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?

James and Dolly's House.

Preservationist will not be able to resist this wonderful blog about the restoration of James and Dolly Madison's home, Montpelier Mansion. The blog provides some terrific insight into the long and detailed process of restoring an historic home, this one being the home of, no less than, the Father of the American Constitution. With the restoration, the mansion is being returned in size, structure, form, and finishes to the home that James and Dolley Madison knew in the 1820s.

The official opening celebration of the restored home will take place tomorrow, September 17 at the site in Orange, Virginia. The festivities include numerous dignitaries and a living flag made up of 2,500 school children from local elementary schools. And... a Drum and Fife Corps; well, of course.

Don't Do It!

The studio of the artist Arnold Bergier, at Greenwich Avenue and 10th Street,
which was demolished in 1960 to make way for a 14-story building
(despite the painted entreaties). Photograph by Fred W. McDarrah.

We talk about the worth of historic preservation. Its value to American cities is inestimable. However, it is sometimes difficult to explain the complexity of its effect. This coverage of a Vanity Fair article via BoingBoing.net helps to demonstrate this thinking. It is a colorful read, describing "a place, a mood, a way of life." The cohesion of the architecture of place is essential to a sense of place.

In last month's Vanity Fair, Christopher Hitchens considers the importance of urban "Bohemias" and why the ultimate demolishment/development of New York's Greenwich Village is a very, very sad thing. From the essay:

It isn’t possible to quantify the extent to which society and culture are indebted to Bohemia. In every age in every successful country, it has been important that at least a small part of the cityscape is not dominated by bankers, developers, chain stores, generic restaurants, and railway terminals. This little quarter should instead be the preserve of—in no special order—insomniacs and restaurants and bars that never close; bibliophiles and the little stores and stalls that cater to them; alcoholics and addicts and deviants and the proprietors who understand them; aspirant painters and musicians and the modest studios that can accommodate them; ladies of easy virtue and the men who require them; misfits and poets from foreign shores and exiles from remote and cruel dictatorships. Though it should be no disadvantage to be young in such a quartier, the atmosphere should not by any means discourage the veteran. It was Jean-Paul Sartre who to his last days lent the patina to the Saint-Germain district of Paris, just as it is Lawrence Ferlinghetti, last of the Beats, who by continuing to operate his City Lights bookstore in San Francisco’s North Beach still gives continuity with the past.

In aspect and design, New York’s West Village is the opposite of Soho in London in that it began its existence before the famous evolution of Manhattan as a grid had taken shape. As Malcolm Cowley phrased it, evoking the Village just after the First World War, “Most of us drifted to Manhattan to the crooked streets south of Fourteenth, where you could rent a furnished hall-bedroom for two or three dollars weekly.… We came to the Village … because living was cheap, because friends of ours had come already … because it seemed that New York was the only city where a young writer could be published.” Trying to sum up the ethos, Cowley wrote that for his generation the Village was something more than “a place, a mood, a way of life: Like all bohemias, it was also a doctrine.”

Preservation : Act 1

Provincetown Theater, Greenwich Village, New York City
Considered the birthplace of Off-Broadway and alternative theater.

As we have traveled in Europe, we have greatly valued the European concer for the preservation of historic buildings. Europeans seem uniquely able to re-envision their historic buildings to take on new purposes or simply be refurbished. Facades and shells are saved and the building re-imagined. Americans, on the other hand, seem to believe that preservation is too cumbersome and that NEW is easier, and in the long run, better. We think in most cases this thinking diminishes our sense of place and the connection to our roots, with long-term cultural consequences.

So we were very inspired to read this in the NYT. Apparently after an long and arduous battle with local preservationists, New York University relented and agreed to preserve the historic Provincetown Theater in Greenwich Village. NYU's original plan was to destroy it for new campus buildings. The Theater is not actually a very old building, but its historic nature begs saving. And it will be. Thank you NYU and all of those who fought for the theater's life.