1st Edition

The Monumental

Edited By Argyro Loukaki Copyright 2025
278 Pages 57 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

278 Pages 57 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

278 Pages 57 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

The Monumental is an interdisciplinary collection of original, cutting-edge contributions by international researchers pursuing the epistemology and ontology of monuments over time and geography. The contributors are specialists in geography, architectural theory and history, prehistoric, Greek and Roman archaeology, modern art, Byzantine studies, landscape theory, and heritage reception.... Read more

List of figures
List of contributors
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Towards an ontology and epistemology of the monumental

ARGYRO LOUKAKI

PART I
The Mediterranean as source of monumentality and sublimity from prehistory to the present 

1 The monumentalization of Mycenaean architecture after 1200 BCE
MANOLIS MIKRAKIS

2 Monumentality as a form of societal expression: The case of Naxiwn Polis in the Archaic period
ALEXANDRA S. SFYROERA

3 Shaping the ancient urban landscape: Monumentality in the cities of Roman Greece
VASILIS EVANGELIDIS

4 Hagia Sophia, monumentality, and the world stage
ROBERT G. OUSTERHOUT

5 The perception of monuments in Late Byzantium and beyond: Representations of donors holding a church model
DIONYSIOS MOURELATOS

6 The other monument: From monumentality to mnemonicality
KONSTANTINOS I. SOUEREF

PART II
Modern and ultramodern dialogues with Classical monumentality: Exaltations, antagonisms, disputes, retractions

7 Political monuments as references to the idealized ancient landscape
KONSTANTINOS MORAITIS

8 Building modern sacred geographies: The subtle monumental of Dimitris Pikionis
ARGYRO LOUKAKI

9 Monumentalizing historical time: Body, nation, and utopia in 20th-century Greece
DIMITRIS PLANTZOS

PART III
The Eastern and Western monumental from antiquity to the present

10 The East-West divide, the Eastern monumental and Greek classicism: The case of China and India
ARGYRO LOUKAKI

11 On the monumental                                                                    
MANOLIS KORRES

12 Architecture of magnificence: Monumental tendencies in mid-18th-century architectural discourse
FELIX MARTIN

13 A particular kind of monumentality in the work of Mark Rothko
KALLIOPI KOUNDOURI

14 Postwar social housing: the (anti)monumentality of Georges Candilis
KORINNA ZINOVIA WEBER

15 Monumentality, skyscrapers, and being human
GORDANA KOROLIJA FONTANA-GIUSTI

PART IV
Bridging the European center with the Mediterranean periphery: 19th
21st-century artistic and architectural links

16 Monumentality, poetry, and memory: Eugène Delacroix’s The Death of Sardanapalus and Yannoulis Halepas’s Sleeping Lady
MELITA EMMANOUIL

17 Monumentality and the Great National Donors in Greek cityscapes: Phantasmagoria in the midst of crises
LILA LEONTIDOU

Concluding thoughts
ARGYRO LOUKAKI

Index

Biography

Argyro Loukaki is Professor Emerita at the Hellenic Open University (HOU). She has a DPhil from Oxford University, an MSc in Architectural Engineering from NTUA, an MA from Sussex University, and an MSc from Panteion University. She has obtained doctoral/postdoctoral fellowships and prizes from the Greek State Scholarship Foundation and universities including Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, NTUA, and the universities of Oxford and Princeton. Loukaki created the Master’s Program “Art-Cultural Heritage-Development Policies” and launched bi-annual international conferences on art and/in space held at the Acropolis Museum. Earlier, she accomplished urban planning, architectural design and monuments’ preservation projects as a functionary of the Greek state, including archaeological landscaping and restoration, and was Planning Advisor to the City of Piraeus. She has authored 11 books plus many articles and monographs in English and Greek on art, architecture and space, cultural heritage, restoration and its aesthetics, Mediterranean cultural geography and the geographical unconscious, tourism, landscape, and the spatialities of Classical Greek tragedy. The Monumental is the fourth by Routledge. Previous books by Routledge include: Living Ruins, Value Conflicts; The Geographical Unconscious; Urban Art and the City: Creating, Destroying, and Reclaiming the Sublime.