Future history will not create ruins anymore. There will not be enough time for that.
Marc Augé
Ruins can offer an effective incentive for rebirth, a way back from origins to creative energy. An interruption of death or oblivion is needed for civilization to modernize.
John B. Jackson
The second issue of the journal JADH is dedicated to the theme of “destruction”, its perceptions, as well as its implications that can be perceived in several fields of architectural heritage as positive and negative at the same time (destruction/construction, absence/loss, memory/oblivion, etc.).
Destruction refers to the process and outcome of an event: every destruction, regardless of whether being voluntary or involuntary in nature, imposes a reflection on losses, things that have existed but ceased to exist, and forces us to make a value judgment about what we recognized as being part of our history and identity.
A destructive event becomes very relevant for the social life of the collectivity that is subject to it, and its results can be materialized over time depending on several directions and different ways.
For example, it is possible to verify the recovery of a line connecting with its own past - which has become so just because it precedes the event -, through strong participation in the process of rebuilding, which imposes the recovery as it is considered the historical identity of the affected population.
In other cases, the destruction implies a deeper fracture in the history of the collectivity, generating an active reaction that assumes diverse implications and an acceleration of the processes (of various natures: planning, historical, social, economic, cultural, etc.) and amplifies, in this way, the break with the past that already started with the destructive event itself.
The destruction becomes the main theme of this issue, which encourages the investigation of the multi-faceted interpretations of the term itself in a multi-disciplinary horizon.
Even though we do not preclude the canonical process of destruction-reconstruction, we further encourage the various interpretations in the space-time dimensions that may be examined.
To contribute to this issue, we invite groundbreaking investigations and reflections about themes revolving around (but not limited to) the following fields: