OBSERVATIONS : DESIGN : The Old Versus the New : Architectural Strategies for Recycling Aging Buildings

FOR MUCH OF America’s history, new meant good, newer meant better. Now, in a veritable revolution in American attitudes, we are seeing a reversal of what Walt Whitman called “the pull-down-and-build-over-again spirit” of the United States. Change meant progress, progress meant newness, and newness meant throwing out the old--including the built world.

Adaptive re-use exemplifies this new shift in attitude. The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission said more than 10 years ago: “Creative adaption provides pride in our heritage, a link with the past, respect for the aesthetics and craftsmanship of another time, insights into our own development, ample creative opportunity for architectural innovation and problem-solving, enhancement of the urban fabric, greater security, stability and beauty, while conserving basic materials and meeting modern needs.” To some extent, adaptive re-use is an extension of common sense to a pragmatic realization that it is practically impossible to remain purist about the functions of a building. It permits us to live in converted schools, to shop in converted post offices, to study in converted train stations. In a sense, recycling can also be seen as a form of architectural criticism.

There is no guarantee, however, that old buildings, even those worth preserving, will actually be preserved. Benjamin Thompson, whose recycling projects have included Boston’s Faneuil Hall / Quincy Market complex and New York’s South Street Seaport, stated: “Most old buildings are eminently worth saving because they speak to us about time and tradition and where we came from and because they display materials and workmanship that we cannot afford to duplicate today. (However), without an attempt to use some imagination in both preserving and updating them, most of our heritage buildings (are) going to be disposed of.” In other words, if the worthwhile buildings are to be saved, they will have to be saved for something other than mere restoration--

or mummification, as some critics put it.

For all its positive results, the adaptive re-use phenomenon has not escaped criticism. Philosophical and economic complaints, as well as questions of appropriate design, are being raised by preservationists, developers and neighborhood residents alike. One of the loudest outcries--one that would never have been raised but for the flourishing success of adaptive re-use--is that traditional rehabilitation concerns, such as historical and architectural integrity, are being overshadowed by the commercial interests of private developers. Ada Louise Huxtable, former New York Times architecture critic, pointed to the South Street Seaport, a commercial fishing center converted into a fashionable mall along New York City’s East River, as a potential example of this controversy. “The city is about to sacrifice the last of the genuine character of a fragile historical survival to economic development masquerading as a way to save the past,” she wrote. “Out of innocence, or ignorance, we continue to make the kinds of bargains for preservation that turn out not to be bargains at all.” Huxtable identified a growing concern. Too often preservation is coming to be equated with the construction of vast commercial malls, and one cannot help but wonder if this is a fad of which the public will soon tire. These “cathedrals of consumption” may eviscerate the original architecture and its history, leaving a much slicker and more controlled atmosphere.

Issues such as those posed by commercial malls impress upon us the need for an intelligent, educated, overall policy of adaptive re-use. The phenomenon has matured enough so that our attention now must not simply focus on “saving” buildings or neighborhoods but also encompass more complicated considerations. What criteria should be applied, for example, in determining which structures to rehabilitate? Some buildings may have qualities completely apart from architectural detail that mark them as worthy of saving and re-using. A structure may have special significance within a community, as in the case of one old Los Angeles building in Watts that was a factory during the Depression and at that time employed the parents of many current residents. The structure was preserved and converted into a shopping plaza not because of its high architectural distinction but because it is, to the community, a place of genuine meaning.

A building is much more than an architectural or engineering accomplishment--it is the reflection of a community’s history and personality. Thus, reasons for recycling buildings, for preserving areas, must sometimes reach beyond the purely architectural. William Conklin, an architect and former vice-chairman of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, put it one way. “Buildings,” he said in an interview, “are like friends. Just as we respect the structure of our social relationships in the world, so we should value our urban context. When we wipe out our buildings, we wipe out not just the physical objects but many more subtle urban networks.”

AS THE PRESERVATION and adaptive re-use movements mature, we seem to be outgrowing the compulsion to freeze in amber every Colonial saltbox or Victorian mansion. There are, after all, some 17 million buildings in the United States that are at least 50 years old, and not even a zealot would want all of these preserved, or even a large fraction of them. We also seem to be developing broader interests concerning what should be preserved, as is evidenced by the growing fascination with industrial architecture. Because we long viewed industrialization as a major factor in the demolition of our physical heritage, we refused to acknowledge its structures as potentially recyclable. Today we consider the remnants of America’s industrial era, the furnaces and foundries and mills of our Gilded Age, also worthy of re-use. The Sloss Furnaces in Birmingham, Ala., are a prime example. These structures, squat, muscular and plug-ugly, have absolutely nothing of the charm of an antebellum plantation house, but are they not of historical significance that may even surpass the mansion’s? If rehabilitating industrial architecture makes perfectly good sense to us today, however, that was not the case 20 or so years ago, at the outset of the contemporary preservation movement. But back then, who would have guessed that we would someday seek to preserve New York’s Lever House or the first drive-in restaurant, the McDonald’s in Des Plaines, Ill.?

Just as we have refined our ideas on what should be recycled, so have we developed more sophisticated theories about how we should recycle. More and more, for example, projects involving adaptive re-use find themselves intertwined with the complicated architectural issue of “contextualism.” This is because adaptive re-use requires harmony of old and new, where strict restoration does not. In demanding good modern design as well as respect for what already exists, adaptive re-use is unique.

Contextualism pushes the concept of harmony beyond individual buildings to include entire blocks and neighborhoods. While the success of an adaptive re-use project depends largely on how compatible the new use is to the old building, compatibility within the surrounding environmental context is also important. William Conklin recently said, “A building should relate to its existing context and be respectful of that context. It should not make the adjacent buildings look ridiculous; it should not cast the other buildings in its shadow. But it should make a positive contribution.”

The key to success of adaptive re-use is recognizing those buildings or streets that are, or once were, special, whether for architectural, historical or cultural reasons. These are the structures we must struggle to retain. We have already seen that perhaps the most creative and economical means of saving them is adaptive re-use. Some idealistic preservationists may argue that ultimately nothing is superior to maintaining the original building, as well as its function. The late scholar Walter Muir Whitehill was not one of them. In 1966, in a prophetic report produced by a special committee on historic preservation, Whitehill wrote: “We already have on exhibition more historic houses and museums than we need or are good for us as a nation. Indeed, they multiply so fast that some form of institutional contraception must soon be invented. Let us save what we have around us that is good, not for exhibition, not for ‘education’ but for practical use as places to live in and to work in. Preservationists should try to keep America beautiful, rather than to create little paradises of nostalgia in an ocean of superhighways, billboards, neon signs, parking lots, used-car dumps and hot dog stands.” That advice will be more pertinent than ever as we move into the 1990s and the realities of a rapidly changing world demand that we develop ever more culturally and technologically appropriate uses for our old structures.

In the end, the issue of adaptive re-use pivots on the most fundamental of conflicts: age versus youth, the old versus the new. Neither has a corner on virtue. “Preservationists are guilty far too often of indiscriminately insisting that old automatically means good,” Paul Goldberger, Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic of the New York Times, wrote. “On the other hand, architects have too often given them sufficient reason to believe the converse--that new must mean bad. That isn’t true either and the preservation movement cannot go on acting as if it were so.”

Architect William Pedersen puts it another way: “To reconcile the old and the new, one must bring a respect and an understanding of both, and then search for an architectural strategy that fuses these two polarities. Architecture that excludes one or the other is profoundly pessimistic.”

From “Remaking America: New Uses, Old Places,” by Barbaralee Diamonstein. Reprinted by permission of Crown Publishers, Inc. Copyright 1986 by Barbaralee Diamonstein.