Lucia Allais

Lucia Allais is an historian and theorist of architecture at Princeton University who works at the intersection of architecture, preservation, politics and technology in the modern period, with a special focus on international institutions and global practices in the 20th century. Her current book project is a history of monument survival and international bureaucracy in the 20th Century, tentatively titled Designs of Destruction. This work traces how monuments were protected from destruction—from the League of Nations in the 1930s, through the Allied Air Forces in World War II, and the 1972 World Heritage Convention—probing how building materiality and international ideologies combined to make monument salvage the crux of a new kind of cultural cooperation on the world stage.