The Monumental

Argyro Loukaki is Professor Emerita at the Hellenic Open University (HOU). D.Phil. Oxford University, M.Sc. Architect-Engineer NTUA, M.A. Sussex University, M.Sc. Panteion University. Doctoral/postdoctoral fellowships and prizes: Greek State Scholarship Foundation, universities of Oxford, Princeton, Aristotle of Thessaloniki, Crete, NTUA. Loukaki created the Master’s Program “Art-Cultural Heritage-Development Policies” and launched bi-annual international conferences on art and/in space held at the Acropolis Museum. Earlier, she accomplished urban planning, architectural design and monuments’ preservation projects as a functionary of the Greek state, including archaeological landscaping and restoration, and was Planning Advisor to the City of Piraeus. Author of eleven books plus many articles and monographs in English and Greek on art, architecture and space, cultural heritage, restoration and its aesthetics, Mediterranean cultural geography and the geographical unconscious, tourism, landscape, and the spatialities of Classical Greek tragedy. The Monumental is the fourth by Routledge. Previous books by Routledge include: Living Ruins, Value Conflicts; The Geographical Unconscious; Urban Art and the City. Creating, Destroying, and Reclaiming the Sublime.

List of contributors

List of figures

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Towards an ontology and epistemology of the monumental

ARGYRO LOUKAKI

PART 1

The Mediterranean as source of monumentality and sublimity from prehistory to the present

1 The monumentalization of Mycenaean architecture after 1200 BCE

MANOLIS MIKRAKIS

2 Monumentality as a form of societal expression: The case of Naxiwn Polis in the Archaic period

ALEXANDRA S. SFYROERA

3 Shaping the ancient urban landscape: monumentality in the cities of Roman Greece

VASILIS EVANGELIDIS

4 Hagia Sophia, monumentality, and the world stage

ROBERT OUSTERHOUT

5 The perception of monuments in Late Byzantium and beyond. Representations of donors holding a church model

DIONYSIS MOURELATOS

6 The Other Monument: From monumentality to mnemonicality

KONSTANTINOS SOUEREF

PART 2

Modern and ultramodern dialogues with Classical monumentality: exaltations, antagonisms, disputes, retractions

7 Political monuments as references to the idealized ancient landscape

KONSTANTINOS MORAITIS

8 Building modern sacred geographies: the subtle monumental of Dimitris Pikionis

ARGYRO LOUKAKI

9 Monumentalizing historical time.

Body, nation, and utopia in 20th century Greece

DIMITRIS PLANTZOS

PART 3

The Eastern and Western monumental from antiquity to the present

10 The East-West divide, the Eastern monumental and Greek classicism:

The case of China and India

ARGYRO LOUKAKI

11 On the monumental

MANOLIS KORRES

12 Monumental tendencies in mid-18th century architectural discourse

FELIX MARTIN

13 A particular kind of monumentality in the work of Mark Rothko

KALLIOPI KOUNDOURI

14 Postwar social housing: the (anti)monumentality of Georges Candilis

KORINNA ZINOVIA WEBER

15 Monumentality, skyscrapers, and being human

GORDANA KOROLIJA FONTANA-GIUSTI

PART 4

Bridging the European center with the Mediterranean periphery: 19th – 21st century artistic and architectural links

16 Monumentality, poetry, and memory: Eugène Delacroix’s The Death of Sardanapalus and Yannoulis Halepas’s Sleeping Lady

MELITA EMMANOUIL

17 Monumentality and the Great National Donors in Greek cityscapes: phantasmagoria in the midst of crises

LILA LEONTIDOU

Concluding thoughts

ARGYRO LOUKAKI

Index