Wider das Verschwinden der Dinge

Monument inventories are scientifically based descriptions of monuments in words and pictures. The idea for their creation was a reaction to the serious destruction of monuments since the French Revolution and the beginning of industrialization. With the insights, methods, and tools they offered, they shaped the emerging architectural sciences of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Matthias Noell explores and considers this new genre of books that emerged in the 19th century. He introduces the main authors and protagonists in 19th-century Europe – Arcisse de Caumont, Ludovic Vitet, Victor Hugo, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Franz Xaver Kraus, Johann Rudolf Rahn, or Max Dvořák, among others – and analyzes not only their precise attempts at systematization, but also describes the poetic melancholy of their reflections in the face of inevitable failure. In an impressive manner, Noell embeds the efforts of architectural science in the history of ideas and culture of the time, thus tracing the history of ideas of a major European project.