The only tech that works is advertising
I did not intend to write a third blog in a row complaining about technology, but here we are, in 2026 in the days of the slow internet. Lots of sludge getting in the way of getting work done. I have had to bring on social media managers for one of my non-profits and the advice in 2026 is you need to get the information out 5-7 days in advance if you have any hope of it finding its way into people’s feeds by the time of the event. Yes, you can “boost” it, which means making it an advertisement. Advertisements are the only part of the current technology ecosystem that works. Mostly.
Let’s say you want to read an article. You need to plan on 1-2 minutes of embedded, pop-up, banner and border ads for every 2-3 minutes of reading time. Thanks to their advanced design, you will accidentally click on one in every 25 or so interactions, and be brought to a horrible place you don’t want to be. If I read an article in a magazine or newspaper, I will read it about 40% faster because the ads are stationary.
The internet is slow. It used to be faster. That’s because of the ads.
Now, if I search in a browser for something, I FIRST get their branded AI bot, which gives you 80-85% accuracy of a middle of the road mediocre sampling of the issue in its most frequently discussed form. That is kind of fast, and somehow doesn’t have ads but I usually skip right to Wikipedia, which reads like an actual printed thing and gives me more information faster.
Advertising is the only aspect of technology where efficiency is maximized. Everything else – especially information – is much slower nowadays BECAUSE IT NEEDS TO BE so the advertisement ecosystem can function at highest efficiency.
My favorite aspect of the slow internet of 2026 is when your phone spies on you, hears you are looking at something – POS system, refrigerator filter, slide scanner, matcha or whatever – and then gives you five to ten thousand ads for that thing. Even after you already bought it. They haven’t figured that part out yet. Maybe they can sell you six.
Many of these ads are designed to put you to work for them. I have these FB ads for POS systems that have morphed into surveys – the original ad is blacked out and all it wants to know is how much I bill per year, and it won’t even give me a proper ad until I agree to go to work for them. I call it the GAG economy.
The POS system argybargy is quite hilarious because I realized today that I have two completely separate sales reps trying to sell me the same POS system, which was recommended by ANOTHER system (that is basically advertising) since they did not work with the billing system we are using. The most humorous part of this unending sales pitch is that I only agreed to talk to them because we are currently using four different systems for ticketing and donations and memberships. I wanted to reduce that number. Turns out, REDUCING THE NUMBER OF APPS you need to use is NOT part of the ecosystem. You need to buy more. Feed the machine. And 75-100 companies are selling one of them. But not all of them.
The inherent value of capitalism is its efficiency, but it has lost that in the internet era. All it can do is whomp you with more and more ads, because that feeds the machine the money it needs to run. But it is running very inefficiently. Like sludge.
The other HILARIOUS thing about contemporary inefficiency is that even ad-free apps COPY the sludgy rhythms of the advernet. I tried to open an email just now and lost 10-15 second because the email app has to send me a notification of the new email. So I have to WAIT for that notification to go away so I can finally open the email. 15 seconds gone and I don’t get that time back because even the app wants to advertise itself. At the expense of efficiency.
Every app wants to send you notifications, which would add an UNBELIEVABLE amount of time to every online task. You have 100 apps and they each want to be your one and only true love. And they are psychotic loves who don’t know when to let go or stand back.
And no one can figure out a better system that MORE ads and MORE texts and MORE notifications? Any engineers here, or are we dependent on MBAs who only know how to SCALE and not how to get things done?
Oh, and this blog thinks I can’t write. Not because I can’t, but because they want to sell me Yoast SEO. But that would slow me down. Why would I want that?
Giddyap!
LINKS to my last two blogs: AI SLOP and ARE AI THE SEA PEOPLES?
WEDNESDAY UPDATE:
This is how bad the algorithms are now that AI is driving everyone to the same lane on the same road. I’m in Google News curious about how the Chicago Cubs are doing in the wild-card race in MLB with only a few games left. Google provides me with a grid of FORTY EIGHT (48) articles, every single one of which is about how the games will be rescheduled due to the Nor’easter coming this weekend. That is the ONLY STORY. The one I want – which would be easy to find in an analog newspaper – does not satisfy the large learning model. How dumb.
Are AI The Sea Peoples?
Remember in the olden days for doctor’s visits you had to fill out all of these forms 15 minutes before the appointment and then fill them out again and then repeat them verbally after that? Thanks to technological advances, it now takes 30 minutes to fill out the same forms the same number of times because you also have to download two apps and create two passwords and four identity queries only to have the doctor tell you to lay off the technology because you have carpal tunnel syndrome.
Oh, and then they want you to fill out a survey. The process is demonstrably slower thanks to technology. That’s not precisely true – it is demonstrably slower because of all the ads and popups and other digital demons trying to monetize the technology. And then there is the technology trying to monetize itself by creating unnecessary layers. I get to update this website in WordPress, but with another website I work on, it was constructed in WordPress with another app called Elementor that someone got someone to pay for because it did something that the original app didn’t do and now we are back to 30 minutes for a 15 minute task.
There is so much sludge on the internet now that opening links takes forever – I was trying to register for a conference and by the time the form came up there were three because I must have hit the button three times in my impatience. Here’s my favorite: If you ever try to look at once of these listicles on Ranker or Weird History you better be sure that the list is no more than 12 items long, because otherwise the endless hulking sludge of ads will kill the listicle before you ever get to Number 13, leaving you with a whiteout screen with nothing on it. Only way out of the whiteout is to quit the app and reboot.
I think Odysseus was surfing the web rather than the Aegean and Tyrrhenian because he got whacked by more popups than my YouTube account. He goes from the 15 minute task pre-AI to the 30 minute task post-AI to 10 years getting from Troy to Ithaca without even visiting Saratoga Springs. At least at the movie theater all the ads were before the movie.
And since Odysseus the movie had a minutelong scandal a couple weeks back, here is my take:
As a historian, I am sometimes critical of movies that are replete with anachronisms (Braveheart) but on other occasions (Elizabeth and Marie Antoinette) they aren’t true to historical events but they somehow manage to capture the essence of the historical figure. So, I am not a purist, and I am less likely to be a purist about a lengthy lyric transmitted orally for five hundred years. The tiny fragment from the third century BC currently on display in New York City has three lines that aren’t in the standard text, so we are not dealing with hard evidence here. I do agree that Nolan removed the humor (and most of the sex) from the lyric, but he didn’t pervert or subvert the essence of the story. (also John Leguizamo steals everything he is in.). He also avoided a surprising amount of CGI, like in the Giants scene where he used actual people tall and short.
The Odyssey is set at the beginning of the Bronze Age collapse, caused by the ill-defined “Sea Peoples” referenced in the movie, which leads me to posit: AI are the Sea Peoples of today. AI are doing their best to precipitate our collapse through misinformation and the pandemic of endless mediocrity. Not to mention making everything take longer and go slower.
Now, if this is a parallel to the Bronze Age collapse, we should have first seen the collapse of the palatial economies and ensuing diaspora of craftspersons and landscapers. But the damn McMansions are still there with their armies of workers. Everywhere.
Nowadays we have a very visible ultrarich predator class, which would seem to parallel the Bronze Age rulers on their own private islands throughout the Aegean and Mediterranean, and, indeed, private islands are a thing. But their economic collapse has not happened. Granted, the predator class has seized power and is trying desperately to win a culture war by making everything dumber and gaudier.
And more boring. AI will like totally try to sell you the most popular thing even when you instruct it otherwise, because it is impressed ONLY be quantities of data. Not by quality. Quality can be singular and special and lonely, which is the opposite of a big dataset. So, I asked AI for “museums that only had a few objects.” AI gave me “tiny museums” like the Mmuseumm in New York which is an elevator shaft full of ordinary objects. I corrected its error and AI was very apologetic, acknowledged I was correct and then came up with a couple museums in the UK. So I had to prompt AI for a third time, telling it to look in Japan. It finally came up with the Teshima and Chichu, which is what I was looking for. It also corrected me that the Miho (below) actually has a large collection, even though it only displays a small number of items. So, three for me, one for AI.
Ok that AI adventure was a bit of a slog – hard to get away from the stuff that is highly advertised and thus a bigger dataset. I mean you could fix that, but that is not necessarily in the interest of the predator class – they need you dumb. And they need you to think AI graphics look good. If I was 13, I would think they look good. If I was a gamer, I would think they look like game graphics, which have a cachet. So, a contemporary counterpart of the Bronze Age collapse – a dumbing down of culture – does seem plausible.
Teshima art museum – home to one artwork. The artwork is also made of water. Like AI is. But less water.
Just learned today that AI can manage country and pop songs, but is a complete disaster with Baroque counterpoint. I guess music isn’t math after all…
AI Slop
The phrase “AI Slop” is already commonplace, and it inspires me to invent more neologisms like “Cry me a data center” or “Grok willing and the creek don’t pop-up”. I have written all 670 blogs over the last two decades without AI, or have I? I am a late-adopter with Post Technology Stress Disorder and you can see that in my blogs from the aughty-aughts. Heck, you can see it from a couple of months ago when I ranted about how real retail service companies cannot ever, ever change an old email or recognize a different phone number, no matter who is dead. And they are willing to give up months of revenue just to carry that rotting corpse further.
So what do I think of AI? My first reaction to AI writing was that it was like a 14-year-old who has been asked to turn in a three-page essay but only has one page of material. Repetitive. You see it in tons of social media posts which look like proper long-form discussions but hammer the emotional hinge of the story like six times in 400 words. That is the written version of the AI image that has the wrong number of fingers or arms. Of course, both of those examples are a year old so I suppose by now AI is like 15 and knows how to draw hands better.
This is a real life photo from 12 years ago no AI.
I have attended one workshop and one training in AI in the last 24 hours so here is what I learned, mostly from Huy Pham and Paul Kim, whom I first saw present on this issue almost a year ago in Arkansas.
AI is a marketing term for the latest iterations of pattern recognition technology. Basically it looks at large amounts of data and identifies patterns and recurring themes. So, like you learned in computer science 40 years ago – GIGO. Garbage in, garbage out. Huy and Paul work for APIAHiP (Asian and Pacific Islander Americans in Historic Preservation) and if they ask AI about Asian sites in the National Register of Historic Places and if AI looks at all 100,000 nominations and sees less than 1% it will tell you basically NO. There aren’t any. Not significant. Not important.
Since AI is basically pattern recognition, everything it produces will tend toward the mean, the median, the average and ordinary. It is not a place to look for exceptionalism or new ideas. Culturally, it has a flattening effect. What is new about it in the last few years – as opposed to the pattern recognition software of 20 and 30 years ago – is the Large Language Model. Basically you give it tonnes more examples. So it gets even meaner. It cannot provide conclusions, only predictions. It reflects what is common, not what is true. Garbage in, garbage out.
I guess I’m not a big fan
If you want the National Register of Historic Places to identify underrepresented stories, you need to do it yourself, because it requires not lots and lots of old data, but a new approach. You need to reconceptualize the process, which is not something in AI’s wheelhouse. Garbage in, garbage out.
“Hallucinations,” however, are in AI’s wheelhouse. They will confidently answer a nonsense question like “Who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1956?” and even provide fake citations from nonexistent journals, as we have seen recently. It seems the AI doesn’t know how to say “I don’t know” which is a prerequisite of real intelligence. It eagerly answers queries because – like the 14 year old – it can’t not. Even if it is hallucinating.
If you get the “Nobel Prize in Economics,” you will get it here, in Stockholm, but it will actually say Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, and it only began in 1969. Four of the five original Nobel prizes are also delivered in Stockholm under the terms of Alfred Nobel’s 1895 will, with the Peace Prize awarded in Oslo.
Presents predictions as conclusions. Repeats what is common rather than what is true. Hallucinates.
No wonder the predator class and the oligarchy are so enamored of it.
More microdosing and unlocked tranches than Sand Hill Road.
So, does AI work with historic preservation? I have always said that the beauty of historic preservation is that it treats every resource as an individual, with individual characteristics and individual significance that cannot be commodified. Zoning treats properties as a category, like grain being graded and loaded into a silo. It becomes a commodity sans terroir. Pattern recognition technology might be suited for zoning or other commodifying tasks, but telling the story of a place is specific and nonfungible.
Terroir.
So, to answer the question: AI can help if you need to find out how many 1926-29 Tudor Revival houses in the Monte Vista district have casement windows or how many National Historic Landmarks are shaped like elephants.
But if you are nominating a site with a story that has not been heard before – AI doesn’t know. Because it hasn’t been told. And it doesn’t know what it doesn’t know.
Why doesn’t someone get AI to do the dishes or wash the floor? Something useful, you know?
Truth is no stranger to fiction
There is actual information on the internet amid the drivel and some of it challenges our basic conception of how media works. The idea is that something happens in real life, and then it is conveyed through media. From 30,000 year old cave paintings to AI modified images, we assume that the message and the medium are antecedent to the act. Except that the message IS the medium, and there are a surfeit of examples where the media created its own reflection in real life and then people perpetuated it as ritual or tradition. In other words, the media message came first and real life second.
Peer pressure c. 1000 BC
I was just reading on History Facts about how the practice of kneeling on one knee (ahem, the left please) became a tradition in marriage proposals. While kneeling to a superior power or religious entity (ahem, the right please) goes back to Alexander the Great and infused the feudal era, the modern marriage proposal actually derives from … the movies. Specifically, silent movies, since the economy of kneeling action meant you didn’t need to waste dialogue cards on the act. Yes, kneeling was an aspect of courtly (often Platonic) love, but the specific association with marriage proposals postdates film.
A more recent example is illustrative. In the 2015 James Bond film Spectre, the titular character’s opening sequence happens within Mexico City’s Day of the Dead parade. Except there never had been one. Then the Mexican government launched an actual Day of the Dead parade – inspired by the movie – in 2016. In the decade since it has become a huge tourist attraction. The scene was also a nod to the Junkanoo scene in Nassau Thunderball (1965), but of course Junkanoo already existed.
Twenty years ago, the book The Da Vinci Code inspired mass tourism to various sites in France, Scotland and Rome to the extent that places like Saint-Sulpice Church had to post signs countering the book’s conspiracy theories. Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland got 38,000 visitors a year before the book, 80,000 a year after and 176,000 after the film came out. It still gets 140,000 visitors a year, with over half citing the book and film as the reason.
Twenty two years ago the movie Sideways caused California vintners to rip up their Merlot vines and replace them with Pinot Noir due to the character’s preference. I still prefer Pinot Noir, so that film definitely changed my behavior.
It took over a century for someone to finally create a real 221B Baker Street in London, now a museum to the most portrayed literary character of all time, who has statues on multiple continents. Kinda like Hercules or Athena Nike.
Just do it.
Everyone has heard of Leonardo da Vinci and many museums have one or more of his paintings from the Italian Renaissance. Which is the most famous? If you said “Mona Lisa” then welcome to the world after 1911. 1911 was the year the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre. Its image was plastered on newspapers throughout the world until its recovery in 1913, elevating it from one of many Leonardos to OG status, which it did not have before 1911.
I mean this one’s pretty good. Ermine is pretty good too.
The world economy rests on a dead cell phone
Ah, the joy of two-step verification! I have just spent an hour unsuccessfully trying to log in to my business Amazon account, all because COMMERCE is dependent on a dead cell phone. No use trying to call customer service, for they will insist on sending a text to the dead cell phone. You will not be able to sign in online, because the account does not have a number (well, it does, but it is not used for anything). It does, however, have a cell number. If that cell phone is lost, dead, deleted or no longer employed, you have now successfully exited the economy.
Now, I did speak to a very nice gentleman who understood my problem before putting me on silent hold for 20 minutes. The website shows you how you can update your account information, but only AFTER you have signed in, which means you still need that cell phone. You cannot sign in without it. All of the online customer service is similarly dependent in its entirety on that dead cell phone and the ethereal unrequited beauty of two-step verification.
What happens to the phone that gets flushed? The employee who retires? There was briefly an option to have them call a landline instead of texting a cell, but the algorithm resists that option with a ferocity that would make Longshanks blush. Then, just to make sure you are defeated, they make you wait before sending another code, by which time it is too late. Code by Kafka, I guess.
We shouldn’t be giving Amazon custom anyway, but I did try. And it isn’t just them. Every vendor in the world rests their entire customer relationship on a single cell phone number. That number can only be changed/edited if it is still working! It is like a massive inverted pyramid of relationships and transactions and accounts and credit cards, none of which can function without the dead cell phone being reanimated.
I can’t even turn on my work computer without two-step verification. I need my cell phone. I have used two-step verification for years when teaching at the local Uni, so I know how to do it. The challenge at work is that business accounts are similarly dependent on personal cell phones. You call the Amazon help line – from a landline – and the automated voice asks to send you a text. It does not give you any other option. If that old line is long gone, so is your account. All of the ways to recover the account will require that cell phone.
This seems a strange and fragile way to run an economy.
APRIL UPDATE: I learned this week that when they drain the San Antonio Riverwalk every two years, they find about 500 cell phones. That’s a lot of business not getting paid. Wonder how many cell phones are lying in the Strait of Hormuz rn?
Oh, and just went through this with AT & T – we wanted to make sure the issue – which caused a TWO MONTH ABSENCE OF SERVICE – did not happen again, so we closed the old account and opened a brand new one. We made sure no personal cell phones were involved, so we could prevent this clusterfracas from happening again. No dice. Neither Apple nor AT & T will allow a business to be a business – it needs to be some individual’s phone. And they were willing to lose two months of custom just to maintain this silly, flimsy system. I would say bring back the party line, but Que será, será.
Ease of movement
One could argue that the whole of human history is a journey toward ease of commerce and communication with hydraulics on the side. Roman roads and aqueducts remain two millennia later to underscore their importance to that empire. Endless layers of burnt and polished lime forming walkways still snake through the Guatemalan jungle as testimony to the communications link of the Classical Maya. The Tayrona of Colombia’s Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta built arguably too many stone walkways in an attempt to maintain commerce and communication in the obtusely moist and mountainous high jungle. The incomparable monuments of Angkor existed only because of the massive barays that held the water that made civilization possible. I suppose you could add the US interstate system to this list, which we cling to and amend daily, defying its manifest obsolescence.
In architectural history, the 20th century styles of Art Deco and Modernism celebrated the continuity of materials and lines, visually and materially embodying the ethos of commerce and communication and free-flowing hydraulics. The train and the automobile sought to symbolize sleekness and speed and the mythology of the unencumbered in their relentless windswept contours. You can still see it in the modern trains of China and Japan.
I’ve had a Mayan archaeologist comment on the hubris of their lime walkways and compare it to our own material profligacy. Each civilization burns itself out on the hulls of its kernel concepts, lost in materiality because they invested too much meaning into the thing and were afraid to let it go, confusing gross domestic product with wealth and wealth with the economic everyday. Upon its invention, the thing – the walkway, the road, the car, the chariot – meant commerce and communication and control. That meaning remained even as it drifted into obsolescence, so the civilization invested even more in it because of what it meant, not what it could do.
Civilization literally comes from the word for cities, and commerce is both the source of wealth and an end in itself, an activity that is the economic everyday. Stadtluft macht frei, nicht wahr? Six years ago I wrote about cities and the logic of concentration and how every event from the telegraph in the 1840s to the telephone in the 1870s to COVID in 2020 spurred hyperbolic predictions about the end of concentration that were wrong, as they always are. Commerce is civilization, and it means much more than money and goods, it means ideas and inventions, and new ways of smoothing surfaces, increasing speed and building up. We want to be on top of each other because that is where new and interesting things happen.
It wasn’t a wall, it was a road. And it’s name means Long City.
Photos copyright Vincent L. Michael 1996-2025
Fast Track
The demolition of the East wing of the White House suddenly brought historic preservation into the mainstream consciousness this week, with valid recriminations from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, American Institute of Architects and other bastions of civil society. Now, many of those knew that, in fact, the executive does not need to follow the same preservation laws as the rest of the country, and while the Advisory Council for Historic Preservation and others opined on a restraining order, the entire 120-year old wing was gone in a week.
That is because they resorted to mechanical demolition with a (rented) backhoe, which makes for the best visuals. Given the executive predilection for reality-TV-style-theatrics above realpolitik, the choice makes sense. It wastes dollars, though, and contradicts modern practice regarding deconstruction and re-use of valuable materials, a topic I covered recently. Clearly, leadership has their broughams mired in the weird 80 years.
The demolition of the Epstein East Wing is a rare moment when historic preservation spends some brief time at the height of national consciousness, and heck, it could continue next week when some western legislator with a bee in his buckskins is holding a hearing on the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966. We might not wish for that, though, because everything that rises up in this performative administration tends to fall and crash just as fast (except prices).
Yes, it is the People’s House, and yes, the approach drew the appropriate rebukes from the bastions of civil society, and yes, at the end of the day there was precious little anyone could do about it. And yes, it is dumb and artless and clumsy and cowardly. They follow the fast track because they can’t do the actual work. The renderings of the oversized replacement building work in the media, even though they don’t work architecturally, as anyone who looks closely can see. But then again, it’s probably just a pretence for rebuilding the underground bunker…..
Photos by me from March tour of WH – except the featured image – you have to guess where that is.
Remember when the buck stopped here? Good times.
DECEMBER UPDATE:
Kudos to the National Trust for Historic Preservation for filing a lawsuit last week against the demolition of the East Wing. Reality stars reign in media fights, but they fold when evidence is required.
Deconstruction and the weird 80 years
I saw a wonderful presentation by Mae Bowley at the Destination Downtown 2025 conference last week in El Dorado, Arkansas. Deconstruction is the systematic dismantling of older buildings in order to re-use their materials. San Antonio adopted one of the best deconstruction ordinances in the country a couple of years ago and Stephanie Phillips and the rest of Shanon Miller’s team got plenty of kudos.
Opening of the Material Innovation Center at the Kelly Bungalows in November, 2022.
Mae’s presentation was electric for many reasons, but the one that stood out to me was the historical one. Deconstruction is not a new thing – it is what everyone everywhere did until about 1940. Only during the last 80 years did we do something different. That different thing was demolishing buildings and throwing them in the trash. No one did that before.
And Mae provided another historical tidbit I had missed completely. Mechanical demolition with bulldozers and the like was a product of World War II, where those machines were needed to clear jungles for airfields or urban debris for troop advancement. Urban renewal started immediately after World War II, and all of a sudden we had new mechanisms – like bulldozers, which derive from tanks – for reshaping place. Urban renewal continued through the 1960s and the National Historic Preservation Act is traditionally seen as a reaction to urban renewal and interstate highways, which required the bulldozing of many, many buildings.
Now, I was aware of the economic shift that took place during this same weird 80 year period. In the early 20th century and before, buildings were commonly moved and reused. Heck, I have seen a significant building moved in San Antonio every year over the last decade. When that happened in 1900 – and it happened everywhere – the economic rationale was simple. The fixed asset of the building was worth more than the land. Even when places like Euclid Avenue in Cleveland saw demolition of mansions, it was because a new use – industry – was MORE valuable. Same in LA circa 1915.
Moving the 1880 Claudius King house in San Antonio, 2019.
Mae even illustrated the long history of deconstruction when she illustrated the deconstruction she did of a 1920s house. By the time they got under the sheathing and onto the walls themselves, they found evidence of earlier materials that had been reused. In other words, the deconstruction revealed evidence of earlier deconstruction.
Which made me think of buildings around the world built from materials scavenged from other buildings. Like this Jacobean house constructed from the stone of Fountains Abbey (Yorkshire, UK) after the dissolution of the monasteries.
Or this mosque in Delhi (India) composed of the ruins of a couple dozen Hindu and Jain temples.
Or, like, most of Rome. Or even like our San Antonio Missions, whose limestone and sandstone walls migrated over the decades into nearby buildings.
The Sisson House near Mission San Juan – this house was itself a deconstruction project last year.
Deconstruction of the Sisson House at Graf and Presa, October 2024.
Mae also spent a lot of time talking about wood – because deconstruction allows you to get some old-growth wood, which is not something that exists in the market in 2025. Old growth wood is straighter, more disease and rot-resistant and has a tighter grain. It is one of the most notable materials that can be easily recycled (once you pull the nails out). Brick, too. When I started in heritage conservation in 1980s Chicago I saw that even then demolition sites would save the Chicago brick and “send it to the South”. When I got to San Antonio in 2016, I finally saw a building made of Chicago brick. In 2009.
Also it is Ladino one of the best restaurants at the Pearl – where they re-used EVERYTHING.
I looked back and it seems I blogged about Deconstruction in 2009 and was pretty negative – I compared it to the difference between recycling and reusing. Recycling requires a lot of energy and produces a lot of waste compared to reuse. I can reuse a bottle by cleaning it, but to recycle it I have to grind it up and remelt the glass. But what I did not realize at the time was that deconstruction is something we have been doing since we first made cities and towns. And it makes sense – why should the landfill get all of the good wood?
Conserving Heritage in the wake of Historic Preservation.
Way back in 2009 I embraced Donovan Rypkema’s challenge to rebrand “historic preservation” as “heritage conservation,” which I did in a blog here. I had recently finished my dissertation on the history of historic districts, observing how the community planning movement of the late 20th century changed historic preservation from a curatorial pursuit to an exercise in democracy. To be truly democratic, more stories reflecting ALL populations needed to be told, and “heritage conservation” to me included the invaluable efforts to rescue lost history and those sites that have great community significance but little or no architecture.
Or both.
Shortly after that I began an effort which continues to this day to look at ways that the National Register of Historic Places could tell the full American story. The curatorial – and architectural – emphasis of the 1930s-1960s limited these stories. Ned Kaufmann estimated at the turn of the millennium that only 2-4% of National Register sites told the story of women and people of color, and today the number is still likely below 10%. Since 2012 I have participated in or moderated several sessions at the annual PastForward conference of the National Trust for Historic Preservation looking at this issue. 2015 was a highpoint, with a panel discussion at PastForward that included two State Historic Preservation Officers (SHPOs), a presentation at the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation (thanks Brad White!) and a lecture at the Eighth National Forum on Historic Preservation Policy and Practice that was published in 2018 with specific recommendations for amending the National Register and the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for Rehabilitation. The rubric was Addressing the Diversity Deficit and many people contributed valuable ideas and insights.
My initial presentations on the subject of reforming the National Register and the Secretary’s Standards were met with anger by Carol Shull, longtime Keeper of the National Register, although by 2016 she told me they were “getting better.” I can recall meeting with Julianne Polanco before she was SHPO for California and telling her I wanted to totally redo the National Register. She calmed me down and pointed out that you could do a lot of good for diversity with existing tools if you just used them properly. She was on my 2015 panel at PastForward along with Allyson Brooks, Washington state SHPO. They both used the existing tools very creatively to promote diversity. Consequently, my 2018 recommendations were reforms, not radical recasting. In fact, official National Register guidance began to shift toward heritage conservation that same year when they issued a guidance that said interior spaces that had lost all of their architectural finishes could still retain historic significance under Criterion A (history).
Like this interior of the Forum on 43rd in Chicago. Actually, it has some of its finishes. But is needs to be conserved not because of those finishes but because of the community story they circle.
In 2020 I moderated a PastForward panel that included the new head of the National Register, Sherry Frear and my San Antonio colleague Sarah Zenaida Gould, one of the founders of Latinos in Heritage Conservation (along with Julianne Polanco and many other friends) called “A Deep Dive On Integrity.” This was COVID times, so it was a Zoom panel and it managed to attract over 500 participants. In four weeks I will be on another panel with Sherry and Sarah on the issue of Integrity, at the PastForward conference in New Orleans. In addition to the diversity question, there is also the confusion of “integrity” with structural integrity. The word itself is the problem, dating to 1966 when we Americans were too scared to use the word “authenticity.”
This house has historic integrity, but not structural integrity. The Park Service will be knocking it.
So now there is a dust-up between the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, led by Sara Bronin, who has issued policy statements and comments on a whole variety of contemporary issues and how preservation should react to them. On the other side are State Historic Preservation Offices and National Park Service folks who actually implement the National Register and the Secretary’s Standards. Most recently, there is a call from ACHP for comment on a series of regulatory streamlining proposals to promote climate resilience.
Pointing to the flood level lines at Mies’ Farnsworth House, c.2009.
Like many of my colleagues in the National Preservation Partners Network, I do not find myself in one camp or another. On the one hand, some of the streamlining proposals from the ACHP comment are canards that either don’t happen (transit line and bike lane planning, review of the inside of residences, mechanical and electrical systems) or have already been accepted as reasonable or reversible (solar panels, engineered wood products). On the other hand, the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards have not been updated or reviewed in over 30 years, which is way too long.
Even in 1990 we did not regulate paint color.
On the one hand, the idea of streamlining regulatory processes is attractive. If it works. If current regulations are turning around in an average three business days, then that is not exactly earth-shattering. The issue does not seem data-driven but anecdote-driven. It feels like a series of solutions in search of a problem. Also, many of the “solutions” were long ago implemented by various agencies who are quite skilled at following the rules.
Not the Postal Service.
On the other hand, I have watched regulators argue about very silly minutiae. Admittedly, I am the opposite of the precious preservationist. I love original materials because they can’t be had today for love or money, but if they are already gone, game over. Bring on the Hardie Board and plastic lumber.
Modern wood is so bad you can see how bad it is at 60 miles an hour.
In addition to not being terribly precious, I am not an architect, so I don’t have tons of faith in technology. One of the articles of faith is that energy upgrades work. I have a lot of experience with energy upgrades whose claims are driven by sales, not data.
One of the suggested policies:
- Broadening the scope of building envelope energy efficiency improvements, including replacement windows, doors, and insulation, without further historic preservation review.
My response:
This fails to take into account three facts. First, many historic windows and doors perform as well as modern replacements. Restored old-growth windows are warrantied for 50-60 more years than contemporary products. Second, window and door ratings are based on the uninstalled product, yet most of the thermal leakage, even in new construction, happens at the frame. Third, while interior insulation could go without review, exterior insulated finish systems (EIFS) can significantly shorten the life of a building’s skin due to the method of installation and quality of materials.
Just do what Barrio Dogg did – ignore the permits and regulations and cover the building with enough goop to change the original proportions!
And then there is the profit motive. Windows and doors may be less than 10% of construction costs but they are among the biggest markups (20-25%) for contractors, so they are a profit center.
At the end of the day it is not about policies or practices, but process. Whether a given state or federal agency is fast or slow in the process is a consideration, but the larger consideration in any democracy is having a public process. If we want to tell the full American story, we need to have a place for everyone to speak.
I have always said that the brilliance of heritage conservation reviews is that unlike zoning, the resource is not graded or commodified: every review is about the individual resource and the conservation of its characteristics as defined and valued by the community. Let’s not lose that.
DECDEMBER UPDATE:
Sara Bronin, Chair of the ACHP, spoke at our Duda Forum on November 16 right after the DRAFT Program Comment on Housing, Climate and Transportation issues was released. I have taken a look at the new document and find that many of the objections I raised in my own comment on the comment were in fact addressed, and I no longer see a tendency to give blanket approval to unproven replacement windows and insulating systems. Much of the document is now focused on glossing over reviews involving repair or maintenance of windows and doors (fine) and maintenance, repair or in-kind replacement of elements like roofing, foundations, canopies and foundations (mostly fine). It encourages caulking, pointing, and weatherstripping and has benefited from some wise input regarding previously painted surfaces and low-pressure water washing. So someone listened!
San Antonio Roundup May 2024
Tomorrow is the last day of May and the last time the Institute of Texan Cultures will be open in their original 1968 home, a Brutalist landmark that is the only downtown building by a Mexican-American architect, as I detailed recently here.
What else is happening in San Antonio (not counting endless evidence-free speculation about a downtown Spurs stadium)?
This is a 1920s bungalow at 800 W Russell Place in Alta Vista, which is not a landmark district. As you can see, it is getting a new roof. Here is a view from North Flores:
Much of the original clapboard is being preserved. Here is what the house looked like three years ago after its second fire…
In most towns this building is demolished.
In San Antonio, where preservation is more ingrained into the local psyche than elsewhere, this building is coming back three years later in its original form, most of which will be new material. That is how we roll (with the exception of the Institute of Texan Cultures above). I have seen buildings with massive holes in the roof and collapsed porches and chimneys brought back from the dead here. It is not unusual. It is an ethic.
Three years ago Sue Ann Pemberton’s Main Street Architects brought this Monte Vista house back from the dead. Heck, over 30 years ago the Harnisch House in King William was completely gutted by a fire, nothing left but masonry walls. So here it is a few years ago:
But the threats that came up in May 2024 were of a different sort. First, there was a proposal for a 200-foot high Ferris Wheel three blocks behind the Alamo. The Conservation Society was the first to oppose it when it went for rezoning, but we were quickly joined by the Alamo Trust, Centro and others and the matter has been deferred, perhaps indefinitely. The proponents didn’t want to call it a Ferris Wheel but an “observation wheel”. I suppose it isn’t the 1893 wheel by Ferris (which was a riposte to Eiffel’s tower of four years earlier) and it was to be a bit smaller.
The bigger question was why downtown?
Six years ago, the Alamo Reimagined Plan was all about bringing a sense of reverence to Alamo Plaza, pushing out the populist entertainments for a more refined atmosphere. Now they are back? Tomb Raider replaced by Observation Wheel? Even the World Heritage folks got wind of it and were not pleased.
To top it off, a second tawdry proposal emerged. A group called Outfront Media proposed “Urban Entertainment Districts” a la Denver and Atlanta, with a host of digital billboards flying right in the face of the recently adopted Sign Code. Times Square, anyone? Reverence?
Now, Ferris Wheels and digital signs are all well and good. They make sense in Times Square and La Vegas and Pudong and Akhibara. Heck, they would make sense at Port San Antonio or out on 1604. Just not downtown.
And what makes sense for Pudong does not make sense for the Bund it faces.
The digital billboard trial balloon is getting a lot of flak (and for once that metaphor makes sense).
So what else is happening? A five-time building permit violator finally opened his restaurant, presumably treating the health code better than the building code. Here are some before and after photos of how this Lavaca gas station building had all of its proportions changed. How did he do it? He just got a permit for something and did something else. Five times! Mejor pedir perdón que permiso I guess.
Three years ago.
A few months ago. The parapet changed, the walls changed, thje proportions changed. Not only did he violate five permits, he used the nastiest low-quality finish there is (EIFS!!!) and just kept globbing stuff on top of stuff. Poor building’s life just got a lot shorter.
What else? Unlike San Antonio, which has a robust preservation ordinance and department, the city of Alamo Heights does not. They at least have an Architectural Review Board, which recently voted 6-0 to disallow the demolition of Harvey Smith’s own house. Smith was the architect who restored the Spanish Governor’s Palace and Mission San Jose in the 1930s.
Earlier this year they also managed to save a century-old house in Alamo Heights thanks to community uproar. So, kudos to Alamo Heights – at least you have your landmark-free neighbors Olmos Park and Terrell Hills beat! See below – it is still there!
On the other hand, we are probably going to lose the Sisson House, which has been deteriorating for over a decade next to the San Juan acequia, not far from the mission complex. Owned by the National Park Service, there will be Section 106 review. Unlike our burned friends above, this one may not make it, as the city has already proposed making it a training site for the Deconstruction ordinance, which requires older buildings to be pulled apart by hand and the irreplaceable materials re-used.
It has a really cool limestone basement also.
That’s all for now – see you in June!