Architectural Demolition in Seventeenth-Century Warfare: The Case of Castro (1641–1649)

Giordano Ocello, Ph.D.

Demolition practices and dismantling processes acquired a systematic nature and economic rele-vance in the early modern period. War demolitions between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries constitute a specific subset of occurrences through which to observe this phenomenon. On the one hand, demolitions became a legitimized practice, subjected to scientific theorization in parallel with technological advances in siege warfare and professionalization at all levels of expertise across Eu-rope; on the other hand, they necessarily involved provisional labor and the ad hoc contributions of local communities demanding highly site-specific solutions.
 
Taking the seventeenth-century demolition of Castro as a rich case study, this project will integrate archival documentation with material evidence, examining to what extent early-modern war demoli-tions affected the material, social, and economic sustainability of the building industry and contextu-alizing the pragmatic and managerial aspects of Castro’s demolition within the broader panorama of studies on the history of deconstruction. In doing so, the study situates demolition within a broader spectrum of early modern practices—spoliation, conquest, looting, revival, and deliberate erasure—demonstrating how acts of destruction actively reorganized artistic production, material circulation, and architectural value.