Architecture Here and There

Illustrations: Soldier Field, in Chicago, with the alien addition that led to the stadium's removal from the National Register of Historic Places; John Carter Brown Library on Brown campus in Providence, with 1991 addition; Buddy Cianci; Renzo Piano's proposed tower in Turin, Italy

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Buddy Cianci's reputation as a friend of historic preservation (let's grant him that) lapsed briefly at the "Transform Providence" conference in the year 2000, during the mayoral term between his two felony convictions. He told an audience of design professionals that they should not let Providence become a "museum."

Well, who could disagree with that? Providence must remain a living place, not a stage set of dead buildings preserved in glass exhibit cases. Mayor Cicilline today is equally adamant that Providence not become a "museum." So am I.

But when Cianci said "museum," many preservationists heard this instead: "new buildings in old styles" -- styles that preservation organizations were created to protect. Cianci had been all for that in the 1990s, supporting the mall and criticizing new designs in Capital Center that rejected the city's architectural heritage. But most preservation pros were against it, and still are.

Cianci could have used a primer on how to interpret their obfuscatory language. Steven Semes has just written such a primer, called The Future of the Past: A New Ethic for Historic Preservation, Architecture and Urbanism (Norton, 2009).

For example, Semes targets for clarification the word "historicism." Many preservationists consider "historicism" an insult to be hurled at any new building in an old style. Actually, it is an academic term for studying old buildings as "documents of their time," irrelevant for building today. "For historicists," he writes, "the notion that style might be independent of historical sequence -- that one might legitimately build in a particular style decades or even centuries after it first arose -- violates the legibility of the historical process. . . .

"This," Semes continues, "is the source of the common modernist distaste for stylistic revivals. Subsequent appearances of a style -- Colonial Revival works from the early 20th Century, for example -- are therefore considered inauthentic and labeled as 'pastiche.' . . . To the historicist such stylistic anachronism is seen as a form of fakery. Consequently, current preservation policies discourage restorations or reconstructions that might create 'a false sense of historical development,' as expressed in the Secretary of the Interior's Standards for Rehabilitation. . . .

"But that," declares Semes, "is not what a style properly is. A style is like a literary genre that may be employed at various times and for various reasons, persisting and changing in the development of a literature. . . . To build in a historical style is not to pretend to be living in another time; nor is it an attempt to deceive. It is an exploration of a [language of form] that may have application in and relevance to any number of times and places, even far removed from its original appearance."

[Why is the 1991 addition (to right of original in photo) to the John Carter Brown Library (1904) at Brown illegitimate in the eyes of preservationist hardliners? It is, in fact, a fine example of how the new can be differentiated from the old without sacrificing historical context to modernist/preservationist orthodoxy.]

By embracing a dubious historicist approach to architecture, preservationists unwittingly promote what Semes calls "the decontextualization of historic buildings -- they become museum artifacts instead of remaining part of our living world." Exactly what Cianci thought he was against!

"Why," asks Semes in a series of penetrating questions, "should allowing a place to evolve as it always had in the past be considered 'false'? What if the historicist scheme of historical periods with their unique and exclusive styles is a fiction? What if there is no progress in architecture apart from the technical progress that comes from advances in engineering or the response to new programmatic needs? If there is a Zeitgeist, why should it necessarily lead to an iconoclastic rejection of traditions instead of a renewal of them?"

"It is not," notes Semes, "the idea of progress -- in the sense of reasonable improvements in technology or civic and social life -- that critics of modernist architecture question, but the presumption that progress can be embodied only in certain architectural forms believed by the avant-garde to represent our current stage in the historicist narrative. . . ."

"Renzo Piano," he adds by way of example, "recently responded to popular resistance to his proposed glass skyscraper in Turin by characterizing his critics as being 'afraid of the future,' as if it were beyond dispute that 'the future' and his designs were synonymous. Undoubtedly, it is not the future per se that frightens Piano's critics, but the prospect of a future decided and enforced by architects and their powerful corporate clients without consulting the people whose lives are affected, and showing no respect for the historic center whose beauty will be diminished by the new tower. In a culture that pays lip service to nonconformity and the questioning of authority, the power of architectural elites has yet to be subject to the kind of public questioning now typically directed at political and economic ones."

When Buddy Cianci graduated from prison to radio a few years ago, I suggested that this might be a good role for him to play. So far as I know, he has not yet taken up the calling.

David Brussat is a member of The Journal's editorial board (dbrussat@projo.com). His blog on projo.com is called Architecture Here and There.

 Tags  Architecture Buddy Cianci Future of the Past Preservation Providence RI Steven Semes

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