Nations remember selectively, and the shape of that selection is not (0) INCIDENTAL to the politics of the present. Monuments, anniversaries, and school curricula in a constant process of curation by which certain events are granted the dignity of public commemoration while others are quietly from the official record. That this process is political is hardly a revelation; what is less often is the degree to which it is also architectural. The physical arrangement of a capital city — what occupies the central squares, what is tucked into peripheral streets, what has been demolished and paved over — a tacit hierarchy of memory that citizens internalise without needing to articulate it. A visitor walking through such a city is, whether she realises it or not, an argument about what matters. Nor is this argument Every generation inherits the built environment it finds and must decide, often by default rather than decision, which of its predecessors' commemorative choices to with and which to leave in place. The result is a palimpsest whose layers the ideological tectonics of the society that produced them.