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Staircases: history, repair and conservation

to record the patina of the past while arresting the passage of time, even if paradoxically this meant erasing it. The new medium of photography provided a vehicle for defining authenticity and evoking a sense of nostalgia for the past and materialising memory, but in the process providing a justification for returning buildings to an earlier more perfect state. This is perhaps the book’s most interesting chapter. The unlikely genesis for The Fragile Monument was the author’s research on Le Corbusier’s ‘Urbanisme’ of 1925 and his assertion that his radical scheme to modernise Paris would save the past. The concluding chapter – ‘Restoration in the Machine Age’ – therefore examines the relationship of modernism to heritage. Arrhenius explains what can be learnt about the cultural value of context based on the example of an urban strategy of total re-development of Paris that would have left only exceptional individual monuments to somehow signify its essence. This failed concept of individual national icons – removed from their overall cultural, social, political and religious underpinnings, and reduced to the status of objects in a kind of open air museum – reflects to some degree the concerns and need to memorialise remembrance that influenced the thinking of the French Revolutionaries with which this book commenced.