Session 5. OUV World Heritage Nomination – Erich Mendelsohn

Do transboundary and transnational properties promote international cooperation and representativity?

Oshrat Wolfling-Assa, Ruth Liberty-Shalev & Tal Alon-Moses

In the spirit of the 1945 UNESCO Constitution, the World Heritage Committee strives to promote international cooperation. It is evident in the Committee’s support of transboundary* and transnational** properties as tools for encouraging international cooperation and improved representation of state parties and heritage themes. Thus, international cooperation does not merely aid heritage protection but also endorses UNESCO’s intents to foster ‘intellectual and moral solidarity of mankind‘ and to boost the 2030 Agenda of Sustainable Development Goals.

The presentation will analyze transboundary and transnational properties on the World Heritage List and present their inscription trends and characteristics to examine whether they succeed in promoting cooperation and diversity. Our analysis will address four indicative aspects – the participants (i.e., the involved state parties and global regions); the inscription trends; heritage types (natural versus cultural); and lastly property types (transboundary versus transnational).

Our findings demonstrate a clear shift from natural transboundary properties in the 1980’s and 1990’s to cultural transnational properties in the last two decades. We will argue that despite the aspiration to promote international cooperation and improve representativity, most resulting inscriptions correspond to existing trends and inclines on the List, e.g., the dominance of the European/North American region. To conclude, we will address the proposed Erich Mendelsohn’s nomination considering our investigation.

* Transboundary property - a continuous area which extends across the borders of neighboring countries.

** Transnational property - a series of components located in the territory of different countries.

Oshrat Wolfling-Assa is a PhD Student in the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning at the Technion, Israel, and a member of ICOMOS Israel. She is an active architect holding a bachelor’s degree (BArch) in architecture and a master’s degree with honors (MArchII) in architectural conservation, both from the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning at the Technion.

Ruth Liberty-Shalev is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning, Technion—Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, where she leads the Conservation of Built Heritage Unit. She is also a practicing architect specializing in the conservation of archaeology and built heritage 1994 and holds an MA (cum Laude) in from Oxford Brookes University. Between 2008-2017 she served as head of the monitoring committee of the Israel National Commission to UNESCO, and on the Israeli delegation to UNESCO World Heritage Committees. Since 2022 she serves as Board member of ICOMOS Israel. Her practice, Ruth Liberty-Shalev Architecture & Conservation, is located in Haifa, Israel.

Tal Alon-Mozes is a landscape architect and Professor at the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning, Technion—Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa. She holds a MLA degree from UC Berkeley and a PhD from the Technion. Her scope of interest includes the histories of the designed landscapes of Israel. Among her published works are two edited books on Israel’s modern landscape architects, and numerous articles.

OUV, Attributes and Values – A way of Understanding the Concept of Outstanding Universal Value

Birgitta Ringbeck

The World Heritage Convention is based on the concept of Outstanding Universal Value (OUV) meaning according to § 49 of the Operational Guidelines for the Implementation of the World Heritage Convention: a “cultural and/or natural significance which is so exceptional as to transcend national boundaries and to be of common importance for present and future generations of all humanity.”[1] But only 33 years after the General Assembly adopted the World Heritage Convention, the Statement of Outstanding Universal Value (SOUV) was included for the first time in the 2005 Operational Guidelines and has become operational since 2007. While the draft version is the mission statement for the preparation of a World Heritage nomination, the final version approved by the World Heritage Committee is the central reference document for justifying inscription and assessing developments, risks and threats following recognition as a World Heritage property. A SOUV provides a clear, shared understanding of the reasons for inscription and of what needs managing in order to sustain the Outstanding Universal Value for the long-term. The concept of OUV will be explained using successful examples and a proposal for a draft SOUV of selected examples from Mendelsohn´s œuvre.

[1] https://whc.unesco.org/en/guidelines/

Birgitta Ringbeck, Dr., Ministerial Advisor (retired), was from 2002 to 2022 the commissioner of the Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs of the Länder in the Federal Republic of Germany and from 2012 to 2022 also head of the World Heritage coordinating body, based in the German Federal Foreign Office in Berlin. From 2012 to 2015, she was member in the German Delegation to UNESCO´s World Heritage Committee. She studied art history, archaeology and ethnology in Münster, Bonn and Rome and began her career at the Regional Association of Westphalia Lippe, working on the research project History of Traditional Architecture in the Beginning of the 20^th Century. From 1990 to 1997, she was Head of Department of Preservation of Regional Traditions and Culture at the NRW-Stiftung, a foundation for the protection of nature, regional traditions and culture in Düsseldorf/Germany. Between March 1997 and December 2011 she was the director of the Supreme Authority for the Protection and Conservation of Monuments at the Ministry of Construction and Transport of the Land North Rhine-Westphalia. Ringbeck is the chair of the board of trustees of the German World Heritage Foundation and member of ICOMOS, ICOM and TICCIH. Her primary fields of expertise are monument preservation, industrial heritage, World Heritage nominations and World Heritage management.

Biographical or Thematic Approaches of Serial Transnational World Heritage? Erich Mendelsohn’s Designing and Building for the Modern Diaspora

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.

Twentieth-century architecture, Transnational serial nomination and World Heritage List: Some examples for thought and research

Pierre-François TOULZE

In this paper, the first step will be to carry out an overview of the properties relating to 20th century architecture inscribed on the World Heritage List (WHL), as well as properties linked to a single architect, on the WHL or on the Tentative Lists (Gropius¹, Le Corbusier², Perret, Gaudi, Horta, Rietveld, Plečnik, Luis Barragán, Aalto, Van de Velde, Ödön Lechner, etc.). For these types of properties, we will mention a number of highlights relating to the Outstanding Universal Value (OUV), including the criteria for inscription, the justification of the components of the serial nomination, comparative analysis or possible extension³. It should be remembered that, for each of these properties, the Outstanding Universal Value is inseparable from the personality of each of their creators, but also cannot be understood without taking into account their respective cultural worlds and the influence that the works had.

Then, after briefly presenting the notion of serial property, we will show its evolution in World Heritage “jurisprudence” and in the history of the implementation of the World Heritage Convention, and in particular the recent development of transnational serial nominations for both natural and cultural properties.

We will then present how the figure of Erich Mendelsohn is evoked in the files of properties already registered on the WHL (e.g. The 20th Century Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright (USA), Berlin Modernism Housing Estates, Bauhaus and its Sites in Weimar, Dessau and Bernau, and Fagus Factory in Alfeld (Germany)).

On the basis of all these elements, the last part of the paper will be an opportunity for the author, who has not been involved in a transnational serial nomination about modern architecture, to propose some reaserch avenues in the context of a transnational serial nomination.

Note : This communication is not proposed by an architect or an art historian but by an independant consultant specialised in the implementation of the World Heritage Convention.

Pierre-François TOULZE is independent consultant since 2014, he is specialised in cultural heritage, in particular in the implementation of the World Heritage Convention and the elaboration of nomination files for the World Heritage List or management plans for properties already inscribed. He works closely with other international experts who are experienced in the evaluation of World Heritage candidate properties.

Pierre-François TOULZE is also a member of ICOMOS France (International Council on Monuments and Sites) and of the International Cultural Tourism Committee (ICTC), the international scientific committee of ICOMOS on cultural tourism. He is also a member of the evaluation panel of the World Monuments Watch programme of the American foundation World Monuments Fund and participates in the evaluation process of World Heritage candidate properties.

1.  Walter Gropuis (1883-1969) is directly linked to three different properties on the WHL : Berlin Modernism Housing Estates, Bauhaus and its Sites in Weimar, Dessau and Bernau, and Fagus Factory in Alfeld.

2.  First transnational file involving seven countries and three continents: Europe, Asia and America.

3.  For example, it is the case for The 20th Century Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright : ICOMOS then the World Heritage Committee encourage the State Party to proceed to the extension of the series in the future, when the conditions for the additional components are established (Decision : 43 COM 8B.38)