Miguel Caballero (Spanish & Portuguese, Northwestern University) presents his recent book The Monument of Tomorrow (PSUP, 2025), shortlisted for the 2026 Morey Book Awards by the College Art Association. A study of how radicals (liberals, communists, and anarchists) transformed an aesthetic and political strategy of creative destruction into one of creative conservation as an anti-fascist strategy. The focus is on the Spanish War (1936-1939), which became a laboratory of creative conservation of cultural heritage for the subsequent World War II and a crucial milestone in the creation of UNESCO and the conceptualization of World Heritage.
In conversation with:
Lucia Allais, Director of the Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, Columbia University, and author of Designs of Destruction: The Making of Monuments in the Twentieth Century (University of Chicago Press).
Nina Gurianova, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Northwestern University, and author of The Aesthetics of Anarchy, Art and Ideology in the Early Russian Avant-Garde (University of California Press).
Jesús Escobar, Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor of the Humanities, Department of Art History, Northwestern University, author of Habsburg Madrid: Architecture and Spanish Monarchy (Penn State University Press).