Eeven if Koolhaas is a bit "out there", criticism on preservation resonates with many and preservationists are often denounced in similar terms as the environmentalists ("tree huggers"- "building huggers").
We can legitimately ask ourselves, what preservation is supposed to affect, how it should be handled and whether it has become a tool of political fights that should be resolved with other weapons and in other arenas, the very point Goldhagen makes.
In my opinion, a good city, no doubt, needs to be able to change, innovate and even provoke at times.
However the city is nothing without its citizens. For its residents the good city also needs to provide comfort, orientation and continuity. Rampant economic obsolescence forcing ever more rapid change requires a counter-weight to protect the cultural heritage and identity of the community.
It would be intriguing to apply these thoughts to the battles about the "Superblock" in Baltimore, a case where preservationists wage a battle against developers over preservation of buildings, meaning and use; thus it is clearly a case were preservation has filled a breach created by lack of good urban planning.
June 10, 2011 (New York Times)
Death by Nostalgia
By SARAH WILLIAMS GOLDHAGEN
THE modern historic preservation movement started in New York City in the early 1960s, when a band of locals pushed the issue into popular awareness with their unsuccessful effort to block the destruction of the old Pennsylvania Station.
Now, nearly a half-century later, New York is home to the most high-profile attack on the movement yet: in a recent exhibition at the New Museum, the architect Rem Koolhaas accused preservationists of aimlessly cherry-picking the past; of destroying people’s complex sense of urban evolution; and, most damningly, of bedding down with private developers to create gentrified urban theme parks.
Some of Mr. Koolhaas’s criticisms are on target — but his analysis is wildly off-base. It’s not preservation that’s at fault, but rather the weakness, and often absence, of other, complementary tools to manage urban development, like urban planning offices and professional, institutionalized design review boards, which advise planners on decisions about preservation and development.
It’s that lack, and the outsize power of private developers, that has turned preservation into the unwieldy behemoth that it is today.
Some historical context is in order. As American cities expanded rapidly between 1890 and 1930, urban dwellers and municipal governments realized that developers, who were building ever-larger and ever-taller buildings, would never reliably serve the public interest.
So cities tried to strike back: Manhattan’s hulking Equitable Building, which blocks street-level sunlight practically all day, helped provoke New York’s 1916 zoning resolution that required significant setbacks for tall buildings.
Then, in 1926, the Supreme Court ruled that municipalities could regulate the use of private property based on the broader public interest. Professional city planning was born, but systems to vet building and urban design quality at the federal, state and local levels — common in countries and cities across Europe — were never institutionalized.
By midcentury, professional urban planners were developing and sometimes designing large-scale, long-term regional and urban plans and helping write land-use and other laws to govern urban development’s shape and future.
But without design-review mechanisms, their output of low-quality public housing and ill-conceived megablocks soon turned the public against them. By the late 1960s, an emergent populist, antigovernment sentiment among voters began to shift power back into private hands.
City governments, suffering the economic downturns of the 1970s and ’80s, gave ever more leeway to real estate developers, and ever more voice and political power to hyperlocal community boards; both groups typically focused on their own narrow and usually short-term interests rather than the broader, long-term public good.
As a result, historic preservation laws, which by the late 1970s were increasingly popular in a country bored by modernism and excited by nostalgia, became, de facto, one of city governments’ most powerful instruments for influencing private development.
Tax-starved cities, inspired by earlier preservation projects like Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco and Faneuil Hall in Boston, began to use preservation to create so-called target destinations; New York’s first foray was the initially successful South Street Seaport.
Savvy developers soon began collaborating with cities and preservationists, co-opting the movement for their own interests while capitalizing on the public’s nostalgia for yesteryear. Developers became experts at including just enough of the old — a facade here, a foyer there — to ease the approval process and even win sizable tax breaks on their projects.
In other words, preservation morphed into a four-headed monster: a planning tool, a design review tool, a development tool and a tool to preserve genuinely valuable old neighborhoods and buildings. Today decisions about managing urban development are frequently framed as decisions about what and what not to preserve, with little sense of how those decisions affect the surrounding neighborhood.
Worse, these decisions are mostly left to the whims of overly empowered preservation boards, staffed by amateurs casting their nets too widely and indiscriminately. And too many buildings are preserved not because of their historic value or aesthetic significance, but because of political or economic deal-making.
Instead of bashing preservation, we should restrict it to its proper domain. Design review boards, staffed by professionals trained in aesthetics and urban issues and able to influence planning and preservation decisions, should become an integral part of the urban development process. At the same time, city planning offices must be returned to their former, powerful role in urban policy.
That’s the way things work in Europe, where vibrant contemporary cities like London, Berlin, Paris and almost any city in the Netherlands blend old and new without effacing their normal evolutionary processes.
As these cities demonstrate, preservation should be one of several instruments necessary for creating livable, attractive and vibrant urban spaces and architecture. Otherwise, in the hands of weak local governments, powerful real-estate interests and untrained panels, it is indeed an impediment to the healthy modernization of our cities: a recipe for aesthetic insipidity and urban incoherence.
Sarah Williams Goldhagen is the architecture critic for The New Republic.
Background:
“Cronocaos” is an exhibition about the increasingly urgent topic of preservation in architecture and urbanism by OMA / Rem Koolhaas and organized by the New Museum. First presented at the 2010 Venice Biennale, at the invitation of Kazuyo Sejima, Commissioner, “Cronocaos” takes place at the New Museum’s 3,600-square-foot, partially renovated, ground-floor space at 231 Bowery. It examines the growing “empire” of preservation and analyzes the consequences of these regimes for how we build, rebuild, and how we remember.
Twelve percent of the planet now falls under various systems of natural and cultural preservation. According to Koolhaas, heritage is becoming more and more the dominant metaphor for our lives today—a situation he calls “Cronocaos.” Koolhaas seeks to find what the future of our memory will look like, and how our obsession with heritage is creating an artificial re-engineered version of our memory. Lacking a set of coherent strategies or policies and generally not engaged by architects and designers, preservation is an under-examined topic, but increasingly relevant as we enter an age of “Cronocaos,” in which the boundaries between preservation, construction, and demolition collapse, forever changing the course of linear evolution of time.
“Cronocaos” includes historic objects and photographs; analysis of the rapid growth of preserved urban and natural territories; and a timeline of OMA projects that have confronted the issue of preservation over thirty-five years of practice, including the 2001 proposed extension to the Whitney Museum of American Art and the curatorial master plan for The State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. Each project within the OMA timeline will take the form of a postcard for visitors to peel off the wall and take home. By the end of the exhibition, preservation and depletion will be evident in the exhibition itself. Reflecting the exhibition’s themes, the former restaurant-supply space will be visually transformed into two very different areas: one side will remain “preserved” as it was while inhabited by the restaurant supply store; the other will be minimally renovated.
Visitors may purchase tickets to see “Cronocaos” at the Visitor Services desk at the New Museum, at 235 Bowery.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5ACWyzBwUk&feature=related
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