Word: preservationism
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The '60s, a generous, hopeful time, produced terrible urban policy and dispiriting architecture, while in the '80s, a gilded, ungenerous age, the nation is saving buildings and repairing cities. An uncomfortable irony, but preservation is a conservative movement. Thus it carries with it a whiff of complacency and rue.
Peter Beltemacchi, chairman of the department of city and regional planning at the high-modernist Illinois Institute of Technology, objects to the tendency toward the picturesque and fake rustic in today's preservation % passion. The Rouse Co.'s cleverly conceived "festival marketplace" developments in Baltimore, Boston and elsewhere can seem...
Indeed, the act of preservation -- poking around an old building, studying half-forgotten design principles up close, figuring out how to put the structure right, buttressing, straightening, sanding, replastering, painting -- is profoundly instructive. Restoring a 19th century house makes thoughtful architects and planners think differently about how they design new...
Take Donald Trump. Trump, who in 1980 pulled down and smashed a set of art deco bas reliefs from an old Fifth Avenue building ("They were stones with some engravings on them"), says today that "a lot of times preservation is used as an excuse to stop progress" and "as...
No, preservation has not been carried too far. The passion for good old downtowns has not yet got out of hand. The lessons of the past two decades have not been learned too well.