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Workers’ Assembly Halls as a Proposition for UNESCO’s World Heritage

2012; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 19; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13527258.2012.675509

1470-3610

Peter Ludvigsen,

Museums and Cultural Heritage

Abstract UNESCO’s World Heritage List does not have one single cultural example from the industrial workers’ history or culture. After a suggestion from the Danish Heritage Board, the Workers’ Museum has, since 2009, inventoried a large number of workers’ meeting halls worldwide with the purpose of suggesting a selection to be included in a transnational serial nomination for the Tentative List to World Heritage. Following two years of research, nine workers’ meeting halls erected between 1874 and 1938 have been proposed. They are all nationally listed, have a high degree of authenticity and integrity, and are today the finest existing monuments representing the history and culture of industrial workers. Together they also illustrate the most important aspects of the development, similarities and differences of the international labour movement in the industrial period. The suggested buildings are situated in Australia, the USA, Finland, Sweden, Germany, Belgium, France and Denmark. Keywords: World Heritageworker’s monumentscultural historylabour movementinternational variationsintegrityauthenticity Acknowledgements I am indebted to Vagn Buchmann for assistance in the research on which this paper is based. I also need to thank Brigitte Johnen, Lena Fluger (translator) and Marieke Burgers. I also thank Nick Mansfield (Great Britain), Holger Gorr, Horst Koch-Panzner, Heinrich J. Schümann (Germany), Gerd Callesen, Marcus Strohmeier, Udo Wiesinger (Austria), Julien Tanari (Switzerland), Hendrik Defoort, Stefaan de Ruyck, Rik Vandecaveye (Belgium), François Papiau, Guillaume Lasserre (France), Jaume Matamala (Spain), Anne-Mette Rahbæk, Sven Berggreen, Henning Grelle, Hans Uwe Petersen, Karl Ejnar Jørgensen, Kitt Boding-Jensen (Denmark), Kjersti Bosdotter, Margareta Ståhl, Bertil Thorén (Sweden), Kalle Kallio, Kati Kosonen, Margaretha Ehrström (Finland), Peter Meyer (Norway), Etsuo Yokajama (Japan), Margot White, Rosslyn Ferry, Neale Towart, David Cragg, Andrew Reeves, Terry Irving, Luke James, Michelle Majchrzak-Smith (Australia), Karen Lane and Chet Briggs (USA). Notes Rådhusvej 43, DK-2920 Charlottenlund, Denmark. 1. The Workers’ Museum and the Labour Movement’s Library and Archives, the Social Democrats’ Archives, II International, archive No. 500. 2. Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Peru, Brazil, USA, Australia, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Germany, The Czech Republic, Hungary, Austria, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Switzerland, Spain, Italy, the UK and Iceland. 3. Among others, the Ford Factories introduced the 8-h day in 1914; Mexico and Russia in 1917; Germany in 1918; Austria, Belgium and Denmark in 1919; France in 1936 and China in 1995. In Britain, it has never formally been implemented. 4. In 1916, the AFL built a skyscraper as its headquarters in the centre of Washington DC. The building was later taken over by the United Association of Journeymen and Apprentices of the Plumbers and Pipefitters Industry. Now the building is in the process of being converted into a hotel. The conversion has only left the original façade and the authenticity is lost. 5. Länsstyrelsen Östergötland, Kultur- och samhällsbyggnadsenheten, beslut 2007-06-14, 432-722-88 (County Board decision). For non-Nordic readers, a good guide to further reading about the labour movement in the Nordic countries is: Bagge Hansen and Callesen (Citation1992). 6. During the years before the Second World War, several famous Finnish architects designed workers’ assembly halls, for example, Saarinen in Kotka in 1907 and Aalto in Jüväskylä in 1925. Tampere saw the building of the first People’s House built in stone in 1900. It has been enlarged repeatedly, most recently in 1985. 7. An interesting Maison du Peuple is located in the working-class suburb Clichy-la-Garenne. It is an exceptional building in several respects. The extremely functionalist building was designed by Eugène Beaudoin and Marcel Lods with a multifunctional assembly hall, cinema and theatre, a market hall and administration offices for the trade unions. It was, however, the engineers Jean Prouvé and Vladimir Bodiansky who made it exceptional by designing the construction in glass and steel, creating the multifunctional assembly hall – on top of the market hall – with a removable floor and ceiling, and movable partition walls for the room to be used as a cinema and theatre. All in all, a construction in which functionalism has been taken to its most technically devised extreme. The outcome is a building that is interesting, but today unfit for any other purpose than the market hall on the ground floor.