Historic Preservation

Definition

Historic preservation is the public, legal, and cultural practice of retaining significant older buildings against the pressures of development, justified in Goldberger's account not by nostalgia but by the city's need for depth in time. Its intellectual charter is Sir John Summerson's 1947 essay "The Past in the Future": old buildings "cost money to maintain," unlike works of art and literature, and preservation therefore requires justification, for which Summerson offered a graded list of categories culminating in "the building whose only virtue is that in a bleak tract of modernity, it alone gives depth in time." Its legal charter, in New York, is the Landmarks Preservation Commission, established in 1965 after the loss of McKim, Mead and White's Pennsylvania Station, with power rooted in the police power of city government and the finding that preservation is "a public necessity… required in the interest of the health, prosperity, safety and welfare of the people." By its fortieth anniversary the commission had designated 1,120 individual landmarks, 104 interior landmarks, nine scenic landmarks, and eighty-three historic districts protecting twenty-three thousand buildings. The principle survived constitutional challenge in the Grand Central case (U.S. Supreme Court, 1978, 6–3, upholding the New York law against Marcel Breuer's tower scheme), making Grand Central "the triumphant savior" against Penn Station's "martyr." Goldberger's own criterion is restraint under uncertainty: "A building lost is never regained."

Key Thinkers

• Paul Goldberger — the critic's account of preservation's charter, law, and cases.
• John Summerson — "The Past in the Future" (1947) and the categories of justification.
• Jane Jacobs — the city's need for aged buildings as a condition of its diversity and vitality.
• Hugh Hardy — 18 West Eleventh Street: "The past is not a costume rack that we loot to suit our fancy." (PAGE NEEDED — see log.)
• Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Philip Johnson — the Committee to Save Grand Central. (PAGE NEEDED — see log.)

Related Concepts

• ever-continuing-past — preservation's positive theory: not freezing but sheltering a vibrant present.
• adaptive-reuse — the practical form preservation often takes.
• memory — preservation as the institutionalisation of collective memory.
• architectural-martyrdom — the destruction that powers preservation's arguments.
• spolia — the pre-modern, appropriative counterpart to preservation.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• source-notes/goldberger-2009-why-architecture-matters — ch. 6 (pp. 147–58) gives the full preservation narrative: Summerson, Penn Station, the Landmarks Law, the Villard Houses, 18 West Eleventh Street, and Grand Central.
• source-notes/summerson-1963-classical-language-architecture — Summerson's classical scholarship, the other face of the historian invoked here.

Open Questions

• If taste is cyclical, how can preservation decisions be made responsibly without either preserving everything or yielding to the current cycle?
• Does designation protect architecture or the social composition of neighbourhoods — and who bears the costs of the protection?
• Is the "public necessity" rationale still adequate when the protected buildings are precisely the ones that exclude the less affluent from a district?