LiMa – learning from history – Jeremy Eichler

ABOUT THE COVENTRY CATHEDRAL –

“The old cathedral, once the largest parish church in England, must have seemed like an impregnable fortress of God to its parishioners over the centuries. Now it couldn’t even fend off a drop of rain. This encounter with the radical fragility of constructions that once seemed permanent has long been part of the ruin’s disturbing power. “our gaze lingers on the ruins of a triumphal arch, a portico (…) of a palace, and we withdraw into ourselves” wrote Denis Diderot in 1767 in response to a painting of ruins. … “we ponder the ravages of time, and in our imagination we scatter the rubble of the buildings in which we live on the ground, we are the sole survivors of an entire nation that no longer exists.”

On November 15, 1940, the morning after the bombing that destroyed Coventry Cathedral, Provost Howard
… It is easy to imagine the architect Basil Spence visiting this place for the first time and feeling the attraction of the ruin described by Diderot, its way of revealing the deep vulnerability of the present, even as it often makes claims to eternity. …

The concrete fortresses and bunker architecture of a modernist brutalism so popular after the war were, it has been noted, in part a conscious or unconscious reaction to the fear of bombing, to the fear of death and destruction from above.”

Quoted from: Jeremy Eichler; The Echo of Time. Music and life in the age of the world wars; Clett Cotta, Stuttgart 2024, p.296

Photography: Jeremy Eichler; ibid. p. 295