Lyndhurst, Kykuit and Glass House
I am just back from New York and meetings of the Historic Sites of the National Trust for Historic Preservation where we welcomed our brand new Vice President of Historic Sites, Estevan Rael-Gálvez. I also got the chance to see three of the National Trust Historic Sites, starting with perhaps the greatest Gothic Revival house in America, Lyndhurst.
Designed in two stages by Alexander Jackson Davis for two owners, Lyndhurst is best known as the onetime home of Gilded Age robber baron Jay Gould, and its architecture reflects the ostentation and chutzpah of the man who created the first “Black Friday” in the stock market 130 years ago. It has been a Trust property open to the public since 1965, and many hikers and bikers pass by daily as they ramble along the Hudson River. Continue Reading
Memories of Ireland
Portumna Castle, 2002
This blog only began in August of 2005, by which time I was already well into my work with the Weishan Heritage Valley in Yunnan, China, which I write about here often. But before China we used to take students to Ireland, under the auspices of the Burren College of Art and the government heritage agency, the Duchas. These trips (in 1998, 2000 and 2002) focused on preserving Portumna Castle, a fascinating Jacobean building that stands historically on the cusp between the fortified tower house and the emerging Classical manor house. In a sense, it is a Classical manor house with gun loops and machicolations: Renaissance refinement but with the option of drowning guests in boiling oil. Continue Reading
Do We Really Want Authenticity?
Shoso-in, 8th century temple pavilion at Nara, photographed 2004.
“Authenticity” is a word we keep coming back to in the world of cultural heritage conservation. The concept of authenticity lies at the centerpiece of the international charters that have defined preservation practice since the 1930s, and especially since the shift toward “intangible cultural heritage” that began with the Nara document in 1994.
Authenticity is a key aspect of how visitors encounter and experience historic sites. In our work in the Weishan Heritage Valley in China, we stress the value to the heritage tourist of authenticity. This is an argument for maintaining local businesses along the Southern Silk Road in Weishan, rather than removing them for tourist shops, as has been done in Lijiang, a World Heritage Site that experienced catastrophic tourist development and became an economic monoculture. Continue Reading
Palm Springs Modernism Week
Palm Springs tramway gas station, Frey and Chambers, 1962
I have seen the future of historic preservation, and it is Mid-century Modernism. It isn’t just the influence of Mad Men or Dwell, which recently celebrated its first decade. The writing was on the wall in the 1990s when Anne Sullivan, who replaced me as Director of the Historic Preservation Program at SAIC, started her class “From Lustron to Neon: Preserving the Recent Past” and within two years it was the most popular elective EVER. I managed to get my work on architect Barry Byrne into a Mid-Century panel in 2002 at the Society of Architectural Historians Conference, thanks to Victoria Young and Christine Madrid French, and Chris is now the Director of Trust Modern, a supporter of Palm Springs Modernism Week, which draws quadruple digits to the desert oasis to feast on the glories of steel cantilevers, ribbed concrete and floor-to-ceiling glass. Continue Reading
The Past is Hideous
From the magazine of the National Trust for Historic Preservation:
“We shall be guilty of serious malfeasance if we do not seek to preserve for later generations the best and the most typical examples of those decades, using the same regard that we give to distinguished examples of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Everyone thinks that the architecture, decorative arts, costumes and similar products of their immediate predecessors are hideous…” Continue Reading
What is Modern?
In Beverly Hills they just demolished the 1961 Friar’s Club. In Chicago the big preservation issue is Bertrand Goldberg’s 1975 Prentice Women’s Hospital. Yet for many people, the idea of preserving buildings of the Recent Past is anathema. Often the dividing line is a generational one: our historic preservation students in their 20s and 30s have been excited about 1960s and 1970s architecture for a long time. Many people in their 50s and 60s are not.
There is an old saw that you don’t want to preserve something you saw built, but that is certainly not true for me. I got a camera when I was eight and took pictures of the not-yet-complete John Hancock tower in Chicago, and just over 20 years later there I was in front of it helping with a press conference to save a 21-year old building, already an icon of its city. Continue Reading
iFacebook progress
This blog has occasionally taken issue with technology, especially when that technology seems designed not to facilitate a solution but simply to move product. But technology and desire, as Apple have shown us time and again, are fiercely interpenetrated, and often the hype of a technological advance like the iPod, iPhone or iPad is actually matched by category-creating performance. Suddenly we have a need we never had before.
Now the moralists and ideologists will fret that the new technology will transform us so much we will lose our moral or ideological compass, unless we can maintain control over the technology. That is the meme driving fantasies from H.G. Wells through the Terminator and the Matrix. If that idea makes you feel better, go ahead and have it. But it is wrong. Of course the technology changes us, it always has. Continue Reading
2012 and the End of Linear Time
The world is quite rapidly becoming a single place with a single, albeit multifaceted and sometimes contradictory culture. Yet the culture shock is alive and well and modes of apprehending the world often remain bound in the tunnelvisions of particular cultures.
When we plan our School of the Art Institute of Chicago student study trips to the Weishan Heritage Valley in Yunnan, China, we account for culture shock in the pacing and length of the trip, because sometimes you just gotta have a Starbucks or a Snickers bar no matter how much you desire to broaden yourself. Continue Reading
Authenticity, Ascetism and Christmas History
In Charlie Brown’s Christmas, the plot revolves around the commercialization of Christmas and the need to find its “true meaning,” which in that case and most others refers to the biblical story. We might see this 1960s vision of Christmas commercialization as a reaction to the deliberate and pervasive fostering of the consumer economy in post-World War II America, but the fact of the matter is that Christmas stories about its “true meaning” have been prevalent since at least the middle of the 19th century. BY the mid-20th we had “It’s a Wonderful Life”, the honest loving George Bailey contrasting with Mr. Potter as Mammon’s own archangel. It’s there in “Scrooged” again in 1988. Continue Reading
The Next American City: A Response
By Vince Michael and Anthea Hartig
We regrettably missed Charles Buki’s Next American City speech at the National Preservation Conference in Austin, but studied it and it is a provocative scorcher, as the self-described “community developer” no doubt intended (see for yourself at www.czb.org and http://www.czb.org/blog/2010/10/comments-at-the-national-trust-for-historic-preservation/). Buki congenially opens with his denouncing of the label preservationist, but goes on to share his valuable critique of our built environment – and of preservation’s seeming lack of care about community and over-privileging of architecture and its rehabilitation. We here writing don’t have the luxury of eschewing the preservationist label, although we are both active in the discursive movement afoot to change that label (see Forum Journal, Spring 2010, focused on “What’s Next for Historic Preservation,” in particular Donovan Rypkema’s headlining article, Michael’s and Muniz/Hartig’s pieces therein and the follow-up Forum On-Line discussion with Rypkema and Vince Michael.
Buki’s overall critique of our social built environment finds it Koyaanisqatsi-esque—an out of balance set of places in which interdependencies and interconnections have been lost. He also argued convincingly that distinctions between city and suburb are artificial and not helpful, especially in the wake of our efforts to rebuild such places through preservation, new urbanism, or even “old” urbanism, about which we couldn’t agree more, but for reasons different than his. Here goes. Continue Reading