Architecture Here and There

Illustrations: Above, Leon Krier parody (1985) of London't historic Downing Street with modernist intervention (p. 113) (From The Future of the Past, 2009, W.W. Norton); below, front cover of book, with renovated Soldier Field, in Chicago

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In last week's column, "Speaking truth to preservation," I promised (or threatened) to introduce preservationists to a new book, The Future of the Past, that describes why they are so reluctant to address the greatest threat to beautiful old buildings and historic places.

The book, by architect and architectural historian Steven Semes, who runs the Rome Studies Program for the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture, is subtitled "A Conservation Ethic for Architecture, Urbanism and Historic Preservation." It asks professionals in those fields to re-examine the ethic that many of them embrace today, which sees historic buildings as "documents of their time" with "little relevance to how we design buildings and cities today." It is an ethic that is robbing the public of its beautiful places.

My review of Semes's book ran on Dec. 17. I challenged architects and preservationists to read it. In last week's column I renewed that challenge. I will prod these professionals -- especially officials paid by, working for and accountable to the public -- to defend their beliefs.

"My aim in this book," writes Semes, "is neither to demonize modernist design nor to argue that traditional architecture is right and modernist architecture wrong. Rather, I want to set out as clearly as possible the differences between them and why I believe the two traditions are antithetical. They cannot easily be combined or hybridized in the way that Gothic and the classical were from the 15th to the 18th centuries, for example. In that case, the Gothic and Renaissance or Baroque styles were different in their respective formal languages but their underlying principles were fundamentally reconcilable. To the contrary, when traditional and modernist architecture come together, we find an opposition of aims as well as procedures, of fundamental premises as well as forms. This opposition has complicated all attempts to synthesize or harmonize new and old architecture in historic settings."

The average person instinctively perceives the incompatibility, but for decades practicing architects, architectural historians and historic preservationists have managed to convince civic leaders responsible for our built environment that in modern times only "modern" architecture is appropriate to build -- even in historic settings.

How did this view come to be dominant?

"The influential writings of [architectural historians] Sigfried Giedion and Nikolaus Pevsner presented the genesis of modernist architecture as the inevitable product of the spirit of the age," writes Semes, "and then retroactively identified as 'pioneers' those historical designers whose work seemed to point toward modernism."

It may be natural that architectural historians focus on buildings designed by architects who defy the conventions of architectural history. But to teach that the exception is more important than the rule in architectural history skews students' understanding of architecture's past and present. Most buildings, including those that tease out the creative potential of time-honored principles, fall well within architecture's conventions.

The evolution of architecture is far too complex to be categorized into stylistic "periods" with any degree of academic rigor. "Despite Pevsner's claims to the contrary," writes Semes by way of example, "it was because someone invented rib vaulting that the Gothic style emerged, not because the spirit of the time required it."

If historians, examining man's history in hindsight, are unable to use scholarship and language to agree on the significance of particular historical epochs long ago, how can architects be fairly expected to "express" their own era in the far blunter terminology of glass, steel and concrete?

The idea is absurd, and it is no surprise that the architecture arising from it is essentially absurdist, nihilistic and egocentric, as are the principles of historic preservation and architecture criticism that flow from it. (Anyway, if we do live in an era of turmoil and decadence, architecture should seek not to reflect it accurately but to change it.)

"Critics," writes Semes, "often praise a new work by saying, 'And here the architect calls into question what a door can be' -- or a window, a bathroom fixture, or a building. This calling into question of what might otherwise be taken for granted exerts a strong fascination [in] contemporary culture, but it precludes the formation of a stable visual language or set of models, without which there can be no consistent criteria for judging the merits of new designs or sustaining a formal tradition, to say nothing of maintaining dialogue between old and new in historic settings."

I hope these quotations from The Future of the Past will whet readers' appetite for upcoming columns on the book -- and even more important, encourage them to read the book itself.

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

 Tags  Architecture Future of the Past Leon Krier Modernism Preservation Steven Semes

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