The most sophisticated statement on monuments—though initially not the most influential—came from Europe’s leading multicultural empire. The Austrian state appointed Alois Riegl, a lawyer-philosopher-curator in Vienna, to draft legislation on historic preservation. In his theoretical preface from 1903, “The Modern Cult of Monuments,” Riegl suggested that the state, through monument care, could inspire the kind of social cohesion formerly supplied by the Church. The “religion” of monuments (Denkmalkult) went beyond Heimat, beyond ethnonationalism, to someplace transcendent.
Riegl assigned pluralistic meanings to monuments: the intentional “commemorative value” from the past, a subjective “historical value” legible to the educated, and an “age value” accessible to all. Of these, Riegl considered age value the most modern, visual, direct, and emotional. Because anything could get old, any landscape feature—including the vernacular, the unintentional, the organic—could become an index of time, thus gaining memorial value.
In modernity, a condition of newness, the worth of age was the aura of becoming and passing. From the contemplation of temporariness came wisdom and reverence—an ethical education. Riegl wrote in near-religious terms about the redeeming power of decay. The temporal was the spiritual. He looked forward to a future age of altruism when societies protected all timeful things, not just the rarest and oldest. He thought the age threshold for legal registration should be sixty years rather than a century or a millennium. Caring for a building corresponded to respecting a tree: letting it age slowly through noninterference. Riegl imagined a secular sacred landscape permanently graced by long-term cycles of impermanence
—Jared Farmer, Elderflora: A Modern History of Ancient Trees
