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Theses (Historic Preservation) Graduate Program in Historic Preservation

1998

The Impulse to Preserve: A Theory of Historic

Preservation
Debora de Moraes Rodrigues
University of Pennsylvania

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The Impulse to Preserve: A Theory of Historic Preservation
Disciplines
Historic Preservation and Conservation

Comments
Copyright note: Penn School of Design permits distribution and display of this student work by University of
Pennsylvania Libraries.

Suggested Citation:

Rodrigues, Debora de Moraes (1998). The Impulse to Preserve: A Theory of Historic Preservation. (Masters
Thesis). University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA.

This thesis or dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/hp_theses/305

 UNIVERSITY^
PENNSYLVANIA.
LIBRARIES
 The Impulse to Preserve: A Theory of Historic Preservation

Debora de Moraes Rodrigues

A Thesis

in

Historic Preservation

Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in

Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Master of Science

1998

Supervisor
1
Reader
David G. De Long QustaVo Araoz
Professor of Architecture Executive Director. ICOMOS

Graduate Group Chair

F/anK/G. Matero
Associate Professor of Architecture

i vi /",-7 m I? / C\
Dedicated to the memon- of my mother, Eva Maria de Moraes Rodrigues.
 Acknowledgments

At the University of Pennsylvania. I would like to thank my advisor.

Professor David G. De Long, for his interest in my topic and for all the knowledge he has

imparted. For his careful reading of my final draft. I thank my reader. Gustavo Araoz. At

Yale University, thanks are due to Beverly Joy and Robert Dincecco of University

Planning, and to Susan McCone. a Yale Di\inity School student. Finally. I thank my

family, especially my father. Josemar Rodrigues. and Lorena and Joseph Bottum. for all

their guidance and support throughout my graduate studies.

Ill
 Contents

Acknowledgments iii

Illustrations v
Introduction 1

Chapter 1 Problems and Absurdities in Preservation Practice

The Van Rensselaer Mansion 8
The Palace of Fine Arts 1

Penn Station 16
The Chicago Stock Exchange Building 20
The Gropius House 23
The Marin County Civic Center 25
Conclusion 28

Chapter 2 Theory from Viollet-le-Duc to Le Corbusier 35

Eugene Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc 35
John Ruskin 41
Modernism 47

Chapter 3 Theory in the Late Twentieth Century 52

David Lowenthal 55
M an f redo Tarfuri 59
Christine Boyer 68
Conclusion 76

Chapter 4 The Sterhng Divinity Quadrangle 78

Protest Against the Proposed Scheme 87
The Lawsuit: Save the Quad v. Yale 90

Chapter 5 A Theory of Historic Preservation 93

Bibliography 113
Index 127

IV
 Illustrations

Figure 1. Photograph by Michael McGovern. in "Who's News." Historic Presenation 47

(November/December 1995): 21.

Figure 2. Photograph from 1801-1803 Walnut Street. Fell-Van Rensselaer Mansion

folder. Philadelphia Historical Commission. Philadelphia. Pennsylvania.

Figure 3. Photograph from 1801-1803 Walnut Street. Fell-Van Rensselaer Mansion

folder. Philadelphia Historical Commission. Philadelphia. Pennsylvania.

Figure 4a. Photograph from San Francisco History and Archives Room. San Francisco
Main Public Library, in Sally B. Woodbridge. Bernard Maybeck: Visionan- Architect
(New York: Abbeville. 1992). 100.

Figure 4b. Engraving by G. B. Piranesi. in Pininesi: Rome Recorded (Rome: American

Academy in Rome. 1990). 163.

Figure 5a. Photograph from the Collection of the New York Historical Society, in Steven
Parissien. Peniisxlvania Station: McKini. Mead and White (London: Phaidon. 1996). 30-
31.

Figure 5b. Photograph by Bill Diehi. in Lorrame B. Diehl. The Late, Great Pennsylvania
Station {New York: American Heritage. 1985). 151.

Figure 6. Photograph by John Vinci, in John Vinci. The Tradiiii^ Room: Louis Sullivan
and the Chicago Stock Exchcmge (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1989), 61.

Figure Photograph by the Society for the Preser\ation of New England Antiquities,
7. in
Walter Gropius. Gropius House (Boston: The Society for the Preservation of New
England Antiquities. 1970). n.p.

Figure 8. Photograph in David B. Rosenhaum. "Out of Sight. Out of .Mind." Engineering

News Record 233 ( 12 September 1994): 18.

Figure 9. Photograph by William Schwarz. in Aaron Green. An Architecture for

Denuicracy: Frank Lloyd Wright: the Marin Countx Civic Center (San Francisco:
Grendon. 1990). 37.
Figures 10a. and 10b. Photographs in Nikolaus Pevsner. Ruskiii caul Viollet-le-Duc:
EngUshuess and Frenchness in the Appreciation of Gothic Architecture (London:

Thames and Hudson. 1969), 39.

Figure 1 Drawing by John Ruskin, in John Ruskin. The Seven Lamps of Architecture.
1 .

e^'^printing (New York: Noonday Press. 1977). plate V. n.p.

Figures 12a. and 12b. Photographs in Mohsen Mostafi and David Leatherbarrow, On
Weathering: The Life of Buildings in Time (Cambridge: MIT Press. 1993). 7-8.

Figure 13. Photograph by Laurence Laurier Associates, in E. R. Chamberlin, Preserving

the Past (London: J. M. Dent, 1979), no. 15, n.p.

Figure 14. Drawing by Arthur Cotton Moore, in Arthur Cotton Moore. The Powers of
Presenxition: New Life for Urban Historic Places (New York: McGraw-Hill. 1998).
193.

Figure 15. Photograph Charles R. Longsworth. Conuminicating the Past to the Present
in

(Williamsburg. Va.: The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. 1981 ). 21.

Figure 16. Photograph by the author.

Figure 17. Photograph by the author.

Figure 18. Drawing by R. M. Kliment & Frances Halsband, m R. M. Kliment & Frances

Halsband Architects, Yale Divinity School Feasibility Study. February 1997. 3.

Figure 19. Drawing by R. M. Kliment & Frances Halsband. in R. M. Kliment & Frances

Halsband Architects. Yale Divinity School Feasibility Study. February 1997. 7.

Figure 20. Photograph by the author.

Figure 21. Photograph from the Delano & Aldrich Collection. Avery Architectural and
Fine Arts Library. Columbia University. New York.

Figure 22. Photograph by Cervin Robinson, in John J. Costonis, Icons and Aliens:
Law.
Press. 1989). 42.
Aesthetics, and Environmental Change (Urbana: University of Illinois

Figure 23. Photograph by the author.

Figure 24. Photograph by William Seitz. in Jill Herhers. Great Adaptations: New
Residential Uses for Older Buildings (New York: Whatson. 1990). 56.

VI
 1

Figures 25a. and 25b. Photographs from the Department of the Environment (Crown
Copyright), in M. W. Thompson. Ruins: Their Presenatiou and Display (London:
British Museum Publications. 1981). 39.

Figure 26. Photograph by William Garnett. in Peter Blake, God's Own Junkyard: The
Planned Deterioration of America 's Landscape (New York: Holt. Rinehart and Winston,
1964). no. 107, n.p.

VI
 Introduction

A Theory of Historic Preservation

All historic preservation is vexed by a simple philosophical point. If beauty is en-

tirely in the eye of the beholder, if historic importance is merely a creature of historical

interest, if the past is wholly a projection of present anxieties, then everything and nothing

deserves to be preserved — for everything and nothing is equally valuable, everything and

nothing is equally significant, everything and nothing is equally rare.

We lack, of course, the conservative capital to preserve the past entire, just
as we

lack the revolutionary resolve to destroy the past entire. And so we lurch undecided from

historic preservation to historic preservation, preserving the ephemera of 1960s rock mu-

sic with the same energy that we preserve the National Gallery's Renaissance paintings,

allowing tourist traps to disfigure Gettysburg's battlefield with the same abandon that
we

allow new brick walkways to beautify Baltimore's harbor. Historic preservation is some-

thing that we do without being entirely sure why we do it: a practice without coherent

theory or accepted justification, and consequently a practice doomed to some absurdities.

Part of the problem is this; the demand that historic buildings and sites be pre-

served is. by definition, socially subversive of the present, for it wrests some of the tradi-

tional rights of property away from the authority of ownership and capital. A good neo-

Marxist could embrace that fact and use it to build the coherent theory of historic preser-

1
 —

vation that we currently lack: all the judgments of beauty and historic importance that

people think they are making when they demand historic preservation are in fact nothing

more than unconscious expressions of the power relations of class, race, and gender —but
historic preservation can in certain cases still be a good thing to do because it helps to

move property from private to public control, and it has a revolutionary effect in raising

class-consciousness and unsettling the vested interests of the rich, white male owners.

And another part of the problem is this: the demand that historic buildings and

sites be preserved is. by definition, intellectually subversive of the present, for it seeks to

wrest authority away from autonomous selves — belittling present purposes in the name of

the superior authority of the creative impulses of the past. A good postmodernist could

embrace that fact and use it to build the coherent theory of historic preservation that we

currently lack: our belief in transcendental judgments of beauty and historic importance

have not survived the collapse of our belief in the transcendental rationality that guaran-

teed them — but historic preservation can in certain cases still be a good thing to do be-

cause of its playful effect of light-minded aestheticism. and its help in breaking down the

distinctly modern notion of ordered progress in history.

But though they may be able to build coherent theories to guide preservation

which is to say. provide an internally consistent rational for preservation —both Marxism
and postmodernism fail to provide a convincing rational, for neither seems capable of ac-

counting for the fact that, before the emergence of any theory, human beings seem to have

a genuine impulse to preserve. Research in the history of ideas could report the ebb and

flow of this impulse, and sociological investigation could report its present extent. But the
truth behind the impulse to preserve — and consequently a genuine theory of historic pres-

ervation —cannot emerge from either the history of ideas or sociology. It must emerge,

rather, from a philosophical examination of beauty, history, and rarity as these notions

appear in the practice of historic preservation.

The contemporary impulse to preserve is often naive and unretlective in its appli-

cation — and occasionally ludicrous. But. as I hope to show in the course of this thesis, it

also represents an accurate though inchoate moral insight into the need to have meaning

and beauty around us for the Good Life. What we demand, the case studies examined in

this thesis will reveal, is a theory that defends the possibility of common sense in historic

preservation. Places are worthy of preservation when they manifest beauty, rarity, histori-

cal association, and simple antiquity. The worthiness, however, is finally moral: the ex-

tent to which places contribute to life well-lived.

In Chapter One of this thesis, some of the pressing theoretical problems are raised,

with particular reference to six brief examples of problematic preservations: the Van

Rensselaer Mansion in Philadelphia, the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, New

York"s Penn Station, the Chicago Stock Exchange Building, the Gropius House in Mas-

sachusetts, and the Marin County Civic Center.

In Chapter Two, early attempts to formulate a theory — from the nineteenth-

century Eugene Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc to John Ruskin, and on to the Modernist ar-

chitects and theoreticians — are analyzed both for their failures as theory and their histori-

cal importance.
 In Chapter Three, the analysis of attempts at theory continues into the late twenti-

eth century, with particular attention paid to the work of David Lowenthal. Manfredo Ta-

furi, and Christine Boyer.

In Chapter Four, the details of a real-life, complicated, and not entirely resolvable

middle-ground preservation project— the Sterling Divinity Quadrangle at Yale Univer-

sity—are presented as a case study upon which to test a theory of preservation.

And finally, in Chapter Five, there is posed, if not a complete theory, at least the

prolegomena to a theory, searching in the conservative tradition of Edmund Burke for

hints to how we may construct a commonsensical. middle-ground theory that would allow

us to distinguish good from bad preservation.

 —

Chapter 1

Problems and Absurdities

in Preservation Practice

complete dedication to the future, might

A complete dedication to the past, like a

would certainly solve the current

leave us with considerable practical problems, but it all

theoretical problems of historic preservation.

The truth, however, is that we do not have now — and never will have — the re-

sources necessary for such extreme positions: we lack the conservative capital to preserve

everything, just as we lack the revolutionary resolve to destroy everything and start anew.

The past, said Karl Marx, '"weighs like an alp upon the brain of the living." And thus,

from time to time, we mvest energy and money and expertise in saving things that we

probably shouldn't bother to— as, to take a whimsical example, a house shaped like a

carefully preserved by a retired key-punch operator and grandmother ot two.

work boot

The house, located outside York, Pennsylvania, was built in 1948 as a promotion

gimmick by Mahlon N. Haines — a flamboyant retailer known as "the Shoe Wizard of

York." Upon learning that outsiders planned to buy and relocate the shoe, Ruth Miller

who lived nearby— quickly purchased it, stating, -'[tjhat house belongs here."" Preserving

'
Karl Marx. The Eighteenth Bniinarie of Louis Bonaparte (New York: Intern. 1898). 5.
Ruth Miller, quoted in "Who's News." Historic Preservation 47 (November / December 1995):
- 21

5
'"uniqueness" — and this house is certainly unique in any sense of the word —poses a par-

ticular problem: the fact that a building uniquely represents a form of architecture does

not make it worth preserving if the form of architecture it represents is bad.

Fig. 1. A slwe-shaped house presevMil h\ a il tired

ke\-piinch operator and grandmother of t^vo.

But just as there is unnecessary preservation — a falling too far into the extreme of

trying to preserve evervthing old — so there is unnecessary destruction — a falling too far

into the extreme of trying to destroy e\'erything old. A proposal to clear the Parthenon and

the other old bits of stone from the Acropolis in Athens, a willingness to build condo-

miniums on the site of Mont-Saint-Michel, a desire to construct a convention center at the

Taj Mahal are all too absurd to be contemplated. But scarcely less vandalous things have

been done in the name of clearing the past for the future.
 The desecration of the holy places of England during the Reformation —Crom-
well's roundheads using cathedrals for target practice — is responsible for many of the

Gothic ruins that the Victorians would later so much admire. The nose of the Sphinx in

Egypt was knocked off by cannon-fire. The ruins of ancient Rome were plundered for

stone.

The destruction of. for example, historic Warsaw by the Nazis may be a special

case — an unintended consequence of the barbarity of modern total war. But during the

twentieth century, the Communist regimes in particular have often operated on the delib-

erate desire to destroy the past. The outright destmction of and confident refusal of

maintenance of churches behind the h'on Curtain has resulted in huge losses. And in

Cambodia, the Khymer Rouge, declaring their accession to power. Year Zero on the new

order, carried the systematic extreme of destroying everything old — buildings, artifacts,

and people alike — as far as it has ever been carried. Even though it ultimately fails in its

project to start over, totalitarianism — Fascist and Marxist alike — has proved willing to

attempt destruction unenvisioned before the twentieth century.

Preservations, however, rarely have to deal with such extremes, and when they do.

there are far more important moral stands to take than preserxationism. But that fact does

not necessarily save them from all failure. As preservation lurches from smaller project to

project, we can find less extreme but nonetheless real examples of preservations that have

unnecessarily siphoned off resources to save the unworthy and examples of destruction

that have unnecessarily cleared the ground of the worthy.

 —

At the extremes, common sense and theory are in conflict: we can hold an extreme

theory of systematic destruction or preservation only in the absence of common sense.

But that fact is not sufficient to mean that all theory is unnecessary. When we look at the

middle ground between the metaphysical extremes, we find that our current lack of a co-

herent theory of preservation — a commonsensical, middle-ground theory, as it were

leads architectural practice into real failures.

The next two chapters of this thesis turn to the failure of theorists— from Eugene

Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc to Christine Boyer— to provide a workable middle-ground the-

may be helpful first to take up quickly some particular exam-

ory of preservation. But it

ples of middle-ground failures in preservation: the Van Rensselaer Mansion in Philadel-

phia, the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. New York's Penn Station, the Chicago

Stock Exchange Building, the Gropius House in Massachusetts, and the Marin County

Civic Center. The aim is to seek in them the failings that point us to the necessity for de-

terminina why we need a more widely understood theoretical approach that can be used

as a general tool for each particular case.

The Van Rensselaer Mansion

There is a claim, made by many postmodern thinkers, that we are living at the end

of time— that there are no originals left for us— that the effect of making copies of real

things is at last to reduce the real things themselves to copies. On its face, the claim

seems to mean the end of meaningful human endeavor, of a purpose for human thought,

there were ever an example that seems to prove the

of a reason to do anything. But if
postmodern claim true, it would be the degradation of the Van Rensselaer Mansion on

Rittenhouse Square.

In the late nineteenth century, as expressions of their wealth and power, the elite

of Philadelphia built large houses in the city, particularly around Rittenhouse Square. The

Van Rensselaers — wealthy beyond their ability to spend their money — built themselves a

four-story home on the corner of Walnut and Eighteenth, and decorated it with European

originals or pieces copied from European originals: Empire moldings. Directoire balus-

trades, and even a ceiling decorated with portraits of the Doges of Venice.^

Fig. 2. The Van Rensselaer Mcinsion adaptheh ii\, ,

In then- own odd way. as expressions of the derivative taste of the American nou-

veau riche. these European pieces probably worked well in the mansion. The house had a

'
See 1801-1803 Walnut Street. Fell-Van Rensselaer Mansion folder. Philadelphia Historical Commission.
Philadelphia. Pennsylvania.
 a

certain grand sweep, a largeness of room and space, and could display and give meaning

to highly decorated fireplaces, walls, ceilings, doorways, etc.

With the changes overtaking the city in the twentieth century, however, houses

such as the Van Rensselaer Mansion became economically and socially impractical. The

rich families moved out; the mansions decayed; and the social life that could tolerate such

grand expressions of wealth and power passed away. In 1942, the Van Rensselaers gave

up the fight, and their mansion on Walnut and Eighteenth passed through the hands of

various tenants: a ritzy social club, a high-tone retailer, and, at last, "Urban Outfitters" —
would-be trendsetter, selling knock-offs of high fashion to guileless high school girls.

In some sense, the mansion has been preserved as a result of these adaptive uses.

The facade basically remains, though an extra door has been cut into the side facing Wal-

nut Street. The interior was more or less gutted to make room for merchandise and to ad-

here to fire and building codes, but the most interesting architectural element.s — the

stained-glass dome in the entrance, the medallions decorating the ceiling of the dining

room, the ornamental plaster scattered throughout the house —have been at least partially

salvaged. They can still be seen by anyone willing to look past the merchandise displays.

In another sense, however, the effort to keep the mansion intact has been mis-

guided, for nothing of the mansion remains to be preserved. This is not to say that what

remains of the facade should be torn off or that the interior plaster ripped from the walls.

But such architectural and decorating elements had their meaning and their effect on the

viewer because they belonged to a house — a house with enough sweep and grandeur to

'ibid.

10
give the pieces scope and enough naked weahh and power to give the pieces force. The

house gave itself and its parts context. One might well object to what it represented, but at

least the house was what it was: it was real; it was itself.

Fig. 3. An original fireplace mantle of the Van Rensselaer

Mansion ripped from its context.

The truth to which the postmodernists rightly point is a psychological one: the ef-

fect of making a large number of copies is that the original is finally turned into a copy

itself— a copy of itself, or. worse, a copy of the copies of itself. When Ralph Lauren or

Victoria's Secret or the Museum Store moves into an empty space in a shopping mall,

they decorate the walls with cheap copies of the architectural elements
found in nine-

teenth-century American mansions. It's only stage caipentry. of course — only a theatrical

11
set— but the attempt is to give the store the feeling of being a room in a wealthy person's

old house. When Urban Outfitters moved into the Van Rensselaer Mansion, they carefully

preserved certain architectural details— for which they may deserve some praise. But they

showrooms the feeling of a Ralph Lauren show-

did the preservation in order to give their

mansion. And Urban Outfitters already is an old man-

room that has the feeling of an old

sion: the original became an imitation of the imitations of itself.

The result is finally a complete loss of the mansion. The only thing that gave the

architectural elements meaning was their context, and that context has been destroyed by

details, their nar-

Urban Outfitters" adaptive use. Their careful preservation of dissociated

the interior spaces (especially of the rotunda beneath the dome)

rowing of the sweep of

are demonstrations of their desire to make the house "just like"" a store in a mall— of their

desire to make the house a copy of the copies of itself.

The Palace of Fine Arts

"Everything made now."" remarks George Kubler on the history of things,

"is ei-

ther a replica or a variant of something made a long time ago and so on back without a

first break to the first morning of human time.""" Kubler, with this statement, strengthens

the postmodern claim that there are no originals left for us.

"With this dim \iew. there are several options for preserving the past. We can rep-

with new materials elsewhere, as was done in Nashville" s Parthenon,

licate the original

Athens.""^ Built of a less

"the woiid"s only full-scale, full-color copy of the Parthenon in

Yale University
'
George Kubler. The Shape of Time: Remarks on the Histon' of Things (New Haven;
Press. 1962). 79.
World (New York:
^
James Marston Fitch. Historic Presenation: Curatorial Management of the Built

McGraw-Hill). 210.
12
than noble reinforced concrete, this 1920s replica is said to be more authentic than the

ancient original: Tennesseeans boast that the Greeks would have to study the correct de-

tails in Nashville in order to rebuild the original in Athens^ We can also reconstruct the

vanished originals, as was done in Virginia's Colonial Williamsburg, America's "living

museum," where, with the restoration of eighty-two buildings, the reconstruction of 375

buildings, and the destruction of 616 buildings, a mix of old and modern-day copies min-

gle together to create a town that never really existed at any point in time. Or we can even

demolish the decaying original and build a newer one in its place, as was done in San

Francisco's Palace of Fine Arts. These three examples neither exactly preserve nor restore

an existing building; they attempt, instead, to replicate a moment in time long past.

In the case of the Palace of Fine Arts, the duplicated palace is a replica masquer-

ading as the original. The original structure, built by Bernard Maybeck in 1915 for the

Panama-Pacific International Exposition, was never meant to last. A temporary pavilion

of lath and plaster has been made permanent with steel and concrete.

The exposition — originally an attempt to boost San Francisco out of an economic

slump following the 1906 earthquake and fire — soon became the official international

exposition for 1915, which was also the year celebrating the opening of the Panama Ca-

nal. There were ten exhibition palaces in all — built by several well-know architects such

as McKim, Mead and White, Carrere and Hastings, and Henry Bacon — but Maybeck's
palace was the one that drew the most attention, instantly changing his status from un-

known draftsman to architect of the exposition's most admired structure.

See David Lowenthal. The Past is a Foreign Cauntiy (Cambridge: Cambridge Unixersity Press. 1985),
291-293.
13
 a

The Palace of Fine Arts was a composition of four separate classical structures

surrounded by landscaping. Intended as an art gallery, only one of the structures was used

When asked how he had arrived at the right form for cre-
for the exhibition of paintings.

ating such a perfect harmony between architecture and nature, Maybeck pragmatically

replied:

This process is similar to that of matching the color of ribbons. You

pick up a blue rib-

bon, hold it alongside the sample in your hand, and at a glance you know it matches or it

examine form and see whether

does not. You do the same with architecture; you a historic

produced on your mind matches the feeling you are trying to portray—
the effect it

modified sadness or a sentiment in a minor key.

Maybeck wanted to capture the vision of decaying structures caimbling and half-

reverting to nature, where overgrown moss and lichen and other encrustation added the

picturesque quality so much admired by the Romantics. His palace should suggest a sense

of G. B. Pira-
of sadness, as did the structures depicted in the richly detailed engravings

nesi, whose picturesque ruins were a forerunner of late eighteenth-century Romanticism.

Maybeck wanted the image of "[a]n old Roman ruin, away from civilization, which two

thousand years before was the center of action and full of life, and now is partly over-

grown with bushes and trees.

"'^
Piranesi's engravings depicted a perishable Rome, de-

perhaps then,
voured by time and nature. Ruins and decay suggest the transience of life; it

intention to suggest the transience of architecture, since this palace

was
was Maybeck" s

designed for an instant in lime, "a consciously created fantasy that was part of the illu-

sionary architecture of a world's fair."

9-10.
Bernard R. Maybeck. Palace of Fine Arts and La,s^oon (San Francisco: Paul Elder. 1915).
"Ibid.. 10.
'"
Kenneth H. Cardwell. Bernard Muxheck: Artisan. Architect. .4(7/,vM Santa Barbara: Peregrine Smith.

1977), 151.
14
 Fibs 4a ami 4h McnhttL uanuil Ins FciUm of Fine Arts
Btiiuiiil

(top) to capture the image of an old Roman ruin, aniiy from civili-
zation, as depicted in the richly detailed engravings of Piranesi

(bottom).

The exposition lasted a little less than a year, and. even before it ended, the deci-

sion was reached that this transient piece of architecture would become permanent: May-

as a temporary
beck"s Palace of Fine Arts was the only building not demolished. But.

structure, it could not be maintained for long without extensive and costly repairs. By the

15
late 1950s, its stucco-over-wire-lath exterior was a decayed ruin. Ironically, when it had

finally achieved the melancholy note of vanquished grandeur, becoming the romantic ruin

Maybeck had envisioned (when new. the structure had never been very ruin-like), the

building was torn down and an identical one was put in its place.

In 1958, a bond issue to rebuild the rotunda was voted down. In 1959, however, a

San Francisco resident gave $2 million to save the structure; $2 million more was

matched by the state of California, and nearly equaled by the city of San Francisco. The

whole project eventually cost $8.5 million (the original had cost $700,000).'" Maybeck,

who had watched the palace decay with pleasure, was ambivalent about its preservation:

on the one hand, he tried to devise ways in which to encase the structure in plastic; on the

other hand, he considered planting the site with redwoods, so that "children of the future

might find bits of ornament and sculpture of a wondrous ruin of a previous generation

among the trees.

'"'''
Its reconstmction was completed in 1967. and it now stands as a per-

manent reminder of what was supposed to be tieeting architecture, a mere fantasy of ar-

chitectural grandiosity.

Penn Station

Modeled after the third-century baths of Caracalla. and described as one of the

greatest railway stations in the world. New York City's Pennsylvania Station — McKim.
Mead and White's timeless vision of classical splendor — lasted for little more than fifty

years. It took six years to build the station, and three years to destroy it: as an editorial in

" See "The Dream Made Permanent." Progressive Architecture 49 (February 1968): 122.
See David Morton. "Palace of Fine Arts." ProgressiveArcliitectiire 37 (Noxemhcr 1976): 66.
'-
Cardwell. Bernard Maxbeck. 132.

16
 New York Times put ""[ilfs not easy to knock down nine acres of travertine and
the it.

granite. 84 Doric columns, a vaulted concourse of extravagant, weighty grandeur."

build-
The decline of the soot-stained travertine marble and pink Milford granite

ing had begun long before it was slated for demolition: the ailing Pennsylvania Railroad

had been trying for years to get rid of what had become to them a •"white elephant."

They finally sold the site to the Madison Square Garden Corporation, which had plans to

replace the elegant, neo-classical station with a circular, futuristic

sports complex (the

would be relocated underground). The travertine marble taken from

new train station

quarries near Tivoli. Italy— the same stone used to build Hadrian's tomb, the Roman

Coliseum, and the Basilica of Saint Peter's— was to be replaced by concrete panels from

the Plasticrete Corporation in Hamden. Connecticut.

In 1962, upon learning that the railroad was attempting to save itself by sacrificing

Penn Station, a small group of young architects — calling themselves the Action Group for

Better Architecture in New York— banded together to protest. Their organized public

protest —picketing the station, collecting signatures on petitions, and enlisting the aid of

several renowned architects— did not stop the demolition: however, it did arouse enough

public reaction, which helped establish the New York Landmarks Law. The passing of

law had been brewing since 1957, when the Municipal Art Society published a
forty-
this

page list of New York City structures deemed worthy of preservation. Among this list, ot

course, was Penn Station.

'^
Farewell Penn Station." New York Times. 30 October 1963. seel. A. 38.
to
September 1962,
See Foster Haily. 'Battle Over Future of Penn Station Continues." New York Times. 23
'-'

sect. A, 78.
Heritage, 198?). 28.
See Lorraine B. Diehl. The Late. Great Pennsxlvania Station (New York: American
"^

17
 The loss of New York architecture and the preservation of old buildings had also

concern of James Felt, the Chairman of the City Planning Commission; he was
been a

instrumental in establishing the Landmarks Preservation Commission—created to protect

(The planning commission

"structures and areas of historic or aesthetic importance."'^

had no jurisdiction over the preservation of the city's architecture: it was permitted only

to pass on the proposed use of land, therefore, it could not rule on the value of a building

1 s
that was already on the site, only on the nature of its replacement.)

Felt asked the Chairman of Zoning and the President of the Municipal Art Society

mayor recommending that an advisory committee be formed. In

to write letters to the

was appointed, and. in 1962. was formally

1961. a thirteen-member advisory committee
it

constituted as a mayoral commission. But it was only in 1965 that a Landmarks Law was

Landmarks Preservation Commission authority to act on its decisions.

passed, giving the

Penn Station was just a year away from total destruction. (Ironically. James Felt.
By then.

so hard for the establishment of a Landmarks Law, disqualified himself

who had worked

of interest: his
from the Madison Square Garden zoning hearings because of conflict

brother. Irving Felt, was president of the Madison Square Garden Corporation.)

Time magazine. Irving Felt, believing that the gain from the
In a 1962 article for

that "[tlifty years from

new buildings would offset any aesthetic loss, confidently claimed

now, when ifs time for our Center to be torn down, there will be a new group of archi-

" Ibid.. 20.

Hello Haiiihiir,iier: An An-
See Ada Louis Huxlablc. -Prcscrx alion or Perversion?.'" in Goodbye Histon:
'*

(Washington. D. C: Preservaiion Press. I9S6). 47.

thology ofArchiteanral Delights and Disasters

See Diehl. Late. Great Pennsxlvania Station. 28.

'''

18
 Figs. 5a. and 5b. Penn Station before demolition (top) and one of
its preserved eagles (bottom), strangely out of context in front of
Madison Square Garden.

tects who will protest."' In 1982. Madison Square Garden was declared bankrupt; in

1984, the Garden's then owners were seeking to demolish the complex and start again.

There were no protests. Even an odd proposal to relocate the gloomy subterranean station

Ir\'ing Felt, quoted in "Pcnn Pals." Time. 10 August 1962, 42.

19
 as Vincent Scully put '-[olne entered the
a few blocks further west drew little interest; it.

city like a god. . . . one scuttles in now like a rat."'

to adorn
Only fragments of Penn Station have survived: a few of the eagles went

one eagle sits in the Washing-

the bridge outside Philadelphia's Thirtieth-Street Station;

ton Zoo and another one went to the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in upstate New

York; two stone maidens went to Ringwood Manor and one went to
the Brooklyn Mu-

the entablatures, the

seum. Everything else— the remaining stone maidens, the columns,
1")

granite and marble moldings— were dumped in New Jersey's Secauscus Meadows."

The Chicago Stock Exchange Building

Ripping fragments of buildings from their original contexts and then collecting

and preserving them in museums has often been the last resort for preservationists. This

demolition of
descended into absurdity when, during the Christmas season following the

Adler and Sullivan's Chicago Stock Exchange Building, paperweights

made of lucite-

encased chips from its terra-cotta facade were being advertised and sold under the head-

line ""Jingle Bell Rock.""

but none
Several important Adler and Sulli\an buildings ha\e been demolished,

created as much controversy as the Chicago Stock Exchange Building: demonstrators

picketed in front of the building daily; scathing editorials and columns appeared regularly

-'
Vincent Scullv. quoted by Ada LouisA'nr York Review of Books ill November 1975),
Huxtable. in
in

Phaidon. 1996). 24.

Steven Parissien. Pennsylvania Station: McKim. Mead and White (London:
''
See Parissien. Pennsylvania Station. 23.
--'
See John Vinci. The Trading Room: Louis Sullivan and the Chicago Stock
Exchange (Chicago: Art In-

stitute of Chicaeo. 1989). 54.

20
in the pages of Chicago's newspapers; several local and national architectural organiza-

tions became involved, eventually taking the matter to court: and, most tragically and

most dramatically, one man lost his life while gathering fragments of ornament from the

partially-demolished, mutilated building, buried beneath the very fragments he was trying

to save.'

Located in downtown Chicago — in a thirty-five-square-block area known as "The

Loop" — the thirteen-story Chicago Stock Exchange was denied official landmark status

on the grounds that it would be a financial burden to the new owners, who could make a

greater profit with a new building. (Many local and national architectural organizations

had written to the City Council and the mayor, urging them to grant the building land-

mark status under the newly defined legal protection of the Commission on Chicago

Historical and Architectural Landmarks, but to no avail.)

Without any law to protect it, the tall, metal-framed commercial building was de-

molished to make way for another commercial building —newer, taller, with more mod-

ern amenities and thus more economically viable. Soaring forty-three stories above the

ground, the glass and steel replacement, known as the Heller International Building,

ironically ended up being a financial disaster: the developers were unable to meet the

S400.000 monthly payments on their $41.3 million first mortgage. As Ada Louis Hux-

table put it:

What is economically unviable now is a big building barely distinguishable from any of
the other S5() million jobs anywhere, and what vvas economically un\iablc before was a
unique work of art and genms. Rehabilitation might ha\e been considerably better. There

'""
See Richard Cahan, They All Fall Down: Richard Nickel's Struggle to Save America 's Architecture
(Washington. D. C: Preservation Press. 1994), 9-26.

21
 is a bitter lesson here in economics and environment. Sound business practice turned out
to be both unsound investment and destructive urbanism.'^

Like Penn Station, fragments of the Chicago Stock Exchange have survived: when

it was certain that the building would be demolished, several institutions expressed their

interest in preserving parts of the building. (This was a nice side business for the Three

Oaks Wrecking Company: according to standard demolition procedures, anything a

wrecker can sell for salvage is part of the deal. They set up a small makeshift shop on the

ground floor and sold stripped pieces of ornament. ) New York's Metropolitan Museum.

anxious to acquire their own bit of Sullivan, asked for the entrance arch along with five to

seven of the surrounding bays. Their proposal: to reconstruct these fragments as one of

the new park entrances to the museum — part of their new master plan. But. as Ada Louis

Fig. 6. The salvaged entrance arch from Adler and Sullivan 's Chicago
Stock Exchange Building, no longer sening its original purpose.

-'
Ada Louise Huxtablc. "What's Best for Business Can Ravage Cities." \'e\v York Times. 6 .April 197:
sect. 2. 30.

22
Huxtable put it. "[h]aving permitted destruction of ihe building, Ciiicago is reluctant to let

the arch 20."'

The building's arch, along with its reconstructed trading room, ended up at the

Chicago Art Institute. The trading room was "enshrined" in the institute, where one can

glimpse the six different ornamental patterns of stenciling in some fifty-seven different

shades of green, yellow, gold, rust, brown, and blue. The arch sits just outside the insti-

tute, no longer serving its purpose as an entrance, which the Metropolitan Museum had

proposed, but as a sort of disembodied triumphal arch. What was not sold off was un-

ceremoniously dumped in Lake Calumet on the city's far south side.

The Gropius House

Considered a milestone of modernism when completed in 1938. the Gropius

House, located in Lincoln, Massachusetts, was the U. S. home of renowned Bauhaus ar-

chitect Walter Gropius for thirty years. In succeeding years, however, the house has come

to be considered not one of his major contribution to architecture, and, as Henry-Russell

Hitchcock writes, "no more successful than much of his work of the late twenties in Ger-

many.""^ But the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities nonetheless

felt compelled to restore the house and "make it look right.""

But. in order to "make it look right." the society was faced with se\eral problems

not encountered in their previous colonial restorations; what to do with mass-produced

materials that had not aged well and that were no longer available. Ati Gropius Johansen.

-''
Ada Louis Huxtable. -.A Bad End. .And a Good Idea." New York Tinits. 26 December 1971. sect. A. 24.
''
Henry-Russell Hitchcock. Aichitectiirc: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New York: Penguin. 1977),
524.
"^
Peter Gittleman. quoted in .Alastair Gordon. "Back to the Future," Interiors 151 (Jul) 1992): 24.

23
Gropius's daughter and an advisor in the restoration, was certain that her father would

have wanted for everything to look brand new; the society, however, felt that "a sense of

time should be retained," and left the house's tarnished, time-worn chrome as it was."'' (A

curious choice, since accurately capturing the modernists' sense of their time and the ex-

pression of time in a modernist building would seem to dictate a sense of timeless and

perpetual newness — of always new, unaged materials.)

/'/s;. 7. Tlie Gropiits House, a modernist classic carefiillx presened

In tlic Socienfor the Preservation of New England Antiquities as

"
an "authenticated antiquity'.

On the other hand, the society completely replaced the old cork floors: the com-

pany that had manufactured the original floors still had Gropius's order on file and v/as

therefore able to match them.'" Ise Gropius, the architect's wife, had originally waxed the

floors every week to keep them looking like new. But later years without waxing and an

Ibid.
'

Ibid.

24
 .

attempt to remove the top surface with a rotary sander had ruined the original material/'

The preservation society, which tries in their projects to retain as much of the original

fabric as possible, justified their action by reasoning that Gropius, where he still alive,

would most certainly have replaced the worn flooring."

On surveying the interior work of the conservators, Ati Gropius Johansen made

several changes (she wanted the house to look as though her parents would "walk in any

minute"):'' her father's glasses were placed where he had always left them on his desk; a

piece of sculpture was returned to its rightful place; the fireplace screen was opened (her

parents would never have had the screen closed, as the conservators had done); the sofa

was pushed back; the books were shoved against the wall; the tables were pulled out;

even the branches in the fireplace were rearranged.^ At last the modernist house was fin-

ished — carefully preserved by the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiqui-

ties as an "authenticated antiquity," the youngest in the society's collection.

The Marin County Civic Center

An even clearer, perhaps the finest, most ironic example one could ever hope to

find in the absurdities of preservation occurred in the adaptation of the Marin County

Civic Center: in the name of preserving Frank Lloyd Wright's progressive, liberal design.

See Thomas Fisher. "Restoring Modernism: Updating Mass-Produced Parts." Progressive Archiiecntre
70 (April 1989): 111
Ibid.
'i
Ati Gropius Johansen. quoted m Jane Holtz Ka\'. "The Gropius House: Reno\'ating a Modern Classic."
New York Times. 8 December 1988. sect. C. 1

"
See Michael J. Crosbie. "Restoring a Modern Milestone." Architecture 11 (No\ember 1988): 98.

25
an underground jail reminiscent of nothing so much as a medieval dungeon was con-

structed on Wright's site."^

First commissioned in 1957. Frank Lloyd Wright's concept for the civic center

was officially adopted by the Marin County Board of Supervisors in April of 1958.

Wright was able to finish the plans for the center only just before his death, at the age of

ninety-one. The associated architect. Aaron Green of San Francisco, together with Mrs.

""^
Wright and Wright's Taliesen staff, carried on the project after the architect's death.

In the 1970s, however, the civic center's jail and courthouse became the site of

several high-profile trials that posed problems Wright had never anticipated: one judge

was assassinated by a gun smuggled into a courtroom, and increased security required

changes in design. But even more, the national increase in incarcerations, and Marin

County's part as a center of drug-trafficking, led by the late 1980s to a need for larger and

more secure jail-space in the Hall of Justice.'

Wright's "organic integration" with the landscape made a building that cannot be

extended easily or beautifully. The interior space is quite flexible, but the interior would

no longer hold the jail, and the exterior space is quite inflexible. Wright's executors and

disciples led a public campaign against the idea of building a separate jail on the site as a

betrayal of Wright's design:'^ Aaron Green, who worked on the project following

'^
See Da\id B. Rosenhaum. "Out of Sight. Out of Mind." Engineering A'cu^ Record 233 ( 12 September
1994): 18-19.
'
See Bruce Brook.s Pfeiffer. ed.. Letters to Apprentices: Frank Llo\d Wright (Fre.sno: California State
University Press. 1982). 11.
See Roger Montgomery. "Frank Lloyd Wright's Hall of Justice." Architectural
Forum 133 (December
1970). 55. and Aaron Green. An Architecture for Democracy: Frank Lloxd Wright: The Marin Counts-
Civic Center (San Francisco: Grendon. 1990). 102.
'*
See Paul Goldberger. "Jailhouse Blues: The Ballad of the Mann Count\ Jail." New York Times. 25 March
1990. sect. H. 36.

26
Wright's death, argues in his boolc on the civic center that what Marin County needs is a

changed legal culture rather than a new jail.

''
But at last, in a compromise achieved in the

early 1990s, one of the hills of the site was hollowed out and an underground jail con-

staicted. (In my own interview with Mr. Green, when I mentioned that I hadn't noticed

the new facility, he solemnly replied. "Precisely.")

Fig. 8. Marin Count}' Civic Center's controversial jail, a dirt-covered prison

masquerading as a hill.

There is, of course, an inestimable absurdity in the unself-conscious declaration

by one of Wright's disciples suggesting that the Marin Country jail problem should be

solved not by reforming the building but by reforming criminal procedure: in order to

preserve one building's integrity of design, a nation of 250 million people ought to com-

pletely reform its legal culture. Perhaps we ought to. but on the list of reasons for doing it.

preservation of Frank Lloyd Wright's designs is going to come fairly low.

See Green, An Architecture for Democracy. 102. "It would be better in all respects if law enforcement,
treatment, and education were to be funded at a percentage of those costs to extricate the county from its

exaggerated drug-related crime conditions. Creative law enforcement together with enlightened crmiinal
justice application could ser\e the immediate needs of the communit\ rather than the excessi\'e construction
of hotel facilities for criminals."

27
 yet another absurdity in the fact of maintaining
Wright's organic in-
And there is

tegration of his buildings by turning one of the organically integrated features of the land-

"Architectural features of the true

scape into a dirt-covered prison masquerading as a hill.

from topogra-
democratic ground-freedom," Wright once declared, "would
rise naturally

phy.

Wright often made

But the greatest absurdity comes when we remember that

claims about the political effect and purpose of his work:

"Organic architecture," he said,

only true architecture for our democracy. The dynamic ideal

we call democracy . .
.

"is the

these United States by

has now every opportunity to found the natural democratic state in

way of a natural economic order and a natural, or organic, architecture."^' In his original

designs. Wright aimed to provide the prisoners with light and a view— though his plan

was under construction. But is hard to

altered for security even while the building
it
was

jail entirely underground merely for the sake of

imagine that Wright would countenance a

preserving his earlier design.

Conclusion

on the beauty of life, the Victorian William Morris said

In a lecture he delivered

not and cannot be the same thing as ancient art. and cannot replace it;
that imitative art is

we superimpose this work on the old. we destroy it both as art and as a record of his-
if

beautiful, and its loss disas-

tory. The natural weathering of the surface of a building is

trous.^' Morris's near contemporary John Ruskin put a similar thought

when he wrote:

* Frank Lloyd Wright, quoted without citation in Green, ,4;; Architecture for Democracy. 2.

""
Ibid.. 55.
"- Bmldtnos ami Prospects (Westminster; Architectural Press. 1948).
See John Piper. "Pleasing Decay." in

90.
28
 [A]s for direct and simple copying, it is palpably impossible. What copying can there be
of surfaces that have worn half an inch down? The whole finish of the work was in the

half inch that is gone: if you attempt to restore that finish, you do it conjecturally; if you
copy what is left, granting fidelity to be possible (and what care, or watchfulness, or cost
can secure it?), how is the new work better than the old? There was yet in the old some

life, some mysterious suggestion of what it had been, and of what it had lost; some sweet-
ness m the gentle lines which rain and sun had wrought. There can be none in the brute
"
hardness of the new carvina.

Morris and Ruskin have not gone unchallenged. Rudolf Amheim. for example,

argues for a different view of duplication when he writes that "[ijt is not sensible to ac-

cept only original works as art and dismiss all reproductions as nonart.""^"' He adds that the

distinction between original and reproduction oftentimes is anything but obvious: for ex-

ample, the Ise Temple in Japan has been razed and rebuilt every twenty years since A. D.

478. Banning power tools and metal nails — since that would call the authenticity of the

shrine into question — the Japanese maintain that the replica is the Ise Temple, as long as

they use the same type of wood, the same type of tools, and the same construction tech-

nique when rebuilding.

Does this make the Japanese Ise Temple more authentic than the Palace of Fine

Arts, which was built with stronger, more durable materials? To answer that question,

one must think about which qualities of the original are mamtained in duplication and

which qualities are lost. Ada Louis Huxtable writes that "[tlhey have to do with the \alue

of a li\el\ original \ersus a dead copy, the integrity of a work of art as expressi\'e of its

"*'
John Ruskm. The Seven Lamps of Architecture (New York: Dover. 1989). 184.
Rudolf Arnheim. "On Duplication." in Tlie Forger's Art: Forgery and Pliilosopliy of Art (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press. 1983). 237.
••'
Ibid.

29
time, the folly of second-hand substitutes for first-rate inventions, the aesthetics and eth-

ics of duplication measured against creative art."

Huxtable names the keys to judging the failure of duplication in the Palace of Fine

Arts and the Van Rensselaer Mansion. And she points us — with her invocation of two
branches of philosophy, aesthetics and ethics — toward the need for a philosophical foun-

dation for distinguishing good preservation from bad. But aesthetics and ethics are tan-

gled disciplines today. The confusion in the law of copyright proves that it is not in fact as

easy as Huxtable seems to think to speak of the "ethics of duplication."

One danger derives from the anti-democratic impulse that of necessity begins to

build in those who claim to have a special insight into a particular field's ethics and aes-

thetics. The danger is always most acute when the specialists both claim a special insight

and are unable to give a reasoned, philosophical justification of that insight which might

be tested in a political arena.

Frank Lloyd Wright, for example, may have been correct in his claims to have be-

gun a truly democratic, truly American style of architecture, (He professed Emerson as a

forefather, although his claims have more of a Whitmanesque. "I sing the body electric"

sound than the genuine Emersonian tone.) And in fact. Wright did express something

uniquely democratic, uniquely American with his work — insofar as architecture can ex-

press American democracy. There is a reasonable claim that his buildings manifest an

openness born of the frontier experience, a longing for rightness born of the Protestant

heritage, a desire for frankness born of philosophical pragmatism, and an equality born of

Huxtable. "Where the Past Meets the Future." in Goodbye Histoiy. Hello Hamburger. 171.

30
the American Revolution. But there is something peculiar in the notion, apparently held

by some of Wright's disciples and admirers, that the preservation of Frank Lloyd

Wright's expression of democracy is too important to be left in the hands of the common

people, but is the duty of an elite of appreciative architects.

Fig. 9. The Marin Count}' Civic Center, Frank Lloyd Wright's c\prc.\si(in oj

democracy.

In deciding among these middle-ground examples — sorting out good results from

bad. good motives from bad —common sense is going to carry us a long way toward an-

swering this question. We cannot preserve everything —e\en if it were metaphysically

possible (which it isn't), it is not financially possible. We need to make choices and dis-

tinctions about historic preservation, and common sense will help. When a preservationist

argues that the suburban ranch house is a dying art form in need of professional attention,

the only commonsensical response is to lay back our ears and bray.

And yet. common sense is not going to sort out all the questions of historic pres-

ervation. Despite our at least apparently general cultural agreement that we should do

31
preservation, we lack a shared explanation for why we should do it — a coherent theory to

which the culture generally subscribes.

Common sense, for example, is not sufficient to sort out the ironies involved in

preserving a house out of the Bauhaus revolution, a "building of the future." which served

to break the grip of the corrupt and meaningless past on architectural forms —one of the

buildings of those revolutionary architects who frowned upon preservation. Authentic

modernist buildings were conceived as utilitarian, expendable machines. Indeed, there

was a feeling that many modernist buildings were designed with a limited life expectancy

in mind. Much of its work was often with untested materials and untried techniques, with

the notion that once these buildings had served their purpose, they could be torn down to

make way for newer buildings. The Gropius House has become a monument to a style

that detested monuments.

Old buildings should look old. according to Ruskin. but where does that leave the

modern buildmgs that were intended to look new? The marks of age —crumbling stone.

peeling paint, cracked plaster — have to be eliminated and thus do not convey what we

look for when we do historic preservation: a sense of the past. A modernist building

ought not to show on its surface the passing of time, what the German architectural histo-

rian Alois Riegl would term as "age value." In order to look good, these buildings have

to be crisp, and shaip. and clean. But time acts against all buildings and stains them: it

dulls their colors and crumbles away their edges. In the modernist style, "signs of decay

'
See Alois Riegl. 'The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Its Origin." Oppositions 25 (Fail
1982): 20-51.

32
irritate rather than lend atmosphere." The taste for building decay is intimately linked

with Ruskin's restoration philosophy. Buildings should gain with age. but in a modern

building, "[tjhat which looks white and pristine and excellent when it is completed may

'"^^
look dreary and spotted and dirty when smoky rain has dribbled down it for ten years.

Although modernism has its admirers and although there are those who see in

modernist buildings great beauty, the problem is this: if we believe the modernist princi-

ple, we ought to tear these buildings down once they get old; if we decide instead to vio-

late the modernist principle, and make these buildings into monuments, we must be will-

ing to shoulder the enormous expense. Alan Baxter, of English Heritage, gives us a solu-

tion similar to what was done for the Palace of Fine Arts: decaying modern buildings

need not be preserved: instead, some examples should be demolished and replaced with

replicas, stating that "those which are truly exceptional should be rebuilt as facsimiles

using better current technology where appropriate.""

Part of the problem may lie in epistemology — the metaphysics of explanation.

When we demand a theory for historic preservation, we are demanding something outside

the actual practice of preser\'ation: we are demanding what belongs ultimately to philoso-

phy. And the same era. culminating in the 1970s and 1980s, that saw the rise of preserva-

tion in America saw as well, at least in academia. the rise of an attack on philosophical

foundations: Frederick Jameson insisted that philosophy is imperialistic oppression:

" Ibid.. 3.
'
Piper. "Pleasing Decay." 94.
^°
Giles Barrie. "Replicas' Plan to Save Modern Listed Buildings." Building Design (.A.ugust 1993):

33
Jacques Derrida called philosophy a sick "'white mythology"; Richard Rorty demanded

the replacement of philosophy with "light-minded aestheticism."

In the late 1990s, we may be past the worst of this philosophical attack on phi-

losophy. Rorty" s most recent book, for example, calls for a return to at least the political

certainties of the old, 1930s-style Left; even while his star has very much dimmed in his

native France. Derrida's most recent work seems to call for a new, almost mystical cer-

tainty in the truth of democracy."

This decay of anti-philosophy may allow us again to speak of philosophical an-

thropology, the psychology of the good life that demands some preservation of the past. If

we can recognize that the failure of previous theory does not condemn all possibility of

middle-ground theory, we can make some moves toward proposing, in a democracy, cri-

teria for distinguishing good preservation from bad.

^
See Richard Rons. Acliieving Our Coimny: Lefrisi Thought in Twentieth-Cenrun Anwrica (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1998). and Mark Lilla. "The Politics of Jacques Derrida," New York Review of
Books (25 June 1998): 36-41.

34
 Chapter 2

Theory from Viollet-Ie-Duc

to Le Corbusier

From the Greeks who preserved the architectural forms of their original wooden

temples in a more durable marble to the Japanese who preserved their sacred Ise Temple

by dismantling it every twenty years and replacing it with a faithful replica built of similar

materials, the impulse to preserve has existed since there were first things worthy of pres-

ervation. It was only in the nineteenth century, however, that the impulse became an in-

stitutionalized practice, and that ideas concerning restoration developed into preservation

philosophies, with France and England leading the field of what was to become the mod-

ern preservation movement.

Eugene Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc

In France, the impulse to preserve was motivated by the French Revolution, which

destroyed much of the country's medieval architecture. It inspired in the Victorians a

yearning for a lost past: an increasing amount of literature concerning the Middle Ages

satisfied their newfound fascination for exerything Gothic, and the romantic writings of

Frangois-Rene de Chateaubriand. Charles Nodier and Baron Isidore Taylor.

Alexandre

Laborde, and Victor Hugo, among others, lent romance to things gone by and made the

35
public aware of the need to preserve what was still left. "The more remote these times,"

wrote Chateaubriand in 1802, "the more magical they appeared."' In their 1820 travel ac-

counts, Voyages Pittoresques and Ronuuitiques clans I'Ancienne France, Nodier and

Taylor described themselves as the last travelers to see the ruins of ancient France, which

would soon cease to exist. The less romantic and more pragmatic Laborde classified

chronologically the monuments of France in two volumes."

It was Victor Hugo, however, who not only wrote about French medieval archi-

tecture, but who also exerted the most influence in the need for its preservation and pro-

tection. In his 1823 Bandes Noires, Hugo vehemently attacked the notorious Bande

Noire —brigands who were destroying France's medieval monuments to obtain its stones

for profitable use as second-hand building material. In an article entitled, "De la destruc-

tion des monuments en France," Hugo called for some system of surveillance of monu-

ments, since it would be impossible to recreate such works of art: they no longer had the

genius of that age; industry had replaced art. And in his "Guerre aux demolisseurs!" Hugo

was more explicit in calling for a solution to the problem of preservation, appealing for

the creation of a law to protect and preserve medieval buildings, stating that if France did

not preserve its medieval architecture, it would never again have any architecture worth

preserving.'

Frani^'ois-Rcnc de Chateaubriand, Genius ofChnstidiiity { 1802) Pt. 3. Bk. 1, Ch. S, 385.

"
See Jacques Duponl. "Viollet-le-Duc and Restoration in France." in Reculinos in Historic Preservation:
Win? What? Whom?, eds. Norman Williams. Jr.. et al. (New Brunswick. N. J.: Center for Urban Research.
1983). 9-17.
See Neil Le\ine. "The Book and the Building: Hugo's Theory of Architecture and Labrouste's Biblio-
theque Ste-Gene\'icve." in The Beaux-Arts and Nineteenth-Centun Freiuli Architecture, ed. Robin Mid-
dlelon (Cambridge: MIT Press. 1982). 139-268.

36
 was 1830 the impulse became official: concerned with the state
And so it that in

Louis PhiUipe appointed archaeologist

of decay of France's medieval inheritance. King

Ludovic Vitet— one of the -jeunes erudits" of Sunday

salons— to the newly created post

Monuments Historiques:' Vitet. in turn, prompted the creation

of Inspecteur General des

writer Prosper Merimee (author of

of the Commission des Monuments Histonques. The

1835 as In-
Carmen, on which Bizet's opera was based) succeeded Vitet
in
the novella

success the first few years: following the Revolution, many

specteur General, with little

buildings were in a sad state of disrepair, and the

architects who worked on them knew

little of medieval construction techniques.

was something quite novel." In 1840. the

In addition, the idea of restoration still

Emmanuel VioUet-le-Duc— an intimate of Merimee and a

twenty-six-year-old Eugene

self-taught architect who possessed knowledge of medieval architecture— was given his

Viollet-le-Duc success-
first major restoration, the Church of La Madeleine de Vezelay.

crumbling church, which had been in a state of such near-collapse that

fully restored the

Merimee. when visiting the

no other architect would dare undertake the commission.

restoration in progress, became so impressed with VioUet-le-Duc' s work that he invited

the young architect to accompany him on his official visitations to historic sites through-

would last for several decades.

out France.*^ This collaboration

of Vieu." in Heavenly Mansions and Otlier

See John Summerson. ••Viollet-le-Duc and the Rational Point
'

Essaxs on Architecture (London: Cresset. 1949). 138.

Theon- ofVwllet-le-Duc: Readings and Com-
See Eugene Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc. The Architectural
^

nientan\cd. M. F. Hearn (Cambridge: MIT Press. 1990). 271.

Mbid.. 1.

37
 this period that Viollet-le-Duc carried out
an extensive restoration
It was during

France. Viollet-le-Duc is responsible for a vari-

campaign. One of the busiest restorers in

cathedrals, chateaux, hotels de ville, and even an

ety of restoration projects-churches,

the beauty of ruins, the English were less taken

with
entire medieval city. (Enamored of

Royal Institute of British Architects visited

his restoration methods: the Secretary of the

"went away with a feeling of extreme

Viollet-le-Duc' s medieval city. Carcassonne, and

disgust ... a paltry plaything ... no better example of the useless restoration going on in

France.")

was the commission to restore

Viollet-le-Duc's most important project, however,

Lassus in 1844. As M.
Notre Dame de Paris— awarded to him and Jean-Baptiste-Antoine

F. Heam put it, "[i]t marked the moment when he became Merimee's protege and was put

establishment."' (Victor Hugo, who

on track to a central position in the Parisian cultural

published his Notre Dame de Paris in 1831. in which a great, decaying medieval building

reader's imagination, was a

dominates the story and makes Gothic architecture touch the

restoration.)
member of the board that had selected the architects for the

and, though no one

Viollet-le-Duc carried on the restoration for several years

challenged him, many were shocked with some of his decisions: he changed the form of

the flying buttresses along the nave; he removed genuine thirteenth-century work in order

865-66 ( 1 866), 147. quoted in Stephan

Sessional Papers of the Roxa! Institute of British Architects 1
'

A Study in English Restoration Phdosophy (Oslo: Uni-

Tschudi Madsen. Restoration and Anti-Restoration:

versiiclst'orlaget. 1976), 91.

**

M F HcM-n. AirhitectumI Theon- of Viollet-le-Duc. 2.

'
Ibid.
38
to "restore" what he thought had been there from the onset; and he ordered new replace-

ments for the statues of the bibhcal kings that stood on the west facade — for which he had

no archaeological evidence.' (During the Revolution, all ninety original statues had been

toppled and destroyed, the Gothic likenesses of the kings of France declared to stand as

"monuments to fanaticism and royalty in the streets of Paris."" The English, in their

customary distaste for Viollet-le-Duc's restorations, wrote of Notre Dame: "What Paris

mobs have spared, however, will now be restored.")'" Viollet-le-Duc also replaced older

materials with newer, better ones, stating:

In restorations there is an essential condition that must always be kept in mind. It is that
every portion removed should be replaced with better materials, and in a stronger and
more perfect way. As a result of the operation to which it has been subjected, the restored
edifice should have a renewed sense of existence, longer than that which has already
'""
elapsed.

Architect, restorer, writer, and archaeologist, VioUet-le-Duc was the founder of

the modern restoration movement: it was a new art and he therefore had to make new

rules as he went along, formulating his own interpretation of the medieval Gothic struc-

tures he analyzed. His restorations were purposeful inteipretations of historic monuments:

few medie\a! monuments were built all at one time, and Viollet-le-Duc would make

changes according to his "unity of style" theory. Viollet-le-Duc's philosophy is perhaps

best stated in his 1854 Dictioiiiiaire Raisonnec de V Architecture Francaise. in which he

writes: "The term restoration and the thing itself are both modern. To restore a building is

"Tbid..5-6.
Carmen Gomez-Moreno. Sculpture from Notre-Dcimc. Paris: A Dramatic Discovcn- (New York: Metro-
politan Museum of Art. 1979), 8.
"
G. F. Bodle\ . "Church Restoration in France." Tlic Ecclesiologist. 21 ( 1 86 1 ): 71. quoted in Madsen,
Restoration and Anti-Restoratinn. 85.
'"
Architectural Theoiy of Viollet-le-Duc, 275.

39
 Figs. lUa. and 10b. Violler-le-Diic's restoration at Pierrefonds, in
which he reinstated the castle in a state of completeness that could
never have existed at any given time.

not to preser\e it. to repair, or rebuilt it: it is to reinstate it in a condition of completeness

••14
that could ne\er ha\e existed at anv eiven time." For Viollet-le-Duc. architecture had to

do mainh with the faculty of reasonins: loeic. documentation, and scientific accuracv-

these were the pillars on which the principle of restoration was built. But e\en VioUet

Ibid.. 269.
See Madsen. Restoration and Anti-Restoration. 15.

40
le-Duc was aware of the consequences of his philosophy, stating that "absolute principles

may lead to absurdities."'^

John Riiskin

When England began to respond to its impulse to preserve, its response was in

part a reaction against Viollet-le-Duc's current methods of restoration, which were being

practiced with the same enthusiastic zeal at home by restorers such as Sir George Gilbert

Scott. Like France, England had become besotted with its medieval inheritance. "It is a

striking paradox that as England became the first industrial nation." observes the scholar

Charles Dellheim. "it became increasingly fascinated by its preindustrial past."'^ The ro-

mance of medieval architectural forms, paintings, and novels provided relief from the

new era. which was becoming increasingly industrial and rationalistic. Victorians turned

to the Gothic for all the qualities they found lacking in contemporary life: the beautiful.

the sublime, and the picturesque.

From the historical novels of Walter Scott to the Arthurian romances of Alfred

Tennyson, writers provided an escape to the past. Artists, as well, depicted the passage of

time; a genre of Romantic art appeared in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that

pictured — in soft pencil or watercolor wash — what existing buildings would look like af-

ter centuries of decay. "Fantasizing decay afforded romantic artists welcome relief from

the humdrum present." writes historian Da\id Lowenthal. "Hubert Robert's ruinous Loit-

vre. Joseph Gaudy's decrepit Bank of Ent^Uuul were pleasing partly because the imputa-

"'
Architectural Theory ofViollet-le-Duc. 274.
Charles Dellheim. The Face of the Past: The Presenation of the Medieval Inheritance in Victorian
England (Ca.mbr\dge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), xiii.
41
 contemplation of ruins in
tion of decay abolished their workaday functions."'' From the

came the eighteenth-century fashion of building artificial

mins—
paintings and literature

19

"producing new Tivolis"— which sprang up in every fashionable gentleman's grounds.

writer John Ruskin. on viewing restorations in his

country as well as abroad,
The

formulated
developed his own philosophy toward the subject. Before him. Merimee had

definition of restoration in his Rapport siir la restauration de Notre Dame de

his own

which he states: "By restoration we understand the conservation of that

Paris of 1845. in

and the recreation of that which has definitely existed."-^ Ruskin. believing
which exists

was a lie from beginning to end. vehemently contradicts Merimee and

that restoration

VioUet-le-Duc in his 1849 The Seven Lamps of Architecture:

public monuments, is the true

Neither by the puhhc. nor by those who have the care of
means the most total destruction which a
meanins of the word reswmtum understood. It

which no remnants can be gathered; a destruction

building can suffer: a destruction out of
accomp^anied with false description of the thing destroyed. Do not let us deceive ourselves

impossible as it is to raise the dead, to

restore
in this important matter; it is impossible, as
architecture. That which I have above in-
any thins that has ever been great or beautiful in
upon as the life of the whole, that spirit which is
given only by the hand and eye ot
sis'ted

the workman, never can be recalled. Another spirit may be given by another time, and it is
then anew building; but the spirit of the dead workman cannot be summoned up. and

commanded to direct other hands, and other thoughts."

that there
Ruskin. who had a deep respect for medieval craftsmanship, believed

toward the monuments of the past, both as historical documents and

exists an obligation

As the scholar Stephan Tschudi Madsen put it. Ruskin adhered to

as religious heritage.

a gift from God which is only given to us to be ad-

the principle "that the very earth is

'*
Lowenthal. Pastis a Foreign Coiintn. 168.
1953). 23-24.
See Rose Macaulay. Pleasure of Ruins (New York: Walker.
'-

-°
Prosper Merimee. quoted without citation in Madsen. Restoraiwn and Ami-Restoration. 15.

-'
Ruskin. Seven Lamps of Arcliitecture. 184.
42
ministered, it is entailed on us, and this earth and the contribution of human beings to its

development are to be preserved and passed on to the next generation.""

A full-scale revolt against French restoration practices did not begin until the

1870s. The first to take initiatives were the followers of Ruskin, with the painter William

Morris leading the group. In 1877, he formed the Society for the Protection of Ancient

Monuments; founded mainly to protect medieval buildings, it soon broadened its scope to

include buildings of other periods. Like most Victorians, Morris was infatuated with the

Gothic, but "as a true preservationist he did not want to confine protection to one style or

one period.""' Morris echoed Ruskin's beliefs when he argued for preservation:

It has been most truly said . . . that these old buildings do not belong to us only; that they

ha\'e belonged to our forefathers and they will belong to our descendants unless we play
them false. They are not in any sense our property, to do as we like with. We are only
trustees for those who come after us."

Ruskin and his followers wished to preserve old buildings as they had survived.

Modem technical methods were to be applied to stabilize the structure, but unlike Viollet-

le-Duc's methods, it was to be done without changing the structure's outward appearance:

no attempts should be made to add. alter or restore. In response to current restoration

methods — the restorers" practice of removing plaster from the walls of the buildings they

" Madsen. Restoration and Anti-Restoration, 46.

" Nikolaus Pevsner, in Jane Fawcett, ed.. The Future of the Past: Attitudes to Conservation 1 174-1974
(New York: Watson-Guptill. 1976). 51.
"""
William Morris, Speech at Annual Meeting of SPAB. Report 1889. quoted in Fawcett, Future of the Past.
16.

43
 away the surface and hence all visible marks of antiquity— Morris
repaired, of "scraping"

.•i''5

nicknamed his method "anti-scrape.

enthusiastically followed, the

Although these theories and technical methods were

a protective law until 1882. This law. the Ancient Monuments

government did not pass

had been introduced to the House of

Protection Act. was a compromise: various bills

monuments, but all were opposed for they

Commons calling for the protection of ancient

private property.""' The Act made vandal-

"appeared to involve unjust interference with

ism by members of the public punishable, but it could not keep the owner of an ancient

monument from destroying or neglecting his property: when Commissioners informed an

was in a bad state of disrepair, his reply was that "they

owner of ruins that his property

are ruins now. and if they fall they will be ruins still . . .
What more do you want'^"''

was not only inevitable that the passage of

Ruskin him.self was a lover of ruins: it

mark on a building, for Ruskin. it was desirable. Weathering, the "finish"

time leave its

aging that enhanced

the environment puts on a building over time, was seen as a romantic

a building's appearance.-' Medieval stone buildings, especially, weathered gracefully:

on this buildings and created what

dirt, carried in the air or deposited by rainwater, settled

Philosophy." in Historic Prescrvanau To-

See John Summerson, -Ruskin. Morris, and the -.Xnli-Scrape-
-^

day: Essaxs Presented to the Seminar on Preservation

and Restoration. Willuunslvirg. Virginia. Septeinlyei
Virginia. 1966). 28.
S-ll. J965 (Charlottesville: University Press of
-''
Nikolaus Boulting. in Favvcett. Future of the Past. 17.

-^
The Rev. J. A. Bennett, in Fawcett. Future of the Past. 17.
Weathering: The Life ofBiiiUiings in Time (Cam-
See Mohsen Mostafi and David Leatherbarrovs. On
-*

bridsc: MIT Press. 1993).

44
the Romantics found to be an aesthetically pleasing play of light and shadow in its crev-

ices. Even buildings weathered to the point of almost virtual destruction were seen as

picturesque.

Fig. 11. While traveling through Italy,

the writer John Ruskin was able to cap-

ture in his drawings the picturesque
Cjualit}' of what the Romantics found to
he pleasing decay.

The greatest glory of a building was not in its stones: the greatest glory of a

building was in its age: "in that deep sense of voicefulness. of stern watching, of mysteri-

ous sympathy, nay, even of approval or condemnation, which we feel in walls that have

45
 '

Ruskin pointed out how modest

long been washed by the passing waves of humanity."''

and that his generation had no right to destroy historic monu-

was our place is in history,

no light sin to destroy anything that is old; more especially because

ments: "Hence it is

a space of
even with the aid of all obtainable records of the past, we. the living, occupy

own eyes; we look upon the world too much as

too large importance and interest in our

„30
our own.

to preserve derived from a pas-

For both VioUet-le-Duc and Ruskin. the impulse

Viollet-le-Duc's impulse was born out of

sionate interest in medieval architecmre. But

work of those who understood the logic of ra-

Rationalism: Gothic architecmre was the

Ruskin' s impulse was born out of Romanticism: Gothic

archi-
tional construction. And

work and thus endowed with beauty.

tecture was the work of those who loved their it

Ruskin was a rough crafts-

"[W]heras the independent creator of the great cathedrals to

a highly intelligent designer.""

man," wrote Nikolaus Pevsner, "to VioUet-le-Duc he was

two men. there came to full expression the Rationalist and Romantic
To the work of these

very much with us: preservation at

impulses to preserve, and these expressions are still

finds itself attempting to find some solution to the antipathy of Viol-

the present day still

let-le-Duc and Ruskin.

-" Limps ofAnhiteetiire. 177.

Ruskin, Seven
'"
Ibid
Frenchness in the Appreciation of Gothic
.„koiius Pevsner -Ruskin and Viollet-ie-Duc: Englisiiness and
Eugene Enuuanuel Vwllel-le-Dne. 1S14-1S79 (New York:
Rizzoli.
Arch.teclurc." ,n Lamia Doumato. ed..

1980). 51.
46
Modernism

One solution is simply not to preserve— or at least not to create buildings that in-

purpose terms of the op-

spire preservation. Though he would hardly have phrased his in

position between VioUet-le-Duc and Ruskin. in 1923

Le Corbusier wrote that "[wlithin

no longer be a solidly-built thing that sets out to de-

the next twenty years, a building will

and decay: will be a tool."'- Many modem buildings were designed with a
feat time it

limited life expectancy in mind. Much modernist work was often with untested materials

once these buildings had served their pur-

and untried techniques, with the notion that

pose, they could be torn down to make way for newer buildings.

that, despite Le Corbusier's writings, he and his disciples did

It might be argued

that in reality they intended their

not in fact intend their buildings to be disposed of.

One purpose of rhetoric like "expendable

buildings to last longer than one generation.

machines" is simply its value to shock: its literal truth or falsity is beside the point of its

previous traditions, and a

usefulness in provoking a break with the past, a break with
all

change of
turn toward what the poet W. H. Auden called "new styles of architecture, a

heart."- Modernists like Le Corbusier were much influenced by the provocative writings

who proclaimed in his 1914 Manifesto of Fu-

of the futurist architect Antonio SanfElia.

Architecture that -houses will last less time than we do." that each generation will
turist

own But SanfElia's demand for "perishable art" was clearh in

have to build its city.''

'-
Le Corbusier quoted without ciiation in Martin Pavvley. "A Modern Moritun.- Conference Proceedings:
Wessel
First International DOCOMOMO Conference. September 12-15. 1990. eds. Hubert-Jan Henkei and
of Technology. 1991 ). 65.
de Jonse (Eindhoven. Netherlands: Eindhoven University
'-
W. H. Auden. -Sir. No Man's Enemy. Forgiving All." in The English Auden. ed. Eduard .Mendelson
(London: Faber and Faber. 1977). 36.
-' Rvner Banham. Theo,-y and Design In the First Machine
Antonio SanfElia. quoted without citation in

Aze (New York: Praeser. 1960). 135.

47
 '

own book, Toxmrds a TVeu' ArchiTectiire. in which

tended to be rhetorical. Le Corbusier's

we should "purge our houses, give your help that we may construct our
he states that

towns," has a distinctly futurist tone.

Figs. 12a. and 12b. Le Corbusier's 1929 Villa Savoye. only iliirry
\ears after construction, was no longer a solidly built thing that
set out to defeat time and decay.

once the break with the past had been made, ue find
modernists, or
And. in fact,

writers who write about modernists, especially Hitchcock and

Johnson m their 1932 The

materials and the difficulty of

Intevnational Snle. openly discussing the durability of

Frederick Etchells (New York; Dover. 1986). 24.

Le Corhusier. Towards a New Architecture,
^^ trans.
48
 signs of aging, specifically the surface mate-
finding materials that don't sliow premature

They devote an entu'e chapter to the

rials, the all-important white walls of modernity.

"[ilt is a chapter concerned, almost obsessed, with

cause, and. as Alice Jurow describes it.

finish materials which can achieve the principle of continuous

the problem of finding

mmimal interference from -flaws that come with time.'"-'

wall surface with

when modernists acmally got down to building buildings rather than

It seems that

m some ways contradicted their theory. A

talking about building buildings, their practice

number of key figures of the Modem Movement were not so much concerned with the

intellectual aspect, ideals that existed inde-

practical aspect of architecture as with the

reality. They succeeded in carrying out their declared

pendent of a building's structural

program when it came to considerations such as the doing away with ornament and re-

the constructions themselves,

placing It with a simple layer of white paint. But as regards

they seemed to encounter a pair of difficulties.

The first difflculty is logical, involving the fact that buildings by their very nature

that "[t]he
are built for a certain level of permanence. Even Hitchcock and Johnson note

with architecture" and that "temporary

idea of permanence has always been associated

as those built to endure."" Build-

constructions are seldom as architectural in character

withstand certain extremes of nature; they must be

sturdy
ings must be strong enough to

Moreover, they involve an investment of the human

capitals
enough to keep out the rain.

36
Alice Juniu. -The Immaculate Conception: .\ging
and the Modernist Building.- Arclienpe 2 (Fall 1982):

Snle (Nevs York: W. W. Norton. 1966).

"Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson. Tin IniemaUonal
82.
49
 a certain return expressed in years of
livabil-
of money and time that demand from them

ity.

difficulty is psychological. No artist with any kind of ego— and one

The second

modernists had healthy egos-^an build for the

can assume that Le Corbusier and other

into the work of art a desire for

moment. The very psychology of creation introduces

this pattern; within a few years

permanence. And. in fact. Le Corbusier" s practice shows

only participated m the restoration of his own

of his modernist classics. Le Corbusier not

work, but also began to build timeless buildings.

leading apostle of Machine Art" went on to

build
As Peter Blake notes, -'the

concrete^oncrete in its crudest, most brutal form, beton brut'

structures that were "all

virile as rock, deliberately chipped and cracked."'' Unlike the

Concrete ... as rough and

white stucco facade was beginning to show

premamre signs of
Villa Savoye, whose tired

way of building that still used a

aging. Le Corbusier's later concrete structures sought a

modern material, but which would age as well as any of the ancient buildings of Rome.

from the beginning in more durable

Other modernists, such as Mies van der Rohe.
built

merely from the fact—

materials, and much of the decay of modernist buildings derives

which they did not intend-that the new materials and techniques were imperfectly un-

derstood.

And so the fact remains that, intended or not.

the Modem MoNement buildings-

rhetoric and thus provides presumptive evi-

current condition matches the modernists"

Le Corbusier was exactly that: a turn, ^^h^ch

dence of the rhetoric- s truth. The turn by

118-119.
'-
Peter Blake The Master Builders (New York: Knopf. 1961).
50
marks a change in his worlc. His early designs may have been for disposable buildings,

and his later participation in some historic restoration is not an infallible sign of his

youthful intentions. The imperfectly understood materials and techniques that are now

decaying in a very ugly way are in fact the logical and necessary result of his demand for

a break with the past. The weakness of experimental buildings is one of the reasons they

are 'experimental.'" The modernist apostles of the Machine Age did not succeed in their

effort to leave behind the question of preservation — the tired, old opposition of Viollet-le-

Duc and Ruskin. They succeeded only — with their rapidly decaying buildings — in inten-

sifying the problem for subsequent generations.

51
 Chapter 3

Theory in the Late Twentieth Century

Viollet-le-Duc and Ruskin, the

In this hunt for a solution to the opposition of

American problem of preservation is a

United States faces a unique situation. Part of the

France and England, it seems feasible in

lack of consensus; unlike nineteenth-century

pounding away at antique buildings, as Viollet-

twentieth-century America neither to start

molder away picturesquely, as Ruskin

le-Duc thought proper, nor to leave their ruins to

thought proper.

But a greater problem is that America is not a nation with any medieval buildings

Europe had little impact

to preserve. The preservation philosophies of nineteenth-century

and— more important— applied awk-

in the United States before the twentieth century,

wardly to the American situation. Much can be gleaned from the writings of Viollet-le-

Duc and Ruskin. if for no other reason than that most preservation practice and theory

America— which both lacks a national consensus of the

derives from their work. But in

Gothic archi-
kind that could emerge in France or England and lacks the imposing public

Europe— the preservation movement has looked

tecture that gave rise to preservation in

look to mod-
for theory primarily to contemporary academic writings (though they often

ern European models).

52
 —

Several noted authors — preservationists, historians, architects, urban planners

gladly tell us why we should preserve, why we shouldn't preserve, what happens when

we do preserve, what happens when we don't preserve, etc. Some books offer a solid back-

ground in the field as it is practiced today; others trigger theoretical speculation concern-

ing preservation; but none develop a coherent theory solely for the field of historic pres-

ervation.

The title of Charles B. Hosmer's Presence of the Past: A History of the Preserva-

tion Movement in the United States Before Williamsburg, gives more than a hint of what

the book contains: Hosmer writes painstakingly about the evolution of the American

preservation movement. His work, as Hosmer puts it, "treats almost every type of preser-

vation group that appeared in the United States before 1926."' He writes about the first

evidence of preservation sentiment (an utterly forgettable notation in the pocket diary of

Benjamin H. Latrobe in 1796) to the first clear-cut example of an organized preservation

movement (the preservation of the small New England town of Deerfield); he writes

about early preservation examples ranging from Mount Vernon to Monticello; he writes

about organized preservation groups ranging from the Ladies of Mount Vernon to the

Daughters of the American Revolution; he writes about preservation activities all over the

United States, from north to south, from east to west.

When Hosmer finally arrives at his chapter on criteria for selecting buildings

worthy of preservation, he gives us a tidy and, on the whole sensible, list: patriotic inspi-

ration, local and civic pride, the need for exhibition areas, family pride, commercial ob-

'
Charles B. Hosmer. Presence of the Pas!: A Histoiy of rite Presenatloii Movement in the United States
Before Williamsburg (New York: Putnam, 1965), 22.

53
jectives. and architectural and aesthetic enjoyment. In his introduction. Hosmer mentions

that "details have been limited in most cases, because such a comprehensive scope is be-

yond the practical limits of a volume ot that kind.""" But though the book — and. indeed,
its sequel in two volumes. Preservation Comes of Age: From Williamsburg to the Na-

tional Trust. 1926-1949 — provides a helpful summary of preservation's evolution in

America, it gives no coherent theory as to why preservation should happen in the first

place.

James Marston Fitch — architect, preservationist, architectural historian, and, in

1965, founder at Columbia University of the first preservation program in the United

States — would appear to be an ideal candidate to write the modern-day theory of historic

preservation. And he finally published his book on the subject in 1982. entitling it. His-

toric Preservation: Curatorial Managejjieut of the Built World.

In the book's first sentence. Fitch explains his intentions: "This book aims to pro-

vide an overview of the urgent problems connected with the management of the built

world, as well as offer a holistic theoretical apparatus for a wise and civilized system of

solving them.""' He does this with an array of examples of preservation both in the United

States and abroad. Fitch provides us with an overview of preservation as a movement,

beginning with why we should save the built environment — the "prototype" — and then
going on to several different topics of interest: economic and conceptual parameters, ur-

ban regeneration, restoration and conservation, adaptive use. reconstruction and repro-

duction, architectural museums, cosmetic consequences of intervention, new systems in

-Ibid.
'
Fitch, Historic Preseivation, xi.

54
 analysis and documentation, maintenance,
old fabrics, historic landscapes, sites and ruins,

and third world countries, and, finally,

interpretation, training, preservation in socialist

the future of the movement.

The promised "holistic theoretical apparatus." however, never quite materializes.

gives a well-
Concerned primarily with the bureaucratic role of preservationists. Fitch

deeply convinced of the moral rectitude

organized overview of preservation concerns. But

no coherent theory as to why preservation should be

of preservation. Fitch at last offers

pursued.

David Lowenthal

scholarly attempt to treat— if not exactly in a

systematic way. then at
The first

wide-ranging way— the preservable past as an epistemological or

least in a suggestive,

even an ontological object came in 1985 with David Lowenthal' s monumental The Past

Is a Foreign Coimtn: A historian trained at Harvard and Berkeley and distinguished by

was well-placed to seek the con-

having held chairs in four different subjects, Lowenthal

nections between history, psychology, philosophy,

and even such distant fields as geology

for the explanation of why we desire to preserve.

He draws his title from a line in L. P. Hartley-s The Go-Bet^veen. "The past is a

differently there." But LowenthaFs title is

foreign country." said Hartley, "they do things

argues— against Hartley and. particularly, against J. H.

at least in part ironic, for he

Plumb- s famous argument about the alienness of history in his 1969 book. The Death of

55
the Past — that in fact the past's "features are shaped by today's predilections, its strange-

ness domesticated by our own preservation of its vestiges."

Lowenthal divides The Past Is a Foreign Count)-}- into three general movements:

"Wanting the Past" in Chapters One through Four, "Knowing the Past" in Chapter Five,

and "Changing the Past" in Chapters Six and Seven.

In "Wanting the Past," after taking up the obvious question of what benefits the

past seems to bring us, Lowenthal takes up the attitude toward history at four specific

moments: the Renaissance, the early modern world of seventeenth- and eighteenth-

century England and France, Victorian England, and revolutionary and post-revolutionary

America. In Chapter Four — sketching such examples as Oscar Wilde's TJ}e Portrait of

Dorian Gray, the historical cycles imagined by Vico. Henry Fuseli's famous 1778 draw-

ing The Artist Moved by the Grandeur of Ancient Ruins, and Lord Elgin's 1814 decision

to leave unrestored the marbles he rescued from the Acropolis —Lowenthal argues that

the prejudice in favor of newness and youth for some artifacts is matched by a prejudice

in favor of age for others.

In "Knowing the Past," Lowenthal enters an old argument about the legibility of

objects from the past, about how we can ever know the past at all — an argument perhaps
best summarized in William B. Hesseltine's critical 1957 essay "The Challenge of the

Artifact," which praises the ability of material culture's remains to inform us about the

Lowenthal. Fust is a Foreign Coiintrx, \\n.

56
 gain emphasis from physical
past.' Admitting that "memory and history both derive and

opposition to the "material" historians, that

remains." Lowenthal nonetheless believes, in

informants. They are themselves mute, re-

"physical remains have their limitations as
. . .

' artifacts deliberately created to carry information-

quiring interpretation." Only those

ideas about the past"'-are actually open

"pictures and sculpture that represent or reflect

for our interrogation.

vexed questions that revolve

In "Changing the Past," Lowenthal takes up the

around the past's presentation of itself and our attempts to grasp, recollect, and preserve

"Manipulation makes the past both more and less like the present— less
that presentation.

more because we put our own stamp on it. Even if we aim to pre-
because we set it apart,

we find them, protective and restorative devices man-

serve things just as they were or as

ironic examples as
tle the past in the machinery of the present."' Lowenthal takes up such

Casa Grande "overwhelmed by its glass

the ancient American Indian adobe structure at

of London Bridge in the American southwest,

and steel protective roof,"' the relocation

Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Nash-

the bisected copy of Trajan's Column in the

ville duplication of the Parthenon. And he uses his examples to argue the dual nature of

links with a recog-

preservation: "We cannot function without familiar environments and

we are paralyzed unless we transform or replace inherited relics."

nized past, but

Cdnnr Stndies m America (Nashville: Amenean Asso-

^
Reprinted in Thomas J. Schlereth. ed.. Material

eialion lor State and Loeal History. 1982).

"
Lowenthal. Past is a Foreign Coiintn\ xxiii.

'ibid.. 211.
^
Ihid.. xxiv.

"ibid,. 276.
"'
Ibid.. 69.
57
 Lowenthal— with some self-mockery, but nonetheless genu-
In his conclusion,

anachronism" of the Eldon League, whose motto is "For-

inely—embraces the "creative

"Merely to know about the past is not enough," he argues. "What is

ward Into the Past!"

needed is the sense of intimacy."

""""-S9P'

Fig. 13. The London Bridge in its new setting in tlie Arizona Desert,
soot
where the ozone in the atmosphere is eroding London 's historical
oflwlfa centiiiy from the stonework.

Though he bemoans "the modernist breach with classical and biblical lega-

"How the World Lost Its Story"' —he

cies"'-— what the theologian Robert Jenson calls

we no longer live in a perceived

nonetheless admits that the breach has taken place and

civilization. But he simultaneously re-

continuity with the long-running story of Western

jects the postmodern view of the past as a "stylistic warehouse."" And his solution to this

" Ibid.. .^78.

'-Ibid.. XXV.
''
"How World Lost Story." Tilings 36 (October 1993): 19-_4.
Robert W. Jenson. the Its Fir.'it

'^
Lowenthal. Past is a Foreign Coiintiy. 383.
58
 of the past, but a refusal
apparent contradiction is an acceptance of the existing alienness

to slip further away. The past is a foreign country,

to allow the unity and story of the past

beyond all understanding and appreciation. What remains of

but not so foreign that it is

from the prac-

must be cherished, even though there are many
ironies that result
the story

tices of that cherishing: "the past

is best used by being domesticated-and by our accept-

ing and rejoicing that we do so.

what Lowenthal offers is at last an attitude rather than a phi-

Attractive as it is.

preserve is in part a reaction to anxieties gener-

losophy. Recognizing that "[t]he rage to

do more than recommend simply that we em-

ated by modernist amnesia."'' he cannot

made has been left untouched,

brace those anxieties and rejoice in them: "Nothing ever

yet these facts should not distress but

emanci-
nothing ever known remains immutable:

And yet. precisely because it gives us no criterion other than attitude forjudg-
pate us.'-"

Lowenthal is unhelpful in precisely the realm in

ing a particular preservation project.

projects we face when we actually do preserva-

which we need help. The middle-ground

tion are not sold to doubters by a claim of superior attitude.

Manfredo Tafiiri

the Institute of Architecture in

Venice
A professor of Architectural History at

Manfredo Tafuri was a prolific writer, producing some twenty-three

from 1968 to 1994.

contemporary architecture.
books in which he considered issues and controversies in

'Mbid..412.
'"
Ibid., XXIV.

"Ibid.. 412.
59
 known and most influential book remains his Theo-
planning, and conservation. His best

ries and Histon' of Architecture.

In this book, the neo-Marxist Tafuri announced the death of architecture, advanc-

Muschamp describes that "architecmre itself was a beautiful

ing the view, as Herbert
it.

corpse, an art form no longer sustainable in the modern world."" Modernism's attempt to

was a failure: "technology

dominate the future through pure reason, argues Tafuri.

ideal emptiness and its alienating power; the anti-

seemed to show, only then, its

historicism of the avant-gardes, ignored in its deeper implications, was seen as a contin-

gent and resolvable, if not already solved, phenomenon."

in a chapter of his
Tafuri was not the first to proclaim the death of architecture:

That"). Victor
1831 Notre Dame de Paris entitled "Ceci tuera cela" ("This Will Kill

and that buildings

Hugo came to the conclusion that architecture was dead beyond recall,

power to express human thought, relinquishing that power to the

had lost forever the

book rather
printed word. The thought of ages and nations would now be embodied in the

stone, so solid and durable, would give way to the book of

than the building: "the book of

'
paper, which was more solid and durable still."

French forerunner, Tafuri agrees that modern

But though he doesn't mention his

sweeping aside the outdated forms of history, has lost the power to ex-
architecture, in

express ideas, but ar-

press all meaning. Architecture once depended upon its ability to

''
Herbert Muschamp, -Nocturne For the Marxist of Venice.-
Ncm York Times. 8 May 1994. seel. H. 37.
Harper & Row, 1976). .^0.
'"
Manfredo Tafuri, Theories ami Hisioiy of Architecture (New York;
-"
Victor Hu<^o Notre- Dame de Paris, trans. John Sturrock
(London; Penguin, 1978), 189.
60
 to dictate any meaning at all with their buildings. To take
chitects nowadays seem unable

m 1994. the much-employed Washmgton,

an example from the days after Tafun's death

Moore recently proposed the backing of the

D. C. restoratiomst architect Arthur Cotton

glass.'' And we. examinmg

White House's wrought-iron fence with explosion-proof

plausibility interpret as an example of totalitarian-

Moore's proposal, might with equal
it

Hugo blames technology: the killed-off "that"

ism, socialism, or democratic capitalism.

murdered by the "this" of the steam-driven printing press. And Tafuri as

was architecture,

caused by the excessive production and

well sees technology as the erosion of values,

consumption of advanced capitalistic societies.

F(,?. Arthur Cotton Moore's proposed protective glass fence for

]4.

the White House might have been interpreted

by the neo-Marxist
as an example of totalitarianism, socialism,
or
Manfredo Tafuri
democratic capitalism.

/Vnr Life for Urban Historic Places {Uc^y York:

See Arthur Cotton Moore. The Powers ofPrescnation:
-'

McGraw-Hill. 1998). 190-194.

61
 —

In Theories and Histoij of Architecture, first published in Italian in 1968 and

translated in the United States only in 1979. Tafuri addresses the failure of historians and

architects to grasp the historical setting of architectural theory. In six chapters, he lays out

a program that is. first, a devastating debunking of the modernists who thought that they

could build something so new that it escaped even its own historical setting, and. second,

a withering attack on the postmodernists who imagine that they can use their buildings as

a critique of history, and. third, a call for a new critical practice that surmounts architec-

ture as a metalanguage that, though unavoidably historical (as every species of Marxist

must admit), it nonetheless recognizes its difference from the architecture it criticizes.

In a clarifying note added to the second Italian edition. Tafuri declares the single

purpose of his work: "just as it is not possible to found a Political Economy based on

class, so one cannot "anticipate" a class architecture (an architecture "for a liberated soci-

ety'): what is possible is the introduction of class criticism into architecture.""" The rapid

emergence of the ultimate Marxist Utopia — the permanent revolution of the proletariat,

the withering awav of the state, and the final emergence of the classless society — may at

present be unlikely (to say the least), but the critical task is not thereby abrogated.

With the historical method of dialectical materialism, the critic of architecture is

able to distinguish criticism from the buildings it criticizes, setting both in their proper

and not identical — historical contexts. Tafuri"s great success, as James S. Ackerman puts

it. is to show, "more persuasively than other positions to the left, how architectural history

in particular was woven into the social, economic, and political fabric of the time being

""
Tatun. Tlitories. iii.
 that earlier efforts to illuminate architecture
through its
examined. Tafuri did this in ways

social ambiance could not.

"merging of the character of architect and critic in the same per-

Bemoanmg the

late capitalism the "pure critic'" is rightly per-

son." Tafuri believes that in the world of

conflict between Le Corbusier and Frank

ceived as a "dangerous figure.""' Denying the

for their recognition of the "his-

Lloyd Wright. Tafuri praises both the modern
architects

toricity of their anti-historicism."-' But both architects, believes Tafuri. took for granted

used as -pieces" of the contemporary city, are dangerous to

that "the historical centers, if

life:'-^ And they represent the very best of the moderns.

History"
Through his first two chapters— "Modern Architecture and the Eclipse of

and the Crisis of Critical Attention"— Tafuri

and "Architecture as Indifferent Object

who did not see their own historical set-

scathingly attacks the anti-historicist modernists

historically comes from its

ting: "The problem with assessing contemporary architecture

phenomenon."' The conclu-

initial choice: presenting itself as a radically anti-historical

end of Chapter Two is the modern failure of both ar-

sion to which Tafuri comes at the

chitect and critic.

architect. "[t]he same work that reveals the unsolved relation-

For the modernist

no longer justifles that very anti-

ship tying its anti-historic origin to a present that

1994):
-'
James S. Ackerman. -In Memoriam.- Journal of the Soaen of Anlutecnn-al Histonans 53 (June

138.
'*
Tafuri. Theories. 3
-'ibid.. 42. . . .
r.r
u projects as Lor- ,

'"
Ibid 48 Tafuri had Le Corbusier— in his early writings, praising such
a hish opinion of
promised over-
the modern condition in a way that
to
busier's plan for Alsziers that was aimed at bettering
Later, however, he represented Le Corbusier s work at
come the constraints of the economic structure.

Chandigarh as abandoning the Utopian effort in favor of a

more allusive symbohzation ot community,
-'ibid.. 11.
63
historicism. uses the metalanguage of criticism, announcing loudly the crisis of the tradi-

tion that allows it to exist as a new symbolic object. As such, it has to remain a readable

diagram of an intolerable situation.""*'

For the modernist critic, "[ijnvolved and rejected at the same time, he takes part in

the drama performed by architecture. . . . [T]he critic ... is nothing but a privileged ob-

server. . . . [F]rom the position of committed collaborator he is pushed into the front row

to witness, as a silent accomplice, the show offered by an architecture contmuously split-

ting itself in an exhausting mirror game.""

In the Third Chapter of Theories and Histoiy of Architecture. "Architecture as

Metalanguage: the Critical Value of the Image." Tafuri lays the groundwork for his con-

stant dismissal of postmodern architecture. The modernists believed that they had reached

the ultimate of history by buildmg curtain-walled boxes; the postmodernists reduce his-

tory to fashion. ^ To live in the world of postmodernism is to live in a world of constant

anxiety: postmodern architects suddenly felt the need to bring symbolism into their work:

"History has been reduced to fashion and is understood in the way Walt Disney under-

stands it — Venturi. who thinks he is being ironic, actually ends up more like Mickey

Mouse.""''

-'
Ibid.. 97
Ibid.
J'
"°
Ackerman. "In Memoriam."' 137.
Manfredo Tafuri. "There is No Criticism. Only Histor\."' Richard Ingersoll inter\ie\\s Manfredd Tafuri.
Casabella 59 (January/February 1995j: 99.
64
 like ready-made ob-
In postmodern architecture, ancient fragments are inserted—

elastic perspective deformations: "almost to show,

jects—in ideal spaces realized through

windows open on to an autre universe, the problemat-

from the inside of those unnatural

but are not yet able to identify its

ics of an existential condition that cannot reject history,

rather than reinforce the historical value of the

ancient
true value ... the pastiches destroy

new contexts." And so, Tafuri concludes. "[h]istory. like nature, is

'things' inserted in the

contradict the present, may put in doubt,

no longer a one-dimensional value: history may

complexity and variety, a choice to be motivated each successive

may impose, with its

"
and soiled by
by plunging into history, by getting involved with it it."
time ... to restore

architectural theorists' writings as "operational

Tafuri condemns contemporary

and. as such, approached past and pres-

criticism:" the majority are practicing architects,

design theorists.- Such a view would lead

ent through their agendas as practitioners and '

him at times to deny his own discipline: "There is no such thing as criticism." he told an

interviewer, "there is only history."'

call for a higher, more historically informed criticism

But more often, he made a

The architects who actually design

of "analytical rigor,"'' the "criticism of ideologies."''

buildings and imagine that in their buildings they are capable of criticizing architecture

have failed to grasp the fact that architecture and the criticism of architecture exist on dit-

'-
Tafuri, Theories. 20.
'-^
See Ackerman. "In Memonam." 37. 1

"•
Tafuri. -There is No Criticism. Only History." 97.

"Tafuri, Theories. 153.

"'Ibid.. 163.
65
 —

ferent historical levels, follow different historical trajectories, and serve different histori-

cal purposes.

For the architect, the result of realizing this is dismal:

Bound to "build" —because by definition the architect cannot just give voice to his pro-
test, dissent or nausea — with no
but trust in the structures that condition their planning, in

the society that will use their architecture, in the independence of their specific instru-

ments, those architects who are more aware find themselves in an ambiguous, contorted,
almost ridiculous situation. If they try to follow their (rare) eversive impulses through to
the end they are shocked at having to decree, as the only possibilities, either the death of
architecture or refuge in Utopia. If they take the road to self-critical experimentalism. they
are bound, in the best of cases, to produce pathetic "monuments." isolated and extraneous
, to urban reality."

And for the critic, the situation is little better:

In a certain sense, this type of historiographical criticism is waiting to be contested and

left behind by historical reality. Since it places present praxis before its objective respon-
sibilities historical reality cannot help judging, after the systems of values have been
identified, that the various contrasting tendencies refer to the concrete response of the
adopted instruments to the intended eoals. But it must also be ready to take as a real da-

turn the contradiction of history and its sudden jumps towards the untoreseen."'

But the condition of history — which is, for a Marxist, finally economic history

as manifest in both architecture and criticism forces us to accept our situation. The true

and helpful critic must recognize that architecture is "a discipline historically conditioned

and institutionally functional to, first, the 'progress' of the pre-capitalist bourgeoisie and.

later, to the new perspectives of capitalist "Zivilization."' For the critic, this is "the only

purpose with any historical sense,"

After the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989. it is hard to give even such softer forms

of communism as Tafuri's halian neo-Marxism much serious consideration. Tafuri's

" Ibid.. 235.

'*
Ibid.. 234.
-"
Ibid., 236.

66
work remains an ideological analysis of the ideological program of architects, not a sys-

tematic reading of their actual buildings, and he does not in fact undertake in Theories

and Histoiy of Architecture the concrete, narrow analysis of buildings that he himself

proposes.

Neither does Tafuri have much to say about historic preservation in particular. But

his scholarship, as Ackerman notes, had "a vitality and conviction lacking in the positivist

history in German scholarship and emulated in America, and it opened the way to excit-

ing new visions of architectural intention. . . . Our discipline has remained basically posi-

tivist and reluctant to engage in deep interpretation, which makes it irrelevant in a larger

""'"
cultural context.

And historic preservation seems capable of gaining, from Tafuri "s work in the

theory of the history of architecture, the unified theory it currently lacks. "Distance is

fundamental to history." claims Tafuri. and "The way for us to gain distance from our

own times, and thus perspective, is to confront its differences from the past." Historic

preservation becomes the means to illustrate and teach the economic truth behind the

myth of progress, and architecture is preserved for its liberating power.

Apart even from the usual complaints one should register against the reductionism

of a Marxist analysis — to say nothing of the moral complaints one should register against

a totalitarian system — Tafuri lacks a psychology, a philosophical anthropology, sufficient

for explaining why humans have the desire to preserve. The system can report the fact as

a historical phenomenon and exploit it for revolutionary gain. But it cannot explain the

''"
Ackerrnan. "In Memonam." 138.
""
Tafuri. "There No Criticism. Onl\
is Histor\." 97.

67
ethical cause, and consequently is incapable of providing the criteria for determining

good preservation from bad.

Christine Boyer

Christine Boyer's The City of Collective Memorw published in 1994. gives us an

understanding of the contemporary city and its sources. Initially intended as a critique of

the current-day practices of historic preservation, urban design, and postmodern archi-

tecture, "instigated by their unacknowledged complicity with real estate forces and gov-

emment economic development policies focusing on redeveloping the centers of Ameri-

can and European cities during the 1970s and 1980s."" '
the book soon evolved into an

exploration of how nineteenth-century images have been translated into contemporary

views of the city and how restoration has forged a confused layering of architectural sites.

Though Boyer wanders in her analysis at times back as far as ancient Athens, she

is primarily concerned with the modern city, and the overriding device by which she or-

ganizes her discussion in The City of Collective Memoi-y is a division of modern urban

history into three eras: the "City as a "Work of Art."" the "City as Panorama."" and the "City

as Spectacle.""

The City as a Work of Art is the traditional city, illustrated by Boyer in Second

Empire Paris, where architects and planners worked "to secure the turbulent present by

tying it to the great artistic inheritance of the past, and mirroring through stylistic refer-

ences the security and traditional order of pre-industrial and pre-revolutionary times.""

Christine Boyer. The C/'n of Collecrive Meinoiy: Its Historical liiiagiy and Architectural Entertainments
(Cambridge: MIT Press. 1994). i.

""•
Ibid., 59.

68
The designers of the modern industrial city before the end of the nineteenth century were

"absorbed with picture making." It is the "picture frame" that "defined narrative space,"

for "there was an urban story to be told within its bounded frame."

The City as Panorama is the modernist and functional city of Le Corbusier. the

city of the "machine aesthetic, the speed of automobile travel," "^

which breaks away from

any historical reference and thus all memory of the past. A twentieth-century phenome-

non, it is "the city of soaring skyscrapers and metropolitan extension.""^

And the City as Spectacle is the contemporary city, characterized by electronic

communication, by computer-simulated visual environments, by odd and paradoxical

juxtapositions, by preserved fragments of the past. and. everywhere, saturated with an ar-

ray of images. It is the city since the electronic revolution, which began in 1980. "decom-

posed the bits and pieces of the city into an ephemeral form.""^^

If Boyer's earlier book. Dreaming the Rational City, was "offered in the spirit of

Michel Foucault,""*^ The City of Collective Menioiy seems born of a reading of Walter

Benjamin, who appears as a touchstone throughout the book: "Can we. like Walter Ben-

jamin before us. recall, reexamine, and recontextualize memory images from the past un-

''

til they awaken within us a new path to the future?"

''
Ibid.. 33
""ibid.. 61.
"ibid., 41.
•"
Ibid., 46.
"*'
Christine Bo_\er. Dreamiiii^ the Rcitidiial Cit}: The Myth of Aineriean Cit}- Planning (Cambridge: MIT
Press. 1983), xii.
"''''

Boyer, Cit}- Menwn. 29.

of Collective Menion.
69
 After two chapters of introduction. Boyer takes up in four chapters four case

studies of the modern city. In "The City and the Theater." she traces simultaneously the

history of theater building with the history of the city. Analyzing the city as a theatrical

presentation — its markets, buildings, and meeting places loci for visual drama to be ob-

served — she shows the startling parallel in development: as theaters grew more and more

elaborate stages, distancing the spectator from the players, so the city grew into a more

and more elaborate theater, distancing itself from its citizens. "The classical theater com-

pelled the spectator to take part in a dialogue. ... In the contemporary city of spectacle,

all that remains of the drama of architecture and the city is pure visual form. We no

longer question the performance."'^

In "The Art of Collective Memory." she performs a similar analysis, tracing star-

tling parallel between the rise of museums and the rise of the museum-like city. Preserva-

tionists are as much to blame as developers for creating the curator-less museum-city.

"Ripping fragments of buildings or artifacts from their original contexts and then col-

lecting and preserving them in nineteenth-century museums is not that distinct an act

from attempts to transform our present-day cities into outdoor museums whose architec-

tural streetscapes and spacial stratas become privileged landscapes to explore in pleasure

or dismay."'^

Yet again, in "Topographical Travelogues and City Views," she traces the paral-

lels in the rise of new techniques for mapping and the rise of the city as a mapped pano-

rama. "Because maps are visual apparatuses through which we view or describe the world

-'°
Ibid.. 75.

"ibid., 131.

70
and are essential instruments of travel, we can begin to explore this mixture of real and

fictitious imagery as it relates to our visual memory of cities.""^"

And in her final case study. "Invented Traditions and Cityscapes." she takes up the

strange behavior of cities and city planners who — in response to the parallels between

cities and theaters, museums, and maps — begin to organize and reform their cities the

better to meet viewers' expectations of finding the city to be a theater, museum, and map.

This forms the theme of her two subsequent chapters criticizing the contemporary

city. In "The Instruments of Memory." she launches a sharp attack on the historic preser-

vationists who are at least in part responsible for urban ficticiousness. "[C]ertain pockets

of the city have been preserved or redesigned intentionally as narrative tableaux utilizing

imaginary architectures and historical allusions. Yet viewing history as a series of narra-

tive representations necessarily implies that "history" will be rewritten and realigned for

specific concerns" — where the present purposes of these "historical phenomena portrayed

as 'heritage"" is the city sold as tourist trap.^

In "Manhattan Montage."' she examines Manhattan's South Street Seaport and

Battery City Park. In the growth of Wall Street's financial district, a deal was reached

between real-estate developers and the South Street Seaport Museum, which controlled a

large parcel of land: low buildings would be allowed, small retailers, and a "historic" feel

developed. But larger development quickly began to intrude on the area. "A sign on the

South Street Seaport claims that The Museum is around you" in the restored mercantile

architecture, in the tall ships docked at its slips, in the morphological plan and names of

•'-
Ibid.. 206.
" Ibid., 369.

71
its streets.""''"^ Writes Boyer, "[i]t is here in South Street Seaport that present-day realities

and nostalgic desires collide, for there is nothing 'natural' about the uneven development

""'^^
of urban America that the market actually sustains. The ninety-three acres of landfill in

Battery City Park were intended to be a mini-city within Manhattan —each of its features

modeled after the city's best other residential areas. But its very falseness makes it less

livable than might be supposed, and cannot prevent the city from intruding.

Fig. 75. Christine Boxer's criticism of history rewritten

can perhaps be illustrated in Colonial Williamsburg,
where the portrayal of heritage is the cit}' sold as tour-
ist trap.

For Boyer, the city is ultimately the collective expression of architecture, a layer-

ing of past and present. Even in Second Empire Paris, architects and planners worked "to

secure the turbulent present by tying it to the great artistic inheritance of the past, and niir-

-'•
Ibid.. 441.
'-'
Ibid., 449.

72
roring through stylistic references the security and traditional order of pre-industrial and

""^
pre-revolutionary times.

But the contemporary city, in the hands of the conscious or unconscious postmod-

ernists, has moved far deeper into ficticiousness. If modernism was a break with the past,

then the contemporary postmodern city, by returning to the traditions ignored in moder-

nity and reevaluating history, has crushed any redeeming sense of tradition. She critiques

the postmodern ambiguities in the practice of architecture, city planning, and historic

preservation:

[T]hese arts still carry within their visual imaginations the influence of nineteenth-centur\-
procedures and representational views of city building. Perhaps unconsciously, often ex-
plicitly, they reach back to manipulate architectural fragments and traces formulated as
expressions of nineteenth-century problems and needs, but then the\ insert these frag-
ments into contemporary contexts that are controlled by vastly changed circumstances and
desires. Engulfed and enframed by a set of new constraints forged in contemporary times,
these fragments from the past appear denigrated by nostalgic sentiments that fuel their
preser\ation or reconstruction. v\'hile our collective memory of public spaces seems un-
dermined by historicist reconstruction. When juxtaposed against the contemporary city of
disruption and disarray, the detached appearance of these historically detailed composi-
tions becomes even more exaggerated and attenuated."^

The "collisions of montage effect" of the contemporary city, for Boyer. is in part a

reaction against the functional rigidity of the modernist city. The contemporary city is a

assemblage of traditional and modernist, which manipulates "space and time, traveling

nostalgically backward through historic reconstructions, projecting our vision forward in

""^'^
futuristic travel adventures. Although Boyer admires some of the features of the con-

temporary city, she nevertheless dislikes being manipulated to feel some official version

of history:

^^
Ibid.. 59.

"ibid., 1-2.
'^
Ibid.. 48.

73
 As being 'modern' in the early part of the twentieth century meant . . . being self-

consciously new, blowing up the continuum of tradition, and breaking with the past, the
contemporary arts of city building, by returning to traditions established in the nineteenth
century, explicitly jump over the city of modernism, hoping to drive that representational

order out of their sight. In a conscious attempt to eradicate modernism's oppositional or

critical stance that aimed to disrupt the hierarchical authority and official heritage that the

nineteenth century bourgeoisie succored within their own set of historicizations and
eclectic views, contemporary reevaluations oi' 'history' have crushed any redeeming sense
of traditions. By now. traditions have been so thoroughly 'invented' or homogenized, and
'history' so absolutely marketed or commodified, misrepresented, or rendered in\isible,

that any oppositional potential rooted in collective memory has been eclipsed com-
pletely.'^

The City as Spectacle is the city that is of most concein for preservationists. Boyer

states that if the modernist city, the City of Panorama, was an anomaly, then the City of

Spectacle was supposedly the natural inheritor of traditions originally displayed in the

City as a Work of Art. Such an argument, however, is intended to eradicate awareness of

the social programs and Utopian ideals embedded within the modernist view. By making

an allegiance with nineteenth-century representational forms, the contemporary postmod-

ern position denies that artists and architects can change the world.

Production and consumption have saturated the City of Spectacle with multiple

images. The failure of postmodernisrn is that it spawns historical amnesia and false re-

conciliations: "It does not allow for critical perspectives grounded in values formed out-

side of the rnarketplace, beyond the grip of the image, in opposition to the aestheticization

of everyday life."^'

'"
Ibid.. 5.
* Ibid.. 64.
'•'
Ibid., 65.

74
 The contextualism of the postmodernists and historic preser\ ationists is marked

by disunity: it is a "matrix of historically referential places that has been instrumentally

imposed on the surface of the city by the developer, the planner, the preservationist, or

urban designer: it is the web of space that defines the city as an array of well-defined or

historically preserved places. But this array entraps and inhibits our desire to explore what

resides outside of the grid, or to understand what must be done to obtain an open and just

society.

This confused layering of past and present has led to a kind of "memory crises."

Boyer criticizes the postmodern inclination toward "discontinuities and ruptures, differ-

ence and otherness. which have "caused any sense of collectivity to disappear."^'' Al-

though the city constantly evolves, either deformed or forgotten, adapted to other pur-

poses or eradicated by different needs, it is only by "recontextualizing memory images

from the past until they awaken within a new path to the future." that we can make the

city around us more than an open air museum of memories.

At first blush, it seems peculiar that Boyer's critique of the role of preservationists

and postmodernists in The Ciry of Collective Meiiion- should be thought to offer grounds

for a peculiarly postmodern theory of historic preservation. But in the final analysis, it is

not so peculiar. Postmodernism is always ambixalent about whether it is describing the

way things ought to be or mereh' the wa_\ they happen to be. .And Boyer provides the

"ibid.. 11.
*-
Ibid.. 480.
'^
Ibid., 29.

75
wherewithal to explain how the postmodern is historically inevitable. Even while she be-

moans it, she accepts it.

For working preservationists, this becomes a justification for the contemporary

practice of piecemeal preservation of the city. Her desire for "collectivism" is more a

hope than an answer, a left-leaning political attitude rather than a coherent theory of his-

toric preservation. And though it may provide the feeling of ethical procedure for preser-

vation, it does not provide the middle-ground theory we need for distinguishing in par-

ticular good preservations from bad.

Conclusion

The logic of change is harsh but certain, for every change has three facets: crea-

tion (the new thing that appears), preservation (the elements of the old thing that perdure),

and destruction (the elements of the old thing that are lost forever). There are occasions

when the loss of a building's spirit would constitute so terrible a destruction that we ban

any change. It is hard to say exactly what constitutes the difference — but the fact of the

difference is certain: the idea of a restaurant in the Pyramids is ludicrous; the idea of a

shopping mall on the Acropolis is outrageous.

As we shall see in Chapter Five, it has something to do with the beauty of a place

(and all that beauty implies), for the spirit of beauty is too delicate to survive much

change. So too it has something to do with the antiquity of a place, for buildings gain a

strange presumption for continued existence merely by virtue of their age. It even has

something to do with the uniqueness with which the spirit of a particular building enfig-

ures and instances a particular moment in time.

76
 But — again as we shall note in Chapter Five — it has most to do with a universal

necessity for relation with the past, and it is from not confronting the philosophical roots

of this fact that the recent attempts to provide a workable middle-ground theory of pres-

ervation have failed. Lowenthal's ultimately emotivist account cannot persuade those

who do not already agree with his taste. Tafuri, in observing only economic motivations,

provides a reductionist account that cannot speak to the root ethical purpose in preserva-

tion or provide the criteria for determining good preservation from bad. And Boyer's

work ends at last in affirming the postmodernism it dislikes, her "collectivism" a Roman-

tic trope that cannot provide the middle-ground theory we need.

Before turning to a philosophical account of this "middle ground" in Chapter

Five, however, it will be helpful to have before us a particular case study. Chapter Four

presents the details of a real-life, complicated, and perhaps not resolvable middle-ground

preservation project: the Sterling Divinity Quadrangle at Yale University.

77
 Chapter 4

The Sterling Divinity Quadrangle

The story of the Sterling Divinity Quadrangle, as New York Times architectural

critic Paul Goldberger puts it. "is a story about the power of institutions and the meaning

of buildings — or perhaps about the meaning of institutions and the power of buildings."

When Yale was founded in 1701, one of its main missions was educating the

clergy. Nearly three hundred years later, spiritual pursuits have nearly completely lost out

to secular; while the law school, medical school, and the school of management thrive.

the divinity school struggles to maintain a distinguished reputation: a curriculum per-

ceived as outdated, internal dissent, and a high acceptance rate (at one point, the school

was accepting more than eighty percent of its applicants) are a few of its current woes."

But the problem that has been the greatest source of agitation is its deteriorating facilities

in the Sterling Divinity Quadrangle.

Built by Delano & Aldrich in 1932. the neo-Georgian Sterling Divinity Quadran-

gle is a roughly symmetrical. H-shaped cluster of adjoining buildings constructed with

handmade, water-struck brick. The complex — built with funds provided by the trustees of

the estate of John W. Sterling —contains a chapel, eight pavilions, two guest lodges.

Paul Goldberger. "Saving a Bek)\ed Chapel by Cutting Out Its Soul." AVu' York Times. 22 December
1996. sect. H. 49.
"
See Jennifer Kaylin. "Nev\ Directions lor Divinity.'." Yale Aliiiiini Mugiizinc 54 (October 1990): 62.
'

78
classroom and administration facilities, library facilities, a dining hall, a common room,

and the Institute of Sacred Music building.

Fig. 16. Yale Uiiiverslrs's Sterling Divinin Quadrangle: not just

a poor copy of Thomas Jefferson 's University of Virginia.

The main axis of the complex runs north and south, with Marquand Chapel lo-

cated at the center. The eight pavilions —used as dormitory space and study area — are

connected by gable-roof colonnaded walkways and are arranged symmetrically, facing

each other across the quadrangle: Hopkins. Brainerd. Seabury. and Beecher on the north

side; Stuart, Taylor. Bacon, and Bushnell on the south. (These housing units were named

for distinguished ministers, theologians, and missionaries who were graduates of Yale.)

The Institute of Sacred Music has rooms, offices, and a library in the southeast corner;

and the dining hall and common room are housed in the northeast corner. The Trowbridge

and Mission Day libraries are located to the south, and administrati\e offices are located

on the north side of the complex. The boiler room, garage, and mechanical storage rooms

79
are in the southeast section of the basement; and the faculty lounge, kitchen, bathrooms,

and storage rooms are located in the northeast section.

Additional facilities, part of a gift donated for the residential expansion of the

Sterling Divinity Quadrangle, sit to the northeast of the quadrangle. Designed by the of-

fice of Douglas Orr in 1957, these facilities include three apartment buildings (Bellamy,

Curtis, and Fisher halls), one dormitory building (Taylor Hall), and a Dean's House. The

Dean's House is executed in a modified Georgian Revival manner using brick with white

trim, and the four halls are brick utilitarian buildings with minimal ornament, executed in

the simple manner that was in vogue two decades following World War II. The quadran-

gle encompasses 165,000 square feet of space, with the five additional buildings adding

1 16.000, bringing the total divinity school complex to 281,000 gross square feet.

Located at 409 Prospect Street, approximately one mile from Yale's central cam-

pus, the quadrangle is patterned after Thomas Jefferson's eighteenth-century plan for the

University of Virginia. Several universities around the country have used the University

of Virginia master plan: Rice. Emory, Southern Methodist, Delaware, Rochester, Duke,

Harvard, Maryland, and Berkeley. But Delano & Aldrich did not merely copy Jefferson's

plan, and it is their variation that sets Sterling apart from other Jeffersonian-inspired cam-

puses. It is "the unique features." claims John W. Cook, "that turn it into so extraordinary

a place.""

John W. Cimk. Buildini^ Diviniry: the Sterling Divinin Quadrangle at Yale Dlvinlt\' School (New Ha\'en:
Institute tor Sacred Music, 1994), 1 1.

80
 While the University of Virginia has the library — a Neo-classical variation of the

Pantheon in Rome — as its central focus. Yale's divinity school rightly has its chapel. But

it has more besides. As Goldberger describes it:

Jefferson's campus had no real back; everything opened up to the view of the Blue Ridge
Mountains, and what lay behind the Rotunda, as the library was called, mattered not at all.

But Delano & Aldrich kept going, showing us that in their minds Jefferson's model was
only the beginning. For the divinity quadrangle opens up to a forecourt before the chapel
and then contains a spatially intricate two-part quadrangle behind the chapel, defined by
sumptuous Georgian brick buildings that contain the major public spaces of the school. It
is at this point, where the complex moves behind the chapel, that it falls over the crest of

the hill and the site begins to slope downward. The architects turned this into an impres-
sive spatial drama, designing stairs covered by brick vaults beside the chapel and a formal
stair from below the complex into this lower quadrangle. That stair makes the entrance
from the rear nearly as powerful an exercise in ordered grandeur as the complex's front.

the classic Jeffersonian view.

These back buildings are the locus of a preservation battle. Yale officials claim

the divinity school's buildings are in poor shape and underused, and the cost of renovat-

ing and maintaining the entire quadrangle is too expensive — troubles to be met by de-

molishing the back buildings that no one sees. Students and alumni who disagree entered

a lawsuit to stop the demolition — arguing that "the gifts should have been enough to fund

maintenance and renovations had Yale handled their funds wisely."^

In the 1970s. Yale began a policy of deferring maintenance on its physical facili-

ties. By the early 1990s. Frank Turner, then pro\ost of the university, wrote of the prob-

lem. "[t]he decay of our buildings is an unhappy fact of life in every area of campus. For

the past twent) to thirty years. Yale has supported its academic program by making an

Goldberger. "Sa\ing a Bek)\ed Chapel."

'
Erin White, "More Join Crusades to Keep Div Quad." Yale Daily News, 15 January 1997.

81
inadequate investment in its physical structures." The deferred maintenance toolc a toll

on the divinity school complex: the paint peeled, the wood trim on the facades rotted, and

the tower of Marquand Chapel had to be surrounded with scaffolding after a column be-

neath the cupola slid off its pedestal. Even the roofs are weak: according to Bruce Fell-

man, there was a standing order to evacuate the top floors should more than six inches of

o
snow accumulate on certain roofs.

Fig. 17. Detail of the Sterling Divinit} Quadningle:

John Raskin's pleasing decay is no longer ven
pleasing in the twentieth centuiy.

''
Frank Turner. ".A Leaner Machine." Yale .Alumni Magazine 55 (March 1991 ): 35.
'
See Gusta\' Niebuhr. "Yale Dninity Tries to Find Its Place in the Future." New York Times. 17 June 1996,
sect. A. 10.
**
Bruce Fellman, "The Future of DiMnity." Yale Alumni Magazine 59 (March 1996): 37.
82
 appointed a Divinity School Re-
In September 1994, Yale Provost Alison Richard

administrators, to assess the long-term needs

view Committee, composed of faculty and

The Review Committee studied the school's extensive

of the Yale Divinity School.

to deteriorating fa-
outdated curriculum and high acceptance rate
its
problems-from its

over a year later, in October 1995.

cilities— and submitted a final report a little

the faculty and student body

The Review Committee recommended downsizing

most important, they also recommended

and implementing minor curriculum changes;

un-
remain at the Sterling Divinity Quadrangle-urging that renovation be
that the school

buildings not be fully renovated at this

dertaken on the quadrangle and that "peripheral

divinity school faculty members

time."^ In December 1995. Provost Richard informed

Review Committee, save for those concerning

she had accepted all the proposals of the

"The matter to which I couldn't gixe a definite reply

the school's deteriorating facilities.'"

complex issue." she explained.

is the location of the school. It's a

In November 1995. one month after the submission of the Review Committee's

Consulting Group, an outside firm that special-

report, the provost retained the Stillwater

and higher education financial analysis, to assess the financial implica-

izes in nonprofit

renovations recommended in the Review

tions of programmatic changes and facilities

report to Yale in January 1996. In this

Committee's report. Stillwater presented their final

concluded that relocating the school to "a newly constructed building

report. Stillwater

Review Committee. Final Report. 30 October 1995. vol. I.

" 8.
Diviniiy School
Quad'L" Yale Daih Neus. February 1996.
'»
See Yen Cheons. "Will Yale Demolish 1

" to Make Massive Changes." Yale

Da,h hens. 13 De-
Alison Richard.^quoted in Yen Cheong. -Divinily
cember 1995.
83
 (Stillwater also noted that
near the center of campus ... has clear financial advantages."'"

we are not in a position to decide whether the obvious financial advan-

"[a]s consultants,

13'
tage . . . should prevail.")

J ^

r^ ^ifQnn^l
Fig. 18. E.xisting site plan of the Sterling Divinit} Quadrangle and
anne.x buildings.

divinity school officials, the provost formed

In February 1996, without consulting

Working Group, which submitted its final report in May 1996. That
the Divinity School

the school— now estimated at S45 mil-

report concluded that the high cost of restoring

"We kept finding that all present and future resources of the Divinity
lion—was too high.

School would be entailed to bricks and mortar." said committee chairman Peter Brooks.

campus was going to be more and more of a financial albatross, and that
-•We felt that the

a slightly smaller and intellectually intense

Dninity School would benefit from being less

'-
Stillwater Consulting Group. Final Report. 29 January 1996.
"Ibid.. 20-21.
84
isolated."'"* A new building of 90,000 square feet was proposed, costing $28.5 million.
"

And rumors swirled that Yale was ready to demolish the Sterling complex and move the

divinity school to smaller, newer facilities downtown. As renowned architectural histo-

rian and Yale professor Vincent Scully put it. "[i]f an institution dwindles and it happens

to be in a great building, they can destroy the building."

In September 1996, however, the Reverend Richard Wood became the new dean

of the divinity school and promptly formed a Steering Committee, composed of members

of both the Review Committee and the Working Group, to examine options for the divin-

ity school to remain at the Sterling Divinity Quadrangle. Concurrently, University Plan-

ning hired the New York-based R. M. Kliment & Frances Halsband Architects, "a firm

with extensive experience of adaptive reuse of university facilities," to do a feasibility

study. '^
Kliment & Halsband completed their study in February 1997 and proposed three

options: a preservation scheme for reusing the entire complex of academic and residential

buildings; a new building scheme for demolishing and replacing the academic buildings;

and an "adaptive reuse" scheme.'

Yale opted for the third scheme, claiming that "[t]he proposed complex of build-

ings is well matched to the substance and spirit of the program, and to the academic and

'""
Peter Brooks, quoted in "A New Report Ponders Moving Di\init\ ." Yale Alumni Magazine 60 (October
1996): 16.
'Mbid.
""
Vincent Scully, quoted in Philip Langdon. "A Pattern ot Destruction," Preservation 49 (March/.April
1997): 14.
'
See Yen Chcong. "Just in Time tor Changes. Di\' School Gets New Dean." Yale Daily News. 27 March
1996.
'^
R. M. Kliment & Frances Halsband .Architects. Yale Di\inil\ School Feasibility Stud\. February 1997. 3.

'"ibid., 6-46.

85
 „20
social mission of the School."" In the proposed scheme, the quadrangle buildings will be

gutted and rebuilt, leaving their facades intact but altering the arrangement of the space

inside. The buildings to the rear of the quadrangle, which now house the dining hall, the

common room, and the Institute of Sacred Music, will be demolished, opening the com-

plex to the east and reducing the campus to about 1 13.000 square feet. The completed

project was estimated to cost S32 million,"' and constituted "an optimal solution," ac-

cording to Yale President Richard C. Levin: "It will preserve the Delano and Aldrich de-

sign [and] it will be a facility that we can afford to maintain, a standard we must impose

if we are to avoid the path of neglect chosen by our predecessors."""

Fig. 19. Kliineiu & Halshand's a.xonninetric of the recoininended scheme,

in which hniUlings of the chapel are demolished.
lo the east

-"Ibid.. 6.

" Richard C. Lc\in. "A Message to Yale Di\inity School Graduates From President Richard C. Le\in."
Spectrum 17 (Spring 1997): 2.

86
 Protest Against the Proposed Scheme

Objections to the proposed demolition of the haci< third of the quadrangle quickly

surfaced. Calling the Sterling Divinity Quadrangle "a masterpiece of American architec-

ture," Vincent Scully, in a letter to Yale President Richard Levin, said that demolition of

the Sterling Quadrangle would be tantamount to destroying the whole thing."" "Yale has

always had a narrowly utilitarian and careless attitude toward its buildings," he wrote,

"and I get the very strong feeling that your administration, whatever its public statements

may be, has in fact marked those magnificent buildings for destruction."" The back

buildings, argued Scully, "deal gracefully with a situation which Jefferson does not even

attempt to resolve at the University of Virginia: what to do with the back of the main

building and the hill slope beyond it.""'

Architectural critic Paul Goldberger also expressed his opinion about the proposed

demolition: "Like the village that had to be destroyed to be saved, the divinity school is

being 'saved" by having a whole chunk of its essence ripped apart."" Mocking a univer-

sity that "assumes that what matters in architecture is only the front." Goldberger believes

that the quadrangle is more "than a poor copy of Jefferson's University ot Virgmia.""

"[T]hese buildings are superb examples of twentieth century architecture which

inventively adapt earlier forms to new purposes." added architect Robert Stern, director of

Columbia University's program in historic preservation."' (Stern did praise the university

''
Vincent Scully. "Letter to the Editor," Yule Dailx News. 28 January 1997.
'
Vincent Scully, personal letter to \'ale President Richard Le\in. 7 October 1996.
"'
Scully. "Letter to the Editor."
'^
Goldberger. "Saving a Bclo\'ed Chapel."
-'
Ibid.
"^
Robert Stern, personal letter to Yale President Richard Le\in, 10 October 1996.
87
for agreeing to save most of the buildings in the complex, but felt that new uses should be

found for the rest of the buildings.)"

Preservationists have an ambivalent attitude toward Yale. Stern lauded the univer-

sity for its preservation of the Old Campus and Sterling Memorial Library. But he also

voiced the concern of Prospect Hill residents that the divinity school site not become like

the nearby Davies Mansion: "an embarrassment to all of us who value the university as an

enlightened force. "^ The run-down, boarded-up mansion has remained vacant since Yale

bought it from the Culinary Institute of America for $1.2 million in \912.^^ Scully also

expressed concern lest the quadrangle become like the Davies Mansion, stating that the

university's "narrowly utilitarian attitude toward its buildings . . . leads Yale to truly sor-

did behavior, like its calculated demolition by neglect of the Davies House."'"

Local and national preservation groups have written to President Levin, express-

ing their concern about the divinity school: Richard Moe. President of the National Trust

for Historic Preservation, strongly opposed "any plan that calls for the demolition of Na-

tional Register buildings and the undermining of the Divinity School's historic charac-

ter."" In their 1995 Preservation Year in Review for the northeast region, the National

"'
See Ned Cramer. "'Dixine Inler\ention." .4/t7»fcc7((rf 86 (April 1997): 32.
"
Stern, letter to Levin.
^'
Patnek Dilger. "Yale Urged Not to Demolish Di\ inity School." .V(\r Haven Register. 18 October 1996.
^'
Vincent Scully, quoted in Erin White. "Sculh Lainbasts .Administrators' Proposals to Raze Div School."
Yale Daih News. 16 October 1996.
"
Richard Moe, personal letter to Yale President Richard Levin, L^ November 1996.
88
 .

34
Trust included the quadrangle under their list of "threatened" buildings." John Vincent

Boyer, of the Mark Twain House, also wrote to President Levin, stating that the proposed

changes "would ruin —both in spirit and in fabric — one of the great collegiate plans of the

twentieth century."'*^

Fit;. J", The Diivus Mansion i xpn •sccl In i cnowiud cmhittciKnil historiiin

Vincent Sciillx as Yale s demolition h\ neglect.

In reply, President Levin said that "[cjareful study has demonstrated that we can

best fulfill the mission of the Divinity School and continue to build on its strengths with

an adaptive re-use of the present facilities."^ Yale"s proposed $30 million reconstruction

plan would preserve the most architecturally significant portion of the school: "the front

part of the quadrangle which faces Prospect Street and has Marquand Chapel at its

"
See National Trust for Historic Preservation, 1995 Preser\'ation Year in Review. Northeast Region. 2.
"^
John Vincent Boyer. personal letter to Yale President Richard Le\in. 4 June j'-^)?.

^''
Richard C. Levin, quoted in Patrick Dilger. "Reconstruction Plans Threaten Historic Buildings at Yale
Divinity School," Connecticut Preservation News 19 (November / December 1996): 1

89
apex."^^ Yale plans to combine classrooms and administrative offices in the underused

residential space that now occupies the front area.

The Lawsuit: Save the Quad v. Yale

Not content with Yale's "partial preservation" proposal, a group of Yale Univer-

sity students and alumni filed a lawsuit against the university in December 1996/

Known as the Foundation for the Preservation of the Sterling Divinity Quadrangle, this

group was formed to demand complete preservation of the quadrangle.

The claimants argue that Yale's plans violated the original goals of John Ster-

ling's 1918 bequest: "There should be no financial reason not to renovate." said attorney

John Peck, Jr. "The money should be there, and if it's not there, we'd like to know why

not."''^ According to the plaintiffs. Yale neglected ongoing repairs, despite the presence of

a S500.000 maintenance fund that was set aside for the divinity school in 1935. Accord-

ing to their calculations, that fund would have grown to 523 million by now with interest

and innation.""' Although university officials have said that claims of such a fund's exis-

tence were "questionable." research in Yale Uni\ersity"s manuscripts and archi\'es does

indeed show the establishment of such a fund^' — and the students call "for a declaratorv

'
Ibid.. 3.
'*
See Karla Schuster. "Waiting Period Lengthens in Di\ init\ School Fate." New Haven Register. 8 Decem-
ber 1996.
"'
John Peck. Jr.. quoted in Isaiah Wilner. "CT .Attorney General May Sue Yale 0\er Divinity School.'"
Yale Daily News. 4 February 1998.
"'°
See Erin White. "Judee Dismisses Suit Over Yale's Div School Policv." Yale Daih News. 28 April 1997.
^'Ib.d.

90
judgment that Yale's plans for YDS 'constitute an abuse of its discretion as trustee of a

.42
public charitable trust.'

Fi^. 21. The Stcrliiii; Divinin Quadrangle's common room, a meeting

place for divinity students, has been slated for demolition.

In reply, Pro\ost Richard declared Yale's stewardship both ""entu-ely appropriate"

and legally sound. '

Yale claimed that "[tlhe law does not allow these plaintiffs to in\oke

the extraordinary powers of this Court m their attempt to overrule the action's of Yale's

governing bod\' and impose upon Yale their \iew of how YDS should be run."^^ Declar-

ing that their opponents ha\e submitted a complaint that is long on rhetoric and conclu-

sory allegations but woefully devoid of any factual allegations show ing any wrongdoing."

Yale's lawyers concluded that "[ojther than the obvious fact that plaintiffs say they do not

like what they beliexe Yale is going to do. the> ha\'e not articulated any substantive rea-

Chester Wickwire v. Yale Universit} (Superior Court. Judicial District of New Ha\en). 21 January 1997.
See Wilner. "CT Attorney General Ma\' Sue."
Chester Wickwire v. Yale Universit\.

91
son why it would be a breach of any fiduciary duty for Yale to do what it proposes to

do.

Agreeing with the university's claim that Yale is a public corporation and its ac-

tions cannot be challenged by private individuals, a New Haven Superior Court judge

dismissed the suit.'*^ But the plaintiffs have vowed to regroup and re-file, and their new

filing may have some extra support. Cynthia Russell— one of the last surviving descen-

dants of the man who endowed the Sterling Divinity Quadrangle (and much besides at

Yale) —has denounced the slated demolition and pledged to sign on as a plaintiff. And

Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal may bring his own suit. (Blumenthal

had set precedent during the last legal battle by filing a brief supporting divinity students'

right to sue. but he did not file his own suit, which the consortium of divinity students and

alumni needed to gain a hearing.)

Although the intra-campus battle seems over, with Yale's administration settled

upon the partial renovation and partial demolition, the legal battle will continue. With the

final outcome yet to be determined, it can be worthwhile to use the case study of the Ster-

ling Divinity Quadrangle— an ideal example of a real-life, complicated and not entirely

resolvable middle-ground preservation project — upon which to test a theory of historic

preservation in Chapter Five.

''
Ihid.
""'
Wilner. "CT Attorney General Mav Sue Yale."
^'
Ibid.

92
 Chapter 5

A Theory of Historic Preservation

The simple fact is that we do historic preservation for no simple reason. Dozens of

explanations for our contemporary impulse to preserve are possible — from psycho-

biological explanations of the behavior of rats, to economic explanations of the behavior

of tourists, to sociological explanations of the modern, alienated "man in the lonely

crowd."

None of these explanations are entirely persuasive, of course, and —more to the

point — none of them have in fact persuaded much of the population. Historic preservation

is a practice that, despite its generally wide acceptance as a pmctice. somehow lacks a

widely accepted reason for doing it.

And this confusion of explanations for our purposes in preserving leads to all sorts

of absurdities in actual practice. The status of law concerning preservation makes a par-

ticular good example.

In both legislative enactments and judicial case law in America, there seems to be

a recognition that it is not things themselves but their contexts that evoke the past. And

place, more than anything else, is what gives us the sense of the past we seek in historic

preservation. Indeed. Henry James (in the unfinished no\el the title of which gave us the

phrase "the sense of the past") declares. "[t]here are particular places where things have

93
 happened, places enclosed and ordered and subject to the continuity of life mostly, that

seem to put us into communication" with the past.' If we cannot say why a sense of the

past is a good thing, the fact that it is good seems certain — and so we have a genuine in-

terest in the preservation of place.

That interest, however, is in very real conflict with other interests. Both as indi-

viduals and as a society, we have an interest in maintaining the right to private property.

How the courts decide the law is always difficult for laymen to grasp, but the demand for

preservation seems to constitute an intrusion on private property.

The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution determines that when a governmental

action amounts to a "taking." the government must pay just compensation to the owner of

any private property involved. In historic preservation, a taking can occur, for example,

when a local historic district or historical commission restricts the use to which an owner

may put his property by denying him the right to demolish, all in the name of the public

good.

A "landmarked" gas station provides a case in point: Sandra and Robert Wagen-

feld found for sale an 1821, four-story, Federal, brick house that happened to ha\e a

derelict 1922 gas station in its back yard. They bought the house anyway, with plans to

demolish the deteriorated gas station to make room for a garden. To their suiprise. the

Wagenfelds were not allowed to tear the station down: the structure was part of the

Greenwich Villaae Historic District, therefore it could not be demolished (even the exte-

'
Henry James. Novels and Tales of Heiuy James (New York: Scribner"s. 1907-1917). \ol. 26: The Sense of
the Past, 48.

94
riors could not be altered) without permission from the city's Landmarks Preservation

Commission.

Members of the commission declared that they might have permitted the demoli-

tion of a more ordinary gas station, but this particular gas station "is a marker of the city's

history, not hidden away somewhere in a library, but sitting right there on the street. It's a

way people can touch base with how the Village came to be — not just a village of writers

and artists and radicals, but people like you and me, some of whom had cars and needed a

gas station."" In other words, the gas station had to remain as it was — neglected and dete-

riorated — or be renovated strictly according to the commission's rules.

The Wagenfelds decided to renovate the building because, as Mrs. Wagenfeld

said, "[w]e couldn't leave it an eyesore."' But nothing could be done without a "certifi-

cate of appropriateness" from the commission; all work had to be approved, down to the

shade of the mortar. The Wagenfelds, worried about their privacy and security, wanted to

build a partly-solid brick wall separating the station from the street, but the commission

ruled that the station had to be more visible to the community. In the end. they compro-

mised on

a brick wall interrupted by three seven-by-eight-foot steel openings and protected by an

elaborate security system. Two years, countless meetings, and $100,000 later, the gas sta-

tion has been preserved.

"
Elliot Willensky. quoted in .Joyce Purnick, "The Saga of a Landmark Gas Station." A'cir York Tii)ies. 1

November 1984. sect. C. 6.

^
Sandra Waaonfeld, ibid., sect. C. 1.

95
 How the Landmarks Preservation Commission deems what is appropriate often

seems arbitrary. A townhouse in the same district received its "certificate of appropriate-

ness" even though it was incompatible with the rest of the neighborhood. In this instance,

the original house no longer existed: during the Vietnam protest era, explosives — which
were being assembled in the house — accidentally detonated. Hugh Hardy, an "inventive
preservation architect," acquired the site and proposed a replacement "that conformed

with neighboring buildings in all respects but one: its protruding, second-story bay, which

Hardy included as a gesture to the site's tragic history.""* Neighbors demanded that the

commission not approve of Hardy's "aesthetic incompatibility" with Greenwich Village's

"•r"B 1,11ft.

Fig. 22. A newly constructed townhouse in the Greenwich Village

"
Historic District was given a "certificate of appropriateness.
despite aesthetic incompatihilit}-.

John J. Costonis, Icons and .Aliens: Law. Aesthetics, and Environmental Change (Urbana: Uni\ersity of
Illinois Press. 1989), 41.

96
existing architecture, but — afraid to impinge on Hardy's First Amendment right of free-

dom of expression — the commission approved of the design/^

A "taking" question may also occur when a local government restricts the use to

which an owner may put his property by denying the right to alter a historic structure for

more lucrative use. In the case of the Boyd Theater of Philadelphia, the state supreme

court ruled in 1991 that government regulation of historic buildings was indeed uncon-

stitutional: the Philadelphia Historical Commission, by designating the Boyd Theater as a

historic building over the objections of its owners, United Artists, had taken private prop-

erty for public use without just compensation.

In 1993, however, the court issued a new opinion: it now decided that "such

regulation is not only constitutional, but very likely indispensable.'"*^ (The judge who

wrote the initial decision — known to be a vehement foe of preservation regulation — did
not participate in this ruling: he was charged with illegally obtaining anti-anxiety drugs

through court employees.) The new ruling was based on the argument that preservation

law should not extend to the interior of a building. Unfortunately, the historical commis-

sion had certified the theater largely based on its interior, but the city's law gives the

commission the power to regulate an interior only in those cases where it might affect the

"'

See Co.stDnis. Icons and Aliens. 40-43.

Thomas Hine, "A Reversal that Allows Presei\ation to Proceed," Pliiladelphui liu/iiircr. 14 No\ ember
1993. sect. H. 1.

Emily Lounsberry. "Pa. Court Shifts Gears on Preser\'ation Law." Philadelphia hu/iiircr. 1 1 No\ ember
1993. sect. A, 14.

97
exterior. Although the reversal was a victory for preservation law. it was unable to solve

the original dilemma of the Boyd Theater's historic designation.

Fig. 23. Philadelplua's Boyd Theater.

But, indeed, that is the nature of law — a necessary effect of trying to use law

without something resembling a consensus. The law is incapable of making the sort ot

distinctions we need if we are to ha\e a policy for preserving historic places, because the

law is incapable of distinguishing indixidual instances and incapable of distinguishing

tastes. As John J. Costonis puts it:

Law cannot create beauty anew More modest and derivative, its charge is to icons, which
.

may or may not be 'beautiful some formalistic sense, against marauding aliens, which
' in

may or not be 'ugly' in that same sense. The law's rigid syntax is decidedly ill-fitted
may
to pinpoint design values. Lawmakers must begin by asking whether or not shared com-

munity sentiment supports the claim that this or that resource is an icon. ... It is commu-

98
 upon .cons tn the f.rst
decision to confer legal status
suppor that legtt.mates the
nity support
place/

what needs
general societal agreement about
We need, in other words, the sort of

And that agreet^en,

pay for that the law cannot gtve us.
preserving and who ongirt to ,t

we seek tn htstortc preservation. We

clear vtsion of the good
can only proceed from a

that this sense is a good

strongest sense of the past and
may agree that place grants the

preserved. But without an

histortc places ought to be
thing ,0 have, and thus agree that

good, we catmot distinguish those places

of the past is
agreement about why the sense

from those places that do not.

that grant it

to preserve wtthout consensus is

The problem is one of dtsunity. and proceeding

make worse. In his htstory of American

not gotng ,0 solve the
problem-and can even ,.

log
examples of absurdity: the modest
preservation. James Marston Fttch gives many

birthplace dwarfed by the grand

said to have been Abraham Uncolu's is
cabin which is

the unpolished Plymouth Rock, strangely out of

Hmestoue mausoleum which houses
it:

the ZCMl Victorian departnrent

displayed in a cut-stone casing: the -spirif of
context. IS

cast-iron and
said to have been preserved
by keeping only its
store in Salt Lake City is

sheet metal facade.

successful preser^ ation. The

With perhaps equal ftrcility. one can find examples of

University of Pennsylvania keeps

its
Arts Library at the
savtng of Frank Furness's Fine

relief front the un.eisitys col-

red. terra-cotta tile roof
and red sandstone walls as visual

^ Costonis. Icons and Aliens. 45.

John J.
124-125.
See Fitch. Historic Presenxnion,
''
orless Van Pelt Library across the walk.'° The restoration in Chicago of Bumam and

Root's 1888 Rookery Building, at one time considered a lost cause, proves that saving

historic buildings on prime commercial land does not have to be economically unviable.

tin-roofed
And the remodeling into an interesting living space of a decrepit. 150-year-old,

bam in Vermont proves the possibility of adaptive use: not particularly beautiful, old. or

unique, the remodeled barn is a perfect example of a change in which the interesting ele-

'
ments of the old perdure.

/";- 24. An old. tin-rontid hum culdptivch itscd: a pei-fcct example

of a change in which the interesting elements of the old perdure.

Jean
See Robert Ventun. •Learning from Philadelphia."' Abitare 312 (November 1992): 146-152. and
"'

Gorman. "A Masterpiece Restored." Interiors 151 (January 1992): 94-95

" See Blair Kamin. "Chicago's Rookery Restored." Architecture 8\ (July 1992): 28. and Michael Wagner.

"Breaking Ground." Interiors 149 (November 1989): 130.

See Jill Berbers. Great Adaptations: A'eu- Residential Uses for Older Buildings (New York:
'- \Vhitne\

Library of Desian. 1990.57-61.

100
 But — as we saw in Chapter One —even successful preservations can lead to ab-

surdity precisely because their justifications are not well considered or widely shared.

What is needed is some sorting out. People have a variety of conflicting reasons for pre-

serving, all tangled together like a ball of yarn: what needs to be done is to tease out some

of the loose ends: to perform what Nietzsche called a "genealogy" of the fleld. or. better.

"

what Michel Foucault called an "archaeology of knowledge."

If we tease out one of the many threads, we see that people seem to have certain

sentimental reasons for preservation — sentimental reasons directly traceable to the stream

of Romanticism in modernity, from Rousseau's Noble Savage, through Goethe's Sorrows

of Young Werther. and on to the contemporary Romance novel. It is from this thread that

there derives the eighteenth-century love of ruins and moralizing about the beautiful, the

sublime, and the picturesque. It is from this thread that there derives the Victorian fasci-

nation with the Middle Ages — from Tennyson's Arthurian Romances to Ruskin's Gothic

cathedrals built by "happy Christians." and on to Henry Adams's analysis of the influence

of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres.

The Romantic impulse to seek the past may indeed, as many have argued, be

caused by a sense of discontinuity from that past: modernity's notion of progress toward a

future golden age is always matched by a sense of longing for a golden age lost now in

the past.'"' The "discontinuity" thesis is often matched with some version of the claim that

See Friednch Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Birth oj Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis
'""

Golffing (New York: Anchor. 1990). and Michel Foucault. The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M.
Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon. 1972).
'^
See J. B. Bury. The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry Into Its Origin and Growth (New York: Dover. 1955).

101
time moves faster in modernity than it did before —from Henry Adams theory of each age
"

being in length the square root of the previous age, to Alvin Toffler's "future shocls.."

But the point is always that modernity had, as its fundamental driving purpose, the de-

struction of all past values: people feel disconnected from the past because they are.

From time to time, the Romantic impulse to preserve decays to outright lies: the

Shah of Iran's twentieth-century invention of Persepolis'" and the eighteenth-century for-

gery of a medieval Scottish epic in Ossian are both examples of nationalism's willingness

to invent a Romantic past where it does not exist. Romanticism can equally decay to

sheer sentimentality — the confusion of history with nostalgia that creates the Rock and

Roll Museum and puts Archie Bunker's chair in the Smithsonian's Museum of History

and Technology.

If we tease out from the tangle of reasons for preservation yet another thread, we

get not Romanticism but Rationalism. Once again, the impulse to preserve is horn out of

a feeling of discontinuity with the past. The difference lies in that instead of romanticiz-

ing the past, an attempt was made to rationalize and thus master the past. This would give

us the past as it really was, without superstition, legend, or myth. In architecture, ration-

alists believed that architectural form was essentially structural form: architectural forms

Sec Henry Adams, The Dei^nulatlon of the Democratic Dogma (New York: Scribner's. 1920). 308. and
'"'

Alvin Totfler, Future Shock (New York: Random House, 1970).

'"
See E. R. Chamberlin. Preservini; the Fast (London: J. M. Dent. 1979). 18-27.
" See John Brmckerhofl Jackson. The Necessity for Ruins ami Otiier Topics (Amherst: The University of
Massachusetts Press. 1980). 89.
102
 —

not only required rational justification, but could only be so justified if they derived their

laws from science.'^

In the nineteenth century, restorers such as Viollet-le-Duc purged medieval

churches in later additions, and in doing so, they believed that they were reconstituting

the true past. But in this effort to improve the past, they did not realize that in actuality

they were changing the past to their expectations of what the past should be. Today, we

can find this rationalistic impulse in the construction of Colonial Williamsburg, with its

buildings and building elements from the postcolonial age either demolished or moved.

(It is true that in the reconstructed Williamsburg, there were used paints and fabrics

brighter — and so more pleasing to our current tastes —than the colonists ever used. But an

entirely rationalist justification was offered that the colonists, if only they had such bright

colors and fabrics, would surely have used them.)''^

Rationalism too is susceptible to deceit: in Fort Worth an abandoned and decaying

downtown stockyard area dating from the 1920s was restored in the style of the 1870s,

while in New Mexico a brand new "eighteenth-century" Spanish Colonial village —com-
plete with eighteenth-century harvest festivals and folkdances — hopes to achieve land-

mark status.'' And as we saw in Chapter One. Rationalism at its most extreme in, for

example, Stalinist Marxism —can issue in an attempt to destroy whatever from the past it

could not subsume under its vision of the rational.

""
See Peter Collins. Chaiiginii Ideals in Modern Arehirecture. 1750-195(1 (London; Faher and Faber.
1965), 198.
See Mitchell Schwarzer. "Myths of Permanence and Transience in the Discourse on Historic Preser\ alion
in the United States." Journal of Arelutcctural Ediiearion 48 (9 Septemher 1994): 3
"°
See Jackson, Necessity for Ruins. 90.

103
 —

But the Rationalistic attempt in scientific history to uncover "the past as it really

was" is not so distinct from the Romantic desire to have the past spark our emotions.

When the threads of Romanticism and Rationalism get tangled together, such ridiculous

results as "tidied ruins" are possible — the attempt to tidy up and thus rationalize the ro-

mantic rums so much admired by the followers of Ruskin. And both threads, together and

separately, can appear in tangles: with patriotic and nationalistic attempts to justify the

modern nation-state, with postmodern aestheticism, with religious revivalism — and tour-

ism, commercialism, and dozens of other threads besides.

Figs 25a and 25b. The BylandAbbex III North Yorkshne niiiw nuulc tuh

And yet. these threads, once teased out. reveal certain points in common — ethical

points that prove worthwhile to develop. We have the postmodern philosophers to thank

for the news that modernity was ultimately successful in its attempts to shatter the past

104
and that modernity shattered itself at the same time. But if the richness of our lives de-

pends in some way on our connection to the past, then we are in a perilous situation — for

postmodernism — as we saw in Chapter Three —gives us no reason to preserve.

But the modernity that the postmodernists invariably have in mind is the intellec-

tual world exemplified by Jean Jacques Rousseau. For the postmodernists, modernity is

based on the Rousseauian autonomous self, broken away from the past. And the modern

impulse to preserve derives from the two movements that meet in Rousseauian liberal-

ism: Rationalism and Romanticism.

There is, however, another intellectual tradition available to us in modernity, the

tradition which owes its clearest expression to Edmund Burke: the tradition of conserva-

tism which emphasizes continuity.

When Rousseau began The Social Contract with his famous claim, •[m]an is born

free, and is everywhere in chains," he meant that society is a contract made among the

living, which the living can change at will."' The "chains" to which he refers are ulti-

mately the chains of the pa.st, the chains of society that the past has handed down to us.

"Society is indeed a contract," Burke wrote in answer to Rousseau. But

it is not a partnership in things subservient only to the gross animal existence of a tempo-
rary and perishable nature. It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a part-

nership in every virtue and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be

obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are

living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are about to

be born."

-'
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, trans. Maurice Cranston (Baltiinore: Penguin, 1968). 1.

" Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Indianapolis: Bt)bbs-Merrill. 1955), 1 10.

105
 If the continuities of the past are not entirely rational, then Rousseauian modem-

ism has failed, and postmodernism shows us how. But Rousseau does not provide the

only possibility of foundational modern thought, and conservatism — appearing in answer

to the Rationalistic excesses of the Revolution in France and the Romantic excesses of

Napoleanism —was designed primarily to account for those not entirely rational continui-

ties of the past without falling into Romanticism.

Within the Burkean tradition, there are thus derivable answers to the question of

why we should preserve. Accepting the ultimately unchangeable nature of human beings,

this anti-Rousseauian tradition sees, for instance, a need to assuage the anxiety of death.

The temporality of architecture can certainly contribute to modern anxiety. The modern

city becomes for T. S. Eliot "the wasteland" — a pastiche of unintelligible shards of his-

tory: "These fragments I have shored against my ruins.""" But the temporality of archi-

tecture can be the source of continuity as well — the source of what Simone Weil called

"rootedness."""' While touring the monastic ruins of lona, Samuel Johnson declaimed:

Whatever withdraws us from the power of our senses, whatever makes the past, the dis-
tant, or the luture. predominate over the present, advances us in the dignity of thiniving
beings. Far from me. and from my friends, be such frigid philosophy as inay conduct us
indifferent and unmo\ed over any ground which has been dignified by wisdom, bravery,
or virtue. That man is Httle to be envied, whose patriotism vsould not gain force upon the
plain of Marathon, or whose piety would not grow v\armer among the ruins of lona.'^

Temporality, when rooted in place, seems able to assuage sorne of the anxiety of

death by allowing us to experience permanence.

-'
T. S. Ehot. "The Wasteland." in Collected Poems {New York: Harcourt. Brace. 1970). 69.
Arthur Wills (New York: Harper & Row. 1971
-"•
See Simone Weil. The Need for Roots, trans. ).

"^
Samuel Johnson, quoted by James Boswell. Johnson 's Journey to the Western Island of Scotland and
Bosuell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson. LL.D.. ed. R. W, Chapman (O.xford:
Oxford University Press), 385.
106
 So too the Burkean tradition points to the richness of life maintained only by con-

tinuity. In the French Revolution's "empire of light and reason," Edmund Burke com-

plained, "[a]ll the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the super-added ideas,

furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the un-

derstanding ratifies" are to be discarded."*^ The ticky-tack track housing of suburban

America is an example of what an architectural world of a single era would look like: and

it is avoidable only with the preservation of the past.

Fig. 26. Modernism working itself out in popular culture: subdivision under
construction near Los Angeles. California.

And so too, the Burkean tradition would argue, we have a responsibility to pre-

serve beauty. What beauty is and how it makes us happy are vexed questions. But the im-

pulse that moved, for example, T. S. Eliot from the radicalism of "The Wasteland" to the

theological conservatism of the "Four Quartets" is proof of the necessity for a view of

beauty that does not depend entirely upon our own present-day tastes.

Edmund Burke. Reflections. 96.

107
 we observe a duty in the world
But finally, the Burkean tradition demands that

"those who are living, those who are

rather than a Rousseauian freedom-a duty toward

Simply by being old. things make a demand

dead, and those who are about to be born.-

the rarity and historical

upon us. and that demand increases the older they are-just as

as
us increases the necessity to preserve
it
ancestors left
associations of an object that our

those now dead and those not yet born.

the continuity, the link, between

to this thesis's major case

All of these Burkean themes bear some application

Yale had properly main-

*
Yale University. If
smdy. the Sterling Divinity Quadrangle
at

would not-after only sixty-six years of

place,
tained the divinity school in the
first it

life— be in such a state of disrepair.

deplored
It was Ruskin. interestingly, who foresaw such deferred maintenance and

It in very Burkean terms:

neglect bmldings first, and restore

them after-
The pnncipal of modern times ... is to them.
and you will not need to restore .

wards Take proper care of your monuments,

.

guard it as best you may and at any cos

Watch an old buildine with an an.xious care: crown: se
Count its stones as you would jewels of a
from e^•erv innuence of dilapidation. wher ,t
city: bind it together with iron
the gates of a besieged
watches about it as ,f at
unsightlinc.s ot the
with timber where it declines: do not care about the
loosens- stay it
^^ontinually,
aid- better a crutch than a lost
limb: and do this tenderly, and reverently, and
shadow. Its evil day
and manN a veneration will be born and pass away beneath us
still
dishonormg and false
must come at last: but let it come declaredly and openly, and let no
substitute deprive it of the funeral offices of memory."

hut u hether preserva-

But the problem now is not what Yale has done in the past,

.something in the future. .And-as is always

tionists can justifiably demand that Yale do

examples-both
the case m what we called in Chapter One the world of •middle-ground"

claim that
some telling arguments. Yale officials can accurately
sides in the dispute have

Ruskin Seven Lamps of Architecture., 185-186.

108
they are in some sense preserving the quadrangle. But there is equal force in Paul Gold-

berger's observation that "[wlhat is most troubling is how disingenuous it is —how it pre-

sents itself as an act of rescue, when it is. in fact, an act of destruction."

We can argue for the preservation of the Sterling Divinity Quadrangle because of

its history. Except perhaps for Princeton"s, no divinity school is as closely linked to

America's history as Yale's. The Foundation for the Preservation of Sterling Divinity

Quadrangle argues that the quadrangle is "a distinguished assembly of buildings of sig-

nificant architectural integrity and historic merit which was specifically designed as the

home of the Yale Divinity School. The Quadrangle is particularly and uniquely suited to

the School's character and mission.""

And we can argue (with slightly lessened conviction) for preservation of the Ster-

ling Divinity Quadrangle because of its beauty. In a New York Times article, the religion

reporter Gustav Niebuhr (a descendent of two of America's most famous twentieth-

century theologians, Reinhold and H. Richard Niebuhr, both at times associated with the

Yale school) calls it "'an architectural gem"; Vincent Scully declares that it is "a master-

piece of American architecture"; Paul Goldberger proclaims that it is a ""complex of intri-

cacy, delicacy and serenity of a sort one rarely experiences anywhere in American archi-

tecture.

"*
Goldberger. "Saving a Beloved Chapel."
-"
The Foundation for the Preservation of Sterling Divinity Quadrangle. Campaign Update II: Campaign for

the Preservation of Sterling Divinity. February 1997.

° Niebuhr. "Yale Divinity Tries to Find Its Place in the Future": Scully. "Letter to the Editor'": Goldberger.
"Saving a Beloved Chapel."
109
 We can also argue (with definitely lessened conviction) for preservation of the

Sterling Divinity Quadrangle because of its uniqueness. Although based on the University

of Virginia prototype, the quadrangle introduced new elements that made it unique — and
these are the very elements that Yale proposes to tear down. As Goldberger declares. "[i]t

is as if Yale and its architects had decided that, yes, this place really wasn't anything more

than a carbon copy of Jefferson, and just to make sure that no one missed that point, they

would tear down everything that showed that Delano & Aldrich had some ideas of their

-31
own.

And. at last, we can argue (with very much lessened conviction) for preservation

of the Sterling Divinity Quadrangle because of its age. The quadrangle is certainly not

ancient, but American architecture is still a relatively new architecture and this group of

buildings were built at a time that would be hard to replace nowadays: as Scully puts it,

"the idea of tearing down grand old buildings to build questionable new ones seems irra-

tional at best. The error of economic arguments to justify such acts has been demonstrated

repeatedly."'" Or as Richard Hegel, the municipal historian for New Haven, observes,

"'^
'[y]ou couldn't afford to build those buildings today.

Ultimately (to borrow somewhat ironically the words with which William F.

Buckley announced in 1955 his reasons for establishing the conservative magazine Mv-

tioiial Review), what preservation is for is "to stand athwart history and yell stop." Preser-

" Goldberger. "Saving a Beloved Chapel."

'-
Vincenl Seully. quoted in Patnek Dilger, •Divinity School Demolition Ripped." New Haven Register. 8

November 1996.
- Richard Hegel, quoted in Yen Che(Mig. "Divinity School Longs to Stay Put." Yale Dath News. 4 April

1996.
110
vation is for slowing things down, slowing demolition down, slowing rebuilding down,

until we reach again some unified cultural sense of ourselves in time. And it is the pur-

pose of historic preservation to maintain what little connection remains.

The truth of this is observed from many different angles of preservation. It is the

neo-Marxist Tafuri who noted that the "continual destruction of the present contributes to

the nihilism of our times.""' And it was the romanticizing John Ruskin who put sharply

our architectural duty to the dead and the unborn:

I must not leave the truth unstated, that it is again no question of expediency or feeling
whether we shall preserve the buildings of past times or not. We have no right whatever to
touch them. They are not ours. They belong partly to those who built them, and partly to
all the generations of mankind who are to follow us. The dead have still their right in
them: that which they labored for. the praise of achievement or the expression of religious
feelmg. or whatsoever else it might be which in those buildings they intended to be per-
manent, we ha\e no right to obliterate. What we have ourselves built, we are at liberty to
throw down; but what other men gase their strength, and wealth, and life to accomplish,
their right o\er does not pass away with their death; still less is the right to the use of what
they ha\'c left vested in us only. It belongs to all their successors.""'

Indeed, something of the same insight was contained in the words Yale President

Levin used when he announced that the divinity school would not move from the Sterling

Quadrangle. Paraphrasing Williain Lyon Phelps, Levin declared. "[IJong after our bones

are dust, long after we have left this planet, these gracious and lovely buildings will con-

"""*
tinue to cast their charms.

But perhaps the finest expression of the purpose of preservation — and in a

uniquely American moment —comes with Lincoln's Gett}'sburg Address. Its purpose was

to dedicate a Ci\il War 2ra\evard where the remains of Northern solders were buried.

''""
Tafun. "There is No Criticism. Onl\ Historv." 97.
"^
Ruskin. Seven Lamps of Architecture. 186.
"''
Richard C. Levin, quoted in Save the Quad, The Case for Renovating the Quad. 29 .August 1996,
111
 but. as J. B. Jackson notes, it can be read as a beautiful description of what a historic

37
monument means and how we should respond to it in our thoughts and actions:

We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that

field, as the final resting place for those who here ga\e their lives that that nation might
live. ... It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which
they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedi-
cated to the great task remainins before us.'^

With these words. Lincoln indicates why we build monuments: at a specific mo-

ment, we make a contract — a covenant — and the monument e.xists as a reminder of that

contract. It is a binding of the future just much as it is a marking of the past: by promising

immortality to the dead, it promises that we will teach children yet unborn to teach their

own children to remember.

'
Sec Jackson. Necessity for Ruins. 93.
Abraham Lincoln. "Gettysburg .Address." quoted in S\end Peterson. The Getrxshiirg Addresses: The
'

Story of Two Orations (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing. 1963). 48-51.

112
 Bibliography

History and Theory Primarily Related to Historic Preservation

Barrie. Giles.
" Replicas' Plan to Save Modem Listed Buildings." Building Design
(August 1993): 3.

Binney. Marcus and Hanna. Presenrnion Pays: Tourism and the Economic Bene-
Max
fits of Consening Historic Buildings. London: SAVE Britain's Heritage. 1978.

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 1

Index

Ackerman. James S., 62, 67

Action Group for Better Architecture in New York, 17
Adaptive Use, 10, 12,54.85. 100
Adler and Sullivan, 20, 22
Ancient Monuments Protection Act, 44
Anti-scrape, 44
Auden, W. H., 47

Bacon. Henry, 13
Bandes Noires, 36
Baxter, Alan, 33
Blake, Peter, 50
Blumenthal, Conn. Attorney General Richard, 92
Boyd Theater, 97-98
Boyer, Christine, 4, 8, 68-76, 77
Burke, Edmund, 4, 105, 107

Casa Grande, 57
Carcassonne, 38
Carrere and Hastings. 13
Chateaubriand, Francois-Rene de, 35, 36
Chicago Art Institute. 23
Chicago Stock Exchange Building. 3. 8. 20-23
City of Collective Memon\ 68-76
City Planning Commission. 18
Commission des Monuments Historiques. 37
Costonis, John J.. 98

Davies Mansion. 88. 89

Delano& Aldrich. 78, 80, 81, 110
Derrida. Jacques. 34
Dictiomniire Raisonnee de rArchitectiire Francaise. 39
Divuiity School. 78. 80-90. 108. 109. 1 1

Eliot. T.S.. 106. 107

English Heritage. 33
 1

Felt, James, 18
Felt, Irving, 18

Fitch, James Marston, 54-55. 99

Foucault, Michel. 69, 101

Gandy, Joseph. 41
Gettysburg Address, 111-112
Goldberge^r, Paul. 78, 81. 87. 109. 1 10
Green, Aaron. 26. 27
Greenwich Village Historic District, 94, 96
Gropius, Ise, 24
Gropius, Walter. 23
Gropius House. 3. 8, 23-25
Guerre aiix demolisseurs, 36

Heller International Building. 21

Historic Preservation: Cultural Management of the Built World. 54-55

Hitchcock. Henry-Russell. 23, 48, 49

Hosmer, Charles B., 53-54
Hugo, Victor. 35. 36. 38, 60. 61
Huxtable. Ada Louis. 2 1 . 23. 29. 30

Inspecteur General des Monuments Historiques, 37

Institute of Sacred Music. 79. 86
International St}'le. The, 48
Ise Temple. 29. 35

James. Henry, 93
Jameson, Frederick, 33
Johansen. Ati Gropius. 23. 25
Johnson, Samuel. 106

Kliment & Halsband. 85. 86

Kubler, George, 12

Laborde, Alexandre, 35, 36

Landmarks Preservation Commission, 18, 95, 96
Lassus. Jean-Baptiste-Antoine. 38
Latrobe. Benjamin H.. 53
Levin. President Richard C. 86. 87, 88. 89, 1 1

Le Corbusier. 35. 47-50. 63. 69

London Bridge. 57. 58
Lowenthal, David, 4, 41. 55-59. 77

128
Madison Square Garden Corporation, 17. 18, 19
Marin County Civic Center, 3, 8, 25-28, 31
Marquand Chapel, 79, 82. 89
Marx, Karl, 5

Maybeck. Bernard, 13-16

McKim, Mead and White, 13, 16

Merimee, Prosper, 37
Metropolitan Museum, 21, 22
Moe, Richard. 86
Moore, Arthur Cotton, 58, 59
Morris, William, 28. 41-42
Mont-Saint-Michel, 6, 98
Municipal Art Society, 17, 18

Nashville Parthenon. 12, 57

National Trust for Historic Preservation, 88
Nodier, Charles, 35, 36
Notre Dame de Paris, 38
Notre Dame de Paris, 38, 60

Orr. Douglas, 80

Palace of Fine Arts, 3, 8, 12-16. 29. 30, 33

Past is a Foreii>ii Country. The. 55-59
Penn Station. 3. 8. 16-20.22
Pevsner, Nikolaus, 46
Phillipe, King Louise, 37
Piranesi.G. B.. 14. 15
Plumb, J. H., 55

Restoration. 13, 24, 33. 35-51. 54. 68. 100

Richard, Provost Alison, 83, 91
Riegl. Alois, 32
Rittenhouse Square, 9
Robert, Hubert. 41
Rookery Building. 100
Rorty. Richard. 34
Rousseau, Jean Jacques. 101, 105-106
Ruskin, John, 3,28, 29, 32. 33.41-46, 47. 51,52, 82. 101. 104, 108
Russell, Cynthia, 92

Sant'Elia. Antonio. 47
Scott, George Gilbert. 41
Scott. Walter. 41

129
 1

Scully. Vincent. 20. 85. 87. 88. 89. 109. 1 10

Seven Lamps of Architecture. The. 42
Social Contract, The, 05 1

Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, 23. 24, 25

Society for the Protection of Ancient Monuments. 43
Sterling, John. 90
Sterling Divinity Quadrangle. 4. 77. 78-92. 108-1 10
Stern. Robert. 87. 88

Taj Mahal. 6
Tafuri, Manfredo. 4. 59-68. 77. 1 1

Taylor. Baron Isidore, 35, 36

Tennyson. Alfred, 41. 101
Theories and Histoiy of Architecture, 60-68
Toffler. Alvin. 102
Towards a New Architecture, 48
Trajan's Column. 57
Madsen, Stephan Tschudi. 42

Van Rensselaer Mansion, 3, 8-12. 30

Venturi, Robert. 64
Villa Savoye, 48, 50
Viollet-le-Duc. Eugene Emmanuel, 3, 8, 35-41, 42, 43, 46, 47, 51, 52, 103
Vitet, Ludovic, 37

University of Virginia. 79. 80. 81. 87. 1 10

Weil. Simone. 106

Williamsburg. Colonial. 13.72. 103
Wood. Reverend Richard J.. 85
Wright. Frank Lloyd. 25-27. 30-31. 63

Yale University. 4. 77. 78-92. 108-1 10

130
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