The View From Rome

I just returned from a ten-day trip to a number of northern Italian cities, most of which I had not visited before. Each of them is very different in character, and each presents intriguing lessons for preservationists and lovers of traditional architecture. I’ll present some impressions of these towns in the next two posts.

The townscape of Ferrara is exceptionally attractive and in great condition, with a minimum of modern intrusion. The entire historic center is a UNESCO World Heritage site and includes buildings spanning a wide range of centuries, types and styles. The unfinished campanile is attributed to the great Renaissance architect and writer Leon Battista Alberti.

On the main square, opposite the flank of the early medieval cathedral, is a modern building designed by Marcello Piacentini and constructed in the 1950s. The new building includes a shopping mall behind its façade of brick neo-Gothic arches, with two floors of office space above. The new structure incorporates remains of two older buildings on the site that had been bombed in the war: a medieval tower and a stone loggia.

No one would mistake the new building for a medieval structure (there is no ornament and the elevation is too uniform), and we are free to regret the absence of the older fabric; but Piacentini’s facade, with its materials and details echoing local precedent, at least allows the historic piazza to retain its character and sense of spatial enclosure. It deserves respect for not ruining the place; if it had been designed more recently, the outcome would most likely have been very different.

Everyone in town seems to be riding a bicycle. The topography is flat, and the street layout is just irregular enough to make riding (or walking, for that matter) enjoyable. (The streets remind me of the curious passage in Alberti’s treatise when he says that the streets of the town should “flow like rivers.”) I saw almost no motorcycles (unusual for Italy), and the entire historic center is a pedestrian zone with few cars allowed. This makes downtown Ferrara both lively and quiet. Can we imagine the streets of an American city filled with pedestrians and bicyclists? Maybe when gasoline reaches $10 per gallon?

Parma and Cremona were next on the itinerary. They, too, lie in the flat plain of the Po, and both are lovingly preserved, largely intact medieval and Renaissance centers with few modern interventions. The stores are mostly locally owned and attractive. Both towns are remarkably lively and sociable, with friendly crowds of residents taking advantage of the handsome piazzas and green prati in the centers of the towns.

Very few tourists were in evidence. Bicycles once again seem to outnumber cars in these streets. There are no better examples of what New Urbanists mean (or ought to mean) by the term “walkable” than these towns: first, walking is a pleasure because the fear factor of being killed is removed; second, it is a pleasure because everything you see was designed to be seen on foot. There is always something to see wherever you look. That is the secret to “pedestrian scale.”

Another lesson that Parma and Cremona offer (along with many other Italian towns) is the total compatibility of every historical style. Parma’s cathedral has a starkly Romanesque façade, but the interior is filled with Renaissance frescoes, including the spectacular paintings in the dome by Correggio. Cremona’s cathedral has a more richly ornamented Romanesque façade and Gothic campanile flanked by Renaissance arcades. The interior is darkly Gothic, but the walls are again covered in Renaissance frescoes.

Adjacent to both cathedrals are freestanding octagonal baptisteries, multi-columned monuments of the Romanesque. Many of the monumental sites of Italy are similar composites of styles, so one becomes accustomed to the intimate interrelationships among them, like the members of a family who are each individual – even at times competitive – and yet form a cohesive unity.

Secretary of the Interior, please take note: Here is “differentiation” marked by superficial variety of form and material and “compatibility” based on shared fundamental principles of space, structure, composition and ornament. The architects and builders intended the harmony-within-variety that characterizes these monumental historic centers, and we could do the same today if we gave up the knee-jerk dependence on contrast and opposition that dominates contemporary attitudes toward additions to historic settings.

Next came Brescia, a city composed of two separate worlds: a compact historic core (the ancient Roman town of Brixium), surrounded by a large, modern industrial city of high-rise office and apartment towers, highway overpasses and industrial plants. The old core is more architecturally interesting than I’d expected – Brescia not on the tourist map – and its smaller streets of medieval houses and Renaissance palazzi are remarkably quiet. They are also largely unrestored and therefore lack the polish of Ferrara’s well-kept streets and facades.

There are two main public squares in the center: the civic Piazza della Loggia (with its Renaissance municipal palace and attractive arcades) and the ecclesiastical Piazza Paolo VI, (dominated by the Baroque cathedral and its Romanesque predecessor). Sadly, both of these squares are open to automobile traffic and parking, and the buildings do not show the standard of care that one finds in the more prosperous cities of the region.

Nearby is the Piazza del Foro on the location of the Roman forum, and throughout the surrounding neighborhood one encounters odd bits of masonry jutting from plaster walls – indications of ancient Roman structures later engulfed in medieval and Renaissance buildings. The Forum space is dominated by the ruins, partially reconstructed, of the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, built into the slope of the hill. The surviving bits of the temple’s white marble portico have been re-erected with brick infill so that we can see about half the original façade of the temple, although in two contrasting materials.

Here, the practice of differentiating the new material from the ancient (as required by the Venice Charter of 1964) is exaggerated, and we lose the sense of what the temple might have looked like when whole. Since Brescia is still today a center of Italy’s building stone industry, would it not be more appropriate to infill the missing pieces with new stone? This is being done at the Parthenon in Athens with splendid results.

Marcello Piacentini also designed an ensemble of buildings around a large civic square, completed in the 1920s and ’30s. The buildings, in the “stripped Classical” style we tend to associate with pre-war Italy (and immediately post-war Washington, DC) include a massive post office, a brick office tower and lower arcaded office buildings on the perimeter.

The intended effect of the grouping is hard to gauge because the entire piazza is now a parking lot, and the single-use buildings around it produce a deadening effect. What Brescia needs – both the modern and the historic parts of town – are some imaginative planning and conservation to bring vitality to a rich but ill-used and insufficiently cared-for center. The material is there, but the social, economic and political atmosphere seems to work against fruitfully capitalizing on it.

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I hope everyone saw the exhibition on Andrea Palladio at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York, which ends on August 1. I was able to view the exhibition in an earlier incarnation in Vicenza, Palladio’s adopted hometown, as part of the celebration of the 500th anniversary of his birth in 2008. With added materials and comments by such American luminaries as Jaquelin T. Robertson and Calder Loth, the exhibition is now on view on the side of the Atlantic where Palladio’s influence has been the greatest.

This widespread influence was largely the result of the architect’s authorship of the most important of the Renaissance treatises, the Quattro Libri or Four Books on Architecture, published in Venice in 1570 (and available in English translation from MIT Press, 2002). The book has largely overshadowed the architect’s built work, and, as a result, both admirers and critics have focused on his published words and images rather than his buildings.

 This exhibition re-focuses attention on the architect’s actual production. In addition to photos and gorgeous wood models of Palladio’s designs, the show displays a selection of Palladio’s drawings, the most impressive of which are his in-situ measured drawings and sketches of Roman antiquities. Everything he designed was rooted in his knowledge of the ancient Roman builders whose works he studied so closely.

His entire concept of architecture was inseparable from his belief — shared by many of his patrons and colleagues — that the architecture of his own day would achieve greatness to the extent that it continued to discover, assimilate and adapt paradigms left behind by the builders of the Pantheon, the great bath complexes, temples, triumphal arches and other monuments of antiquity. To equal, and perhaps to exceed, the mastery of the ancient builders were the great aspirations of the Renaissance architects.

 Palladio’s drawings show us how he saw and used the materials he studied. In her review for the Wall Street Journal, critic Ada Louise Huxtable noted that viewing the drawings “erases the centuries.”

“They create a miraculous fusion of the distant past and the immediate present, a kind of aesthetic time warp that brings the man and his moment wonderfully alive. The hand of the artist and the ink on the page connect instantly with the eye, mind and heart of the viewer. There is an intimacy, a sense of the architect’s presence that no reproduction can achieve.”

But then Huxtable directs her gaze away from Palladio the architect and zeroes in on “Palladianism”—the tradition founded on the Quattro Libri rather than the buildings themselves — and can’t resist slamming the architecture inspired by the Vicentine master in the following centuries.

“Classicism was reduced to empty formulas, and public and institutional buildings established a denatured, clichéd correctness with a horrible life of its own. Huge structures employed numbingly endless columns and redundant motifs in a debased version of the Palladian ideal that reduced a glorious tradition to embalmed orthodoxy.”

She offers no examples, just a sweeping denunciation of the persistence of classicism after its supposed expiration date. Can anyone think of a building with “numbingly endless columns” that bears any resemblance to any work of Palladio? She goes on.

“Shopping malls pasted on meaningless pediments and pilasters…. What was not dead on arrival was Disneyland.”

Now this is a strange thing to say in connection with an architect who “pasted” pediments and pilasters on rural farmhouses in the territory of Venice. Setting aside the vast differences in taste and artistry, the motives for putting a pediment on a McMansion and a classical portico on a 16th-century Venetian farmhouse are not that far apart. Palladio’s aristocratic clients wanted houses that looked like those they imagined ancient Roman senators lived in, while those who build McMansions want houses they think look like those Palladio’s clients lived in.

In all these cases, the use of an architectural language descended from the ancient Greeks — however artful or ham-fisted its application — reflects the social and cultural ambitions of the architects and patrons as much as their aesthetic convictions or taste.

In fact, Huxtable has it backwards. What actually separates shopping malls and McMansions from Palladian villas and public buildings (or their ancient predecessors and subsequent imitators) is precisely the “orthodoxy” she disdains. Palladio’s use of the classical language, grounded in a rigorous conception of formal order and coupled with a marvelous sense of aesthetic restraint, raises his work—and the best of that by later architects based on his designs—to the level of art and places it on an entirely different cultural plane than the contemporary “traditional” design Huxtable condemns. It is the arbitrariness of the “pasted” elements that renders uninformed exercises in classical design so hopeless; what would save them is a more faithful imitation of the Palladian models, with their subtle compositions and satisfying proportions.

Curiously, Huxtable seems to admire Palladio’s drawings more than his buildings. She sees “the hand of the artist” in the sketches but apparently not in the built texture of the buildings themselves. The drawings somehow exist outside of time in her view, while the buildings are prisoners of a historical narrative that places them out of our reach.

But would she find the same allure in the drawings of Richard Sammons, Francis Terry, George Saumarez Smith, David Mayernik, or any of the other talented designers whose work is displayed in the recently published book, The New Palladians (Art Media, 2010)? There are few shopping malls or McMansions in the book, not to mention few “pasted” pilasters, but there are many examples of beautiful, inventive and informed new classical design that demonstrate convincingly that architecture inspired by Palladio need not be either formulaic or antiquarian.

Just before the end of her review, Huxtable opens the door slightly. “Style is irrelevant,” she writes, “to those critical relationships of proportion, plan and detail and to the mastery of the elusive elements that define our ideas of beauty and how we experience a building in its time and place. Whether it is ‘traditional’ or ‘modern’ is a specious argument at best.” This is certainly true, and this opening should allow the New Palladians to find legitimacy, even in a modernist critic’s eyes. But then she slams the door shut again.

“But architectural golden ages are few and far between. The unique combination of historical, social, cultural and economic factors that brings an unprecedented time and talent together cannot be replicated; there is no way to recapture the magic moment that changes the course of art. Although Palladio’s monuments will continue to influence and inspire, the golden age of Palladianism is past. Only those drawings bring it back to life.”

One could write a book painstakingly deconstructing the misguided philosophies of art and history underlying that statement. (See Chapter 6 of my book The Future of the Past.) In fact, no one today wants to “recapture” the specific conditions that allowed Palladio to do what he did, any more than Palladio himself wanted to recapture those of his ancient mentors.

What Huxtable and many others who share her prejudices don’t understand is that classical architecture is never about recapturing the past but about re-appropriating in the present a set of loosely defined and ever elusive values and visions that are perpetually valid but must find new ways of expressing themselves in the conditions of our own time and place. Appropriation and adaptation are the keys to a living tradition, whether in the hands of Palladio himself or the New Palladians who offer their own approximations of those ideals today.

Who knows? Despite Huxtable’s skepticism, maybe the next golden age of classical architecture has already arrived.

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A quick glance at the map of Rome or an aerial photograph reveals a clear contrast between the apparently ad hoc development of the city from ancient times through the centuries of papal rule and the rather brusque, straight boulevards and regular grids of the modern city. You can pick out the new neighborhoods just by the lines of the streets without knowing anything about the areas or what they look like on the ground.

For two millennia Rome had grown by accretion and revision, a steady layering of incremental changes among the winding streets and intimate piazzas constituting the public realm of the city. Then came unification in 1870, and Rome was transformed, practically overnight, into the modern capital of a secular constitutional monarchy. A new court came to town, imported from Piemonte (Turin), with its close affinities to French taste and culture. In the district of Prati and on the Esquiline hill, grids of tree-lined streets modeled after the Piemontese capital quickly filled in gaps in the city’s texture, while new boulevards like the Via Nazionale and the Corso Vittorio Emanuele II plowed their way, Parisian-style, through the formerly dense medieval quarters of the city.

Just as an addition to an individual building reveals attitudes toward the historic character of the original structure, so the interventions by planners also reveal assumptions about either continuity or contrast, or some combination of the two. The planners and architects who envisioned Rome as the capital city of a modern nation state deliberately chose contrast with the baroque spirit of papal Rome at both the urban and the architectural scales: The new streets and blocks, the vast buildings for government ministries and new apartment blocks clearly expressed their “difference” from the ritualized scenography of the city of the popes. Although the new construction for the most part shares with the pre-existing city the classical language of architecture, and although the subsequent changes in the city during the last century have softened the edges of the post-unification interventions, the character of the 19th-century additions is entirely different from what had gone before. Modern Rome is truly a city of contrasts.

Like the modern neighborhoods of Rome, the expansion of American cities can often be read in the lines on the map and the aerial view, although usually in reverse: the older parts of the city are made up of gridded streets and squares, while the suburban expansion is commonly a patchwork of winding streets and formless open space superficially resembling the so-called “organic” patterns of medieval towns. (Of course, nothing could be more unlike a medieval town than a suburban cul-de-sac!) The contrast, again, was intentional and represented the commitment of modern planners to ideals they thought represented modernity, mobility, freedom and progress in the face of tradition.

Today, when the consequences of a half century of suburban sprawl are inescapable and the need to re-urbanize and re-compact already built-up cities is clear, we are faced with another set of contrasts and continuities. In one case we have the contrast between sprawl and attempts to “retrofit” failed suburban developments by New Urbanist interventions based on traditional principles of walkability, mixed use and conformance with the urban transect. Alternatively, we see interventions in pre-existing urban districts in which judicious infill is used to re-weave fraying urban fabric, reinforcing historic neighborhoods by making them “more themselves.” In the first case, contrast is inevitable, as the new elements are intended to remedy a failed development model by introducing the very urban design principles the earlier suburban developments had rejected. In the second case, continuity is the goal, as new blocks and squares are insinuated into the pre-existing plan to increase connectivity and provide sites for new buildings that will sustain a continuous public realm anchored by surviving historic structures.

Although preservationists today are committed to sustaining the historic character of buildings and districts, current thinking – based on the Venice Charter and the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for Rehabilitation – tends to prioritize contrast between new and old elements. This stance is justified not by a desire to impose a new political framework on an ancient city or in order to facilitate mobility and efficiency, but in order to avoid “the falsification of the historic evidence.” While the consequences of an uncritical insistence on “differentiation” in additions to individual buildings are clear, the same issue pertains to the urban scale and the way entire neighborhoods are planned or rehabilitated. The choice of either contrast or continuity sends a potent message about the relationship between the past and the present.

It is not yet clear how preservationists will respond to New Urbanist proposals for retrofitting suburban sprawl or redeveloping historic inner-city neighborhoods. So far, though there is considerable support at the grass-roots level, the leadership of the preservation movement has been decidedly cool toward those promoting traditional architecture and urbanism. Some preservation authorities, though nominally committed to combating suburban sprawl, are at the same time promoting landmark designation of some suburban developments. For example, a proposal to nominate Levittown, PA, as a historic district is under consideration, and there is considerable interest in the “recent past”, including “mid-century modern” commercial structures (aka drive-ins and strip malls). This potentially sets preservationists and New Urbanists on a collision course that has yet to be fully recognized by either group.

New Urbanist proposals for infill development in historic urban centers (like Battery Park City in New York or Downcity in Providence, RI) have also prompted unexpected resistance. As official preservation thinking requires new infill development to be self evidently differentiated, the tendency of New Urbanist proposals to seek continuity of character at both the scale of the urban plan and the scale of the individual buildings has prompted skepticism from some preservation authorities. In other cases, preservation authorities have encouraged new infill development in harmony with adjacent historic buildings or districts, seeing New Urbanism as an ally in their struggle to defend the historic character of the neighborhood conceived as an urban ensemble, rather than as merely a collection of individual historic buildings.

The New Urbanists themselves are not agreed on the issue of style. Some leaders of the movement support traditional models of urbanism while defending modernism for the design of the buildings built on those traditional urban plans, despite the obvious contradiction.

I spoke on this topic at the annual meeting of the Congress for the New Urbanism in Atlanta on May 21. It seems that the intersection between urbanism and preservation has not received much attention from the official organs of either field, but response to my talk suggests that there is growing interest in exploring the ways urbanists and preservationists can work together productively.

Readers familiar with specific projects that shed light on this emerging relationship are invited to contact me with the particulars. I am especially interested in cases where preservationists have either supported or opposed New Urbanist plans based on considerations of character and style. My hope is, naturally, that both groups will recognize their common cause and unite behind a shared commitment to the wholeness and coherence of the built environment, whether in the suburbs or in historic centers. Our aim ought to be to help that process along as much as possible.

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I believe the concept of conservation holds the key to re-conceptualizing contemporary architecture and preservation in response to the re-emergence of traditional architecture in contemporary practice. As I use the term, conservation does not mean embalming something that is dead, like insects in amber; rather, it means managing and cultivating something that is alive, as one conserves an endangered species, a rain forest or a garden.

We understand this very well with regard to natural resources, which are conserved by maintaining the ecosystems that sustain them, clearing away invasive growth and taking remedial action to repair damage. In the same way, we can conserve cultural resources by ensuring their physical integrity and allowing them to assume new roles in the ongoing life of the man-made ecosystem of the city.

Since we can no longer assume that traditional architecture is solely a product of the past, new architecture using historical formal languages and craftsmanship offers us the means to keep historical places alive, allowing them to grow and change without losing their character. A conservation ethic is not a ban on change; rather, it is the management of change to avoid unnecessary loss. Conservation is tied to the concept of culture, which, as Hannah Arendt reminded us, is of Roman origin, deriving from the Latin colere – “to cultivate, to dwell, to take care, to tend” – a term that ultimately “indicates an attitude of loving care.”

Extending that “attitude of loving care” to the built environment is the main purpose of the conservation ethic proposed here.
This is very important: There ought always to be room in our cities for architectural innovation and experimentation, but there must also be places dedicated to the continuity of valued architectural character. So, like a protected wetland or rain forest, a historic district should be a zone in which we impose limits on normal activity for the sake of sustaining the architectural ecosystem, if you will. It should be a “provocation-free zone” within which new interventions strengthen and clarify, rather than transgress or obscure, the historic character of the place. This should be the minimum requirement of any preservation program, analogous to the medical profession’s Hippocratic Oath: “First, do no harm.”

But we cannot be satisfied only with the negative principle of preventing harm; there must also be a positive standard to guide necessary and welcome change. Just as natural resources are conserved by ensuring the health of the ecosystem, cultural resources – and cities in particular – are sustained by the appropriateness of the interventions we make, both for purposes of maintenance and restoration and for the sake of adding new elements.

And yet, despite its central importance and the frequency with which the word is used in preservation debates, the concept of appropriateness has eluded definition. In the eyes of many, the appropriate is simply what the local preservation commission or board of architectural review says it is. Indeed, the apparently subjective judgments of the authorities will continue to face legal and political challenges unless we can establish a more secure way to identify and discuss the appropriate response to individual conservation decisions.

The problem stems from a misunderstanding of the kinds of judgments preservation authorities should make. Their mandate, in most cases, is to ensure the appropriateness of proposed interventions in historic settings. This, in my view, is less a matter of refined aesthetic judgment than simply an ability to identify and approve the fitting and the exemplary, preventing the subversive and the unrepeatable.

 A new building or an addition is fitting when it intends to fit rather than provoke, contributing to, rather than subverting, the character of the place. It is also fitting when it responds thoughtfully to local climate, materials, topography and building traditions, rather than imposing alien features. It is exemplary when it establishes a precedent for others to imitate, recognizing that all architecture is imitative, and imitation is particularly likely if the project is deemed a success. An exemplary project sets a good example for others, making it easier to build beautiful cities – the kind of city that is a whole made up of beautiful parts, rather than simply a collection of unique gestures or isolated objects. The appropriate looks back in time to add to the series of decisions previously made by others, and it looks ahead by setting the tone for those who may come after us. The cultivation of the appropriate over the long term is the key to understanding the continuing growth of traditional cities and the way they maintain valued character over long periods of time.

Understood in this way, appropriateness is not primarily a matter of aesthetic judgment. Indeed, new designs judged by architects and critics to be of the highest aesthetic quality because they follow current fashions are unlikely to be appropriate to places formed on the basis of very different conceptions of architecture. But the assumption that new construction in historic settings must be “differentiated” from historic forms and materials all but requires preservation boards to become judges in a beauty contest for “contemporary design,” rather than simply guardians of an already established architectural character.

Few members of preservation commissions are trained in the finer points of current architectural discourse, and their attempts to become arbiters of “the architecture of our time” naturally embroil them in charges of arbitrary and subjective decision-making. But if it is not the quality (in the art-critical sense) but the appropriateness of a proposal that the authorities are asked to judge, their decision is rendered much easier. They can simply ask, “Is the proposal both fitting and exemplary?” If not, it does not belong in our district.

An important indication of a fitting and exemplary proposal is its relationship to what Howard Davis calls a building culture: the bodies of knowledge, styles, formal languages, building typologies and craftsmanship that form the productive capacity of a living built environment. It is the building culture, and the extended sense of place in which it operates and which it sustains, that must be the focus of our preservation efforts, because only a building culture produces landmark buildings and only a building culture can effectively conserve and sustain them for the long term.

In many cases, historic building cultures are still alive and simply need to be engaged in the care for their own historic achievements. Preservation authorities who recognize and promote the health of a building culture as their highest priority are likely to be good stewards of the “built ecosystem” constituting our historic places. Their decisions will naturally tend toward the appropriate by encouraging the success of the building culture that is best suited to maintaining the character of the place. They will also find themselves on more solid ground when defending their decisions against charges of subjective judgment, because their findings are based on something concrete: the proposed intervention either conforms to the historic building culture of the place or it does not.

On the other hand, policies that make the continuance of a historic building culture more difficult are simply counterproductive: they ensure the gradual destruction of the built ecosystem by depriving it of its sole source of adaptive and fruitful change. The standard of appropriateness and the recognition of the role of historic building cultures are therefore the twin pillars of the new conservation ethic for historic places. Only in this way can we ensure that our most valued historic and beautiful places remain alive.

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What is the proper relationship between historical architecture and the production of new buildings and cities? Are architects and preservationists inevitably at odds, or is there a common objective that potentially unites them? Why do we assume that the architecture of the present and the architecture of the past are entirely different things that must be handled by entirely separate sets of experts? It is necessary to examine these questions in the light of a recovered traditional architecture and urbanism.

Historically, restoration or completion of old buildings and the design of new buildings were simply different aspects of a single discipline. Leon Battista Alberti, in his 15th-century Renaissance treatise, called upon the architect, when undertaking work begun by another, to respect the intentions of the original designer rather than impose dissonant forms. He followed his own advice when he completed the façade of Santa Maria Novella in Florence. Some sites we now think of as integral monuments took centuries to achieve their final form, requiring the commitment of subsequent architects to realize the concepts of their predecessors. It took 400 years before Michelangelo’s Piazza del Campidoglio in Rome was finally completed to his design.

Even when work was carried out in an architect’s lifetime, there was no clear boundary between restoration and new construction. Viollet-le-Duc and his followers restored historic structures and designed new work stylistically continuous with the sites entrusted to their care, as at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris, where the architects’ experience in restoring medieval sites informed the design of a new spire and significant additions on the north side. The experience of building anew in the pre-existing style also informed the architects’ understanding and treatment of the historic conditions.

In the 1920s and ’30s, restoration and new construction at Williamsburg, VA, were undertaken by the same team of architects. Again, investigation of the historic site informed the new designs, and those new traditional designs informed the restoration in productive ways. While sometimes they overestimated the degree of continuity in ways that distorted their vision of the historical evidence, the opposite error, an exaggerated sense of discontinuity between the preservationist and the designer, has caused other, perhaps even more intractable problems.

In New York, for example, one might think that the works of McKim Mead & White would be handled with great care, since the loss of one of that firm’s great masterpieces, Pennsylvania Station, jump-started the preservation movement as a national force in 1964. But this is not the case. In the last decade, several McKim Mead & White masterpieces have received additions that willfully contradict the architectural principles of the original buildings. While we are relieved that they did not suffer Penn Station’s fate, the Harvard Club, the Morgan Library and the Brooklyn Museum have been de-contextualized by the new elements, whose exaggerated sense of difference has permanently changed the way we perceive these important landmarks.

If we take a step back and look at how architects have historically understood the relation between historic and new construction at sites of cultural importance, we find that the most common approach is that of continuity. The Parthenon on the Acropolis in Athens, completed in the mid-5th century B.C. as a replacement for an earlier temple on the site, continued the style of its predecessor. The Louvre in Paris expanded over the course of four centuries without altering its essential style, and the United States Capitol expanded with the new nation, growing new wings and a dome that continued its Neoclassical beginnings right into the 1960s, in triumphant disregard of “the architecture of its time.”

On the other hand, contrasting additions are not a recent idea. Andrea Palladio’s white stone arcades wrapping the medieval Basilica of Vicenza embodied the principles of classical architecture and repudiated the old building’s Gothic style. Significantly, Palladio was not imposing something new but trying to re-establish something old: a classical tradition dating back to antiquity. The handsome new buildings designed by Gabriele Tagliaventi and a team of other traditional architects along the Rue de Laeken in Brussels similarly repudiate the structure they replaced—a 1960s glass curtain-walled office tower—in order to reinforce an older and more valued urban character.

But this kind of intentional contrast can also pose problems for historic environments. Richard Meier’s museum to house the ancient Ara Pacis in Rome, adjacent to the Mausoleum of Augustus, is celebrated by architects and academics but largely detested by ordinary Romans. Its blatant contrast with its historic neighbors has even prompted calls by the Mayor of Rome for the structure’s demolition. The contemporary avant-garde has made conspicuous subversion of context a major theme, as illustrated by Will Alsop’s Ontario College of Art & Design and Daniel Liebskind’s Military History Museum in Dresden.

These projects, and several recent buildings approved in historic districts in New York, raise a troubling question: How is it possible to maintain the historic character of a protected site if contemporary architects insist on a formal language that refuses to enter into relationships with the pre-existing context on any basis other than contrast and disruption? Is the preservation establishment not perhaps a little too eager to support the interests of well-known architects whose conspicuously oppositional stance toward the historic environment contradicts the goals of preservation itself?

There is an alternative. If we could forget for a moment our obsession with projecting “the architecture of our time,” we could see historic places as living entities that not only can grow and accommodate change without losing the character that qualified them for preservation in the first place, but can also provide models for new work in other places and times. In this view, the criterion that matters most is the appropriateness to its setting of a proposed intervention, rather than conformance with rigid stylistic categories or current fashion.

We can choose continuity when appropriate — without copying historic buildings and without introducing alien forms and materials that erode historic character. We can use contrast when called for to heal damaged places or reweave fraying urban fabrics. Accordingly, the relation between new and historic architecture is necessarily complex and cannot be reduced to an uncritical notion of contrast. On the contrary, continuity must be given at least equal weight in the equation.

The only thing that stands in the way of this paradigm shift is our own outmoded thinking. It is always the case that our view of the past is shaped by our view of our objectives in the present. The sequestering of the historic built environment is a symptom of our uncritical relegation of traditional architecture to “history.” If we are willing to view historic architecture as something more than a “document of its time,” but also the product of a living building culture, then the integration of new elements into a historic setting need not involve the introduction of alien or discordant new forms and materials. The historic district, for example, can be a “provocation-free zone” in which consistency of character is valued more highly than conspicuous projection of the date of construction of each building.

This seems to be dawning on the preservation community, and perhaps now the default-setting of contrast will itself be consigned to “its time.” Once we overcome our current ideological blindness, the qualities of historic places will once again be reinvigorated by judicious additions of new elements that support instead of subvert them.

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Considering the debate that is now (finally) breaking out in the preservation community about how to rethink current policies and philosophies in light of the recovery of traditional architecture and urbanism, it seems that a basic source of confusion involves the simplest question of all: Why do we preserve historic buildings, districts and landscapes in the first place? Increasingly, it seems, disputes about how to maintain or alter an historic site have become more intractable as clarity about why we protect such sites has diminished.

The official documents, like the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for Rehabilitation (first published in 1977 and last revised in 1995) or the Venice Charter of 1964 on which the Standards were based, imply that we preserve buildings and sites primarily as “documents of their time,” so that vestiges of the past contribute to historical knowledge and cultural memory. This is the historian’s point of view: the sites are important for what they reveal about the past, just as written documents do. Accuracy and verisimilitude are important because the value of the “document” is a function of its trustworthiness as a witness to what the past was really like.

I have no problem with this viewpoint, and it clearly is the correct approach to landmarks whose significance is primarily historical in the ordinary sense of that word – say Monticello or Mount Vernon. But this historical-documentary motive alone does not explain why thousands of people over the last several decades threw themselves in front of bulldozers and wrecking balls – actually or figuratively – to prevent the destruction of valued structures and neighborhoods whose claim to historical significance is less obvious.

Jane Jacobs battling Robert Moses, protesters trying to save Penn Station, or those who fought for a decade to prevent Marcel Breuer’s office tower on top of Grand Central Terminal were driven by more than historical or antiquarian interest. I don’t think I’m exaggerating by saying they were driven by love. The lay public, in particular, has engaged in a fight for their own homes, workplaces, houses of worship, cultural monuments, beloved streets and parks. Their motive was not, in my view, merely sentimental or nostalgic but deeply pragmatic. The loss of such resources would not only deprive us of places “imbued with a message from the past” (as the opening words of the Venice Charter say), but of places still alive, still valued and still used in the present, places with which people identify and without which they feel lost in their own cities. Hence, we must add to the historical-documentary motive a cultural identity and citizenship motive.

But there is a third force for preservation that we have largely lost sight of over the last several decades: the didactic motive. If the evidence of the past is to mean anything to us, we must learn something from it, and the most important lesson historic buildings can teach us is how to make new places of similar quality. We preserve in order to retain the models on the basis of which future architecture and future cities can be designed. After all, why would we go to the trouble and expense of bringing students and architects-in-training to Rome if not to teach them how the artistic culture of building can embrace a trajectory across time, from antiquity to the present?

Until after the Second World War, to build in Rome was always simultaneously an act of design and one of preservation. It was the continuity of knowledge – both of design and construction – that allowed the city to continue to change and grow without fundamentally abandoning its character. Historically, the proper object of both new design and preservation was not solely the physical structure at hand but, as Francoise Choay suggested in The Invention of the Historical Monument, “our capacity to build” – and, it should go without saying, our capacity to maintain and restore. We preserve, then, in order to learn how to build.

This motive was obscured by the oppositional attitude of Modernism toward historical architecture, but it takes on renewed importance within the context of new traditional architecture and New Urbanism. For example, how would the New Urbanist communities of the last three decades have been possible without the models of Charleston, Georgetown and Williamsburg in the United States and numberless other historic towns elsewhere? And if we want to learn how to build sustainable buildings and communities, we must have examples that have survived for a few centuries to study. Places as diverse as New England villages and New Mexican pueblos can teach us how to build for centuries instead of just the next decade or two.

It seems to me that what is missing from most preservation theory nowadays is this sense of continuity between the historical built environment and our contemporary world. Such a temporal bridge between the past and the future is precisely what we mean by tradition. The motive for preservation, consequently, will be quite different depending on whether we accept this continuity between past and future as real and valuable – or not. Because a large and growing segment of the lay and professional community does accept its value, the first two motivations must now be joined by a third in which historic places are seen as models to inspire architecture today.

This third motive also leads us to a more comprehensive cultivation of our building culture – including the design skills and the craftsmanship that can maintain our historic places and allow us to build new ones of similar quality. Such a commitment requires responses more flexible and more informed about traditional architecture and urbanism than those commonly associated with the first two motives, which – truthfully – require little specialized architectural knowledge. To see a historic place like Greenwich Village or Nantucket, Massachusetts – no less than an Italian hill town or the centro storico of Rome – as a model for urban places elsewhere requires a deep understanding of the character-defining elements that make such places worthy of emulation.

Hence, they must be protected not only from loss due to demolition and decay, but also from insensitive alteration or the addition of new construction that would violate the site’s continuity of character over time. But it is precisely this that brings those of us driven by the third motive into conflict with aspects of mainstream preservation philosophy and practice dominated by the historical-documentary motive. I will pursue this issue further in future posts on this site.

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The recently announced award of this year’s Richard Driehaus Prize to Spanish architect Rafael Manzano Martos is notable for many reasons, not the least of which is that much of his work involves the restoration of historic monuments and – significantly – the addition in similar style of new work in historic settings. The prize is not only recognition of the quality of Manzano’s work, but also an important defense of a preservation attitude exactly contrary to the conventional orthodoxy in the field today.

In Manzano’s hands, restoration and respectful addition involve the completion and realization to the fullest extent of the character of a place without introducing alien forms or materials. Continuity and wholeness, rather than differentiation and contrast, are the primary aims of the project.

While I still look forward to seeing Manzano’s work in person, the published images and descriptions of his projects reveal a deep sympathy between the restorer and the historic reality of the building culture within which he carefully intervenes. This is not the distant and detached handling of isolated artifacts as envisaged by the Venice Charter but, rather, a kind of empathetic entry into the mind of the original builders, drawing from the architect and craftsman of today work that is complementary to, rather than disruptive of, the historic fabric. It is an act of imagination as well as an exercise in science, an attempt at healing as well as a documentation of historical knowledge. It represents a return to the best aspects of the conservation tradition founded, but not always followed, by Viollet-le-Duc and his followers in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Continuity

Manzano’s work takes continuity with traditional architecture and urbanism as a starting point, as opposed to the Modernist urge to make our own interventions as conspicuous as possible. Here the restorer and the architect are one and the same person, and even the design of a completely new building is a kind of restoration. Manzano’s approach is to bring growth and change to the pre-existing environment without destroying the character that makes it worthy of preservation in the first place. The historic structures are recontextualized instead of isolated; we see them as elements of a larger urban ensemble rather than as fragments left behind by an inexorable and blind historical process.

One of the published examples of Manzano’s work is the Casa Fernando Chueca, a new structure facing the Plaza de Dona Elvira in the old center of Seville. (See photo.) The architect has invented a new building that is typologically, tectonically and stylistically continuous with the buildings around it, without being in any way a copy of any of them. With its white stucco walls, punched window openings, tile roof, and judicious ornament it relates gracefully to its neighbors. This resemblance is not superficial but extends into the interior of the building and into the facts of its construction using traditional materials and techniques.

This new structure, built 1973-75, at first glance is little “differentiated” from the historic fabric around it as required by the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for Rehabilitation. Rather, it gracefully joins the conversation that the buildings and urban space around it had been carrying on for centuries before the architect arrived on the scene. Whatever differentiation there may be becomes apparent only upon second and third glance, as the building gradually reveals the particular choices the architect has made – choices that inevitably distinguish this building from the older ones surrounding it without sacrificing continuity with them. Manzano is simply continuing the process of sympathetic growth and change that produced the historic environment itself. What would be the point of a differentiation that precluded this knitting together of new and old to reinforce rather than undermine the historic character of the place?

Some might object that too close a relationship between the new and the historic construction blurs the distinction between what is actually “historic” and what is – from a Modernist viewpoint – an imitation of historical practice. If we cannot tell what is original and what is “Neo,” so the theory goes, we will lose sight of the succession of styles and periods, each the unique and inevitable representation of its historical moment.

This simplistic view of history is both philosophically unsupportable and artistically destructive. If we only allow new work in a historic setting that separates itself from what is already there, over time the contrasting new work will overtake the pre-existing character, irreparably altering it. The doctrine of “differentiation” therefore is logically counterproductive as a preservation strategy. Worse, it destroys the possibility of seeing the city as an artistic whole in which the contributions of different periods sustain a harmonious and consonant ensemble. Introduction of alien forms and materials deliberately selected to depart from or subvert the historic setting brings the centuries-long conversation among buildings to a screaming halt.

Layering

The beauty of historic centers in European cities is largely due to the rich layering of different historical epochs, each constructing its own architecture on top of, around and through the structures left by its predecessors. The mix of periods, styles and building cultures is what gives interest to cities that have been inhabited and built up for millennia.

This variety is saved from cacophony by the simple fact that these different layers speak a common formal language. Like the buildings around the Plaza de Dona Elvira in Seville, they “get along” because they share common conceptions of space, structure, elements, composition, proportion, ornament and character. Without this basis of common agreement – for example if a Modernist “shard” of glass curtain-wall were to be inserted among them – that harmonious character would be destroyed.

It is instructive to note the difference, for example, between Manzano’s approach and that of his countryman Rafael Moneo, whose new Science Building at McKim Mead & White’s Columbia University campus in New York imposes with defiant disregard a dissonant formal language and material palette on its monumental context. The cumulative effect of several such intrusions over the last several decades has all but destroyed the architectural setting envisioned by the original architects. (For more about Moneo’s building and illustrations, see Clem Labine’s blog of November 5, 2009 about this building.)

The award of the Driehaus Prize to Rafael Manzano Martos is a celebration of the continuity of building cultures linking the past and the present. It reminds us that preservation is not about re-creating the past—an impossibility in any event—but rather about shaping the future by means of the things we decide to bring with us from the past and seek to sustain as parts of a living world. That act of selection and carrying forward is tradition. Without a built environment in which past and present are respectful partners, preservation is little more than a form of large-scale taxidermy. Manzano’s work demonstrates the alternative.

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Living and teaching architecture in Rome for the last two years have been transformative experiences, especially because the relationship between new and historic architecture is a matter of keen personal interest to me. Nowhere else is the preponderance of continuity over disjunction so pronounced as in the Eternal City. Almost everywhere one looks one sees how a city can grow and change by building on rather than destroying its historic character. Rome challenges architects, urban designers and preservationists to take the long view, seeing their work as contributing to the city as a whole as it transforms itself in time and yet retains its essential identity.

Taking the long view has not been much in evidence in contemporary architecture, even in Rome, but economic and environmental conditions are forcing change. The traditional city is beginning to look like the city of the future again. After more than half a century of neglect by architects and planners, Rome once again presents itself as a model for building new cities or repairing the ones we have.

Two irreconcilable visions of the city compete for our attention today, each reflecting different sets of values, architectural and social. The first vision is the traditional city – the historic center of Rome being the chief example – which is the product of steady accumulation and transformation within a nearly continuous building culture. The city is composed primarily of outdoor public spaces linked by streets, all of which are enclosed by buildings that form harmonious ensembles despite a variety of ages, purposes, materials and styles.

The buildings get along so well because they employ a small set of related formal languages and spatial concepts that ensure continuity in spite of tremendous variety. The city as a whole is what matters most, not the individual structures. However beautiful they may be, the individual buildings derive their artistic importance from the contribution they make to the larger ensemble.

The alternative – what we see in most new cities and redeveloped areas in older ones – is a kind of architectural zoo, in which the buildings, like animals never intended by nature to share the same ecosystem, live in proximity with one another but remain isolated for their own good, and for ours. Lions over here, penguins over there; Frank Gehry here, Jean Nouvel across the street. Each building is a unique gesture seeking to embed itself in the observer’s memory like a built logo. Together, they constitute an assortment of architectural “collectibles” related only by proximity, bearing little sense of the collection as a whole.

Modernist architects now compete with one another to add ever more exotic specimens to the zoo, especially now that technology allows buildings to bend and gyrate in ways apparently no longer bound by gravity. Architects create objects that, if they were six inches tall, would look arresting on a coffee table but at full size can obliterate the historic character of an entire city. Preservationists have too often acquiesced in this approach, happy to have an old building or two admitted to the collection, like the odd antique thrown in with the Mies chairs and the Koons sculpture in a contemporary loft apartment. In this approach, historic buildings are no more connected to their one-time context than the new buildings are to their newer one; they share a common isolation, each within its own spatial cage – the empty void of streets and “open space” designed to keep the buildings apart.

Rome now has its own example of this approach in Richard Meier’s Museum of the Ara Pacis. The intimate confrontation between the new building and its historic neighbors suggests the unease of animals that might actually devour one another, were they not kept apart by effective barriers. Meier’s Modernist abstraction seems to be eyeing Valadier’s Neoclassical church across the street the way a big cat might contemplate a nearby, but inaccessible, gazelle.

The zoo mentality drives Modernist architects and their preservationist friends to promote “contrast” as an ideal when new construction arises in a historic setting. Andres Duany identified the motive for contrast in historic settings as essentially parasitic: the semantically empty new building feeds on the formal and ornamental richness of older ones, from which it draws a degree of visual interest it otherwise lacks. The old buildings are not exactly consumed but are pressed into service as a necessary “foil” for the conspicuously different new work.

Declining to question the “transgressive” intentions of contemporary architects, the preservationist instead tries to make sure that everyone can tell the difference between the old fabric and the new construction, however dissonant their juxtaposition may be. In other words, preservation becomes an exercise in keeping the animals apart, properly identified and clearly labeled.

I have nothing against zoos, but a zoo is not an appropriate model for a city–at least not a city committed to maintaining the historic character of its prized landmark buildings and districts. These cultural resources cannot be held in captivity but must be allowed to live in their native habitats. The historic sites of our cities and towns are not, in the end, exotic species but, rather, fitting and exemplary models from which we can still learn a lot about how to build.

Preservation should be about sustaining something that is alive, not embalming something dead. People come to Rome by the millions to see a real historic city in which life goes on and buildings of different eras and uses create relationships based on more than contrast and confrontation. Indeed, one of the beauties of Rome is that one often cannot tell in what century a particular building was built – not only because many buildings have been continuously transformed over time, but also because architects almost always thought sustaining a strong sense of place more important than leaving a “contemporary stamp” (as the Venice Charter requires). Wholeness and continuity are the norm; disjunction and contrast appear as unwelcome intrusions, as in the Meier project.

In contrast to the zoo, a good metaphor for a traditional city would be a botanical garden, where different species of plants are propagated in accordance with the local agriculture, topography, climate and way of life. Even when non-native species are introduced, the plants and trees don’t have to be kept in isolation but compose alluring vistas and cool, shady walks. Both the botanical garden and the zoo need to be cultivated and maintained – neither is a work of nature – but the first is an artifice that helps us understand nature and our place in it better, while the second is an inherently unsustainable environment dependent on massive amounts of maintenance to counteract, albeit not entirely, the constant threat of violence and systemic breakdown.

The model of Rome prompts us to re-conceptualize the design of new buildings, the planning of neighborhoods and the preservation of historic environments. It shows us how to cultivate a city in which buildings of different uses, ages, characters and styles can weave a fabric of inhabited enclosure around public spaces that invite civilized social life. Rome proves that buildings are best preserved when they are durable, adaptable and lovable.

Traditional architectural languages, building practices, materials and craftsmanship are also essential to a genuine sustainability not dependent on gadgets. But to profit from all the lessons of Rome, we must have a conservation ethic uniting architecture, urban design and historic preservation in common pursuit of beauty, sustainability and justice. In future blog posts, I’ll explore some of the aspects of this emerging vision of the city and its implications for the health of our historic urban environments.

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