Presenting Difficult Pasts Through Architecture

Rumiko Handa is Professor of Architecture at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA. She holds a PhD in architectural theory from the University of Pennsylvania and a BArch from the University of Tokyo, Japan. Her writings have appeared in: Montreal Architecture Review; Interiors: Design, Architecture, Culture; The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians; Preservation Education & Research; Design Studies; and so on. She co-edited Conjuring the Real: The Role of Architecture in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. She is also the author of Allure of the Incomplete, Imperfect, and Impermanent.

• Introduction; 1. Postwar Rebuilding and Coping with the Past; 2. Four Documentation Centers – Histories; 3. In the Shadow of Propaganda Architecture; 4. Presenting Pasts through Architecture – Intellectual Framework; 5. Formal Characteristics; 6. Physical Traces; 7. Designation; 8. Memento; Conclusion

‘This book provides an intelligibly conceptualized, clearly organized and well-illustrated architectural guide to the Munich, Nuremberg, Berlin, and also Cologne documentation centers that should be of interest to both architects, curators of historical museums—especially institutions devoted to the presentation of a difficult and/or contested past—and public historians who are interested in the ability of architects to contribute to an understanding of the past and an engagement with it in the public sphere. I have often thought that these buildings deserved a monograph, and to my delight, the complexity of their architectural rhetoric has found a match in the architectural criticism, sense of scholarly perseverance, and openness to the at times ironic dimensions of museums of perpetrator history brought to the subject by Rumiko Handa.’Pelt, Van, and Robert Jan. "Review: Presenting Difficult Pasts Through Architecture: Converting National Socialist Sites to Documentation Centers, by Rumiko Handa." The Public Historian 43, no. 4 (November 1, 2021): 153–55. https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2021.43.4.153.