The School of Architecture and Planning at UT San Antonio hosted a colloquium last weekend that began with a keynote by Davide Galleri, PhD of the University of Naples, who spoke about Robie House, the epitome of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie Style and a building I have long known. Indeed, the black and white photo he used of the 58th Street face of the house was the view out my dorm window in 1979-80.

This one is from 2008 after they had torn down my Eero Saarinen-designed dorm.

Galleri’s history of Robie House revealed an interesting conundrum. Most of the house’s history is not about a house as much as a site of landmark preservation. The original owners were there less than two years, and the two subsequent homeowners were gone by the time the building was 30 years old. Like every building in history, it was first proposed to be demolished when it was about 30 years old, in 1941. Preservation pressure kept it alive under institutional ownership until it was threatened again in 1957, when Wright himself argued for it. It was purchased and saved by the same guy who was doing the urban renewal of Hyde Park and demolishing 1000 acres of buildings. It then limped along under the ownership of the University of Chicago for a couple decades before becoming a proper house museum. So, of its 115 years of history, arguably 85 of those years are the history of preservation.

And they still haven’t got the dining room set back.

The more I think about it, this is not unusual. Every building faces its first demolition threat or need for a major overhaul at about 30-40 years. That is when a preponderance of building systems from roofs on down will need to be replaced or trashed. It is normal for most of a building’s history to be about preserving, rehabilitating or retrofitting it. Right now the “Thompson Center” in Chicago is being completely redone exactly 40 years after it was built.

I did not realize until Galleri’s lecture that Robie House faced its first demolition threat in 1941. I always knew about the 1957 battle, since it coincided with the beginnings of the battle over Penn Station in New York, which was the exact same age as Robie House. Even though it looked different.

Heck, when you think about it some more, you realize that the inscription on one of the most famous landmarks of the Western world is all about how it was restored by Marcus Agrippa.

I took this photo 43 years ago, so, like, there is even more preservation history now.

My new place of work, Villa Finale Museum and Gardens in King William, follows this pattern as well. Built in 1876, it was expanded until about 1902, and then enjoyed about 20 more years of being a fancy house, a decade as a slightly bawdy house, and then joined its neighbors at the age of about 65 in being chopped up into a bunch of apartments during the postwar housing shortage. When Walter Nold Mathis bought and restored it in 1967, he was kicking off the restoration of many other houses in King William that had also been chopped up. For almost 60 years this has been a preservation story, and for the last 15 that story is being told to the public each day.

2010.

My favorite example is just two doors down from Villa Finale – James Reily Gordon’s stunning Romanesque Kalteyer House.

Go back to the 1970s and it looked like this.

Now, Galleri and some of the other academics there on Friday night started getting into the questions of how things are preserved and how they are changed, and whether something can be considered authentic or original. Galleri got into the discussion of integrity, which in my experience has caused a lot of trouble and provided little advantage. See my take on these issues and how they have excluded important landmarks here. I also scribbled down “Ditch period of significance” because what is the period of significance? The original construction? Or is is one step back and the original design before it was modified during construction? And who did the modification – was it the architect? And exactly how many angels will fit on the head of a pin?

Loading the angels…..

When restoring Colonial Williamsburg in the 1930s, perfectly historic 19th century buildings were scraped because they did not fit into the period of significance. Even 50 years later during the restoration of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Home and Studio they destroyed work Wright actually did in 1911 to convert it into apartments, in order to go back to the 1899 appearance. So which is it?

Rather than get into a scholarly debate about originality, design and execution, and the great chasms of authenticity and integrity, I think we need to consider that preservation or rehabilitation is part of the story of every building that makes it past 30-40 years. In fact, I am working on a book that considers many lost Chicago buildings, and it is kind of amazing to see how many architectural wonders bowed out before they turned 50.

Masonic Temple by Burnham and Root

Marshall Field Wholesale Store by Henry Hobson Richardson

Prentice Women’s Hospital, Bertrand Goldberg, 1975.

Culture is – by definition – the tending of things that change over time.

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