Meet Me at the Plague Column: Monuments and Conservation Planning

Abstract:Beginning in the 1960s, planners in Klagenfurt, Austria, began using monuments and memorials to frame the pedestrianization of the historic city center. This strategy of urban reinvention shows the convergence of monuments, tourism, and urban planning within the project of heritage conservation, with monuments being visual, spatial, and symbolic pieces with which cities created these larger effects in the postwar period. Relieved of the burden of commemorative practice, these monuments are free to adorn, mark space, and ennoble the old city; in effect, to affirm its historicity in a pivotal moment of transformation. This coincided with the creation of Minimundus, an architectural theme park in Klagenfurt, which, like Klagenfurt's historic core, treats miniature monuments as moveable props in a pedestrian zone. Through moving monuments and Minimundus, Klagenfurt staged a graceful setting for tourism using its historical assets as props. Its indifference to historical precision is, in fact, modernist. Under cover of preservation, heritage, and patrimony, planners assimilated some of the ideas birthed in the more radical context of the rise of the Modern movement in architecture.