28 Feature
The Architect’s Newspaper
©CHRISTOPHER PAYNE/ESTO
AGAINST PRESERVATION An architecture of transformational change A new essay by Deborah Berke, founder of the architecture firm TenBerke, in Transform: Promising Places, Second Chances, and the Architecture of Transformational Change, written in collaboration with critic and author Thomas de Monchaux and published by Monacelli Press, argues not for preservation, but for regenerative reuse. The strategic stitching together of old and new combines two of architecture’s great virtues. On the one hand, there is solidity, continuity, and a sense of place. On the other hand, there is agility, empathy, and a nimble ability to change as quickly as fashion without being fashionable. The space— and time—between old and new is where we live our lives. Opening this space to thinking, making, and being is now more urgent than ever. Transformed and adapted places are inherently pluralistic: visual, material, and spatial diversity in places can resonate supportively with the diverse identities
and dignities of all the people who use those places. An architecture of repurposing, repairing, retrofitting, remaking, and reusing—this is an architecture of purpose and promise, an architecture of the greater good. Finding and fulfilling the promise in old places intersects with historic preservation, sometimes problematically so. Historic preservation constitutes its own professional practice, itsown philosophy, and its own system of advocacy and strategy. As a practice, historic preservation is often associated with regulatory tools that designate a building as “significant.” Typically, to achieve significance and protection, a building, structure, or landscape must fall into certain categories: have a design deemed to be meritorious; have been designed by a small handful of historically canonical architects; contribute aesthetically to a larger historic district whose value has been already established; and/or relate to an event or figure of historical significance (e.g., Washington slept here).
© CHRISTOPHER PAYNE/ESTO
In our practice, we think carefully and critically about what is called monumental, significant, and visible, versus what is called everyday, functional, unselfconscious, and vernacular, even rough-and-ready. The monumental and the everyday depend on each other. They both represent aspects of the architectural, cultural, and natural environment that we can rightfully expect to inherit, inhabit, and pass forward. But the first legacy—the merely monumental—is often privileged at the expense of the everyday. Historic preservation in the United States developed in the mid-20th century in reaction to political abuses of urban planning and urban design that were coincident with the apogee of modernism as a fashionable architectural style. That style’s tendency toward “clean-slate” site planning and elevated freestanding structures was used to provide an intellectual veneer to political acts of demolition of urban fabric. [Landmarking is] an instinct to protect that which is seen to be threatened, vulnerable, and cast aside. But here too the foregrounding of the landmark can come at the expense of other elements of the built environment that are also essential. In our practice, we cherish the so-called background building: the robust and resilient building block of the streetscape’s critical mass that can—because there is so much of it—withstand a lot of culling. But only so much. The unorthodox historic preservation scholar, artist, and