The Ever Continuing Past

Definition

Goldberger's phrase, borrowed from an unnamed source he heard in conversation, for the condition of a city in which the past is not sealed off for display but remains alive and in use: "a past that is not only visible but has an ongoing life that in some meaningful way connects with the present." In a place with an ever continuing past, "the past helps to define the present, and in doing so it continues to evolve. The meaning of the past changes as each age uses it differently, views it differently, interprets it differently," and old buildings have "a meaningful use in the present" — very different, usually, from their original one ("a printing plant may become condominiums"). The concept is Goldberger's resolution of the preservation dilemma: it opposes both the Disneyland museum-city that freezes a false past and the tabula rasa that loses the past entirely. Summerson supplies its criterion — the building whose "only virtue is that in a bleak tract of modernity, it alone gives depth in time" — and New York's historic districts supply its practice, protecting twenty-three thousand buildings across eighty-three districts that, at their best, "do not attempt to make a false past… but to use the past to shelter a vibrant present."

Key Thinkers

• Paul Goldberger — formulates the ever continuing past from Summerson and the New York historic districts.
• John Summerson — "The Past in the Future" (1947): preservation justified by "depth in time."
• Jane Jacobs — the city as a living, changing organism whose vitality depends on old buildings (the aged-buildings condition).

Related Concepts

• historic-preservation — the institutional apparatus of the ever continuing past.
• palimpsest — the layered city that the ever continuing past keeps legible.
• adaptive-reuse — the practice by which old buildings acquire meaningful present use.
• temporality — the lived, layered time of place.
• spolia — the older, more brutal appropriation of the past in building.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• source-notes/goldberger-2009-why-architecture-matters — ch. 6 (pp. 147–50) develops the ever continuing past against both the frozen and the erased past.
• source-notes/jacobs-1961-death-and-life-great-american-cities — the aged-buildings argument that underlies Jacobs's version of the same claim.

Open Questions

• Who decides which past continues? An ever continuing past is still a selection, and the criteria remain contested.
• Can the ever continuing past survive the financialisation of real estate, where preservation is often valued as a scarcity premium rather than as depth in time?