Historic Preservation Goes Awry

The architectural scheme for the surrounding 600,000-square-foot project calls for replicating the incinerator's contours. The result is an unappealing agglomeration variously clad in brick, stone, and glass. The project also includes three undistinguished nineteenth-century houses on the site, adding to the visual clutter but serving to keep the preservationist bureaucracy happy. The incinerator will house the hotel's reception area, restaurant, and a couple of meeting rooms. The smokestack's lower portion may serve as a wine cellar, while providing diversion for people lining up for tickets and popcorn in the multiplex's lobby.

The Georgetown Incinerator Project, as it is fetchingly dubbed, is but one indication that historic preservation in America has gone seriously awry. Preservationists seem increasingly incapable of separating the wheat from the chaff.

The preservationist impulse wasn't born yesterday. When the great poet Petrarch returned to his hometown of Arezzo, in central Italy, he was touched that the local authorities had decreed no change should be made to the house where he was born. The year was 1350.

The modern preservation movement's roots lie in the estimable desire to maintain buildings and sites that have extraordinary significance for various reasons: Either they are associated with great men and women or great events (as with George Washington's Mount Vernon home, Civil War battlefields, or the immigration facilities on Ellis Island); or they have archaeological importance (as with the pre-Columbian Casa Grande ruins in Arizona); or they are architecturally distinguished (as in the case of Manhattan's Grand Central Station). In recent years, though, preservationists have wandered into much murkier waters.

Political correctness is often a factor. Thus the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, a dark little dive, has been listed in the National Register of Historic Places because it is a gay bar associated with the cause of homosexual rights, since its clientele rioted during a police raid in 1969.

Yet preservation's problems run deeper than politics. With increasing frequency, preservationists fail to make the sometimes difficult but always necessary distinction between what is of historic importance and what is merely old. The term "historic" implies a demanding standard. Leaving aside sites of major archeological significance, a building or place specially designated "historic" should somehow be intertwined with our highest ideals. A place like Grand Central qualifies because its beauty and magnificence are emotionally linked to noble aspirations.

The problem with current preservationist philosophy is that many of its exponents, like most of America's cultural elite, have abandoned the idealism long characteristic of Western civilization, an idealism which nurtured enduring conventions in art along with enduring truths in human affairs. This idealism has been supplanted by a relativism which leads preservationists down a slippery slope. If a gorgeous classical performing arts center in Providence, Rhode Island is worthy of preservation, then why not a modernist Denver convention hall that might have been designed by Darth Vader?

Indeed, James Marston Fitch, the late founder of Columbia University's historic preservation program, championed a "growing concern for preserving all aspects of material culture." This documentary ethos sucks the significance right out of the word "historic."

Similarly, a pamphlet published by the Historic Preservation Commission in Montgomery County, Maryland, declares that "At its most basic level, historic preservation reminds us of the way our lives have changed over the years." This sociological orientation led the National Trust for Historic Preservation to put the last remaining original McDonald's on its annual list of America's most endangered "historic" places. What's historic about that edifice? Why preserve it? There would surely be plenty of photographs for interested parties.

Such thinking led the Denver office of the National Trust to campaign in vain for saving Currigan Hall, a convention center erected in 1969 that was slated for replacement. Currigan's rusted exterior steel panels enclosed a 100,000-square-foot, column-free floor beneath an overhead steel frame. Like many modernist buildings, Currigan was an ugly contraption, not a civic treasure. And it was not popular. The preservationists' main argument for saving Currigan from the scrap-heap-they urged it be moved to a new site-was the fact that, when built, it boasted the world's largest rigid space frame. The space frame, observed Jim Lindberg of the National Trust, "sets the building in its time very well." So what?

There is one thing to be said about such elastic notions of historic significance: They greatly broaden job opportunities for preservationists. Michael Tomlan, director of Cornell's graduate program in historic preservation, calls for preservationists to move beyond the great house and the historic tar-paper shack and add "the split level and ranch house" to their protected rosters. Writing in Forum Journal, published by the National Trust, Tomlan asks, "Why shouldn't sports facilities be of interest? Concern for diners, drive-ins, and bus terminals has already given way to airports and truck stops, and even shipping container ports. This is appropriate, and spells a bright future for preservation graduates."

This sounds like some bureaucrat's tawdry vision of turf-expansion. After all, once those truck stops and container ports are deemed historic, they will need to be "documented." Then bottled in one form of preservationist formaldehyde or other. Then "professionally interpreted" for visitors willing to revisit life at its most mundane.

Some preservationists recognize that this kind of thinking leads to trouble. But they are hard pressed to offer an alternative-because advocates like Tomlan are simply taking the cultural relativism that saturates their movement to its logical conclusion. Indeed, preservationist buzzwords like "cultural landscapes" and "intangible heritage" suggest that the curatorial impulse, in theory at least, knows no boundaries. Employing the broadest, most meaningless, and most pretentiously anthropological interpretations of what is worth saving, academics are redefining the value of buildings according to strikingly arbitrary criteria.

So far as architectural aesthetics are concerned, the preservationist notion of "walking through history" leads to the fallacy that the traditional architectural styles which have given us our most beautiful buildings are now buried in the past. So when Denver made "landmarks" of dozens of older, traditionally designed buildings in its central downtown district recently, the preservationists were not about to suggest that these edifices set standards for future downtown buildings. The classic structures merely promote "the special sense of past time and place."

Indeed, the long-term vision espoused by preservationists and an influential business group, the Downtown Denver Partnership, is of the city's central downtown district as an architectural museum whose specimens testify not to enduring artistic norms, but to an aimless process of cultural evolution. Disappointment over the loss of Currigan Hall, meanwhile, has been salved by the preservation of a dismal city office building-a 1950s international-style horizontal box-that could have and should have been put out of its misery as part of a new construction project.

The confusion in preservationist ranks is all but written in stone, thanks to the U.S. Secretary of the Interior's Standards for Rehabilitation. First issued in 1976, the Standards have largely shaped preservation activity since. In order to qualify for federal tax credits, rehabilitation of "historic" properties must adhere to the Standards, which have been incorporated into local design review guidelines across the land.

The Standards decree that each historic property "shall be recognized as a physical record of its time, place, and use." Thus the Georgetown trash incinerator is saved, apparently to remind us what a gritty industrial waterfront looked like in earlier days. I suggest such documentary evidence belongs in a book. The incinerator has nothing to do with Georgetown's essential character. Its demolition should have been a matter of course as the riverfront area was improved.

One of the Standards' most harmful stipulations is that any addition to a rehabilitated edifice must be readily recognizable as historically distinct, in order to avoid unscientific confusion with the original. This is absurd. Let's say an architect adds a couple of stories to an elegant 1890s hotel in converting it into a luxury apartment residence. The architect designs a seamless addition that contributes to the building's aesthetic appeal. Most of us would say hooray. But the architect can forget about a federal tax credit. He has sinned against preservationist orthodoxy. He has "faked history."

Of course, if the architect had done precisely the same thing back in the 1930s, his addition would be regarded as part and parcel of the building's historic character. But today, he must tack on an obviously modernist glass wall or some other sort of unharmoniously "contemporary" appendage.

The lesson is that when you strip a humanistic discipline like architecture of its fundamental concern with beauty and substitute a commitment to fashionable theories, you get ugliness. For modernists, however, it is a godsend that preservationists have lost sight of timeless esthetic standards. Preservationists increasingly subscribe to the silly credo that for a modern building to be "authentic," it must be modernist. Resorting to great classical or Gothic precedents can only lead to "faked history."

Such foolishness explains why residents of the Woodley Park neighborhood in northwest Washington, D.C., recently saw their historic-district status backfire. A high-profile development project involved incorporating a turn-of-the-century townhouse designed in the French classical manner into a new office-retail building. Neighborhood residents strongly preferred the new architecture to be traditional. The District's historic preservation board, however, along with the federal government's Commission of Fine Arts, signed off on an unpopular and unattractive modernist scheme. Though the new construction lacked the original building's graceful proportions and handsome ornamental detail, it was more "authentic" according to current preservationist orthodoxy. As a result, that fine old townhouse was not preserved so much as submerged in low-grade construction.

Ironically, it was widespread hostility to modernism that made preservation a major cultural phenomenon in the first place. The proximate cause was the demolition in 1963 of Manhattan's Pennsylvania Station, Charles Follen McKim's classical masterpiece, and its replacement with a dismal specimen of "urban renewal."

Unfortunately, professional preservationists, like architectural historians in general, seem increasingly disinterested in what made buildings like the old Penn Station inspire passersby. In a colloquium published in the National Trust's Preservation magazine, Columbia preservationist Fitch advanced the thesis that "there are inherent contradictions in trying to make pre-industrial handicraft modes of building a paradigm for the architecture of a technologically advanced age." Other enemies of traditional architectural styles love to dismiss them as "imitative" or "derivative."

By such standards, the beloved Penn Station was a titanic cultural no-no. Dedicated in 1910, McKim's masterpiece was indeed derived, in part, from earlier examples-its magnificent General Waiting Room was modeled on the decidedly pre-industrial Baths of Caracalla in Rome. The monstrosity that took Penn Station's place, on the other hand, was designed in a thoroughly "contemporary," industrialized idiom.

But the old Penn Station successfully integrated classical architecture and its decorative arts and crafts with new steel-frame construction methods. Unlike trendy modernist architects, McKim did not seek to incarnate the Spirit of the Age at Penn Station. He was not remotely interested in building a machine-for-catching-a-train-in. Like other great architects, he reached back across space and time to the greatest achievements in the annals of design. And his end result, with the idealistic understanding of art it reflected, served to enrich the lives of millions.

For modernist critics like Herbert Muschamp of the New York Times, a return to the traditional design epitomized by Penn Station and Grand Central could only serve "to reinforce compliance with outmoded social norms." The relativists try to bury the obvious fact that the great building traditions offer beauty, while modernist architecture routinely serves up ugliness. The ignorant public, they moan, does not "understand" modernist architecture. But a building that needs to be "understood" in an intellectual sense is, in all likelihood, artistically dead on arrival.

Current preservationist orthodoxy offers no antidote to this situation. Worse yet, it scorns contemporary architects who, like McKim, resort to historic precedents in designing new buildings. The town planners, for example, take their cues from Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, who are trying to encourage pedestrian-scale, traditionally styled neighborhoods that defined American communities from colonial times until the 1930s. The idealism inherent in Duany and Plater-Zyberk's reliance on historic precedent is simply lost on trendy pundits. For those afflicted with the relativist plague, such reliance on the wisdom of the past can only be a matter of "nostalgia."

The truth is, a great many cherished "historic" districts across our land are just decent neighborhoods that happen to have been built before World War II. Preservationists deserve our gratitude for rescuing any number of these places from destruction at the hands of urban renewers and highway engineers. The National Trust, moreover, deserves special recognition for helping revive hundreds of neglected Main Streets, while spreading the word about their economic potential.

But when it comes to the ongoing dearth of satisfying new architecture, the preservation movement is part of the problem rather than the solution. Were it not for the modernist superstitions afflicting architects and preservationists alike, we would knock old buildings down when they no longer suited our needs, sometimes even very fine buildings like that classical townhouse in Woodley Park would go because we would be confident that we could replace them with something just as good or even better.

Deciding what to save in our built environment is important. But what we build from scratch is of infinitely greater importance. To the extent preservationists have convinced themselves that America is just one big museum of "material culture," where "authenticity" matters more than beauty, and where traditional architecture is outdated and at odds with the modern condition, they are helping make America uglier.

We must rebuild our confidence in our civilization's ability to produce great architecture. Thanks to planners like Duany and Plater-Zyberk, plus a new generation of classical architects on the way up, and the public's strong instinctual preference for traditional buildings, we have an opportunity to bring new life to American design. But we have a long way to go.

TAE contributing writer Catesby Leigh is a Washington, D.C.-based architectural critic.