the choice of anachronistic, spurious or conf licting forms for public lettering, such as the use of Imperial Roman forms in the Greek Revival façade of the National Gallery in London, as described by historian James Mosley (Mosley 2007). DOI: 10.4324/9781003096146-22

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Regarding typography, while the importance of printed books as cultural heritage is widely acknowledged, the same is not the case with printed ephemera, ‘the minor transient documents of everyday life’ (Twyman 2008, 19), some of them crucial for understanding letterform history and trends, such as signwriters’ guides and type specimens. The same is true for all sorts of catalogues and promotional material, inasmuch as they serve as evidence towards a better understanding of the history of industrialization, commerce and trade. Once preserved, printed ephemera might help elucidate when, where and how certain products were produced and circulated. Equipment, tools and machinery needed for printing – including metal, wood or plastic type and the punches, matrices, moulds and other apparatus needed for producing them – are also relevant for understanding how typography worked, but, as with other industrial resources, their value as cultural heritage has not always been recognized, particularly in Brazil. Cultural heritage is currently defined, in the Brazilian Constitution, as tangible and intangible assets ‘bearers of reference to the identity, action, and memory of the various groups that constitute Brazilian society’ (Brasil 1988). The definition, although not explicitly, encompasses designed artefacts, industrially produced, and the practices related to their conception and manufacture. Industrially produced artefacts, however, have rarely been listed, and the literature on Brazilian industrial heritage has so far focused mostly on industrial buildings and ruins (see, for instance, Kühl 2010a). This situation has led to the systematic (albeit unplanned) disposal or destruction of assets that are crucial for better understanding the history of designed artefacts and their use and for assessing the relevance of its cultural legacy. If designed artefacts and design processes in general (that is, the artefacts and processes that configure the artificial world, not restricted to the design of the built environment) are to be considered as part of heritage policies, the status of typography and lettering as part of design history and design culture should be better understood and addressed. This chapter will, therefore, address this need by first establishing the relevance of typography and lettering for design and heritage and then describing Brazilian heritage policies and legislation, before concluding that local typographic traditions are endangered.

Typography as design heritage The term ‘typography’ can be used, in a wide sense, to encompass the whole set of practices and processes involved in the creation and use of typographic characters: the visible signs related to orthographic (letters) and para-orthographic (numbers, punctuation and other signs) elements of verbal language (Farias 2016, 10). In a strict and more precise sense, however, a distinction should be made between manual processes for obtaining such characters and defining their spacing and alignment – as in handwriting, calligraphy and lettering – and mechanical or automatic processes where those elements and the metrical relations between

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them are determined in advance – as in typographic processes proper (Smeijers 1996, 19–23). Letters and numbers found in printed artefacts such as books or in digital documents where text is editable (or has been edited) are therefore more precisely related to typography, while those that are unique pieces – drawn, carved, painted or moulded – in particular if not meant for reproduction, are more precisely described as lettering. It is common to think of typography as the visual aspect of verbal language. This is true if we consider the final outcome of the typographic process – a surface with visible marks that can be decoded if we are familiar with the writing system used. There is more, however, to typography than letterforms on a page. Typographic shapes proper are always configured along with a metrical structure that defines how much space there must be between letterforms and how letterforms should be aligned. This is a key aspect of the typographic process, which is materially or informationally embedded in type by physical volume and dimensions or by parametric curves, spacing and position values. Typographic processes are by definition mechanical, multi-dimensional and unavoidably material and industrial. They involve a number of phases, going from the conception of characters and typefaces (type design) to type production (type founding), composition (typesetting) and printing (letterpress, lithographic reproduction or digital display). Typography is mainly ‘graphic’ or visual in some of those phases and industrial in others. Typefaces are conceived and produced for distribution and repeated use, and that depends on special machinery, such as moulds, pantographs, type casters and computers that replicate them. The traditional processes of typographic composition and printing also depend on specific industrial machinery. Museums of print or of typography, established since the early twentieth century in various parts of the world, are typically set up in former printing shops, and the core of their collections is the machinery, equipment and outputs of those companies (Figure 16.1, upper). Extraordinary examples of such museums are the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp, Belgium, and Tipoteca Italiana in Cornuda, Italy. The former gathers the oldest surviving typography equipment and machinery, along with documents related to three centuries of printing businesses. The latter gathers an exceptional number of assets – mostly Italian, from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – among them dozens of casting, composing and printing machines and hundreds of cases of wood and metal type. The preservation of type casting equipment and machinery is most rare – only a dozen companies exist that still produce metal or wood type today. One of the few institutions that hold a collection of such materials is the University of Barcelona, custodian of the Neufville-Bauer type foundry archive. Nothing of such relevance or extent exists in Brazil. The Brazilian National Museum of Print, established in 2002, is a rather bureaucratic place, with a few relevant assets, located in a late modernist building in Brasilia. The Tipografia Pão de Santo Antônio museum, established in 2005 in an early twentiethcentury letterpress printing shop in Diamantina, a UNESCO World Heritage

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Upper. Wood type, the University of São Paulo School of Architecture and Urbanism letterpress printing shop. Lower. Page of a Brazilian type specimen, in Especimen dos Typos de Phantasia Existentes nas Officinas da Imprensa Official, São Paulo, 1931.

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Site in Minas Gerais (Utsch 2015), offers a well-researched collection in an engaging ambience but is small and quite far from main urban centres. Replicating, reviving or renewing earlier typographic shapes – that is, the marks left by type on paper or other surfaces – are traditional procedures in type design. This is how typefaces originally designed for one technology (e.g. movable type) were adapted to others (photographic or digital composition). Such procedures, however, are rarely meant to produce accurate replicas (Shaw 2017), and, even when they do, due to material and technical restraints, the resulting items can only partially preserve the original shapes and metrical structure, let alone the material and sculptural qualities of type. In the last decades, along with the popularization of 3D printing and a renewed interest in letterpress, different methods for the production or replication of movable type have been tested – these involve experiments in cutting wood type with computer-controlled machines (Dietzsch et al. 2019), casting plastic resin type from metal type (Kühne 2018) and replicating historical type using small-scale digital fabrication resources (Marotta 2019). Such experiments have proved that replicating movable type accurately with 3D printing techniques will only be possible with equipment able to reproduce very fine details. Safeguarding original type sets is, therefore, imperative for the preservation of typographic material culture. Samples of the final outcomes of typographic processes are traditionally preserved in libraries and ephemera archives. They are also at the core of digital humanities efforts for reproducing and sharing images of such artefacts. From the point of view of typography as design heritage, however, the most relevant assets related to that phase of the typographic process would be type specimens – catalogues prepared by type founders, phototypesetting companies and letterpress printers in order to exhibit their repertoire to potential clients (Figure 16.1, lower). Such catalogues display images of the typefaces and also inform in what sizes they were produced, suggest the kind of text they were considered adequate for and eventually tell at what price they were sold ( Farias, Aragão, and Cunha Lima 2012). Comparisons between typographic repertoires from different places and time frames can lead to a better understanding of typographic trends and tastes and of the dissemination and circulation of typefaces (Garone 2012; Farias and Cunha Lima 2016). Despite their relevance for design heritage – that is, to the understanding of how printing culture contributed to the constitution of Brazilian society, or ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 1983) – type specimens were, at the time of their production, working artefacts that would become obsolete as soon as a new catalogue was issued or the type founder or printer went out of business, and they were seldom preserved. Efforts at reconstructing early printers’ typographic repertoires from systematic examination of their printed outputs (books, newspapers, almanacs) have been undertaken in recent years in Latin America (Garone 2015; Farias et al. 2018). They have resulted in publications and digital databases that, in the case of São Paulo city printers, automatically render dynamic versions of

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what could have been the printers’ type specimen pages (Farias and LabVisual research team 2018).

Lettering as design heritage While libraries and museums of print are the places where most items related to typographic heritage can be found, the streets are the best place to find examples of lettering that can be understood as part of a wider design heritage. Letters and numbers in the public environment contribute to the texture of the cities and to a sense of place. They are numerous, especially in urban areas, but they are also constantly on the verge of disappearing. Most of them are not meant to be perennial or fixed – they may announce products or services that will last only for a couple of hours or lie on the surface of a moving body. As the struggle for control of the urban environment is constant, typography and lettering in this context have always been in continual threat of being erased by new policies or victorious powers. This could be something as trivial as painting over graffiti or ripping out an undesired poster or as tragic as demolishing a monument or a building. Replacement or erasure can also be planned, something that tends to occur with commercial lettering during renovations or modernizations. The most common threat to typography and lettering in the public environment, however, is neglect. This is something that occurs not only with ephemeral elements such as posted bills or painted letters but also with inscriptions planned for permanence, in particular those that are subtle in terms of scale or impact. This is the case of architectonic epigraphs, signatures of architects and builders found in the façades of buildings (Farias, Gouveia, and Dixon 2012). Small inscriptions such as these might be overlooked during renovations or urban policy updates or simply decay due to aggressive environmental conditions (Farias 2015, Smith, Gomez-Heras, and McCabe 2008) (Figure 16.2, lower left). Laws and regulations limiting the presence and dimensions of commercial messages in public space are usually praised by architects and urban planners (e.g. Laube and Widrig 2016, 34–35). Such policies tend to result, in fact, in less visually charged urban landscapes, promoting a better appreciation of buildings and cityscapes. This is, however, not without controversy if considered from the point of view of lettering as design heritage (e.g. Fernández 2018). In São Paulo, the so-called lei cidade limpa (clean city law), promulgated in 2006, banned all kinds of advertising in the streets, except for shop signs in limited number and standardized sizes. The initiative, mostly well received, was nominated for the Brit Insurance Designs of the Year awards in 2008 (Etherington 2008), among other prizes. The enforcement of the law, however, compelled practically all shop owners to remove signs and renovate their façades without any previous assessment of the eventual heritage value of historical businesses. The only examples of historical commercial lettering that survived were those carved in stone or moulded in stucco in the façades of the buildings. The lack of proper assessment of what should be preserved still goes on, threatening

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FIGURE 16.2

Upper. Old hand-painted ad revealed after the collapse of an adjacent building in São Paulo. Lower left. Architectonic epigraph, damaged during building façade renovation in São Paulo. Lower right. Lettering on boat in Belém.

Source: Upper: Rovena Rosa/Agência Brasil 02/05/2018. Lower left: Brazil, Haroldo Gallo/Acervo Epigráfico Paulistano, 2007. Lower right: Pará, Brazil.

São Paulo lettering heritage: a rare example of a mid-twentieth-century handpainted advertisement shown in Figure 16.2 (upper), for instance, was accidentally revealed in 2018 when an adjacent building was destroyed by fire, but the building residents soon covered it with green paint (Tomaz 2018).

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Once lettering is removed from a façade, it is usually treated as trash. Museums dedicated to lettering are less common and more recent than museums dedicated to print or typography. One of the few existing examples of such institutions is the Buchstabenmuseum (Museum of Letters) in Berlin (Germany), which holds a unique collection of shop fascia lettering. Another threat to lettering as design heritage is the eventual disappearance of people who have mastered original lettering styles. The tendency for modernization and the demand for quicker and cheaper solutions provided by digital technologies has been making signwriters redundant in many parts of the world and diminishing the diversity and distinctiveness of local lettering traditions. Letras que Flutuam (f loating letters) (Martins 2017) is an exemplary initiative for registering and safeguarding this kind of knowledge. The website and project, led by Brazilian designer and researcher Fernanda Martins, focus on the names painted on wooden boats by specialized letter painters in the Amazon river delta known as abridores de letras, or ‘letter openers’ (Figure 16.2, lower right). Her research resulted in the identification and recording of the work done by over 70 letter painters (Martins 2017). It won a number of important prizes, including the Rodrigo Melo Franco de Andrade 2018 award, granted by the Brazilian National Historic and Artistic Heritage Institute (IPHAN), which encouraged Martins to lead a proposal for the official recognition of the abridores de letras’ work as intangible heritage.

Design in Brazilian heritage policy and legislation According to the official history of Brazilian Historic and Artistic Heritage institutions (SPHAN and Pró-Memória 1980, 9), the first initiative towards safeguarding historical heritage in the country can be traced back to the preoccupation, expressed in 1742 by the vice-king of Brazil, regarding the destiny of buildings left by John Maurice of Nassau in Pernambuco (a region in the northeast of Brazil that was under Dutch rule from 1630 to 1654). The first pieces of legislation regarding Brazilian historical and artistic heritage, however, were issued in the 1920s, in the context of the First Brazilian Republic. From 1920 to 1930, a series of laws and norms were proposed by representatives of different units of the Brazilian state, aiming at the protection of archaeological assets, monuments, buildings and artworks. The first Brazilian federal law regarding heritage was issued in 1933, but only in 1937 – under Getulio Vargas’ Estado Novo (new state) nationalist regime – was a more comprehensive organization and protection of the national historical and artistic patrimony enacted through legislation. The Decree-law number 25, issued in November 1937, is still relevant today. It instituted what would later become the current National Historic and Artistic Heritage Institute. It established, as well, the four books (livros de tombo) currently used for registering heritage assets – the book of archaeological, ethnographic and environmental assets; the book of historical assets; the book of fine arts

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assets; and the book of applied arts assets (SPHAN and Pró-Memória 1980, 75). The Decree-law 25 also stipulated that the assets listed in those books would be held in custody by national museums – the National Historical Museum (created in 1922, not to be confused with the Brazilian National Museum, destroyed by fire in 2018) and the National Fine Arts Museum (inaugurated in 1938), both in Rio de Janeiro, which was then the country capital, and ‘as many other national museums as necessary’ (SPHAN and Pró-Memória 1980, 79). Although the existence of a book for listing applied arts heritage assets might suggest that there was an early recognition of design heritage in Brazil, this is not exactly the case. The book, described currently by IPHAN as gathering information on relevant pieces of ‘decorative arts, design, graphic arts and furniture’ (IPHAN 2014), contains in fact only four entries – one for glass jars (listed in 1939), two for sacred images of Our Lady of the Good Death and other religious figures (listed in 1964) and one for a bridge (listed in 2012, also present in the books of archaeological and artistic heritage) – against over 800 in the fine arts heritage book, 700 in the historical heritage book, and more than 200 in the archaeological heritage book. The heritage assets complete list contains a number of entries (such as lamps, a clock, a walking stick and a locomotive) that might have been proposed as applied arts heritage but whose listing was rejected. It also contains pieces that could arguably be considered design – such as boats, airplanes and the collections of the Arts and Crafts Museum in Belo Horizonte – but that were listed in other books (fine arts, history or both) and not in the one dedicated to applied arts (IPHAN 2014). In the late 1970s and early 1980s, during the last phase of Brazilian military dictatorship, Aloisio Magalhães, a pioneering and inf luential Brazilian designer, deeply concerned with the idea of cultural patrimony, occupied some of the highest governmental positions related to heritage policies. He was the head of the National Center for Cultural Reference (CNRC) from 1975 to 1979 and then the head of IPHAN and of the Brazilian Culture Secretariat (then part of the Ministry of Education and Culture) from 1979 until his death in 1982. His presence and prestige, however, were not enough to secure a concrete place for design within Brazilian heritage policies. The current Brazilian Constitution, drafted once the military dictatorship ended and enacted in 1988, establishes that Brazilian cultural heritage encompasses tangible and intangible assets. That includes not only urban or archaeological sites and architectural or artistic works but also ‘forms of expression’, ‘ways of creating, making and living’ and scientific or technological creations ( Brasil 1988). A place for designed objects and design processes as part of Brazilian cultural heritage was therefore reiterated, although, once more, not explicitly nominated. In 2000, four new registry books were created for intangible heritage: the book of knowledges, the book of celebrations, the book of forms of expression and the book of places (IPHAN 2014). Described as the site for registering intangible heritage related to the ‘production of objects and/or provision of services

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that may have practical or ritual meanings’, the ‘book of knowledges’ currently lists 13 assets, some of them related to product or food design. A few assets related to visual or graphic design (such as graphic patterns applied to body and objects by native people and cordel books) can be found among the 18 assets currently registered as ‘forms of expression’ – most of them related to music and dance. The focus of the Brazilian intangible heritage program, in any case, is on crafts and non-industrial processes rather than design-related assets. The Decree-law number 25 of 1937, which is still at the core of current Brazilian heritage policies and legislation, was an adaptation of a much more detailed and ambitious plan, drafted by modernist novelist and art critic Mário de Andrade, who was, in the early 1930s, at the head of the São Paulo City Department of Culture. Mário de Andrade’s draft (SPHAN and Pró-Memória 1980, 55–68) includes a more precise description of the meaning of ‘applied arts’, proposes the creation of a Museum of Applied Arts and Industrial Techniques that would gather assets listed in the book of applied arts and anticipates that the advisory council of the organization responsible for managing heritage policies would include not only historians, archaeologists, ethnographers, architects and fine artists but also graphic artists and craftsmen. In his plan, Andrade predicted objections that his proposal could encounter and wrote answers to them. One of those objections regarded the Museum of Applied Arts and Industrial Techniques and the artistic status of industrial techniques. He replied by arguing that such a museum would have an important pedagogical role for what he called ‘education though image’, giving as precedents to be followed the Deutsches Museum in Munich and the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry and providing examples of topics to be explored in such a place in Brazil, among them iron, coffee and printing. In 1976, an ordinance issued by the Ministry of Education and Culture established a National Museum of Iron and a Museum of Coffee. Although both of them are today preserved as heritage buildings, none became a Museum of Applied Arts and Industrial Techniques. Besides IPHAN, during the twentieth century, many Brazilian states and also some municipalities instituted their own heritage organizations. São Paulo city heritage, for instance, is managed by the Municipal Council for São Paulo City Preservation of Historical, Cultural and Environmental Heritage (CONPRESP) and by the São Paulo State Council for the Defence of Historical, Archaeological, Artistic and Touristic Heritage (CONDEPHAAT). Both of them, despite the broad spectrum of action, tend to focus on built heritage, listing mostly buildings, archaeological sites and assets and religious art. In Rio de Janeiro, a city listed as a World Heritage cultural site by UNESCO in 2012, heritage is managed by the Municipal Council for the Protection of Cultural Heritage (CMPC) and the Rio Heritage of Humanity Institute (IRPH). Since 2000, those organizations have started to include procedures for also assessing and listing intangible heritage. Differently from the structure of all other Brazilian heritage organizations, where design or designers are rarely mentioned, the Rio de Janeiro IRPH

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organogram includes a Design Centre (Centro Carioca de Design – CCD) as one of its major managing units (the other two being dedicated to archaeology and to registry and research). This resulted in the promotion of a number of relevant design-related initiatives and even a book about design and heritage (Camargo, Ribeiro, and Fajardo 2012; IRPH 2016). Washington Fajardo, one of the organizers of the book and the head of the Rio de Janeiro Cultural Heritage Council and Institute from 2009 to 2016, states in the introduction of his management report that his administration was guided by the idea that planning and design were at the very origin of material culture items that would eventually be recognized as heritage (IRPH 2016, 6–7). The only artefact related to traditional design disciplines (graphic and product design) listed as heritage during Fajardo’s administration, however, are the Gamboa Port cranes (acquired from US and German manufacturers in the 1970s and 1980s) that were in danger of being affected by the urban works initiated for the 2014 FIFA World Cup. Assets listed earlier as Rio de Janeiro heritage include pieces of nineteenth-century French iron urban furniture and what seems to be the only example of lettering so far listed as part of Brazilian heritage: urban preacher Profeta Gentileza’s hand-painted panels in the pillars of Caju Viaduct. One of the innovations implemented by IRPH during the Fajardo years was the inauguration of books for registering traditional businesses – one specific to botequim bars, another for shops of all kinds, among them a letterpress printing shop active since 1946. While this in some way helped to promote the preservation of interior design and shop façades, the fact that the assets were listed as intangible heritage and the absence of clear criteria for establishing if and how the shops and bars complied with the ‘remarkable characteristics that identified them as representative of this heritage category’ resulted in legislation that is not enough to safeguard elements of graphic, furniture, fashion or even architectural design related to those businesses. Regarding bars, the IRPH report states that ancestry, ambience and ‘architectonic characteristics’ related to ‘organization and furniture’ were the criteria behind the selection of places for inclusion in the book (IRPH 2016, 79). The intention of the legislators, however, was not to preserve façades (or the commercial lettering therein) but to ensure that the listed businesses would continue to operate at the same address (IRPH 2016, 78–87). A revision of the current state of shops and bars that have been included in the books, conducted in early 2020, showed a few cases where an effort to preserve or restore some kind of authenticity had been made (among them Bar Luiz, established in 1887, and Confeitaria Colombo, established in 1894), and many shop fascia that could hardly ever be considered authentic in terms of graphic design and lettering (among them Tabacaria Africana, established in 1846 and Casa Urich, established in 1913) (SEBRAE RJ 2016). Commercial lettering included in buildings listed as tangible heritage – such as cinemas and art deco buildings – on the other hand, has been more coherently restored and efficiently preserved.

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One difficulty that certainly affects those interested in understanding, preserving or restoring letters and numbers as part of bigger structures – such as buildings, machinery or vehicles – is the lack of precise records – photographs, plans or blueprints – of the letterforms. This is a gap that the research team involved in the Tipografia Arquitetônica Paulistana project (Gouveia, Farias, and Gatto 2013) tried to fill by producing photos, rubbings, vector illustrations and three-dimensional duplicates of São Paulo city architectonic epigraphs (Farias 2017). The lack of references affects, in particular, lettering that is part of everyday life artefacts, such as designed and popular culture objects. This is the case of the popular Brazilian vessels that are being listed by IPHAN as part of nautical heritage – only the lettering of some boats, such as Canoa de Tolda Luzitânia (InfoSãoFrancisco 2019), was preserved coherently with local traditions.

Conclusion Typography and lettering play an important part in our social interactions, allowing us access to texts in general, adding a finer grain to the texture of the cities, and contributing to collective memory and to a sense of place. Heritage policies, however, do not always grant typography and lettering – or design in general – the status they deserve, and this is the case with current Brazilian heritage policies. The main concerns of Brazilian heritage policies so far have been towards archaeological, architectural and fine arts assets. Despite an early mention of applied arts, and the leading role played by a design practitioner in the government, design never achieved a concrete place within Brazilian heritage policies. Rio de Janeiro’s Centro Carioca de Design is an exception to this, but its inception did not result in a significant number of product or graphic design artefacts being listed as heritage assets or in the creation of any kind of design museum. With regard to typography and lettering as design heritage, the initiative of claiming intangible heritage status for the work of Amazonian abridores de letras is laudable, but it will not be enough to preserve Brazilian print and letterform culture. Not many old fascia lettering signs have survived, most letterpress printing shops have already discarded or destroyed their assets and the existence of typecasting equipment and machinery is uncertain. The very boats and commercial signs painted by abridores de letras are being replaced or repainted every day, not always with a sense of being part of a tradition to be preserved. Preserving physical type and lettering as part of design heritage involves finding coherent ways to supplement incomplete type sets and to reconstruct or replace damaged pieces. Given the differences in scale and level of detail, and also the replicable nature of designed artefacts, could the conservation and restoration principles expressed in the Venice Charter and other international heritage documents (Petzet 2004; Kühl 2010b) be applied to typography and lettering as

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heritage assets? This is a relevant topic for further investigation, because many typography and lettering artefacts are unavoidably ephemeral. The preservation of movable type and letterpress as cultural heritage, on the other hand, accompanies a growing interest in its continuous use – something that potentially raises attention to its value but also leads to eventual overuse, wear and deterioration. The preservation of knowledge about type production (punch cutting, type casting or founding) is key in this regard. During the twentieth century, ideals of modernization and of ‘good’ design were established in Brazil before awareness of the importance of safeguarding typographic heritage could emerge, leaving almost no chance for local lettering and letterers to prove their relevance. Urgent action is needed, but, despite current political drawbacks, we are lucky to count on a new generation of designers today that are much more sensitive to the value of design as culture and as heritage. So let’s save some letters today!

Acknowledgements I would like to thank my dear colleagues and architectural heritage specialists Beatriz M. Kühl and Carlos Faggin for their comments on a previous version of this text; and also CNPq and FAPESP for supporting my research.

References Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Brasil. 1988. “Art. 216.” In Constituição da República Federativa do Brasil. Brasília: Presidência da República. Accessed July 9, 2020. www.senado.leg.br/atividade/const/ con1988/CON1988_05.10.1988/art_216_.asp. Camargo, Paula de O., Paulo E. V. L. Ribeiro, and Washington Fajardo, eds. 2012. Design e/é Patrimônio. Rio de Janeiro: Centro Carioca de Design. Carter, Rob, Ben Day, and Philip B. Meggs. 2007. Typographic Design: Form and Communication. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Dietzsch, Rafael, Rafael Neder, Alexandre B. Gontijo, Maria Luiza C. Silva, Leonardo A. Costa, and Thiago O. Rodrigues. 2019. “Projeto e Uso de Tipos Móveis de Madeira no Contexto Tipográfico Brasileiro.” In Proceedings of 9º CIDI – Congresso Internacional de Design da Informação, 2395–2404. São Paulo: Blucher. Etherington, Rose. 2008. “Shortlist for Designs of the Year Awards.” Dezeen, February 6, 2008. Accessed July 9, 2020. www.dezeen.com/2008/02/06/shortlist-for-designsof-the-year-awards/. Farias, Priscila L. 2015. “Epígrafes Arquitetônicas Paulistanas e Londrinas: Uma Comparação Sob a Perspectiva do Design da Informação.” InfoDesign 12, no. 2: 222–238. Farias, Priscila L. 2016. “Estudos Sobre Tipografia: Letras, Memória Gráfica e Paisagens Tipográficas.” Habilitation Thesis, Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brasil. Farias, Priscila L. 2017. “Typographic Landscapes.” Accessed July 9, 2020. https://sites. google.com/usp.br/typescapes. Farias, Priscila L., Isabella R. Aragão, and Edna Cunha Lima. 2012. “Unraveling Aspects of Brazilian Design History through the Study of 19th Century Almanacs and Type

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Specimens.” DRS 2012 Bangkok: Proceedings of the Design Research Society International Conference, 498–511. Bangkok: Chulalongkorn University. Farias, Priscila L., Anna P. S. Gouveia, and Catherine Dixon. 2012. “Architectonic Epigraphs: Details That Tell a Bigger Story.” In Design e/é Patrimônio, edited by Paula de O. Camargo, Paulo E. V. L. Ribeiro, and Washington Fajardo, 189–209. Rio de Janeiro: Centro Carioca de Design. Farias, Priscila L., Daniela K. Hanns, Isabella R. Aragão, and Catherine Dixon. 2018. “Designing the Early History of Typography in Brazil, Starting from Printing in São Paulo.” ICDHS 10+1: Back to the Future, the Future in the Past: Conference Proceedings Book, 493–498. Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona. Farias, Priscila L., and LabVisual Research Team. 2018. “Tipografia Paulistana.” Accessed July 9, 2020. www.fau.usp.br/tipografiapaulistana. Farias, Priscila L., and Edna Cunha Lima. 2016. “Transatlantic Eccentricities: Tuscan Typefaces as an Example of Transnational Typographic Taste.” Communication Design 4, no. 1–2: 4–20. Fernández, Eduard. 2018. “Hong Kong’s Fight to Save Its Neon Shimmer: A Photo Essay.” The Guardian, July 25. Accessed July 9 2020. www.theguardian.com/ travel/2018/jul/25/hong-kong-neon-lighting-threat-chinese-regulations. Garone, Marina. 2012. “Imprenta La Purísima Coronada: Comentarios Acerca del Repertorio Tipográfico de un Establecimiento Michoacano (ca. 1895-).” Boletín del Instituto de Investigaciones Bibliográficas 14, no. 1–2: 121–150. Garone, Marina. 2015. Historia de la Imprenta y la Tipografía Colonial en Puebla de los Ángeles (1642–1821). México: UNAM. Gouveia, Anna P. S., Priscila L. Farias, and Patricia S. Gatto. 2013. “São Paulo City Epigraphic Archive: Construction Steps and Procedures.” International Journal of Architectural Heritage 7, no. 5: 579–590. InfoSãoFrancisco. 2019. “O projeto Luzitânia.” Canoa de Tolda. Accessed July 9, 2020. https://canoadetolda.org.br/iniciativas/projetos-permanentes/luzitania/. IPHAN, Instituto do Patrimônio Histórico e Artístico Nacional. 2014. IPHAN. Accessed July 9, 2020. http://portal.iphan.gov.br. IRPH, Instituto Rio Patrimônio da Humanidade. 2016. “Relatório de Gestão 2009– 2016.” Accessed July 9, 2020. www.rio.rj.gov.br/dlstatic/10112/6647718/4182603/ IRPH20092016_download.pdf. Kühl, Beatriz M. 2010a. “Patrimônio industrial: algumas questões em aberto.” arq.urb, no. 3: 23–30. Kühl, Beatriz M. 2010b. “Notas Sobre a Carta de Veneza.” Anais do Museu Paulista: História e Cultura Material 18, no. 2: 287–320. Kühne, Dafi. 2018. “The Dafi Kühne Printing Show.” Accessed July 9, 2020. https:// vimeo.com/channels/printingshow. Laube, Agnès, and Michael Widrig. 2016. Archigraphy: Lettering on Buildings. Basel: Birkhäuser. Marotta, Nello A. 2019. “Recupero e Ri-attualizzazione del Carattere Griffo.” In Editoria e Innovazione Fra Analogico e Digitale, edited by Emanuela Bonini Lessing, 37–60. Venezia: Università IUAV di Venezia. Martins, Fernanda de O. 2017. “Letras que Flutuam: Territórios Fluidos da Amazônia.” In Ecovisões Projetuais: Pesquisas em Design e Sustentabilidade no Brasil, edited by Alfredo J. Oliveira, Carlo Franzato, and Chiara Del Gaudio, 335–348. São Paulo: Blucher. Mosley, James. 2007. “The National Gallery’s New Inscription: A Very English Blunder.” Typefoundry: Documents for the History of Type and Letterforms, January. Accessed 9 July 2020. http://typefoundry.blogspot.com/2007/01/.

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Petrucci, Armando. 1993. Public Lettering: Script. Power, and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Petzet, Michael. 2004. “Principles of Preservation: An Introduction to the International Charters for Conservation and Restoration 40 Years after the Venice Charter.” In International Charters for Conservation and Restoration, Monuments & Sites (vol. 1), 7–29. München: ICOMOS. Accessed July 9, 2020. http://openarchive.icomos.org/432/. SEBRAE RJ. 2016. Guia de Compras Negócios de Valor: Centro do Rio de Janeiro. Rio de Janeiro: SEBRAE. Accessed July 9, 2020. https://m.sebrae.com.br/Sebrae/Portal%20 Sebrae/UFs/RJ/Artigos/Guia%20de%20Compras%20Neg%C3%B3cios%20de%20 Valor.pdf. Shaw, Paul. 2017. Revival Type: Digital Typefaces Inspired by the Past. New Haven: Yale University Press. Smeijers, Fred. 1996. Counterpunch: Making Type in the Sixteenth Century, Designing Typefaces Now. London: Hyphen Press. Smith, Bernard J., Miguel Gomez-Heras, and Shelby McCabe. 2008. “Understanding the Decay of Stone-Built Cultural Heritage.” Progress in Physical Geography: Earth and Environment 32, no. 4: 439–461. SPHAN, Secretaria do Patrimônio Histórico e Artístico Nacional and Pró-Memória, Fundação Nacional. 1980. Proteção e Revitalização do Patrimônio Cultural no Brasil: Uma Trajetória. Brasília: Ministério da Educação e Cultura. Tomaz, Kleber. 2018. “Anúncio histórico ‘descoberto’ após desabamento de prédio em SP é pintado e divide opiniões.” G1 SP – São Paulo, September 15. Accessed July 9, 2020. https://g1.globo.com/sp/sao-paulo/noticia/2018/09/15/anuncio-historicodescoberto-apos-desabamento-de-predio-em-sp-e-pintado-e-divide-opinioes. ghtml. Twyman, Michael. 2008. “The Long-Term Significance of Printed Ephemera.” RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage 9, no. 1: 19–57. Utsch, Ana, ed. 2015. Museu Tipografia Pão de Santo Antônio: Patrimônio Gráfico entre Ação e Preservação. Diamantina: Associação do Pão de Santo Antônio.

PART VI

Digitisation and online user experience design

17 RECONTEXTUALIZING BURMESE COLONIAL PHOTOGRAPHS AS CONTEMPORARY FASHION ACCESSORIES AT YANGOODS ‘To revitalize Myanmar’s heritage’ Carmín Berchiolly Introduction The purse, a personal object that is owned, is produced as both a status symbol and as a functional item to hold one’s possessions. The photograph, an object that captures its subjects, freezes them in time, forever immortalizing their image while also forbidding the viewer from understanding the subject beyond that particular moment. When colonial photographs of Burmese women are reprinted on fashion accessories such as purses, a new paradigm is born. Through these objects, one can own the Burmese and publicly sport their image. This chapter considers how colonial photographic images of Burmese people are digitally manipulated and reused today in commercial designs. The images are still controlled by foreigners who, just like in the original context in which they were produced, deal in the growing tourist industry.1 In 2015, a French-owned fashion and household goods company, Yangoods, was established in the Burmese city of Yangon. Their products display prints of digitally manipulated images from Burma’s colonial period (1886–1948), mostly featuring female ‘beauties’ in traditional garb. A reappropriated photograph titled Princess that appears on a canvas handbag produced by the fashion company Yangoods was originally taken in the nineteenth century by the British-Italian commercial photographer Felice Beato (1832–1909). Beato’s extensive oeuvre includes the work he produced while in Burma for over a decade. The photograph used in the Yangoods handbag is not well known. The image is part of a photographic series of the princess and other Burmese women that were taken by Beato soon after he arrived in the city of Mandalay (Figure 17.1). Beato’s original black-andwhite photograph captures a female model of likely Burmese descent among a wealth of objects that signal her high status within Burmese society. She casually reclines on her side on a traditional f loor cushion, confronting the viewer with DOI: 10.4324/9781003096146-24

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FIGURE 17.1

Upper. Felice Beato, title unknown, c.1890s, photograph. Lower. Yangoods, ‘Princess’ handbag. 2015. Author’s collection.

Source: Upper: Creative Commons. Lower: Photograph courtesy of the author.

a direct gaze – perhaps welcoming our presence. Her legs are pointing away from the camera in a customary polite position. She wears an elegant htamein (a long skirt) and loosely fitted blouse, both made with intricately woven f loral and geometric fabrics. Her hair is styled with a high bun and a f lower diadem. She is well adorned, signalling to the viewer that she is a lady of status. To her left,

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Beato has chosen to include a number of colonial silver bowls and some Burmese lacquered containers.2 The bowls hold two cheroot cigars, while another half-smoked cheroot is carefully laid on the edge of the model’s cushion. The surroundings are adorned with a hanging patterned curtain, a potted f lowering tree, and various patterned rugs. The 2015 Yangoods version has been changed in multiple ways that remove the image from its original context and add a new layer of digital manipulation. Rather than being presented in an interior setting, the Yangoods designers have cut out the princess and transported her to an imagined Burmese landscape. This sepia landscape creates a stark contrast with the princess, who remains lounging on her floor cushion. In the far distance, we see two small pagodas and possibly a Buddhist monastery or a palace. Flanked by a tropical palm and a tree, the scene features various valleys and bushes that recede into the distance, while the princess lies on her cushion placed on the bare ground, perhaps now enjoying a picnic. In the midground, to the left of the princess, we can see a roaming elephant, defined by his rough silhouette. The Burmese silver bowls have been replaced with a container and a lamp that appears to be Chinese. A traditional Burmese nesting food container has also been added to the composition. The reverse of the purse features an identical landscape without the princess, who has now been replaced with the Burmese caption ‘beautiful maiden from Bagan’. The caption refers to the ancient ninth-century city of Bagan, likely chosen due to the city’s popularity among tourists. However, the original image was most likely taken in Mandalay, where Beato primarily worked. Purses from Yangoods’s early seasons relied on photographic manipulations to create their design while being printed on generic forms. The main material was mostly canvas as a favourable surface for various printing techniques. Other details such as straps, sturdy metal zippers branded with the company’s logo, and soft inner linings with additional pockets make the Yangoods bags functional and suitable for daily use. They also advertise their use of vegan leather in all their products as a way to appeal to the environmentally conscious consumer. The company offered the Princess design in various styles, including large tote bags, small hand clutches, and medium-sized crossbody bags with an adjustable strap, plus cushion covers, framed canvas prints for wall hanging, and packaged postcard sets. What happens when a contemporary company rebrands a colonial image of Burma that was constructed by European photographers? Do the images appropriated by Yangoods represent Burmese heritage? Or do they signify Burma as a place, idea, or product that may be purchased, possessed, or consumed? We must further question what happens when image producers and consumers are no longer part of the imperial milieu; what do the images mean? What sort of encoded messages do they carry? Yangoods’ presentation of Burmese heritage only differs from that of its colonial predecessors in explicit statements where it claims to revitalize heritage. From a functional and commercial perspective, both Yangoods and colonial curio shops operated under the same principle – to commercialize Burmese heritage for Western consumption.

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The camera is an instrument that can go beyond merely producing evidence, but it is incapable of producing an ‘existential essence’ (Tagg 2007, 1–3). An image is thus empty, created as a testament of its time rather than of the subject matter which it depicts. In this context, the photograph is treated as a material thing which denotes a history. For John Tagg, a photograph can never bring back its referent and thus cannot be treated as confirmation that the subject matter, as we see it, truly existed (5–6). This contention is born out of the understanding that an image is contrived by its maker under the inf luence of various photographic conventions and institutions. Colonial images of Burma have greatly inf luenced the way in which Westerners think about the region and erroneously represent a homogenous Burmese identity, culture, and heritage. It is necessary to contextualize these images historically to understand that their function was a testament to the colonial presence in Burma rather than an expression of Burmese identity.

Photography and tourism in Burma In 1852, Dr. John McCosh (1805–1885) took the earliest known photographic images of Burma during his service with the British forces. The images coincide with the second Anglo-Burmese war of 1852–53, 13 years after the advent of the daguerreotype (Falconer 2014, 15–17). These early photographs were produced by foreigners for foreigners to represent the land and its peoples under new colonial rule.3 Felice Beato, the German Philip Adolphe Klier (1845–1911), the Indian D.A. Ahuja (?–?), and others exerted control over the production of Burma’s visual history for over six decades, until the early twentieth century when Burmeseowned studios such as London Art Studio, established by U Ohn Maung, began to appear and explore the potential of both photography and film.4 After decades of civil unrest under a military regime, businesses in Myanmar have more recently catered to the tourist boom that the country has encouraged since its reopening to foreign entry in 2007 (Ministry of Hotels and Tourism 2019). Foreign businesses in Myanmar profit from an interest in colonial images and the marketability of native people, who are admired for their exotic ethnicity. Some companies, for example Crazy Buff, based in Chiang Mai, Thailand, have used Myanmar textiles to create fashion lines that directly imitate traditional dress and are made by and for foreigners. Other foreign-owned companies in Yangon such as American-owned Hla Day and Pomelo, and Japanese-owned Dacco, have recently opened their businesses to cater to Western markets by selling hand-made products. Yet other stores such as the French-owned Yangoods reappropriate colonial images to represent Myanmar and its people by selling products that are mass-produced outside of the country. Yangoods has established itself as the market leader for souvenir and fashion goods within the tourist sector. In 2018, Lonely Planet described Yangoods as an ‘accessories and souvenirs brand known for its sepia portraits and images of old Burma jazzed up with

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pop-art colours. It offers high-quality bags, pouches, cushions and stationery among other things’ (Lonely Planet n.d.). In the same year, Yangoods described itself as ‘a lifestyle brand that specializes in the blending of historical art with 21st century sensibilities to revitalize Myanmar’s heritage’ (Yangoods 2018). Tourist consumer reviews generally focus on the unique photographs that use familiar objects, making them appropriate for use back home. One Christmas shopper describes the items as ‘different but not so different as [sic] they are [have] limited appeal’ (Steve 2019). Other reviewers focus on what they believe are locally made products. Examples include a tourist who praises the company for not providing ‘lousy, tatty, cheap, Chinese mass-made stuff ’ despite Yangoods’s foreignmade products (Angtravel18 2017), and a reviewer from 2016 who believed the company was local describing it as a ‘a cute little local design business among the sea of crazy fabrics, jewelry and Buddhas’ (HaTaLa41 2016). Another reviewer described feeling offended by Yangood’s superficial appropriation of traditional Burmese imagery (Ye Yint 2015), a view that was curtly dismissed months later by Yangoods’ Director of Sales as naive and uninformed (Eotorm 2016). The original studio portraits, which were already carefully orchestrated by colonial photographers, are now digitally manipulated by Yangoods, further infusing them with an imported, Western ideology. Their marketing strategies cater to the tourist boom and mirror the opportunistic strategies that inf luenced British colonialism. Although the country has been in f lux since 2015 due to a democratic transition of government, the roots of colonialism are still present, and they have the potential of morphing into a form of neocolonialism that encourages the consumption of both products and stereotypes. Practices of reproducing the visual culture of the colonial period have become neutralized, depoliticized, and absorbed into the social identity of the country – an evolution that Roland Barthes described as myth (1957). Myanmar has been further Westernized today, and with this change, the agency of the Burmese continues to be manipulated in order to fit into the expectations of the West. It is important to question contemporary practices among this wave of foreign businesses that are establishing their storefronts in Myanmar because they employ marketing campaigns to present their ideologies as the new dominant reading of colonial sources. While local communities understand and welcome the potential economic benefits and new opportunities that foreign businesses bring to their country, my personal experience working with young Burmese middle- and upper-class students and with older faculty members suggests that while they believe colonial images can engender nostalgia for the past and respect for the old kingdom, when changed into the context of fashion accessories for tourists, their function shifts towards commercial gain at the expense of historical value. More generally, my conversations with consumers in public settings revealed that their interest in Yangoods was mainly because of the visual elements and colourful designs. While tourist consumers enjoyed the use of old images and imagined their visual impact back at home, locals often purchased Yangoods because of the growing trendiness and popularity within the cosmopolitan cities of Yangon and Mandalay.

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Because Yangoods has also marketed to the local Burmese community, which constitutes a third of their consumer base (Gurley 2016), we must ask how the reading of their merchandise changes when the consumer is local rather than foreign. Yangoods has been successful with Burmese youth from the middle and upper classes who are attracted to current trends and fashion styles. In 2017, the brand marketed its colonial images line on its website and in social media using descriptors such as vintage, thereby attracting individuals interested in unique items, including customers who encountered the images for the first time through their products. Local consumers felt attracted to the images because they evoked fond memories of old family albums and sometimes purchased Yangoods products to give as gifts to their foreign friends. Like Beato, who owned and operated a massive curio shop where he offered sales catalogues and mail orders to foreigners, Yangoods offers a version of Burmese culture in the commodified familiarity of souvenir goods sold to travellers in a Westernized setting. While this practice is no longer uncommon throughout the country, stores that offer these commodities and luxury goods often market to local consumers from higher socioeconomic backgrounds. The common practice of bartering is removed, making it attractive to travellers who dislike the pressure of the typical Southeast Asian sales environment.

Reading contemporary reappropriated images Though Edward Said’s inf luential work has been scrutinized by other postcolonial scholars for ‘failing to take into account the nuances of the relationship between colonizer and colonized and the systems responsible for its reinforcement’ (Hight and Sampson 2013, 6), it provided a foundation for new ways of understanding the complex relationships between East and West and allowed other scholars to expand beyond his centre-periphery binary. Said’s Orientalist theory contends that the Orient exists as a justification to polarize the colonizer and colonized (Said 1979). Through this narrative, the West positively self-defined as active, advanced, masculine, civilized, and so on; conversely, the East earned the opposing and negative aspects of this ideology, such as passive, underdeveloped, feminine, and barbaric. The dualisms of Orientalism became more than just a way of defining the Orient. Rather, they became a process by which to define the European construct of self, and thus, everything outside these boundaries became the Other. Homi K. Bhabha questions and expands on Said’s Orientalism by unveiling the connotations that the use of binary terms carries, as they imply a sense of solid distinctive-ness and essence-ness (1994, 35). According to Bhabha, the binary approach reinforces the idea that a type of purity exists in cultures before they were colonized and that it is possible to revert back to this original state. Rather, Bhabha proposes the concept of cultural hybridity, which understands culture as constantly in f lux and thus not capable of being pinned down and conceptualized to a specific type of essence (1994, 185). Perhaps most important in Bhabha’s work is his exploration of mimicry as a process that allows for a transformation

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into mockery. This process allows the colonized to exert agency, as they are capable of reversing the process, successfully questioning colonial authority and even terrorizing it (Bhabha 1994, 115). Fernando Ortiz’s process of transculturation provides a useful framework to consider the changes that occur when one culture meets another and they begin to exchange inf luences (1940, 98). He described this complex process as a type of collision between cultures, one that is not guaranteed to succeed and one that can often be violent (98). Through his framework, we can understand the transculturation that occurred in Burma when it was forced to change from a kingdom to a colony and later on when the camera was introduced to the country, forever changing the relationship that its people would have with the outside world. Furthermore, Burma experienced another transculturation when it reopened to the world after the military regime of the 1960s, allowing foreigners to return to the country and settle in, becoming expats and exerting strong inf luence in the development of a transitioning country. Marwan Kraidy builds on Ortiz’s work by considering it as both a practice and space where constant power negotiations take place while asserting that hybridity and domination can coexist (2002, 4). As explained by Lees-Maffei, Ortiz’s work also describes ‘how an object or image accrues new meanings in response to changing contexts and locations’ (Lees-Maffei and Maffei 2019, 107). In the case of Yangoods, the contemporary context in which colonial imagery is used by Yangoods effectively transforms their meaning, although it is up to the consumers to interpret this meaning and perhaps grant a new interpretation of the works. Roland Barthes’ concept of myth is useful for problematizing seemingly benign everyday visual and material culture, such as trendy images and dress accessories, and revealing how they are neutralized and absorbed into the mainstream (Barthes 1957). Myth obscures its ideological underpinnings and discourages critique (or encourages passive consumption) (Barthes 1957, 128). While it does not conceal, myth can also distort meaning into a type of collective illusion that can often be used to justify the behaviours of those in power. Ultimately, as Barthes’ (1957) assertions would suggest, myth dangerously de-historicizes and de-politicizes meaning. The photograph is, according to Barthes (1957, 17–20), originally devoid of meaning and even resists any form of connotation, especially because attempts to describe content often lead to exclusions. However, photographs are often accepted as having more descriptive power than language or as transporting us to a vivid reality. The relationship of text and image provides a type of anchor that guides us and tells us ‘the correct level of perception’ (Barthes 1957, 39). The photograph and its accompanying text and captions can be understood as different kinds of messages that cooperate with each other to provide various kinds of signification (Barthes 1977, 15–31). Because of their specificity, captions hold more authority than the images. Beato, Klier, and Ahuja portrayed their Burmese subjects in a way that ref lected their nineteenth-century understanding of the East as Other to the

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West. The appropriation of their photographs by a contemporary company like Yangoods today, however, raises new questions about how images signify in different political and economic contexts. In my analysis of Burmese images, the original myth-producers are the photographers and their businesses. In the contemporary context, the producers are the new companies that reuse the old images. In the case of Yangoods, colonial images of Burma, which were already imbued with myth when first created, are reintroduced as contemporary fashion, posing as authentic Burmese cultural heritage by a company that profits from the past. Nearly all the photographs of Burma produced in the colonial period were originally created with a superimposed caption and often provided authoritative descriptions, even if at times contradicting the photograph itself. How, then, might we understand the intended purpose of colonial images of Burma? The texts chosen to accompany photographs of Burma and the Burmese were not arbitrary or unmotivated: they helped to bolster the moral justification of the British colonising mission. Even if the image producers were not working directly for the British, they were complicit with, and profited from, colonization by settling and opening businesses in the new colony. They simultaneously acted as supporters and inf luencers of the process. The image producers were not only informed by colonialism but also served to inform it. In a contemporary Burmese context, the use of colonial photographs by companies such as Yangoods during a time of rapid Westernization allows the company to reintroduce them under the disguise of heritage with a modern appeal. The manipulated photographs stand in for heritage because they gloss a distant, and mythical, past. The historical distance obscures their constructed and imagined status as inauthentic and authenticates them as historical representations. This is an instance, therefore, of design creating heritage, albeit of an inauthentic and problematic kind. The images, now seemingly devoid of their colonial context, appear as benign representations of a country that is modernizing. Beyond the images, the objects upon which they are printed signal to the West that Burmese culture retains its own individuality while allowing the inf luence of other fashion styles. After all, the purses, cushions, and coasters sold by Yangoods may be Western in style and form, but the decorative elements remain Burmese. Thus, the products that result from this process and become part of local material culture are adopted as a version of contemporary Burmese style, obscuring its relationship to Western dominated mass production. Yangoods’ decontextualization of these innately Orientalist images reintroduces them to contemporary Burmese society as benign fashion statements while ignoring the complexity of the period in which they were created. As fashion statements, the products sold by Yangoods, when worn by local youth who look outside the country for inspiration and understand the context of the colonial past, may transform the Yangoods purse into a statement of self-aware irony, or kitsch. Through this practice, the connotations carried by the colonial images and their myth are f lipped, and a sense of ownership is regained by the local population. This practice could legitimately empower the

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local communities who choose to wear colonial images of their own culture and past, therefore regaining and renegotiating the terms in which such objects should be read. This reading of Yangoods’ products must question what happens to the status of fashion items when this takes place. If the consumers of these foreign-made goods are local and worn as an explicit anti-colonial statement, are they then considered objects of local heritage? Or do they continue to hold the previously discussed meanings as long as the production, manufacture, and distribution remains innately foreign?

Yangoods in the news and social media Delphine de Lorme is a painter who left Paris around 2008. According to lepetitjournal.com (2017), she first exchanged her Parisian lifestyle for that of the Philippines, where she resided for several years. Upon travelling to Myanmar and falling in love with the city of Yangon, she decided to settle there in 2013. Previously, the artist produced TV shows in France and a line of handcrafted furniture in Cebu, Philippines. Merritt Gurley, writing for the online magazine Travel & Leisure, places Yangoods among other trendy businesses that are helping create a hipster scene in Yangon.5 Gurley’s interview with de Lorme reveals that the idea behind the business emerged in 2014, when de Lorme and her friends Clara Baik and Jean Curci spotted old postcards at a party. The three founded Yangoods, with de Lorme as the creative lead and later Htin Htin, a local fashionista and editor of the Yangon style magazine Moda. To Gurley, ‘the collection is super cool and holds up a mirror to the trendy subculture emerging in Rangoon’ (2016). This reputation of coolness and trendiness has allowed the company to be widely associated with the youth fashion scene. Since its inception, the company has grown rapidly and added multiple shops in most major cities in Myanmar and significantly increased in popularity on most social media platforms. The line has expanded to the major Myanmar airports, cruise ships, and airlines. Additional marketing by the company includes multiple commercials, fashion shows, and special events, as well as Burmese reality TV appearances on shows such as ‘Forever Stars’. Their website states that ‘Yangoods is a lifestyle brand that specializes in the blending of historical art with twenty-first century sensibilities to revitalize Myanmar’s heritage’ (Yangoods 2018). This business mission implies that Myanmar’s heritage needs revitalization. It might also be taken to imply that this is because the country has not adopted (Western) modernism. These ideas stall the country’s attempt to rewrite its own autonomous history by promoting Western ideologies that prevailed in colonial times. This is also apparent in social media. For example, a posting made by de Lorme, featuring herself as she presents one of her products, is captioned: ‘Already more than 3 years that I’ve arrived to Myanmar. My new traditional Chin blouse match perfectly with my pop city pouch! Love to use traditional and make it fashionable’ (De Lorme 2016).6 This statement assumes that traditional designs do not belong in the category of fashion

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and that the country’s use of traditional textiles and garb has become outmoded. While the country has indeed adapted new forms of fashion in recent years, this is not unlike previous changes that have consistently taken place in every decade. For example, modes of Western fashion such as bell bottoms were popular in the 1970s, and blue jeans have been part of the Yangon style since the 1980s. Traditional Burmese textiles continue to belong in the realm of fashion, as evidenced by the country’s numerous fashion editorials and storefronts that are devoted to this aspect of Burmese identity and the continued use of quintessential textile patterns such as a wavy motif known as luntaya acheik. Yangoods regularly updates the English-speaking public with its news and upcoming seasonal merchandise on Instagram, where the company publishes images of products in interesting configurations, known as ‘f lat lays’. These montages, akin to the setup of a European still life painting, include the featured product as a focal point while also featuring non-Yangoods products. Yangoods has employed this strategy to associate the brand with high-end companies such as Guerlain, Dior, and Urban Decay. An example of a f lat lay published on Instagram in 2017 features a Yangoods cushion among high-end beauty products (Yangoods 2017). Pictured in the lower right-hand corner is a container of Guerlain blush and Shalimar perfume, which Guerlain describes as ‘the first oriental fragrance in history’. Guerlain is a high-end French beauty company founded in Paris in 1828. French perfumeries such as Guerlain have developed lines that evoked a sense of exoticism with names such as Opium and Un Jardin sur le Nil (A Garden on the Nile). The choice to include such a product may be an attempt on the part of Yangoods to further exoticize the brand. In the case of Shalimar, the Orientalist dichotomy is found within the perfume’s fragrance of vanilla and bergamot, both which originate from tropical climates, and iris, which is deeply connected to Egypt. Guerlain’s US website describes it as ‘an intense wake with a touch of impertinence’ and as embodying ‘sensuality with a hint of the forbidden’ (Guerlain n.d.), further adding to the mystique of the fragrance. A closer look at the Yangoods’ line of products shows the same ideologies so far revealed through the company’s marketing as they transform from a small business to a full enterprise.

The case of ‘The Enchantress’ Among Yangoods’ first-season range, released in 2015, were postcards, totes, clutches, and purses that feature images of colonial Burmese women. The company’s third season (2017) continued this image manipulation trend and ref lected the same ideology. The Enchantress bag displays a digital composition of multiple photographs that create the visual narrative of a Burmese woman dancing for a Burmese man (Figure 17.2). The original image used for the female dancer is a studio photograph dated to 1900. The caption labels the photograph with the number S6 and gives the name of the dancer as Sein Kyaw, ‘Burmese Dancing Girl’. The setting of the portrait is an interior studio containing props including

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FIGURE 17.2

Left. Photographer unknown, ‘Burmese Dancing Girl’, c.1900. Right. Yangoods, ‘Enchantress’ collection hand clutch, 2017, printed image on canvas and vegan leather purse.

Source: Left: Printed postcard reproduction. Author’s collection. Photograph courtesy of the author. Right: Author’s collection. Photograph courtesy of the author.

potted plants, a table, and various drapes. Sein Kyaw is captured in a dancing position as she elegantly presents a white handkerchief in an active pose. She is lavishly dressed and decorated with pearls. The Yangoods version presents a new background that transplants the model into a colonial interior space. The slight smile in the original photograph has been exaggerated in the Yangoods version, a photo manipulation practice that is new to this series. Within the new composition, Sein Kyaw appears to the left, and a sitting Burmese man has been placed behind her and to the right side, making a direct line from his gaze to the body of the model. The male model sits with one leg crossed over casually. A Siamese cat, another symbol for the East, sits beneath him, as if viewing the dancing. The setting is a spacious colonial-style room with grand doors that f lank an enormous portrait of a family. This portrait is from another photograph that has been manipulated to appear as a painting installed in the wall of this ballroom. An old gramophone sits atop a black piano to the far right of the scene, presumably producing music for the dancer. The back of the bag is decorated with a plain background and two Burmese-style decorative frames. This handbag represents a new direction by Yangoods in their manipulation of colonial images. Rather than simply mixing elements to represent ‘Burmeseness’, they have now created an entirely new composition. This new style may be misinterpreted as an original photographic composition from the colonial period. Unless viewers are aware that the picture is a composite of three different colonial sources, there is a risk that the new image will be absorbed

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into the visual record of the perceived past. The company’s website described the ‘Enchantress line’ as follows: A young noble man falling under the enchanting beauty of the dancing maiden. From the time of dynasties to the colonial period, dancing maidens are respected and desired for their stunning grace. Keeping such allure, the Enchantress design creates a sense of elegance. ( Yangoods n.d.) Consumers are presented with a story that validates the visual narrative while granting certain associations to those who purchase and wear this item. The owner of an Enchantress bag is guaranteed status, elegance, and allure. By removing the given identity of Sein Kyaw, and by giving her a new role as the enchantress for the male viewer, the Yangoods image disfranchises and dehumanizes her. It is important to question whether the new Yangoods image of the dancing girl authorizes the foreign gaze (and ownership, through purchase) because it has already been legitimized by the dominant Burmese male gaze. That is, the literal depiction of a Burmese man looking at a Burmese girl permits us as foreigners to objectify and possess the dancer and her image. These considerations are pertinent because the company introduced a line that features highly stylized and digitally colorized contemporary photographs of marginalized, and in some cases persecuted, ethnic minorities taken by de Lorme and her team as they travelled through the different regions of the country. This practice raises ethical questions of image copyright, model and photographer rights, monetary compensation through royalties, and ultimately human agency and repatriation of a person’s image. While Yangoods has created new versions of many of these old photographs, which they describe as a practice that ‘revitalizes Myanmar’s heritage’ and draws inspiration from its rich artistic tradition, the company continues to disseminate a dominant Western ideology under the guise of local heritage. Through this chapter, I have sought to (re)politicize and (re)historicize the myth of Burma’s artistic heritage by deconstructing deeply coded messages that colonial images from the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, and contemporary reappropriations such as those created by Yangoods, are perpetuating for the West. In the same way that colonial postcards circulated through the West as a neatly packaged version of another British colony, so Yangoods’ products have become a contemporary symbol for a new form of possession. Today, Yangon’s youth have adopted fashion styles from all over the world. Increasing access to the internet has accelerated this process, providing new generations with ample inspiration for their creative outlets. We must continue to question the seemingly innocent use of politically charged historical images as a form of benign expression among contemporary businesses. These images can skew the way in which new generations perceive their past

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and their heritage, leading to the potential erasure of a collective memory of the colonial period and thus giving interested powers a new opportunity for repeating the process.

Acknowledgements I am grateful to the Center for Burma Studies at NIU and director Dr. Catherine Raymond for their continued support, to my husband Andre for providing encouragement, and to my son Miles for being my inspiration.

Notes 1 The term Burma refers to the period before 1989, when the country’s name was changed to Myanmar by the military. The term Burmese, in reference to the Bamar people of Burma/Myanmar and their language, is used to refer to past and present contexts. The spelling of city names is based on the historical period referenced. In this context, Rangoon refers to the city before 1989 and Yangon to contemporary times. 2 Silver bowls and lacquered containers of this type were commonly made during the colonial period and can be found in Burmese art collections today. See the Burma Art Collection at Northern Illinois University for examples. These objects were historically associated with the rank of the family, and silverware was usually owned by royalty. 3 Burma’s colonial history is marked by three isolated Anglo-Burmese wars that spanned 60 years and led to full annexation by 1886. The first known English presence in Burma is from 1586, when Ralph Fitch was sent armed with a charter from Elizabeth I to trade in the East Indies. From this early date, interest in a Burma-China trade route, as well as the abundance of teak and rubies in Upper Burma, informed succeeding missions. 4 Few photographs with original stamps and logos exist today in private collections within Burma that show the transition from foreign photographers to locally owned and operated photo studios, especially near Sule Pagoda in Yangon. 5 Hipsters belong to a contemporary subculture and are associated with a revival of older material culture, such as the use of vinyl records, corded telephones, and vintage clothing. 6 Chin people are an ethnic minority living in Burma/Myanmar.

References Angtravel18. 2017. “Trip Advisor.” March. Accessed May 3, 2021. www.tripadvisor. com/Attraction_Review-g294191-d8390966-Reviews-or5-Yangoods-Yangon_ Rangoon_Yangon_Region.html#REVIEWS. Barthes, Roland. 1957. Mythologies. Paris: Editions Du Seuil. Barthes, Roland. 1977. Image, Music, Text. Translated by Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang. Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge. De Lorme, Delphine. 2016. “Yangoods Post on Instagram.” July 5. Accessed June 7, 2021. www.instagram.com/p/BHeAM6FB1dZ/?hl=en&taken-by=yangoods. Eotorm. 2016. “Trip Advisor.” July. Accessed May 3, 2021. www.tripadvisor.com/Attrac tion_Review-g294191-d8390966-Reviews-or5-Yangoods-Yangon_Rangoon_ Yangon_Region.html#REVIEWS. Falconer, John. 2014. “Cameras at the Golden Foot: Nineteenth-Century Photography in Burma.” In 7 Days in Myanmar: A Portrait of Burma by 30 Great Photographers, edited

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by John Falconer, Denis Gray, Thaw Kaung, Patrick Winn, Nicholas Grossman, and Myint-U Thant, 15–35. Singapore: Didier Millet. Guerlain – US. n.d. “Founded in Paris in 1828.” Accessed May 10, 2017. www.guerlain. com/us/en-us/founded-paris-1828. Gurley, Merritt. 2016. “Seeking Inspiration in Burma.” Travel & Leisure Southeast Asia, April 7. www.travelandleisureasia.com/features/2987514/seeking_inspiration_in_burma. html. HaTaLa41. 2016. “Trip Advisor.” June. Accessed May 3, 2021. www.tripadvisor.com/ Attraction_Review-g294191-d8390966-Reviews-or5-Yangoods-Yangon_Rangoon_ Yangon_Region.html#REVIEWS. Hight, Eleanor M., and Gary D. Sampson. 2013. “Photography, ‘Race,’ and Post-Colonial Theory,” introduction to Colonialist Photography Imag(in)ing Race and Place. Florence: Taylor and Francis. Kraidy, Marwen. 2002. “Hybridity in Cultural Globalization.” Communication Theory 12, no. 3: 316–339. Lees-Maffei, Grace, and Nicolas P. Maffei. 2019. Reading Graphic Design in Cultural Context. London and New York: Bloomsbury. Lonely Planet. n.d. “Yangoods.” Accessed July 30, 2018. www.lonelyplanet.com/ myanmar-burma/yangon/shopping/yangoods/a/poi-sho/1542464/357104. Ministry of Hotels and Tourism. 2019. “2019 Tourism Statistics.” Accessed December 24, 2020. https://tourism.gov.mm/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Myanmar-TourismStatisitcs-2019-1.pdf. Ortiz, Fernando, 1995[1940]. Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar. Translated by Harriet De Onís. Durham, NC: Duke University Press (Contrapunteo Cubano del tabaco y el azúcar). Said, Edward. 1979. Orientalism. New York. Vintage Books. Steve. 2019. “Trip Advisor.” February. Accessed May 3, 2021. www.tripadvisor.com/ Attraction_Review-g294191-d8390966-Reviews-or5-Yangoods-Yangon_Rangoon_ Yangon_Region.html#REVIEWS. Tagg, John. 2007. The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Yangoods. n.d. “Enchantress Tote Bag.” Accessed February 25, 2018. www.yangoods.com/ fashion/enchantress-tote-bag. Yangoods. 2017. “Instagram Post.” March 20. www.instagram.com/p/BR4oCTeDg-l/? hl=en&taken-by=yangoods. Yangoods. 2018. “Our Story.” Accessed February 25, 2018. www.Yangoods.com/. “Yangoods Saung Thama.” 2017. Le Petite Journal. www.lepetitjournal.com/birmanie/ 2016-05-17-12-49-28/actu/256685-yangoods-publi-info-saung-thama-la-dame-ala-harpe. Ye Yint. 2015. “Trip Advisor.” October. Accessed May 3, 2021. www.tripadvisor.com/ Attraction_Review-g294191-d8390966-Reviews-or5-Yangoods-Yangon_Rangoon_ Yangon_Region.html#REVIEWS.

18 DESIGNING ABSENCE AT THE ANNE FRANK HOUSE MUSEUM, AMSTERDAM, AND THE SECRET ANNEX ONLINE Exhibition design, virtual reality, and historic preservation Sarah A. Lichtman The Anne Frank House is located in Amsterdam at 263 Prinsengracht in a seventeenth-century canal house. It is where Anne Frank with her parents, sister, and four other Jews hid in the so-called ‘Secret Annex’ during World War II – and where Anne wrote her famous diary. ‘Holland’s unofficial patron saint’ and national symbol of Dutch heritage, Frank is included in the ‘Canon of Dutch History’, a list of topics considered essential historical and cultural knowledge about the Netherlands (Miller 1990, 95; van Oostrom 2007, 203–205), and her wartime hiding place ranks among the most popular heritage sites in the country. It is also identified by historian Alvin H. Rosenfeld as a transnational ‘memory site of primary importance’ (Rosenfeld 2011, 141). The fate of the building, however, was not always guaranteed. In a 1954 letter, Otto Frank confirmed that ‘the rooms of the secret annexe [sic] with the swinging cupboard still exist’, but lamented that, ‘the house will have to be broken down at the end of next year’. Ref lecting the growing worldwide interest in Anne Frank and her diary, between 1955 and 1957, concerned Dutch citizens and preservationists launched a public campaign to save the building. With their help, on 3 May 1957, Frank established the Anne Frank House (Anne Frank Stichting), and, in 1960, a small museum opened on the site. Interest in the house was immediate; 10,000 visitors came in the first year alone and increased steadily thereafter. By the 1970s, hundreds of thousands toured the house annually; by the early 1990s, the annual visitor figures exceeded 500,000 (Hartmann 2016, 466). In 2007, attendance surpassed 1 million for the first time, and in 2019 it reached 1.3 million, a new record (Anne Frank House Annual Report 2019, 2). Corresponding in part to what art historian Bruno S. Frey characterizes as a ‘superstar museum’ – a site that is DOI: 10.4324/9781003096146-25

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a tourist ‘must’ (Frey 1998, 113) – the Anne Frank House evolved into a major destination. That so many wish to visit one of Amsterdam’s ‘most hidden and secretive places’ (Westra 2004, n.p.) has necessitated a series of expansions, renovations, and renewals, most recently in 2018 by exhibition designer Dagmar von Wilcken. Using a design historical approach, this chapter considers the ways in which the design of the Anne Frank House mediates the site’s multiple heritage(s) and actively forms our perceptions of the past (Erll and Rigney 2009, 3). It confirms historian Neil A. Silberman’s definition of ‘heritage places’ as those sites that serve as a ‘stimulus for collective and individual memory and historical associations’ (2016, 30) and the consideration of heritage as ‘inherently a spatial phenomenon’ (Graham, Ashworth, and Tunbridge 2000, 4). The Anne Frank House – and the annex for which the building is best known – is situated within the seventeenth-century canal ring itself designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site and connects to a broader urban and Dutch heritage of tolerance and refuge (Young 1994a, 131). Multivalent, and existing as more than a literary landscape or stop on Anne Frank’s legacy trail, the Anne Frank House further signifies Dutch resistance, Jewish life, World War II and the occupation of the Netherlands, and the Holocaust, which situates it among other sites of ‘difficult heritage’ (Hartmann 2016; Macdonald 2009). As such, it confirms Silberman’s theorization that ‘[h]eritage places can variously or even simultaneously be sites of conf lict, identity, entertainment, patriotism, ideology, and ref lection’ (2016, 36). Reading the building as a designed object that shifts over time thus allows for broad material, spatial, and cultural analyses. As Tom Brink, the Anne Frank House head of publications and presentations, explained, despite its limited space, the house has many stories to tell (Brink and von Wilcken 2017). Through a series of changes over time, the Secret Annex itself has remained largely intact since the arrest and deportation of those in hiding, albeit emptied of its furnishings by the occupying forces. The space participates in what scholars consider ‘geographies of absence’ (Meier, Frers, and Sigvardsdotter 2013, 425), rendering Anne’s absence, as well as that of the others in hiding, a ‘tangible’ or ‘absent presence’ through their remaining traces (Maddrell 2013, 504– 505, 517). The Secret Annex stands, therefore, as a monument to the absences made present not only of those who sought refuge there but also the larger void wrought by the destruction of Dutch Jews in Amsterdam, and European Jewry more broadly. For this reason, the use of virtual space becomes meaningful. As Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett explains, ‘A key to heritage is its virtuality, whether in the presence or the absence of actualities’ (KirshenblattGimblett 1995, 369). The Anne Frank House allows visitors to ‘step back in time’ through its design and reconstruction of the Secret Annex online, an award-winning website where one can experience the Secret Annex as a virtually furnished space. In addition, the Anne Frank House recently launched a virtual reality tour where visitors can stroll through the simulated spaces and even pick up objects such as Anne’s diary. These designed reconstructions

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present an alternative experience rooted in material presence. Informed by absence and presence, authenticity and reconstruction, the Anne Frank House and its design  – both real and virtual – helps communicate and complicate the rich heritage of what many consider to be the ‘best-known building in Amsterdam’ (Anne Frank House n.d. a).

Anti-Semitism, emigration, and the genesis of Anne Frank’s diary Anneliese Marie Frank was born on 12 June 1929 in Frankfurt am Main to Otto Frank and Edith Holländer, well-to-do assimilated German Jews. The rise of National Socialism and increasing anti-Semitism forced the Franks to emigrate to the Netherlands, where the German invasion of 10 May 1940 ushered in a series of anti-Jewish laws, increasingly isolating Dutch Jews. ‘After May 1940 the good times were few and far between’, Anne wrote on 20 June 1942 in the redand-white checked diary she received as a 13th birthday present. ‘[F]irst there was the war, then the capitulation and then the arrival of the Germans, which is when the trouble started for the Jews’, she explained. Nevertheless, for a short time, ‘life went on’ (Frank 1995, 7–8). The situation would change drastically only a few weeks later when, on 5 July 1942, Anne’s sister Margot, then aged 16, received a call-up notice to report to a labour camp in Germany. Increasingly concerned, Otto had been making plans for several months to go into hiding. He furnished and stockpiled supplies in the hidden annex behind his offices at 263 Prinsengracht, a 500-square-foot, bi-level space containing a series of small rooms, attic, and WC and connected by a steep, internal staircase. Separated by a courtyard and connected by a corridor to the main building, the house presented an ideal hiding place since from the street few could imagine its complicated internal layout (Westra 2004, 246). ‘No one’, Anne wrote in her diary, ‘would ever suspect there were so many rooms behind that plain gray door’ (Frank 1995, 23–24). Wasting little time, the Franks made their way to the Secret Annex on 6 July 1942 – where they would remain for the next 761 days – and where Anne kept a record in her diary and chronicled her life in hiding. On 4 August 1944, the worst fears of the occupants were realized; the Dutch Nazi police raided the Secret Annex and arrested those in hiding, along with two of their Dutch helpers. The occupying forces ransacked the Secret Annex but left Anne’s diary in a heap of discarded papers. On 3 September 1944, on what would be the last transport leaving Westerbork camp in the Netherlands, the Franks and the others were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Separated upon arrival and sent to various concentration camps and murdered, of them only Otto survived. Upon his return to Amsterdam in the summer of 1945, Otto Frank received Anne’s diary from Miep Gies. Gies, an employee of Frank’s who aided the annex residents, had gathered up Anne’s diary and kept it for safekeeping. In 1947, Contact Publishing printed Het Achterhuis, or The House Behind; by 1948, it was already in its third printing. In 1950, the diary appeared in French and West

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German editions, and in 1952, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl was published in Great Britain and the United States. The 1955 award-winning theatrical adaptation by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, The Diary of Anne Frank, as well as the 1959 Academy Award-winning film directed by George Stevens, also contributed to its surging popularity. Since its initial publication, the diary has been translated into 70 languages, has sold more than 30 million copies, and numbers in the top 10 of the most widely read books in the world (Van Der Stroom 2003 59–77; McNamara 2010). In 2009, UNESCO included the diary in the Memory of the World Register, an honour reserved for such revered documents as Magna Carta and the Utrecht Psalter (“Memory of the World” n.d.).

263 Prinsengracht: the house ‘itself is a story’ ‘[S]eldom has a text been so closely identified with a building as Anne’s diary’, historian Jeffrey Shandler explains, ‘beginning with its original title, which identifies the book with its setting’. Since its first editions, publishers have included ground plans of the three main f loors of 263 Prinsengracht, even pointing out the hinged bookcase connecting the Secret Annex to the rest of the house; Anne herself provides a detailed description in the diary (Shandler 2012, 53). Built in 1635, the canal-side house ‘itself is a story’ according to C.L. Temminck Groll, advisor to the Anne Frank House restoration project, and has a long and varied history independent of its use as the Secret Annex, which is but a short segment of its past (Westra, 2004, 146). The site and its architectural legacy exemplify the complexities of history and reinforce scholars of heritage and tourism Yaniv Poria, Richard Butler, and David Airey’s theory that ‘there is no such concept as one history’ (2003, 240). Connected to Dutch as well as world heritage by its design and locale, the Anne Frank House is situated in the seventeenth-century Canal Ring, a series of concentric canal networks constituting part of Amsterdam’s early urban layout and added by UNESCO to its World Heritage List in 2010. The organization cited the waterway system and its surrounding architecture as possessing ‘exemplary hydraulic and urban planning’ and ‘outstanding universal value’ (“SeventeenthCentury Canal Ring” n.d.). Beginning around 1600, Amsterdam f lourished as a mercantile centre, and canal rings helped to transport freight, which merchants then stored in waterfront warehouses. Built as a private residence adjacent to two contemporarily built warehouses, 263 Prinsengracht’s long and narrow dimensions typify the design of many period buildings in their economical use of space. Due to its scarcity, canal-side land was at a premium, so owners often built socalled ‘annexes’ deep into their back gardens to be used for living, working, and storage. In 1739, the building underwent a substantial renovation and a new, more spacious annex replaced the original (Westra 2004, 246). It was this same eighteenth-century annex in which Anne Frank would hide some 200 years later. Additional renovations to the front part of the building allowed for multiple uses, ranging from stables to factories (Young 1994a, 131). In 1940, Otto Frank rented the building, converting the space for his fruit and pectin company (Anne Frank House n.d. a).

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In addition to linking Frank’s business with that of seventeenth-century mercantile design in Amsterdam, the building and its annex also belong to a neighbourhood with a long-standing Dutch tradition of tolerance within a country noted for the same (Young 1994a, 131). As scholars of Jewish history explain, ‘[t]here is no city in the Netherlands with so strong a Jewish tradition as Amsterdam’, a city once referred to by Jews as the ‘Jerusalem of the West’ and also known by the Yiddish word ‘Mokum’, meaning ‘place’ or ‘safe haven’ (Stoutenbeek and Vigeveno 2014, 13). Jews arrived in Amsterdam in the sixteenth century, encouraged to emigrate from the Iberian peninsula to a country known for its religious tolerance. The 1597 Union of Utrecht had banned persecution based on religion (18–19). Throughout the centuries, Jews became increasingly integrated into urban life, and 70,000 Jews inhabited Amsterdam at the start of World War II. Situated at the centre of what historian James E. Young identifies as a ‘memorial matrix’ ( Young 1994b, 31) and along the so-called Dutch ‘freedom trail’, the Anne Frank House, the final home of Amsterdam’s most famous Jewish resident, is also part of a neighbourhood primarily known to many Dutch locals as one celebrated for its acceptance of political refugees long before the Frank family arrived (131). ‘In what other country’, French philosopher René Descartes wrote of Amsterdam in a 1631 letter, ‘can one enjoy such complete freedom?’ (Van Galen Last and Wolfswinkel 1996, 16). Three years later, the philosopher sought refuge in the city where he took up residence at 6 Westermarkt, a house in such close proximity to the Anne Frank House, Young notes, that it is not unreasonable to think that Descartes could have witnessed its 1635 construction from his rear window. ‘Both sites’, he suggests, ‘are now linked spatially and metaphysically, reinforcing each to the other as shrines to Dutch enlightenment and tolerance’ (1994a, 131–132). Frank’s stature as a writer, her identification with the Netherlands, and her personification as a symbol of tolerance has only grown over time. In 2008 UNESCO bestowed on Amsterdam the title of World Book Capital and identified Frank as ‘the most famous writer that the Netherlands has ever produced’ and one of the ‘iconic personalities who tell a story about Amsterdam’ (Amsterdam World Book Capital n.d.). Princess Laurentien of the Netherlands, patron of the UNESCO event, identified Frank as personifying the ‘open mind’ of the capital city (Princess Laurentian 2009).

The Anne Frank House: origins and expansions The Anne Frank House has undergone a series of restorations, renovations, and expansions over the last 60 years. Throughout, the designs have helped communicate its role in nurturing and disseminating Anne’s legacy and mediating her complex heritage. In 1953, Otto Frank purchased 263 Prinsengracht, which, like many other canal-side houses after the war, had fallen into disrepair. Unable to afford the necessary renovations, ‘with a heavy heart’, Frank reluctantly sold the building to Berghaus, a textile firm which had also purchased additional nearby properties with the intent to raze them and erect a new building on the site. ‘Anne Frank’s “Secret Annex” is going to be torn down’, the daily newspaper De

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Tijd declared (Westra 2004, 248) as news of the impending demolition spread, raising alarms across the city. The house had already begun attracting visitors seeking tours of the Secret Annex soon after the diary’s publication, and interest grew along with its international reputation. Local residents agitated for its preservation as an important heritage site, and the city architectural commission agreed; it declared the proposed modern structure not to be harmonious with its surroundings (Young 1994a, 133). Moreover, in 1956, the Amsterdam Historical Society wrote in a letter to the Municipality communicating the importance of the house as both a literary and historical landmark: ‘How could people better honor the memory of Anne Frank than by saving this house, which is forever connected to Amsterdam’s darkest years of occupation in terms of both literature and history’ (Westra 2004, 248). In January 1957, Berghaus withdrew its plans, and after a successful fundraising effort led by Otto Frank and Mayor Gijs van Hall, on 3 May 1957, the evening before Dutch National Memorial Day, the Anne Frank Foundation was established (250; Young 1994a, 134). Its goal was to restore 263 Prinsengracht, particularly the Secret Annex, and according to its statutes, propagate ‘the ideals, left as a legacy to the world, in the diary of Anne Frank’ (Westra 2004, 250). To help establish a cultural and educational centre to further these goals, Berghaus donated the house to the foundation, and Frank purchased the adjoining building. Three years later, on 3 May 1960, the Anne Frank House officially opened to the public. Although Frank had wanted the front ‘part of the house to remain the way Anne described it in her diary’ (244), the spaces nevertheless required alterations to accommodate their new function. By the 1970s, increasing crowds necessitated restructuring the building, and in 1993, the City of Amsterdam approved an extensive, multi-year rebuilding project titled the ‘Preservation and the Future of the Anne Frank House’ (254). Construction of a new adjacent building designed by Mels Crouwel of Benthem Crouwel in the late 1990s expanded the museum’s footprint and helped facilitate the still-growing visitor numbers. In the design of the building, Crouwel employed a transparent and open atmosphere echoing the layout typically found in Amsterdam canal houses, such as 263 Prinsengracht, of a divided house with a courtyard (Anne Frank House 2001, 243). The restoration and reconfiguration of the original offices and warehouse, with a new interior plan by designer Marijke van der Wijst, allowed the building to be restored to its World War II appearance and provided a more historically accurate representation of what the structure looked like when Anne hid there, as well as fulfilling Otto Frank’s wish that the wartime layout of the house remain.

The Anne Frank House renewal In 2016, the Anne Frank House began the development of a new museum concept, funded in part by a 910,000-euro award from the BankGiro Lottery. Completed in 2018, the aim was twofold: to provide better facilities to accommodate everincreasing visitor numbers and provide more historical context, including additional

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information about World War II, the Holocaust, the helpers, and the time Anne spent in hiding. Tom Brink had considered the space in its previous iterations a ‘place of remembrance’ where visitors knew the context and events that had occurred there (Brink and von Wilcken 2017). In contrast, as Executive Director Ronald Leopold noted, there was now a need to ‘go deeper’ and for the museum to assume a larger role in telling Anne Frank’s story (Anne Frank House n.d. b.). Many visitors today have less historical knowledge about World War II than previous generations and hail from countries outside of Europe with no direct involvement with the war (Leopold 2018). The museum made available an audio tour for the first time and employed other strategies to convey the ‘macro history of the Second World War and the Holocaust and the “micro” history of the people in hiding in the Secret Annex’ (Anne Frank House n.d. b). The role of the redesign of the museum – encompassing building renovations and expansions as well as the museum route – was to help communicate and mediate this mission. Physical changes to the Anne Frank House, designed by architect Janneke Bierman of Bierman Henket Architects, included a new room specifically for the diary; new offices (now located in the former student housing on Westermarkt square); new spaces for group visits; a new museum shop; new sanitary facilities; a cloakroom; and a new, larger entrance on Westermarkt to better facilitate visitor f low (Reus-Deelder 2017). As Bierman explained, the firm did not ‘want to draw attention to [its] design’ but rather make it ‘subordinate to the function’ (Bierman and Lokhorst 2018). For the concept development and the design of the new route through it, the museum hired well-known exhibition designer Dagmar von Wilcken (who collaborated with her partner George von Wilcken). Von Wilcken has worked on numerous exhibitions – temporary, travelling, and permanent – throughout her career, many of them having to do with World War II and the Holocaust. For the Anne Frank House, she was responsible for the overall design concept – ranging from the interior layout to its graphic identity – and creating a space where visitors encounter, interact, and interpret the museum’s story. Von Wilcken is probably best known for the underground design of the Information Centre for the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a series of abstract granite stelae built on a five-acre site in central Berlin and designed by American architect Peter Eisenman in 2005. Identified by James E. Young as a ‘crucial complement’ to the ‘field of pillars above’, Von Wilcken’s design works in concert with, and as an extension of, Eisenman’s memorial (Young 2016, 71). She employs a number of exhibitionary strategies at the memorial also in use at the Anne Frank House, among them oversized photographs, quotations from diary fragments and letters, and backlit panels of images and texts. In the entry foyer to the centre, for example, the designer installed six black-and-white portraits of other Holocaust victims, thus establishing the importance of individual experiences and their fate while at the same time alluding to the 6 million Jews, many of them still unknown, murdered in the Holocaust (Quack 2015, 16–22; “Information Center” n.d.). For von Wilcken, focusing on individual stories helps make ‘history tangible’ (Quack and von Wilcken 2005, 40), and her designs at the Anne Frank House

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highlight the histories of Anne, the helpers, and the other people in hiding there. As a German designer, von Wilcken experienced two events which had a profound inf luence on her design philosophy. The first was a trip to Israel as a young woman, where she travelled and worked on a kibbutz and met many Holocaust survivors, forcing her to directly confront their country’s past; the second was reading Peter Weiss’s The Investigation (1965), a play about the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials of 1963–1965 in which much of the dialogue derives directly from the trial transcripts. Von Wilcken explained how Weiss’s unemotional presentation of the facts of the trial inf luenced her approach: ‘The story itself is so powerful’, she explained, ‘it doesn’t need any emotional decoration’ (Von Wilcken 2018). Von Wilcken would apply many of these same strategies at the Anne Frank House, fulfilling director Leopold’s mandate to leave ‘the authentic character of the house’ intact while also factually enhancing and contextualizing the visitor experience (Anne Frank House 2017; Leopold and Brink 2017). Von Wilcken achieved this through her legible communication design, improved wayfinding – the designer orients the visitor with a small colour-coded f loorplan installed on each f loor – and the use of neutral exhibition materials. ‘It is about making the historical reasons for living and hiding understandable for the visitors’, she explained, and not to ‘overdesign’ but be ‘strict’ and ‘almost humble’ in her work so as to allow the story ‘to speak for itself ’ (Von Wilcken 2018). After picking up their audio guides, visitors proceed into the original building through the new museum route and begin a tour of the house. Visitors read a quote from Anne’s diary written in Dutch and in her handwriting on the wall: ‘One day this terrible war will be over. The time will come when we’ll be people again and not just Jews!’ The poignant passage is also translated in smaller print into English and German. The handwritten quote reinforces the connection of the museum as a physical space to Anne’s writing and her diary, as well as to her adopted Dutch nationality, the war, and Anne’s fate as a Jewish girl. In the centre of the same room stands a small, brightly lit miniature bronze statue of Frank designed by Mari Silverster Andriessen (1897–1979), a Dutch sculptor and member of the Dutch resistance during World War II, well known for his wartime subjects. Visitors continue into the adjacent room containing a series of backlit life-size portraits of Anne. Von Wilcken designed these spaces to provide ‘a quiet, contemplative, and welcoming atmosphere’ and a ‘very personal introduction to Anne Frank’ (Von Wilcken 2018). To better explain the timeline of Jewish persecution and its effect on those in hiding at 263 Prinsengracht, as well as other Dutch Jews, Anne’s story is next told chronologically. Von Wilcken rejected the excessive use of interactive technology characteristic of many contemporary museums, believing it could undermine the visitor experience. Sara J. Bloomfield, director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, agrees; technology assists in engaging visitors, particularly younger ones, but restraint is needed (Siegal 2017). Von Wilcken feared that even the new audio tour might be too distracting. However, to her surprise, she found that it enabled the elimination of noisy videos that previously filled the open spaces with sound and enabled visitors to concentrate instead on the story being told at their own pace. This created a new,

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unanticipated atmosphere in the house, hushed and ref lective, and freed visitors from intrusive distractions (Von Wilcken 2018). The museum redesign introduces visitors not only to Anne’s story, and those of her sister, the others in hiding, and the helpers, but also pays greater attention to the history of National Socialism and the German occupation in the Netherlands and its increasing persecution of Jews, including the Frank family. An introductory video in what would have been the back of the warehouse at 263 Prinsengracht provides basic information and explains that the Franks f led Germany for Amsterdam when Anne was a child because the country had become an ‘anti-Semitic dictatorship’ in which ‘Jews were systematically persecuted’ (Siegal 2017). In the adjacent room, the front of what would have been the warehouse, von Wilcken installed horizontal information panels, made in three-dimensional relief, with large cut-out glass photographs illuminated from behind. These illustrate the Franks’ history before they went into hiding, beginning with a 1933 Aachen studio portrait of the sisters; a 1935 class picture of Anne in her second-grade Amsterdam Montessori class; a clip from the only known film of Anne; and a photograph, c. 1940, of the Franks posing together on Merwedeplein, their last address before going into hiding. Alongside these pictures hangs an oversized photograph of the German army entering Amsterdam on 16 May 1940. It shows the nearby Westerkerk in the background, linking the house once again to its neighbourhood, city, and national history (Figure 18.1).

FIGURE 18.1

The Anne Frank House, showing the front of the former warehouse at 263 Prinsengracht, Amsterdam, Netherlands, with displays designed by Dagmar von Wilcken.

Source: © Anne Frank House/Photographer: Cris Toala Olivares.

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To foreground the story without distraction, von Wilcken employed neutral modern materials throughout, such as glass, steel, and Corian, a material that can be easily shaped and coloured. She made ‘very obvious distinctions’ between the house and new additions: ‘visitors should realize immediately with one glance what is what’ (Brink and von Wilcken 2017; Von Wilcken 2018). She also used thin blackened steel panels whenever presenting about the Nazis to symbolize the harshness of the regime. Object displays throughout the house reinforce the message of rising anti-Semitism in Amsterdam, such as the yellow star the Nazis forced Jews to wear as an identifying marker and an oversized rendering of the so-called Amsterdam ‘dots map’. This graphic city plan was made by civil servants of the Municipal Administration in 1941 at the orders of the occupying Germans – to identify Jewish households. This now-infamous document, an example of ‘unambiguous official collaboration’, helped the Nazis round up Jews for the deportations to come (Some Were Neighbors n.d.; Anne Frank House n.d. c). The adjacent photographs of the Frank family locate them within the Nazis’ tightening web. Visitors confront Dutch complicity in the systematic murder of Jews in the Netherlands, a country where transports to the death camps continued uninterrupted from July 1941 to September 1944 and from where, according to Adolf Eichmann, they ‘departed so smoothly that it was a joy to watch them’ (Griffioen and Zeller 2018; Hondius 1994, 51).

The Secret Annex: designing absence For most visitors to the Anne Frank House, the highlight – in addition to seeing Anne’s actual diary, which is now displayed in the adjacent building – is to tour the Secret Annex. Unlike the rest of 263 Prinsengracht, however, this space, at the direction of Otto Frank, remains empty (Figure 18.2). ‘After the Anne Frank House was restored, they asked me if the rooms should be furnished again’, Frank explained. ‘But I answered: “No!” During the war everything was taken away and I want to leave it like that’. Nevertheless, soon after the Anne Frank House opened to the public, Frank expressed dismay that some visitors believed the rooms to be ‘very spacious’ even though he assured them ‘that they were getting a wrong impression’ (Westra 2004, 250). In 1961, J. Weiss, using details provided by Frank, made a scale model of the Secret Annex that the Anne Frank House displayed to give visitors a more accurate sense of what Frank described as the ‘unbearable tension’ of the confined living space (254, 250). The emptiness of the annex determines the character of the museum, and it is the absence itself which presents meaning. As scholars have noted, ‘[T]hat which is remembered as absent becomes present in a different way’ (Meier, Frers, and Sigvardsdotter 2013, 425); that is, they ‘announce their presence by the hole or shape or silhouette they leave behind’ (Edensor, quoted in Maddrell 2013, 503). In the annex, where the audio tour ends at the entrance hidden by the hinged bookcase, visitors only encounter traces of Anne and the others. Her picture

Designing absence at the Anne Frank House

FIGURE 18.2

283

Anne Frank’s empty room in the Secret Annex displaying her picture postcards.

Source: © Anne Frank House/Photographer: Cris Toala Olivares.

postcard collection still affixed to the walls of her room, the marks on the wall in Otto’s hand denoting the height of his growing daughters, and a small map charting the allies’ progress through Europe are all that remain of those artefacts once there. As Leopold notes, the emptiness of the annex signifies the greater absence of not only Anne herself, and the others in hiding at 263 Prinsengracht, but also the murdered Jews in her neighbourhood, the city, the Netherlands, and the rest of Europe. This void, he explains, ref lects us as ‘victims, perpetrators, helpers or bystanders’ (Leopold n.d.). This void, therefore, characterizes the house and remains crucial to maintain (Leopold and Brink 2017).

Virtual representations In the 1990s, the Anne Frank House made a series of colour photographs documenting the temporarily refurbished annex, office, and warehouse space – based on Weiss’ model and using Frank’s recollections of 263 Prinsengracht – to help visitors envision the wartime interiors.1 These images form the foundation of the reconstructed annex online, part of the 2018 award-winning refurbished website – annefrank.org – developed by IN10 and Maykin Media. The updated website provides information about Frank and her family, the museum and its mission, as well as supplemental articles. It also includes videos wherein young people discuss their views and experiences of prejudice and discrimination

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(“Anne Frank House Wins” 2019; Anne Frank House Annual Report 2019, 11–12). As historians of heritage note, ‘encounters with heritage sites are increasingly mediated through digital resources’ ( Logan, Kockel, and Nic Craith 2016, 8), and as Yad Vashem, Israel’s official memorial to the Holocaust, has stated, it is both ‘legitimate and effective’ to use digital platforms to commemorate the Holocaust (Kershner 2019). Such technology is particularly appealing to younger people, a substantial group of visitors to the house.2 In the virtual annex, visitors get a threedimensional, 360-degree view of the furnished space. They are able to click on various doors that lead from one room to the next and on objects – ranging from a board game left open on the upstairs table to a set of Jewish prayer books on a shelf above Edith Frank’s bed – and read more information about them and how they relate to the history of the people in hiding. Short, clickable videos embedded in the virtual rooms and activated by the user provide additional content about annex daily life. Throughout, a small three-dimensional icon of the house indicates the user’s location and orients them in the space. On 12 June 2018, what would have been Anne Frank’s 89th birthday, the Anne Frank House launched an immersive visitor experience, updated the following year, using the same images of the furnished attic found on the website. Designed by Force Field, a Dutch virtual and augmented reality development studio, the award-winning 25-minute VR Secret Annex tour utilizes the scale functionality of VR glasses, allowing visitors to seemingly physically inhabit and ‘stroll through’ the space (Anne Frank House Annual Report 2019, 12). Throughout the visit, a simulacrum of Anne’s voice reading from her diary as well as creaking f loors and other sounds add an additional dimension of reality to the experience. Objects themselves come to life, as visitors are able to pick up and examine things such as Anne’s chequered diary. Because every picture on Anne’s wall has been scanned, visitors can have the sensation of touching the ‘actual wall’ and can remove the pictures to examine them. Commenting on the immersive experience, Charlotte Bosman, digital project manager of the Anne Frank House, expressed the sensation of ‘feel[ing] somehow present in the past’ (Anne Frank House 2019). Users of the technology compared it to a ‘time machine’ and noted that the experience was ‘moving’ and ‘haunting’ and felt it akin to visiting the house in Amsterdam (29 July 2018; 2 November 2018); another remarked that being alone during the digital experience reinforced an impression of loneliness and seclusion (16 August 2018). A virtual reality tour of the Secret Annex also provides an opportunity for those with restricted mobility, and those unable to travel to Amsterdam, with a chance to ‘visit’ the space.

Conclusion Both the website and the virtual tour of the Secret Annex and the Anne Frank House of which it is part engage in the act of remediation defined as ‘the formal logic by which new media refashion prior media forms’. As put forth by David

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Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin, (quoted in Erll and Rigney 2009, 3), cultural memory lies in this ‘repurposing’ (5) of the photographs of the furnished interiors, transferring them from one medium to another ‘with the aim of obtaining a more direct connection with reality’ (Wertheim 2003, 161). Anne Frank’s story has a long history of adaptation and remediation in its multiple iterations: diary, play, film, house museum, website, and now virtual reality.3 The digital recreations do not rely on the ‘aura’ of the physicality of the place itself; instead, they provide windows into a virtual world now accessible to a wider audience. Affected by the recent global pandemic and necessarily closed, the Anne Frank House, through its website and virtual tour, can continue to embody and continually reimagine the complex heritage(s) of the ‘best-known building in Amsterdam’. More broadly, this chapter demonstrates that design, a practice associated with planning, ideation, and production, can work effectively to communicate absence, whether in a confined, hidden physical space or in a virtual reality alternative. To paraphrase Leopold, the space may be empty, but it is full of meaning (Anne Frank House Annual Report 2019, 2).

Notes 1 The Secret Annex has also been ‘reconstructed’ in the sets for the play The Diary of Anne Frank (1955) (Lichtman 2019). 2 More than half of the approximately 1.3 million visitors to the Anne Frank House are under 30 years old (Anne Frank House Annual Report 2019, 8). 3 The Anne Frank Video Diary, a You Tube video series launched on 30 March 2020 by the Anne Frank House and Every Media, is a recent addition to this list.

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INDEX

Note: Italic page numbers denote references to illustrations. Abbas, Ackbar: quoted 156, 165 Albuquerque, New Mexico: Indian and Mexican Building and Museum 86–87, 88 Amorphophallus titanium 105 Amsterdam 277, 282; Anne Frank House 273–285, 281; Canal Ring 274; online 283–284, 285n3; Secret Annex 273, 274, 275, 276, 277–278, 279, 282–284, 283; World Heritage site 274, 276 Andrade, Mário de 251 ARC (Appalachian Regional Commission) 110–111 Association of Critical Heritage Studies 4 –5 AT&SF (Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway) 83, 84– 85, 86, 88 Auckland 98; Council 96, 98–99, 100, 106; Domain Wintergardens 96–107, 99, 103, 107n8, 107n9, 107nn11–13, 107n17; Pukekawa 97–98 Australia 69–80; ‘Acknowledgement of Country’ 69, 80n1; British colonization 70, 71; First Nation/Aboriginals 69–72, 73, 74–75, 77, 79, 80n5; Keelup baluk clan 78, 78, 79; landscape 74–76; Mirambeck/Murrup/North Gardens 70, 77–79; Wadawurrung Country and people 69–71, 73–74, 75, 77–78, 80n3 Bagan (Pagan) 261 Barthes, Roland 116; quoted 75, 263, 265

Beato, Felice 259, 262, 264, 265–266; photograph of a Burmese woman 259–261, 260 Berger, Salamon 204, 205, 206–207, 208 Bhabha, Homi K. 264–265 Biedermeier era 134, 135, 136 Birmingham School 3 Black History 40 BLM (Black Lives Matter) 24, 31 botany 190–191 branding 148–149, 151, 155 Brazil 243, 244–246, 249–254; IPHAN (Instituto do Patrimônio Histórico e Artistico Nacional/National Historic and Artistic Heritage Institute) 249–251, 253; nationalism/national identity 243 Bristol 24, 31, 34 British Empire 181; inf luence in Chile (La Colonia Britanica) 38, 40, 41, 45, 48, 49, 50; see also under Australia; Burma; Hong Kong; India; New Zealand; Ohio; South Africa British national identity 181 British royal family: ‘contract’ with subjects 173, 174–175, 178, 179, 182, 183n5; Historic Royal Palaces 180; press coverage 175, 176, 178–179 Britton, Alison: quoted 149, 152 Bruketa&Žinić&Grey 198, 199 Burma/Myanmar 259–271, 271n1; as a British colony 259, 261–262, 263–267,

290

Index

268–271, 271n3; Enchantress handbag 268–270, 269; handbag featuring Beato image 259–261, 260; nationalism/ national identity 262, 263, 268; Yangoods fashion house 259–261, 262–264, 265, 266–271 Canada 185–194; as a British colony 190; Dominion of 187–188, 191; maple leaf as national icon 187–188 Cape Town 218, 222, 223, 225, 226; Bo-Kaap 223–227, 227n3 Chile 38, 40, 41, 45, 49 China: Open Door Policy 154; SinoBritish Joint Declaration 154–155 Coldstream Reports: 1960 2; 1970 2 colonialism/empire 72; Austro-Hungarian monarchy 201, 230, 232, 236; ceremonial 54–57, 56; decolonization 24, 29, 33, 70, 71; Dutch Empire 216, 219, 223–224, 249; German Empire 232; neocolonialism 263; Ottoman Empire 209; postcolonialism 53, 63, 77, 215, 216, 217, 264; precolonization 77, 97–98, 217, 223; settlers 111, 117, 118, 185, 191–192, 193, 194; see also British Empire; Habsburg Empire/monarchy Colston, Edward (statue of ) 24, 31, 32, 34 Colter, Mary 83– 88, 90, 92 ‘community consultation’ 33, 43, 77, 79 conservation 28, 105, 155, 193, 218; in the 19th century 185, 192; specific projects 33, 97, 102, 106; see also Venice Charter Constructivists 235 copyright 141–142, 144, 150–152 Country, notion of 69–77, 79; Songlines 72, 74, 76 Croatia 197–210; dance 197–198, 208; dress 197–198, 199, 207, 208; folk culture 197, 198, 200–210; LADO (National Folk Dance Ensemble) 197–198, 199, 207, 208; nationalism/ national identity 201–202, 205–206, 207, 209, 210; song 197–198, 208; World Heritage sites 209 Czechoslovak Republic (1st) 229–240; Bohemia/Bohemians 230, 231, 234–235, 236, 239; Czech identity 230, 232–233, 238; Little Homeland Reader (Malá vlastivěda) 229, 230, 231–240, 234, 238; Moravia 230, 232, 239; multi-ethnic makeup 230–232, 237–238, 238; nationalism/national identity 229, 230,

231, 237, 238, 239, 240; recasting of borders 231; Slavic identity 230, 231, 232–233, 237–238 Davis, Fred: quoted 156, 157 Dawson, Robert 144, 147 de Lorme, Delphine 267, 270 deltiology (postcard studies) see under South Africa demotic design see vernacular design Descartes, René 277; quoted 277 design history: globalization of 3, 5, 6, 40, 193–194; pioneers 6; ‘retro’/‘vintage’ 156, 165, 264; see also heritage studies Dodge, Betsy Adams 185, 189, 191; Maple Leaf quilt 185–189, 186, 191–194 Dresden 128, 138; German Applied Arts Exhibition of 1906 127–128, 129, 133, 134, 136, 137; Workshops 127, 136, 137 Drummond family sugar bush 189 Dürer, Albrecht 127–128, 130, 131–133, 134, 137–138, 138n2; quoted 138 English Heritage 44 fabrics see textiles; wedding dress (royal) feminism 3; women and folk culture 198, 207, 210; women and nature 185, 189–191, 193; women in industry 179–180, 189, 204 ferns 102, 105, 107n11 First World War 201, 204, 205–206, 230; Cenotaph 43, 44; centenary of 32–33 fragrances 268 Frank, Anne 273–283; diary 275–276, 278, 279, 280, 282, 284; see also under Amsterdam Frank, Otto 273, 275, 276, 277–278, 282, 283; see also under Amsterdam Fred Harvey Company 83, 84– 85, 86– 87, 88 gender politics/studies 3, 189–190 Gentry, Kynan 29, 98; quoted 28, 186–187 Germany: aggression 235, 239; as ‘antiSemitic dictatorship’ 281; identity 131; occupation of the Netherlands 274, 275, 278, 281, 282; Renaissance 131; unification 130–131 Gerritsen, Anne: quoted 145–146 glasshouses 100, 101 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 127–128, 130, 134–135, 136, 138

Index

Grand Canyon National Park: Hopi House 83–92, 84, 87 (see also Hopi people/ culture); World Heritage site 83, 91 graphic design see typography Habsburg Empire/monarchy 197, 201–202, 203, 205, 210, 233, 236 Harnetty, Brian 120, 121, 122 Harrison, Rodney 3, 6, 30; quoted 29, 33 heritage: accommodations between official bodies 222; authorized/ dominant 40, 45, 116, 173, 182, 215, 218; cache sites 116–118, 122; as contemporary 23, 28, 85, 97; desecration 118, 119; developing/ changing 23–24, 26, 30–34, 45, 215, 265; ‘difficult heritage’ 274; digitally altered 223, 259, 261, 263, 266 , 269–270; digitised 43, 59; ‘f lat lays’ 268; former 178, 180, 191, 235; graffiti 247; as ideological tool 33, 176, 208, 210, 215–216, 218, 219; implicit politics 173, 179, 202, 226–227, 235, 267, 270–271; interfaces 113–116, 122; invented 217, 221, 223, 225–226, 268–270; meaning 147, 149–150, 250–251, 274, 282, 285; military 38, 61– 63; multiplicity of 1, 23, 26, 29, 30, 34, 149; as mille-feuille 112–113, 122; natural 185, 187, 188, 191–192, 193–194; ‘official’ 29–30, 209, 222, 253 (see also heritage studies, AHD (authorized heritage discourse)); preservation 28, 106; remaking 34, 149–150, 159–166, 204, 217; as replacement 121, 247; repurposing 30–32, 149–150, 201, 259–270, 285; self-meaning 72, 73, 75; ‘spectacular enchantment’ 97, 105–107, 107n17, 118; unofficial 29–30, 31–32, 115–116, 119; virtuality 274–275 heritage studies 157, 186–187; AHD (authorized heritage discourse) 3, 4, 5, 173, 182 (see also heritage); authorized, ‘official’, contributions to 6 – 8; geo-political expansion of 5, 6; ICH (intangible cultural heritage) 3, 5, 7; ‘material-discursive’ approach 5; origins of 4, 5; politicisation of 4 –5, 7; see also design history Hirth, Georg: quoted 132 Hobsbawm, Eric 226; quoted 148, 221 Holocaust 274, 278–280, 284

291

Hong Kong 154–166; as a British colony 154–155, 156, 158, 159, 166; G. O. D. lifestyle brand 155, 157, 162–166, 164; local identities 155, 156, 157, 158, 162, 163, 165; Shanghai Tang fashion house 155, 157, 158–162, 160, 163–164, 165, 166 Hopi people/culture 83, 84, 88, 89, 90; Old Oraibi pueblo 90, 91; Oraibi village 86, 87– 88; Snake Dance 86; see also Grand Canyon National Park, Hopi House identity politics 27–28, 29, 30, 31, 33, 34, 193; see also nationalism under Brazil; Burma; Croatia; Czechoslovak Republic; India; South Africa India 180, 183, 194; borders 64n1; as a British colony 59, 180; Hind Devi/ Bharat Mata (Goddess India/Mother India) image 52–53, 54, 55, 58, 60; Nadeshwari (goddess) 61–63, 64n4; nationalism 53, 54, 55, 58–59, 60, 63–64; see also Partition of India/ Pakistan Indigenous peoples 110, 111, 114, 118, 119–120, 187; Burmese 262; Canada (First Nation) 185, 191–192, 193, 194; Danes 151; Indian/Native American 83–92, 117–118, 119–120; Mäori 97, 98–99, 187; Nurembergers 132; of South Africa 219, 226; see also under Australia industrialization 2 , 3, 6, 8; in Brazil 243; in Britain 174–175, 181–182; in Czechoslovakia 237; deindustrialization/post-industrialism 4, 110; economy 204; of furniture 127, 128, 136; in New Zealand 98; in the United States 85; of war 40 King Edward VII: as Prince of Wales 174, 178 King George V 171; as Prince George, Duke of York 174, 178 Kjældgärd-Larsen, Karen 142–143, 147, 148 Kršnjavi, Izidor 202–204, 205, 208; quoted 202–203 landscape 2 , 77, 215, 218, 223; American 90, 91, 92, 111; ‘ethnoscapes’ 219 (re)landscaping 43, 46, 50, 86; narratives 74–75; painting 189–190, 194

292

Index

listed structures see Auckland, Domain Wintergardens; Silvertown War Memorial(s); Wellington Monument, Somerset Liverpool 40, 49 London 104, 159; Central 46– 47; Central St Martins 161; City of 40, 43, 48; East 37, 41, 42, 43, 48, 49; Kew Gardens 100; National Gallery 242; Regents Park 99; University 158; Victoria and Albert/South Kensington Museum 203 Lux, Joseph August 136; quoted 135 Mandalay 259, 261, 263 Maple Leaf quilt see Dodge, Betsy Adams maps 229, 231–232, 233–236, 237–239, 238 Markle, Meghan (later Duchess of Sussex) 182n2 Marxism 3 Mebes, Paul 134; quoted 134 Meissen porcelain 144, 145, 146, 150 memorialization 38, 40– 45, 49 Mendl, Bedřich 229, 231, 232, 237, 239; quoted 232 modernist design 229, 233, 240 monuments 23–24, 28–29, 30–31, 209, 218, 247; ‘curated decay’ 25–26; US National Monuments 83, 86; see also Grand Canyon National Park, Hopi House; Wellington Monument, Somerset multisensory experience 104 Muslims/Islam 223–224, 225, 226 Muthesius, Hermann 139n4; quoted 133, 134–135, 137 nationalism/nationhood 85, 181–182; see also under Croatia; India; South Africa nationalist kitsch 209, 266 National Parks, USA: Grand Canyon 83, 86, 89, 91–92; National Park Service 89, 90, 91 Naumann, Friedrich: quoted 127, 130, 132, 136, 138 Nayar, Kuldip 57–58 Netherlands 277, 281, 282; Canon of Dutch History 273 Neurath, Otto 236–237 New York 159, 162, 189, 239; World’s Fair 1939 239 New Zealand 187; as a British colony 97–98, 101, 104, 105, 106 Norway: as a Danish colony 148, 151 nostalgia 85, 152, 154–166, 226, 263; former 138; for home country 188

NT (National Trust) 23, 25, 26, 33 Nuremberg 131, 132 Ohio, Southeast 110–122; as a British colony 110; earthworks 111, 112, 113, 114–115, 116–118, 119–120, 121 Ooi, Joanne 161–162; quoted 161, 162 Ortiz, Fernando 265 ownership 33, 48, 201, 209, 259, 270; claimed 43– 44, 111, 115, 148, 149, 151; communal/metaphorical sense 26, 29, 33, 75–76, 83– 84, 229, 266; intellectual 23, 29; physical 23, 25, 26, 29, 48– 49; of various nations 262 Paris 159, 204, 267, 268; International Exhibition 1925 207; Jardin d’Hiver 99; Peace Conference 1919-20 230 Partition of India/Pakistan 53; AttariWagah border 54–59, 56, 60, 61; ‘border ceremonies’ 53–59, 56, 64n3; Grand Trunk Road 54, 57–58, 64n2; Museum 53; Nadabet border 59– 63, 62; Radcliffe Boundary Award 53, 54; Remembrance Day 53 performance as commemoration 33, 42– 43, 48, 54– 60, 63– 64, 118–122, 176 Pevsner, Nikolaus: Pioneers of the Modern Movement 2 –3 photography 259–263, 265–266, 268 planning permission 44 porcelain heritage/ceramic history 141, 144, 145, 146, 147; blue-and-white 141, 142, 145–147, 148, 149, 150 (see also Porsgrund Porselænsfabrik porcelain); Royal Copenhagen: Blue Fluted pattern 142, 143, 144, 145–146, 147, 148, 150; Straw pattern 144, 146, 148–149, 152n7; Willow pattern 144, 146–147 Porsgrund Porselænsfabrik porcelain 141–142, 144–148, 151–152; court case (see under Royal Copenhagen porcelain); Maxistrå tableware 141–142, 142, 144–145, 147–149, 151–152 postcards: Anne Frank collection 282–283; Burma 261, 267, 268, 269, 270; South Africa 215, 218, 219–221, 220, 223–227, 224 Prague 231, 236, 237, 238–239 Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex 171 Princess (later Queen) Alexandra 174, 182n4 Princess Mary Adelaide, Duchess of Teck 177, 179–180; quoted 174

Index

Princess May (Mary) of Teck (later Queen Mary) 171, 174, 176, 177, 178, 179–180, 182, 182n1 Prince William, Duke of Cambridge 171 public places/spaces/structures 30, 49, 63– 64, 104, 115, 122, 209; commemorative intent 23–24, 28, 31, 38, 43, 274; see also under Auckland Queen Victoria 174, 175 quilts 192; contemporaneous with Dodge’s 188–189; Heritage Quilt Collection 185; Maple Leaf quilt (see Dodge, Betsy Adams) Rée, Paul: quoted 133, 137 Riemerschmid, Richard 127–130, 132–138; Herrenzimmer (gentleman’s study) 129–130, 129, 132–133, 134, 137–138; ‘Machine Furniture’ 127–129, 128, 133, 136, 137; ‘wood poetry’ 127, 130, 133, 136, 137, 138 Rio de Janeiro 250, 251–252, 253 Roosevelt, Theodore 86, 92; quoted 92 Royal Copenhagen porcelain 141–152; Blue Fluted Mega design 141–145, 142, 143, 147–148, 149, 151–152; court case 142, 144, 145, 148, 150–152, 152n1, 152n5 SAHRA (South African Heritage Resources Agency) 222, 225 Said, Edward 264 São Paulo 246, 247–248, 248, 251, 253 Schmidt, Karl 127, 130, 136 Second World War 90, 91, 201, 206, 239, 273–274, 277, 278–279 Shankaracharya 60 Silver, Arthur/Silver Studio 171, 177–178, 181, 183n7 Silvertown War Memorial(s) 38, 39, 41, 47; Brunner Mond munitions factory disaster 37–38, 41, 43, 45, 46, 49, 50; listed 38, 43, 44, 45; local connection/ emotion 38, 41, 42, 43, 47, 48; removal of 42– 47, 49 Smith, Laurajane 4, 6, 7; quoted 173, 186–187 South Africa: Afrikaner republic 217–218; ANC (African National Congress) 217, 221; apartheid 216–219, 222, 223, 224–225; architecture 220, 224–226; boers/Afrikaners 216, 226; as a British colony 215, 216, 217, 218, 219, 222, 223; Great Trek/Voortrekkers 216,

293

219, 221, 226; Heritage Day/National Braai Day 227n1; houses 223, 225–226, 227; Malay heritage 223–225; multiculturalism/diversity 216, 217; nationalism/national identity 215, 216–219, 220–222, 226–227; national monument legislation 218, 222; National Party 217, 218, 221; NHC (National Heritage Council) 222, 227n2; post-apartheid 217, 221–226, 227n1; Robben Island 222, 223; volkspele (folk dancers) 218, 219–221, 220, 223, 225, 226; Voortrekker Monument 218, 220, 222 Starbucks 164–165, 164 Sutnar, Ladislav 229, 231, 233, 234, 235–236, 239; quoted 234, 235 Sweden 219, 221 Tang, David 158–159, 161, 162; quoted 159, 161 textiles 52–53, 198, 202–204, 207, 262, 267–268, 277; industries 175, 180, 181 Tkalčić, Vladimir 204–205, 207; quoted 205 tourism/tourists 53, 85, 222, 223, 225–226, 227; Anne Frank House 273–274, 276; Asian exotica 157, 259, 261, 262–263; Croatia 209; Grand Canyon 83, 86; Hopi House 88, 89, 91; India circuit 54, 57, 59, 60– 61, 63– 64; regeneration of sites 45; Southeast Ohio 120; Southwest United States 85, 86, 87, 88, 90; warfare 38; see also postcards Traill, Catharine Parr 190–191; quoted 191, 192 transculturation 265 Tschinkel, Augustin 229, 231, 233, 236–237, 238, 239–240 typography 242–254, 245; on boats 248, 249, 253; museums 244–246, 247, 249; ‘New Typography’ 233, 234, 240; printed ephemera 243, 246, 253–254; in the public environment 247 typology 113, 122 UK Association of Art Historians 2 UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation) 4, 91; ICH listing/Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage 4, 197, 198, 208, 209–210 (see also under heritage studies); Memory of the World Register 276;

294

Index

World Book Capital designation 277; World Heritage sites 4, 6, 64n2, 223, 251; see also under Amsterdam, Croatia; Grand Canyon National Park Vanka, Maksimilijan and Zdenka Sertić: Sertić quoted 206; Zagreb Trade Fair poster 198, 200, 203, 206–208, 210 Venice Charter 253–254 vernacular culture 3 – 4, 44– 45, 89, 131, 132, 154, 162–163 Vienna 236, 237; Method of Pictorial Statistics 236–237, 240 Wagner, Richard 129–130, 132, 138 Warner and Sons 176–177, 181, 183 wedding dress (royal) 171–174, 172, 175–182, 177, 182n3, 182n4; May Silks 171, 181, 182n2; trousseau 180 Weimar 134, 135 Weiss, Peter: The Investigation 280 Wellington Monument, Somerset 3, 23–27, 27, 30, 33, 34; expense of

construction 25; listed 25; local connection/emotion 23–26, 30, 33, 34; physical deterioration 25; Wellesley, Arthur, Duke of Wellington 24–25 wintergardens (in Britain) 96–97, 99–100, 105–106, 107n2, 107n3, 107n17; see also under Auckland world’s fairs 86, 87 Yangon (Rangoon) 259, 262, 263, 267, 268, 270, 271n1 Young, Douglas 162, 163, 165; quoted 164, 165 Yugoslavia 197, 201–202, 205, 207, 209–210 Zagreb 197, 198, 204; Ethnographic Museum/Museum of Commerce and Craft 204–206; Exhibition of Folk Handicraft 1928 198, 200, 204, 206–208; Museum of Arts and Crafts 203–204, 205; Trade Fair 198, 204, 206, 207, 208