Historic Preservation and Sustainable New Development: Towards a New Building Culture

STEVEN SEMES, PAOLO VITTI, AND JONATHAN WEATHERILL

Together 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

Beauty

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?

Sustainability

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.”

Justice

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