For its latest issue, Arquitectura Viva features a write up of Andrew Shanken’s The Everyday Life of Memorials. Click here to learn more about the book. Click here to access the magazine.

“One hotspot where cancel culture wages a battle with political traditions of the West is the monument. Built in privileged locations but also scattered in places where everyday life goes on, monuments have become not only scenes of rituals for remembering heroes, patriots, and other eminences, but also scenes of conflict: disturbing presences evoking the dark side of history. This well produced and written work touches on both facets of the memorial in the process of analyzing what the passage of time does to it. The monument can be drowned by a motorway, or suffer a total change of meaning, finding itself commemorating deeds which its original builders would never have imagined.”