A representative of the LA Conservancy, a prominent local historic preservation advocacy organization, puzzled us recently when at a public meeting she confidently proclaimed that a building we are designing which will sit next to an unremarkable but still worthy-of-preservation 1920s-era school building in Santa Monica, CA “will without a doubt have a negative impact.” Santa Monica situates in a gorgeous geographic setting, it enjoys a wonderful climate, and it is an affluent city, but it is hardly Paris or Rome. It came into its own as a city in the 20th century, and is not strictly speaking a city, more a collection of auto-oriented streets and free-standing, too-far-apart buildings. Most of its buildings are ugly and like cities from Manhattan Beach to Mountain View so is Santa Monica -- as are those parts of cities on the East Coast and in Europe that were built in the latter half of the 20th century (Yes, you Boston, and you too, Paris).
In Rome in the 1500s the Vatican’s building program included Donato Bramante’s many additions such as the Cortile del Belvedere and Michelangelo’s dome and in the 1600s Bernini’s piazza in front of the re-built basilica. The new basilica replaced the one that had been there since Constantine. A thousand-year-old-plus building, the most sacred in the Christian world, and many neighborhoods were wiped out to accomplish these projects. Change is hard, Bramante was known as “the destroyer” (“il rovinatore”) by the locals. But while the expenditure split the church (Luther was as upset by money as theology), the effort was a sophisticated one whose outcome we now value.
As the capabilities, efficiencies and economies of building technologies improved what was once a slow accumulation of labor-intensive small-scale interventions that became the “historic cores” of cities was cast into the past. Famously, Haussmann under Napoleon III leveled medieval-era neighborhoods at the center of Paris to create what we now know as its historic core even though it was all accomplished as recently as the late 19th century. That was only the beginning. The enthusiastic forces of modernism, driven by cynical attitudes toward cities and adolescent longings for innovation unleashed massive unsophisticated demolition and rebuilding efforts. Post-war urban renewal wiped out pre-industrial and 19th century neighborhoods across Europe and the US.
Not everyone was on board. In some European cities legislation that codified the preservation of “monuments” was established as early as 200 years ago. In the 1800s reactionary voices especially in England warned against the immense transformations of city and country wrought by burgeoning industrialism. Among these the purist John Ruskin was the most prominent arguing for not only keeping hand-made pre-industrial buildings but preserving them in their aged and battered state free of any kind of machine-aided restoration effort. The destruction of McKim, Mead and White’s Penn Station and its awful replacement in the 1960s inspired the preservation of Grand Central Station and birthed the historic preservation movement in America.
The movement has intensified in tenacity and scope since then and it has become personal. No building built in southern California in the last 100 years was hand-built nor is most of what is considered historic here of very high architectural or symbolic value and a lot of it destroyed 19th century predecessors that were hand-built and of historical value. (Modern architecture, the great destroyer, is now considered historically significant and worthy of preservation.) Instead, what’s going on is what art historian Ernst Gombrich has identified as the Law of Compensation, meaning the more rapidly and drastically our environments change, the less evidence we see that whatever is new is better, the more we compensate by digging in our heels to keep things the same. We employ preservation tactics to preserve personal memories and soothe nerves. We want to petrify our environments because we are petrified.
There are no 1,000-year-old religious monuments in Santa Monica, nor did Abraham Lincoln ever sleep there but the rapid and ugly development that has taken place there for almost eighty years has been disorienting and distressing. Most people in Santa Monica and elsewhere are anti-development because indeed there is no evidence that any new development will not have a negative impact. Historic preservation laws and preservation activists assume with certainty that whatever gets built near a so-called “historically significant” building will have a negative impact and we can’t imagine that there are architects who are even interested in if not capable of the kind of innovation guided by what we might call the Law of Compatibility (“first do no harm”), the kind that seeks to create contemporary architecture with a positive impact not so much in conflict with our past as in conversation with it.