The Paradox of Preservation

The Century Plaza hotel, designed by Minoru Yamasaki, opened in 1966 and quickly began accommodating stars and dignitaries. New owners have revealed plans to demolish the hotel, no longer the VIP magnet it once was, and replace it with a $2-billion complex that includes two 50-story towers containing condos, offices, shops and a smaller luxury hotel.


Los Angeles is to modern architecture, what Rome is to Catholicism. However,"California modern" postwar architecture, for better or for worse, undermined the ideas of traditional architecture forever. Its reach is international. Its style immediately recognizable. For some, it is a reason to swoon, for others it seen as an egotistical force undermining the intrinsic value of meaningful design. As historic, modern architectural buildings begin to age, it is inevitable that the preservationists and the developers will collide.

While preservationists would argue for reuse based on green values, developers argue that 60s modern buildings are hardly energy efficient, sustainable or nontoxic. In his Sunday column, Christopher Hawthorne, LA Times architecture and design critic, makes this point:

Those two ideas -- that preservation is green and that postwar city building was not -- are now coming together in some contradictory, even absurd ways. The debate over the future of the Century Plaza has been a case in point. Both sides have tried to argue that they have sustainability on their side, the Conservancy because knocking down the hotel would waste its "embodied energy" -- the energy it took to construct it -- and Michael Rosenfeld, the developer, because his proposed replacement, designed by the architect Harry Cobb, would promote green urbanism, namely pedestrianism and use of mass transit.

These conflicting ideas deserve a thoughtful investigation in less charged venues. It seems that the guiding ideas of preservation-as-green, must be bold and vivid to win the day. The issues confronted in preservation are often more complex and broad than the arguments that are being presented in defense of green preservation. Is preservation always "green?" And, to throw a wrench in the works, we wonder, how preservationists, who typically hold a disdain for modern architecture, will wholeheartedly defend against its demise?

Evoking Puerto Rico : A sense of place

Librado Romero/The New York Times
Rincon Carillo is a casita in the United We Stand community garden.
The clubhouses offer a rural Puerto Rican tradition.

The New York Times published an intriguing article on the casistas (tiny houses) of the South Bronx. The 16' x 16' house pictured above is one of many scattered throughout the Bronx that are meant to evoke the Puerto Rican countryside, where low-roofed buildings surrounded by gardens, known as casitas, “little houses,” are a common sight. These houses serve as clubhouses, mostly for men, although there are some women's quilting/sewing groups that meet in casitas.

Adolfo Carrión Jr., the Bronx borough president, who last week was appointed to a position in the Obama administration, has urged the New York’s Landmarks Preservation Commission in a report issued last month to declare Rincon Criollo, along with other casitas, as city landmarks.

This is an unusual slant on historic preservation which usually includes only older, richly historic, long standing buildings. One could argue, at the least, that these are transient, and "merely" modern structures.

Emphasizing sites that have cultural significance, like the casitas, “is very, very different from how we normally have done things, but it is important to broaden the definition,” said Bernd Zimmermann, a former planner in the Bronx borough office who headed the task force that created the list.

We are certain that there is a lively debate about to arise. If culturally significant buildings are designated as landmark buildings, where would that stop?

hat tip: l.young