Jörg Haspel
“World Heritage transnational serial nominations embody the essence of the spirit of the World Heritage Convention: the principle of the universal value of heritage for humankind and the role of transnational cooperation in the recognition and conservation of the world’s heritage”. This is how ICOMOS Europe recently summed up its experience with the nomination and management of transboundary and multi-part bi- or multinational World Heritage sites. A completely new dimension of geographical expansion and complexity as a World Heritage series had already opened up a few years ago by the inscription of a selection of works by Le Corbusier with 17 properties in seven countries on three continents (2016). “The Architectural Work of Le Corbusier, an Outstanding Contribution to the Modern Movement” is seen by some experts as an epoch-spanning signal for a multilateral reorientation of World Heritage policy.
In particular, World Heritage initiatives for 20th century sites increasingly seem to be taking the biographical or monographic approach of the Corbusier series and the labelling of the application with a prominent architect’s name as a model for promising nominations. The inscription from the USA in recent years of eight buildings by Frank Lloyd Wright in the UNESCO register (2019), the inclusion of a handful of buildings and facilities by Joze Plezcnik in Slovenia (2021) or the current candidate list of Finland with a dozen of works by Alvar Aalto and Portugal with an undefined number of objects by Alvaro Siza stand for a trend of name-dropping and personal attribution to prominent master designers, as they are unknown on the UNESCO list for the heritage of the architectural and urban planning history of earlier centuries.
Using the example of the architectural oeuvre of Erich Mendelsohn, which was created in four decades before, between and after the two world wars and has been preserved with over 40 buildings in eight countries in Europe, the Middle East and the Americas, the paper will explore the question of the World Heritage potential of the preserved Mendelsohn buildings. It will also address the question of whether the Le Corbusier project and a biographical approach should play a model role for future World Heritage proposals or to what extent it can also play an exceptional role that confirms the rule of thematically, typologically and regionally-chronologically argued World Heritage designations.
The programmatic World Heritage studies and relevant World Heritage guidelines, as prepared and published by UNESCO and the Advisory Bodies (ICCROM, ICOMOS, IUCN) for World Heritage nominations, as well as the thematic and regional comparative studies and bibliographies presented by ICOMOS for the cultural heritage of the modern era, are to be considered, including the most recent study prepared by the Getty Conservation Institute in cooperation with the International Scientific Committee on 20th Century Heritage Conservation of ICOMOS and published in 2021, “The Twentieth-Century Historic Framework. A Tool for Assessing Heritage Places”.
An important reference point will be the nomination and management experiences of World Heritage care in Germany, which has a high proportion of bi- and multinational World Heritage sites as well as Modernist World Heritage positions – and where, as is well known, Erich Mendelsohn had his home and centre of work until his emigration in the spring of 1933, before he finally migrated via the UK and Palestine to the USA and was able to take up his professional activities as an architect and teacher again and again with changing partners before he passed away in 1953.
Jörg Haspel, Prof. Dr. phil. Dipl.-Ing., graduated in Architecture and Urban Planning in Stuttgart and in History of Art and Cultural Studies in Tübingen till 1981. He then became a custodian in the inventory department of the Monument Protection Authority in Hamburg and taught at the Hamburg University. From 1992 till 2018 he was Berlin State Curator of Historic Monuments (Landeskonservator) and from 2012 to 2021 president of ICOMOS Germany. Since 2014 he is chairing the Board of Trustees of the German Foundation for Monument Protection (Deutsche Stiftung Denkmalschutz).
Jörg Haspel is a permanent member of the Expert Group on Urban Heritage Conservation of the Federal Government in Germany and a founding member of the International Scientific ICOMOS Committee on the 20th Century Heritage Preservation (ISC 20C). He teaches as an honorary professor in heritage conservation studies at the Technical University of Berlin. His research and publication activities focus on the modern heritage of metropolitan culture. He is a member of the Action Group “Dissonant Heritage” of the Urban Agenda of the EU.