Hewitt, Danielle Shannon; (2024) Tracing the Erratic Movements of London’s Bombsites: On The Architectural History Of Destruction: 1940 to the Present. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

Through archival research and an artistic historiographical practice, On The Architectural History of Destruction reveals various diverse movements of materials and knowledge from London’s Second World War bombsites. The thesis comprises artworks and critical, theorised writing. It proposes an artistic historiographical practice, in which the aim and form of each artistic work is driven by attempts to make the apparently absent, bombed landscape ‘tangible’ (Stoler, 2013): historically, in the present landscape, and in a present moment that is still marked by the violence of aerial bombardment. The thesis responds to W.G. Sebald’s question of what constitutes ‘a natural history of destruction’ (Sebald, 2004, 1999), and his problematic of how a landscape produced by the violence of aerial bombing can be accounted for. The thesis makes a critique of architectural history’s construction of the ‘postwar’ (Azoulay, 2019) by moving focus away from the bombed landscape as merely a precursor to ‘postwar’ reconstruction. The bombsites are revealed as landscapes that were active and generative: of bureaucratic structures and new material economies via the salvage and movement of debris; of new, humanly modified ground and new botanical natures; of disciplinary knowledges; of military infrastructures; and of the calculation of vulnerability and its suppression. Through a centring of the bombsite debris and its material and immaterial movements the metaphor of the erratic – a geological fragment that moves from one location to another – is introduced. From this, a material and indexical practice is developed, which traces and enacts the displacement of the bombed landscape – spatially, temporally and in historical discourse. The thesis is divided into four sections, each comprising artistic work (digital, analogue, and camera-less photography; artists’ films and lecture performance) and a corresponding chapter essay, each of which chart a discursive movement between the artwork and its archival, historical and theoretical relations.

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