Andy Shanken

There is nothing in the world as invisible as a monument,” Robert Musil once mused. Yet recent events have brought them into high relief, both as commemorative infrastructure and as sites of political struggle. This lecture inquires into how memorials and monuments get turned on and off, how people use them in their various states, and finally why memorials are a quintessential example of what Henri Lefebvre called bizarrerie.

Shanken is a Professor of Architectural History and the Director of American Studies at U.C. Berkeley. His book, 194X: Architecture, Planning, and Consumer Culture on the American Homefront (2009), examines anticipatory architecture on the American homefront. A second book, Into the Void Pacific (University of California Press, 2015), is an architectural history of the 1939 San Francisco World’s Fair. His new book, The Everyday Life of Memorials (Zone Books, 2022), explores the meaning of memorials as they are enveloped in daily life and their place within the development of modern cities.