Can a building be too young to save?

[bostoneophyte]

http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/20...-young-save/IaHeHvatkjaeqrgPbSsp2K/story.html

Very interesting article in the Globe asking what tomorrow's historic building will look like. We've all heard the talk about city hall. What do you think? Not just about city hall, but in general?

In many cases, preservationists are fighting a battle against contemporary taste: To the average person, newer buildings often don’t look special, just ugly, or at best unremarkable.
...
It can take decades for a distinctive building to look like something worth saving. “I remember buildings I saw in the ’70s and ’80s that I knew were ugly,” Michael said. “Then I saw them again around 1995 and they weren’t ugly anymore, and they hadn’t changed.” The only thing that had changed was his own judgment.

That phenomenon has led to losses that in hindsight are glaringly obvious and tragic. Today, the demolition of New York’s original Pennsylvania Station, a Beaux-Arts masterpiece built in 1910, is almost universally considered foolish.The 50th anniversary of its razing was marked this year by widespread lamentation: Essentially, how could we not have known better?

If we can’t save it all, the question is how we know what will be beautiful in the future?

 

[Matthew]

It's about more than taste.

Buildings like City Hall are actively anti-urban. Keep in mind that they were constructed at a time when destroying the city from within was seen as a feature, not a bug. From the 19th century, through most of the 20th century, cities were viewed as evil and corrupt places*, and the only antidote was scattering the populace far and wide, to breath in the fresh "moral" air of the countryside. This movement eventually resulted in the slapping of a sterile, concrete graveyard over the scene of sin and iniquity that was perceived to be the essence of Scollay Square.

City Hall and the plaza around it are about more than just architecture, and their continued existence is an assault on more than just the eyes.

As the article said, many beautiful buildings were demolished in old times to make Boston what it is today. And that's a natural process, even if regrettable at times. So if beautiful buildings had to go to help Boston grow, then why in the world would we consider saving the world's ugliest building, when it has so many negative effects?


* Many people still think this way.

 

[davem]

It's a particularly interesting conversation to those in the HP community who actually fought the demolition of whatever existed prior to these buildings, who now have their dogma biting them in the ass as it applies to these modernist buildings.

The biggest issue with these buildings now coming up for preservation is that many of them are just badly designed, not only relating to aesthetics. Your average prewar brick and beam building can be converted, renovated, changed for whatever use and still retain its good looks and stay relevant, hence why so many of them remain today. A huge issue with these newer ones is that they have terrible natural light, low ceilings, perpetually leaky roofs, and are constructed in such a way that its nearly impossible to retrofit them. You used to always hear "old and drafty" with the pre-war buildings, but that can be fixed with insulation and caulk. How do you fix 3 feet of structural concrete?

I really don't know what will happen. What it really takes is for people to care about these buildings, and from personal experience most don't. A lot of the discussions I've had have landed on these buildings being preserved as more of an academic exercise than for their inherent beauty, which typically guided preservation in the past. "Well, we used X,Y,Z reasons to preserve Grand Central, and it appears those those same arguments apply here, so we sort of have to preserve City Hall too..."

Another issue is the preservation community is moving a lot more towards a historic district / adaptive reuse / neighborhood identity / preservation as a catylist for redevelopment sort of thing vs the "preserve this individual building at all costs" methodology, which these buildings run contrary to. Their lifecycle analysis would fall flat on its face, they don't relate to their environment/community, they are not inherently sustainable (many are in fact the opposite - requiring massive energy costs), people don't like them, and they are hard to find new uses for, and even harder to substantially modify.

It's a personal issue for me too, because I've got Johnson's god damned Orange County Government Center right in my home town, which I've grown up hating, the whole county hates, and yet my training and what I believe in says it should be saved. On top of that I've got my architectural education that is letting me see the complex vocabulary these buildings have, giving further ammunition to saving them. But I don't 'like' them, at all. The article misses the beat slightly I believe, yes it is people in their 20s and 30s who are having the conversations about these buildings, and advocating for their preservation. But its in a "I may not agree with what you say but I will fight for your right to say it" sort of way, not "these are magnificent treasures!".

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

It's a particularly interesting conversation to those in the HP community who actually fought the demolition of whatever existed prior to these buildings, who now have their dogma biting them in the ass as it applies to these modernist buildings.

The biggest issue with these buildings now coming up for preservation is that many of them are just badly designed, not only relating to aesthetics. Your average prewar brick and beam building can be converted, renovated, changed for whatever use and still retain its good looks and stay relevant, hence why so many of them remain today. A huge issue with these newer ones is that they have terrible natural light, low ceilings, perpetually leaky roofs, and are constructed in such a way that its nearly impossible to retrofit them. You used to always hear "old and drafty" with the pre-war buildings, but that can be fixed with insulation and caulk. How do you fix 3 feet of structural concrete?

I really don't know what will happen. What it really takes is for people to care about these buildings, and from personal experience most don't. A lot of the discussions I've had have landed on these buildings being preserved as more of an academic exercise than for their inherent beauty, which typically guided preservation in the past. "Well, we used X,Y,Z reasons to preserve Grand Central, and it appears those those same arguments apply here, so we sort of have to preserve City Hall too..."

Another issue is the preservation community is moving a lot more towards a historic district / adaptive reuse / neighborhood identity / preservation as a catylist for redevelopment sort of thing vs the "preserve this individual building at all costs" methodology, which these buildings run contrary to. Their lifecycle analysis would fall flat on its face, they don't relate to their environment/community, they are not inherently sustainable (many are in fact the opposite - requiring massive energy costs), people don't like them, and they are hard to find new uses for, and even harder to substantially modify.

It's a personal issue for me too, because I've got Johnson's god damned Orange County Government Center right in my home town, which I've grown up hating, the whole county hates, and yet my training and what I believe in says it should be saved. On top of that I've got my architectural education that is letting me see the complex vocabulary these buildings have, giving further ammunition to saving them. But I don't 'like' them, at all. The article misses the beat slightly I believe, yes it is people in their 20s and 30s who are having the conversations about these buildings, and advocating for their preservation. But its in a "I may not agree with what you say but I will fight for your right to say it" sort of way, not "these are magnificent treasures!".

That's a good way of putting it. The most preservable of buildings are the most reusable of buildings. The mentality that led to mass nukings of old buildings also built too many new buildings on the premise that they were good for 50 years or 1 lifetime of use...and then you'd nuke 'em again to build something even better. Same deal with the way they built highways. Nobody cared that 1960's capacity would be totally inadequate for 2000's needs...because they assumed that the highway would be blown up and remade again and again.

Lots of urban renewal edifices are showing that limitation now that they're beyond the lifespan where everybody at the time thought they'd be wiped clean and rebuilt anew. Callous disregard for what they were displacing with these monstrosities begat callous disregard for how these monstrosities would adapt. Think that what you're building is generationally disposable...golly gee, you get what you pay for.

There's good foresight and bad foresight throughout civil engineering history. Buildings over 100 years old can be poorly designed or simply played out too ill-fitting to adapt. But the mentality back then was not that whole chunks of the city were like some Etch-a-Sketch you shook once every 40 years for "Progress". It used to be default assumption that the building was gonna outlive you and your kin, and that your work as builder was going to be entrusted to people who were not born yet and who had no connection to you and your vision. Which...was kind of natural given what pre-war lifespans were.

The perception of permanence in the planner's eye tends to lead to better designs, more wiggle room given to uses not predictable in the era it's built. Even if it's "ugly" or the architecture is out-of-style, the postwar developers who started from an assumption of permanence generally came up with works that have worn better than the urban renewalists'. The ranks of the 'least preservable' are the structures built to be ephemeral: "Progress" for my legacy, so my grandkids can replace my "Progress" with "Jetsons Shit Progress" as their legacy. Wax on, wax off.

Arrogant assumption that it would ever be that easy, but that's what people sold themselves on. And now this generation has to deal with being stuck with so many intentionally ephemeral structures.



(Don't even get me started on suburban big box ephemeral and the notion that today's "profit" moment from that new strip mall is that same developer's deadbeat teen's "recapitalization" moment when he gets gifted a cushy V.P. job and tears down that same strip mall in 10 years to build a slightly different strip mall. Probably branded a "Collection" or something...because that's awesomer.)