Archives of New Traditional Architecture
PAGE 13
by scholars on the topic of historic preservation and sustainable architecture
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Davis and Rafael
on building cultures and the value of tradition
spring 2022 Issue No. 3
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Examples of new architecture using traditional building techniques in Spain, Egypt, and Mexico
Editors
Steven Semes
Paolo Vitti
Jonathan Weatherill
Editorial Committee Members
Stefanos Polyzoides
Selena Anders
Javier Cenicacelaya
Kate Chambers
Richard Economakis
Michael Mesko
Steven Semes
Paolo Vitti
Jonathan Weatherill
Samir Younés
Managing Editor Heather Grennan Gary
Graphic Design
Archives of New Traditional Architecture is prepared by the staff and research associates of the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture and published twice yearly. ISBN: 979-8-218-05364-2
Front cover: A detail of the main hall of the Michigan Central Station before the current preservation and reuse project was undertaken.
Evans.
146 for the full story.
* refinement: The act of improving something by making small changes: in particular to make an idea, theory, or method more subtle and accurate.
* repair: To fix or mend a thing suffering from damage or a fault.
Since the 1950s, the vast majority of architects have considered ex novo originality to be the most important dimension of their work. In theory, decoupling design from precedent is the philosophical justification for conceiving virtually all new architectural projects as autonomous works of art; it is especially the case for projects that challenge the cultural and social status quo. In practice, this belief in the inexorable superiority of all that is unprecedented has amounted to the rejection of too many foundational design patterns and conventions; the adoption of high technology as the basis for determining aesthetic values; and the elevating of faith in the future as a pretext for engaging in unbounded formalism. The damage done through the relentless pursuit of originality has generated a state of worldwide physical impoverishment and spiritual confusion never before seen. Modernism’s promise of an improved new human habitat coupled with a superior form of society has not been delivered, nor will it ever. Instead, the role of the architect and of architecture itself have been reduced in scope and importance: from operating on behalf of the common good to serving the interests of the few. In the process, architects and architecture have been peddling literal newness at all costs and promoting a futurist vision that seems increasingly out of reach.
Expecting that every new building independent of its program and place can be designed as high art and serve as a perpetual catalyst for ethical renewal is a quixotic undertaking at best. It sets up an impossibly high bar for every project to clear and guarantees a Sisyphean fate for architecture: always aspiring to the highest possible ideals and constantly coming up short. This has indeed been the experience of the recent past. It is not really surprising that for every beautiful modernist building ever designed in plan, section, elevation, massing, and details, tens of thousands of ugly and impermanent ones have also been produced—buildings that distinguish most if not all the urban expansions around the world. This may be principally due to the lack of talent, education, or relevant skills of the average architect. But more than that, designing an “Architecture of Our Time” has been such a vague and subjective mission that it is impossible to ever bring it to fruition. Ultimately, the current dominant architectural strains have delivered and continue to deliver a catastrophic trio of worldwide outcomes: A uniform and unstable human habitat; an environmental meltdown; and a social, political, and spiritual malaise that have left humanity reeling. Forgetting their professional oath to durability, utility, and beauty, most architects have become blind to these dire accumulated consequences of their design choices and actions. The foreclosure of any possibility for an architecture of cultural continuity and physical healing has become the regrettable current architectural status quo.
Unmoored from the wisdom of tradition, architects have been generating a tsunami of normative, impermanent, and unlovable buildings. The urban framework that these are mostly attached to is an endlessly expanding, car-oriented sprawl. As these anti-urban wastelands have become rapidly unserviceable and as their spread has increased exponentially, addressing the declining quality of our habitat has emerged as the top priority for safeguarding the future of the planet. It is becoming increasingly clear, though, that we cannot afford to replace all underperforming and deteriorating buildings with new ones because the capital, technical know-how, administrative will, and material and energy resources to do so do not in fact exist. As a result, it now appears certain that we are rapidly approaching the moment for an urgently needed architectural and urbanist reset, one that elevates urbanism linked to building preservation and nature conservation as the principal ways to mitigate the cataclysmic worldwide failure of the modernist project. Not only by practicing preservation in its early definition, as saving single ranking buildings and landscapes, or in its later incarnation, as saving whole neighborhoods or planning new ones compatibly with historic ones, but rather by practicing preservation as a radical version of architectural newness that can be dedicated to repairing the failed environments we have inherited and will continue to inherit in alarming numbers.
This new kind of architectural newness will focus on regenerating the out-of-control twenty-first century cities of the world by addressing their redesign in combination with the reuse, restoration, and rehabilitation of their existing infrastructure, buildings, public spaces, and landscapes. This will be accomplished through a design process that incorporates the increasingly relevant considerations of resilience and sustainability. In this context, resilience means avoiding the constant replacement of buildings by selected demolition or mass clearance and instead producing hybrid projects composed of both new and existing parts. The resulting buildings will be of an open-ended form, more easily adapted, transformed, and repaired in response to social and technical change. Also in this context, sustainability means the judicious blending of both time-tested and innovative materials and construction techniques, as well as passive and active energy systems. This approach generates buildings whose usefulness and durability are extended by their low operational and maintenance costs and easier repair over time. These design ingredients contribute to the long-term physical continuity of the human habitat as well as its beauty, meaning, and lovability. This is particularly the case if they have been designed and are being serviced by a bottom-up process that includes the involvement the people who inhabit them. It is entirely possible that in the next fifty to a hundred years the opportunities to engage in this kind of reformist architectural practice will far outpace the now-dominant architecture of new, isolated, exclusively self-referential buildings.
What ideological changes will this emerging preservation-, resilience-, and sustainability-based design ethos require in order to be effectively launched and to prosper? First and foremost, it will require a sharp shift in our understanding of the role of time, place, materiality, and energy in the framing of Architecture. Regarding the question of time, two such changes will be necessary. The first is the adoption of a diverse, culture-specific, continuist architecture to replace the reductive and homogenizing “Architecture of Our Time.” The second is using the living design and craft traditions of the world to ensure the long-term life of buildings by enabling their maintenance or transformation to be carried out in their original character and style. Regarding the question of place, it is imperative to restore architecture to its original role as the art of recombining new and existing civic buildings, the urban fabric, the public realm, and the landscape into notable, permanent place ensembles. Likewise, it is imperative to pay close attention to the context in which buildings currently exist, and to the inspiration, precedent, and guidance that they may provide to complete, long-term place-making. On the technical front, we must rethink the basis for best rebuilding the world in a manner that includes the utilization of all possible kinds of construction know-how, depending on the task at hand and the project location: traditional and new, high and low, pure and hybrid. And we must couple these diverse construction methods with levels of environmental performance that are place specific and energy frugal. Finally, we must power buildings and infrastructure with renewable energy generated at scales large and small, and with sensitivity to local climatic conditions. The hallmark of this future architectural culture should be fluidity in use, variety and continuity in form, longevity in building fabric, and life-cycle economy in service.
The task of worldwide reconstruction is so immense that the launching of an Architecture of Preservation, Resilience, and Sustainability should also be enabled by public policies different from many currently in force. Such policies would include managing change by subsidiarity; relegating decisions affecting planning, zoning, and building regulations to the appropriate institutional or government body; rewarding labor-intensity in construction to privilege skilled craft work; subsidizing an economy of material permanence and clean energy; and shifting taxation to support the construction of buildings for the long run and away from measures such as depreciation, that induce their rapid consumption, disposal, and waste.
Finally, the single most important dimension of this kind of radical architectural newness, the antidote to the blind pursuit of design originality and starchitectural elitism, is aspiring to another kind of public morality. Directly related to the effects of design on individuals and on communities, this kind of public morality rejects the idea of modernist form as a catalyst for perpetual social and cultural turbulence and is instead dedicated to architecture as beauty and service. Respecting the architectural heritage of all cultures, focusing on their physical and spiritual improvement through community-building, attending to education as the relay of ideas and skills from one generation to the next, and through it all, giving us hope that a shared urban future in balance with nature is indeed possible.
STEFANOS POLYZOIDES Professor and Dean The University of Notre Dame School of ArchitectureTogether with the patrimony of nature, there is also an historic, artistic and cultural patrimony which is likewise under threat. This patrimony is a part of the shared identity of each place and a foundation upon which to build a habitable city. It is not a matter of tearing down and building new cities, supposedly more respectful of the environment yet not always more attractive to live in. Rather, there is a need to incorporate the history, culture and architecture of each place, thus preserving its original identity. Ecology, then, also involves protecting the cultural treasures of humanity in the broadest sense. More specifically, it calls for greater attention to local cultures when studying environmental problems, favoring a dialogue between scientific-technical language and the language of the people. Culture is more than what we have inherited from the past; it is also, and above all, a living, dynamic and participatory present reality, which cannot be excluded as we rethink the relationship between human beings and the environment.
—Pope Francis, Laudato Si’ (2015)Historic preservation and contemporary design for new development are subjects with which the academy and the profession of architecture are intensely engaged, but they remain two distinct categories, one looking at the past and the other at the future. They arose and have developed in response to separate agendas and often pursue divergent sets of values and aims. We advocate, on the contrary, that conservation of cultural heritage and the search for new (and sustainable) architecture are properly two aspects of a single discipline that can only benefit from the contributions of both constituents.
We can facilitate this convergence by adopting a Vitruvian three-fold view of the issue: Building well is characterized by what the ancient Roman architect termed venustas, firmitas, and utilitas—or, in English, beauty of form, durability of construction, and fitness to purpose. Today, we might redefine these terms, respectively, as beauty, sustainability, and justice
We believe that everyone has the right to live in a beautiful place. This is not as fantastical as it may sound and it has nothing to do with conventional debates about “style,” elitism, or the use of expensive materials or innovative materials and technologies. To begin with, there is natural beauty, which comes at no cost except what it costs us not to destroy it. Nature is perfect in its harmony and its capacity to adapt and thrive in any condition, even the most hostile. In a delicate balance with natural systems, human ingenuity and creativity (culture) have devised models of beauty in the built environment that reveal astonishing varieties of meaning, complexity, and visual richness, even— or perhaps especially—in cultures we might think are technologically or economically underdeveloped. Every community, it seems, has developed its own repertoire of forms, proportions, ornaments, and decoration so that, until recently, we could find beauty in the most remote traditional villages as readily as in the centers of great metropolitan cities.
In the last one hundred years, however, our capacity to destroy has outpaced our capacity to build or protect. The appalling collapse of biodiversity, the disappearance of entire ecosystems, and the looming threat of climate change are anthropogenic, the consequence of the global industrial system that has also destroyed traditional building cultures. The “care for our common home” to which Pope Francis invites us demands a comprehensive conservation ethic capable of protecting the natural systems on which our lives depend and informing new building in balance with nature at architectural, urban, and landscape scales. Beauty is not extraneous to this necessary ethic, as the durable appeal of visual order and deep meaning are intrinsic to the “sense of place” that makes us care enough about the world around us to take care of it. As architect and urbanist Steve Mouzon has said, a place must be “lovable” if it is to survive long enough to contribute to a more sustainable environment. Place attachment is a consequence of beauty and inspires spiritual ties and moral obligations like those that bind us to the human beings we love. Accordingly, we are called
both to preserve the beauty we find in historic buildings, towns, and landscapes and to propose new development that similarly offers us a lovable home in the world. The first step is to recognize that preservation and new construction are truly a unity and that any contrived barrier separating cultural resource conservation and contemporary building and urbanism must be overcome. The values that make historic places beautiful are the same as those that contribute to successful new places. The essential continuity between past, present, and future must be recaptured, bringing together preservation and design in ways not seen for a century.
Beauty is complicated, however, by its commodification and increasing inaccessibility. Today there is barely a historic district or a conservation area not impacted by mass tourism and gentrification, thus illustrating the failure of the contemporary building culture to produce beautiful, “lovable” places within reach of the middle class. As Andres Duany has pointed out, those who can afford to live anywhere they please routinely choose to live in historic places; but when increased demand meets
a static or declining supply, rising prices and displacement of existing residents is the predictable result. What the market provides for those unable to afford historic neighborhoods is shoddily built, automobile-dependent, and especially isolating for the young, the elderly, and the poor. But even the affluent can find themselves in homes lacking in the most basic indicators of beauty and, as a consequence, find themselves wandering the historic centers of the planet in search of the beauty and authenticity they cannot find at home. As a result, the historic city is captured by a tourist economy that steadily destroys the genuine economy that built and long maintained it. Tourism and gentrification are two faces of the same problem, revealing beauty as a sustainability and social justice issue. What would it take to reform the building culture to render it capable of building new places with the same values and quality we find in historic places, ensuring a beautiful place for everyone?
Our survival as a species (along with the survival of innumerable other species) depends on the wise stewardship of the resources available to us, ensuring that we neither exhaust essential materials and processes, depriving generations to come of the opportunities we enjoyed, nor poison the world with our waste. In the past, sustainability was naturally achieved. The term began to be employed as soon as we became aware of the negative consequences of unthoughtful progress based on the “take-makewaste” approach. Not many decades ago, we began to understand that nature was becoming a threat to our existence in an unprecedented manner. It has been scientifically demonstrated that in the last twenty years the frequency and severity of floods, storms, hurricanes, wildfires, and droughts have intensified as a consequence of a misguided development policy.
An obvious question to ask is, “When was architecture and urbanism last sustainable?” Perhaps it was never perfectly so, as all human communities have extracted unrenewable natural resources and produced waste. We know, for example, that the ancient Romans deforested much of North Africa and the Middle East for
building materials and fuel, and that Victorian Britain mined and burned coal at a colossal rate, producing extraordinary environmental damage and pollution. Some of the deficiencies of historic buildings can be overcome by the judicious insertion of modern technologies, as can be seen in innumerable successful adaptations to improve energy performance. But we must also consider embodied carbon, life-cycle costs, and the associated impacts of automobile-based settlement patterns. A building culture that saw existing historic building stock as a renewable resource and critically applied technologies to render both adapted and new construction carbon-neutral and largely independent of fossil fuels would contribute greatly to staving off the worst effects of climate change, in addition to its other benefits. Nonetheless, historical building practices were, on balance, more sustainable than current ones. Solutions were tailored to the availability of local materials and responded to local climate conditions. Buildings were the result of long-term evolutionary processes in which methods were adapted and innovated as needed, expressing resilience and sustainability through the thoughtful use of resources and capacity to change. We can only admire the skillful management of the settings of the buildings and their structural behavior, designed to withstand local environmental loads. Our historic urban centers, towns, and landscapes offer us endless examples that are worthy of study. Why would we not retrieve this amazing knowledge for a more sustainable and resilient architecture in the present?
The real value of traditional buildings for us today lies not exclusively in their testimony of the past, their aesthetic attractiveness, or their exemplification of stylistic movements but, rather, their role in defining the buildings and “best practices” that we need now. Instead of being the result of technologies and theories that have developed quickly and remain unproven in their long-term sustainability, traditional architecture is the result of secular trial and error processes based on the use of local resources to meet the needs of well-being. The massive use of concrete, steel, and other
industrial products over the last century has overwhelmed many traditional practices and generated a prejudice against their appropriateness for contemporary architecture. This bias, in turn, is now being overwhelmed by the reality of the environmental crisis. The global, industrial building culture is itself under threat at the same moment that traditional buildings are offering us relevant models for a more sustainable and resilient future.
In the last forty years, restoration projects have become a tool to recover knowledge and craftsmanship that we feared had been lost. An extensive approach to the study of traditional buildings through the skills and expertise of conservation experts, craftsmen, architects, and engineers will allow us to retrieve practices and knowledge useful to generate a new, sustainable, and resilient building culture. As the French writer Francoise Choay wrote, “We restore in order to recapture our competence to build.”
Sustainability and resilience must be recognized as social justice issues in two senses: First, poor and marginalized communities are the most exposed to the consequences of climate change. Large numbers of climate refugees from areas stricken by droughts, floods, and other effects seeking asylum in more favorable regions will likely exacerbate existing ethnic, racial, religious, and economic conflicts. Second, and more positively, a recovery of sustainable materials and methods of construction promises to create opportunities for employment and economic stability among precarious populations. The revival of the traditional building trades and crafts offers dignified, rewarding, and meaningful work at a time when increasing economic insecurity, exploitation, and income inequalities have ravaged labor markets and the virtual disappearance of affordable housing in our most successful metropolitan areas has only increased pressures
Learning from the past: Students taking reasoned drawings in the Cappella Chigi (Raphael 1512).The Michael Christopher Duda Center for Preservation, Resilience, and Sustainability was established in 2021 to offer the School of Architecture at the University of Notre Dame new and expanded opportunities to advance its mission, especially in the protection and conservation of “our common home,” as Pope Francis wrote in Laudato Si’. University of Notre Dame Trustee Fritz Duda and his wife, Mary Lee, together with the family’s foundation made a $30 million gift to the University’s School of Architecture to establish a center dedicated to historic preservation and named in memory of the couple’s late son, a Notre Dame architecture alumnus who dedicated his too-brief career to historic preservation in Texas.
The Center is housed in the School of Architecture but serves as a hub for campus-wide work related to the Center’s objectives. The gift enables the School to expand its leading-edge curriculum in traditional architecture and urbanism, support hiring new faculty, sponsor national and international conferences, and provide financial assistance to graduate students enrolled in the Master of Science in Historic Preservation degree program. The Center will be an essential resource for teaching and research in the emerging field of historic preservation, community resilience, and environmental sustainability.
In pursuit of these themes the Center will provide resources in support of the academic program leading to the Master of Science in Historic Preservation (MSHP) degree, including full-tuition fellowships to attract and support a talented and diverse class of students and fund needed new faculty positions. The Center will underwrite educational expenses such as student design charrettes, class travel, public lectures by leaders in the field, conferences and exhibitions, and workshops or demonstrations offering opportunities for hands-on learning by students.
In addition to this support of teaching, the Center will sponsor essential research to articulate and propagate ways in which conservation of cultural heritage (both tangible and intangible) can inform and inspire new sustainable development at the architectural and urban scales. The Center will sponsor and disseminate multidisciplinary research that advances understanding and practice of preservation, resilience, and sustainability in the built environment. This research will focus on such topics as the recovery of historic building cultures, renewable and nonpolluting materials and methods, revival of historic trades and crafts, urban planning and land use that reduces dependence on fossil fuels, reform of building codes to facilitate historic preservation, international Charters and guidance on heritage conservation, and the protection of cultural landscapes and natural resources.
This research program will also be enhanced by a network of allies and collaborators including individuals, organizations, and institutions with which the School of Architecture has existing connections or those with which we seek new relationships. One example is the current agreement with the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, to establish a network/directory of individuals and groups engaged in the practice of and training for traditional building trades and crafts.
In all of these ways, and possibly in others yet to be discovered, the Duda Center will be a vital resource for the School in furthering its mission within the University and beyond.
