C CC C David Lowenthal
Conservation Past and Present
Sylvester Baxter Lecture
Harvard University Graduate School of Design November 17, 2014
David Lowenthal
Conservation Past and Present
Sylvester Baxter Lecture Harvard University Graduate School of Design November 17, 2014
introductio
introduct
on
This counters the status-quo of preservation’s topdown methodology and seeks instead to create places that are open and progressive.
[Susan Snyder]
tion
This is the first GSD-wide event hosted by the new Critical Conservation program. Critical Conservation is part of the design research platform at MDes degree program at GSD. We thank Dean Mohsen Mostafavi’s office and the Events office at GSD for making this occasion possible.
Our program seeks to empower a new generation of designers, planners, real estate professionals, and a diverse range of other stakeholders from around the globe with a foundation for understanding cultural systems—issues of culture, history, identity, and design that frame the conflicts inherent in the transformation of places over time. It’s our goal to empower our students to make nuanced decisions about conservation in complex urban and natural places.
Critical Conservation at GSD had its origins in Rem Koolhaas’ “Cronocaos” 2010 exhibit that presciently warned the design field that “Preservation is overtaking us,” and cast a critical eye on the impulse to preserve, and the growing empire of preservation. GSD’s core goals emphasize the construction of an alternative and sustainable future through design— ever conscious of the need to avoid conformity of tradition. Critical Conservation is not a preservation program. Instead, Critical Conservation proposes that it is vital to keep places alive, dynamic, and capable of meeting modern needs. We have established a critical position that questions why, what, and who determines the conservation/destruction balance.
David Lowenthal’s writings are the foundation of our theory courses. One of our outstanding students from the first Critical Conservation class, Natalia Escobar Castrillon—who is now an Aga Khan fellow pursuing a doctorate at Harvard—was so engaged with Lowenthal’s work that she sent him a message. Out of her initiative, and his engaging response, comes this event. 1
[Natalia Escobar Castrillon] I first became familiar with Professor Lowenthal’s work through Susan Snyder’s and George Thomas’ seminar “Culture, Conservation, and Design.” This seminar has become an outstanding contribution to critical discussions on conservation at the GSD. And Lowenthal’s work has had a significant role on shaping this course.
However, while Lowenthal’s work became a crucial part of our education at the GSD, he remained unaware of his contribution to our work. Out of curiosity and respect, I contacted David Lowenthal nearly three years ago and told him about our program and about the contribution of his writings, and invited him to join our discussion in person. Our emails evolved into an extended dialogue that serves as proof of his commitment to education and the conservation field. Professor Lowenthal not only welcomed and accepted my invitation, but was open to share his latest contributions to the field, and even to read and discuss my own work. This conversation reflected his broad knowledge, his kindness and engagement with students as prospective practitioners and as scholars, and his care for the conservation discipline, past, present, and future. I thank David Lowenthal for sharing his knowledge and time with me and with all of us.
In the Past Is a Foreign Country Lowenthal explains how and why we define and change the past to conform to present expectations or histories. His “Past Time, Present Place” discusses the modern disease of nostalgia, the need to idealize the past as an alternative to the failures of the present. In “Material Preservation and Its Alternatives,” Lowenthal terms preservation an illusion: “Because material objects are continuously transformed, every stage in preservation forces choices among many valid but irreconcilable criteria.” No act of preservation is “permanently appropriate.” His critical reappraisal of the preservation field opened a new path for critical conservation. 2
[George Thomas] Tonight’s lecture is presented by a fund created to memorialize a major Boston figure from the 19th century, Sylvester Baxter. Baxter was the type of person that we would like to attract to Critical Conservation, a person who approached the world in all dimensions. He trained, first, as a journalist in the great age of journalism. He then studied city planning at Leipzig and then came back and wrote on every topic from transportation, logistics, how trains move milk and products to cities, the architecture of the Southwest, the first major book on Spanish colonial architecture—one topic after another. And, at the same time, he engaged with Charles Eliot, who was the son of the president of Harvard, and together they developed the idea of Greater Boston as a concept, seeing it not as separate communities but rather as a totality that ought to relate and develop forms together. The chain of beautiful river parks surrounding Boston is all part of Sylvester Baxter’s vision.
Therefore it seemed appropriate that this lecture would be brought to us in memory of this remarkable Bostonian from another time—who in the age when city planning often looked at big, simple, monumental plans, said that city planning shouldn’t start with form but rather from a thorough study “of all existing conditions.” This is how we in Critical Conservation see the relation between conservation and culture. David Lowenthal’s interests span Sylvester Baxter’s world and much more. David graduated in 1943 from Harvard, served in World War II in the American Army, joined the U.S. State Department, and began a career that took him, first, as a geographer getting his Master’s in California, and then his PhD in history from the University of Wisconsin. For his dissertation David Lowenthal took on one of those titanic figures, whom we still think about and study because almost every week he arrests our attention. This was George Perkins Marsh (1801-1882), who made the case that 3
humanity was perilously impacting the Earth. Marsh’s Man and Nature was published in 1864. David is here for a sesquicentennial symposium on that book, discussing Marsh’s foundational contribution to our world. It seems to me as I skim Marsh and re-encounter his precepts—that corporations are amoral, and “have no souls,” and all the profound social and environmental issues that we debate today, that Marsh exemplified the type of work that David would take on, not advancing scholarship one footnote at a time, but advancing the world in big chunks. His range of interests, his contributions, the groups that he advises cover the entire world from small island nations such as Sark, and UNESCO, and on, and on, and on. And with those contributions, he brings a world to us that he’s experienced, debated, discussed with decision-makers the world over.
Colbert terms, authenticity is like truthiness,” and we knew “He is going to be terrific.” Tonight’s inquiry is especially appropriate at the Graduate School of Design, which had its beginning with Joseph Hudnut and his great hire Walter Gropius. And it continues to the present with a faculty that Mohsen Mostafavi has helped assemble. In our time when more and more data can be crunched, and more factoids can be discovered, the array of findable facts runs the risk of making everything seem equally important, running the risk of making it impossible to find orders of magnitude to establish priorities necessary to make judgments. This parallels the questions that Rem Koolhaas presented in his research exhibit “Cronocaos” for the 2010 Venice Biennale. Koolhaas brought into sharp focus the conflict between the ambition of the global task force of preservation to rescue larger and larger global terrains—now some 12% of the inhabited world, and the densest, most valuable sections at that—and the corresponding contemporary rage to eliminate evidence of the progressive social project
Tonight we will hear David Lowenthal on issues of conservation, past and present. I confess that we had some reservations about bringing a 91 year-old scholar for this event. We Skyped with him on the issue of authenticity. And David said, “Well in Stephen 4
undertaken by postwar architecture. Gund Hall, where this lecture takes place, is a part of this discussion— once lauded as an arrow aimed at the future, it is now lambasted as evidence of the hostility of modernism to continuity and tradition. This conflict results, in Rem’s words, in “The wrenching simultaneity of preservation and destruction that are destroying any sense of a linear evolution of time.” Lowenthal’s topic tonight—Conservation Past and Present—continues this discussion.
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[David Lowenthal]
not to be concerned with that sort of thing anymore.
Thank you, everybody, and especially Natalia, George, and Susan for their generosity, kindness, and hospitality in bringing me back here to a very different Harvard than the one that I graduated from seven decades ago. And different, also, from the Graduate School of Design where I taught in the mid-to late 1960s before Gund Hall was built, when I had the marvelous experience of working on this very spot. On this spot when I was teaching was the 1838 Jared Sparks House, one of the most beautiful buildings on this campus and a superb working place. Harvard is different also because what students in the Graduate School of Design thought they should be doing has changed so much since then. Most of my landscape architecture students were essentially garden designers. They themselves lived in slums. Their studio was chaotic. But they were designing magnificent landscapes for the very wealthy. Harvard is now a very different place. I’m sure there are still the very wealthy. But the students I’ve talked with seem
Before I came this time, I was told that Harvard’s Critical Conservation Program aimed to abandon the old polarities between old and new, past and present, traditional and modern. Those old dichotomies put conservation in the camp of the old-fashioned, of the retrograde, of preservationists who didn’t want anything to change, and who considered material preservation all-important. Critical Conservation intended to look beyond the object to place the discussion in the realms of culture, identity politics, sustainability, and the future. Conservation was now concerned with people more than with places and objects. How true this may be is the issue I want to engage to begin with.
re
I want to consider, in the first place, whether these outdated dichotomies are really all that outdated— traditional-modern for example. There is an assumed difference between what we do with the traditional and what we do with the modern. In London I long taught architects and planners at the Bartlett School 7
and the Architectural Association. And I brought to my classes as many practitioners as I could so that the students would get some sense not only of the theory, the history, the methodology, the scholastic side of the subject, but of the ongoing real-world problems, and how people dealt with them, on the ground and with all the stakeholders. I had no money to give these practitioners, but I gave them a good lunch and enough wine so that they would open up without inhibitions.
is a pledge required by that group. When the SPAB Secretary told us this, a student said, “Well, that’s all very well for ancient buildings. But what about modern buildings?” “Oh no. Nothing to do with modern buildings.” “So,” said the student, “Where do you draw the line?” Right away he answered, “1923.” I asked him afterwards how he came so rapidly to that conclusion and why he chose that year. He said, “Well, he had me. There’s no strict difference between ancient and modern. It’s all a matter of degree. But I would have lost all credibility if I hadn’t come up with a date. So I chose one far enough back before his own birth and yet recent enough so that he would not think it remotely ancient, but part of his own formative background.”
One day I brought the secretary of SPAB, the Society of the Protection of Ancient Buildings, which had been founded by William Morris in the 1870s. Morris believed, like many others of his time—John Ruskin, in particular—that one should never try to restore a building, that restoration was a lie, an impossibility, a contradiction in terms. What you needed to do with old buildings was to allow them gently to expire, give them only daily care, never restore. This Anti-Scrape principle became a manifesto; to join the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, one had to sign the pledge never to restore anything. And it still
Conservation always involves both the traditional and the modern, past, present and future. Another dichotomy that George and Susan termed 8
obsolete was the distinction between us and them. I disagree. All my work over the past half century on heritage, not just architectural heritage, but memories of everything we take from the past, has been pervaded by conflicts between us and them. Indeed, most heritage is essentially defined by differences and disputes between us and them. Heritage originated with the destruction of the Tower of Babel, God’s displeasure at human desires to become God-like. And He dispersed humans into their different tribes, with their different languages, so that they became incommunicable. And having become incommunicable, each tribe, and later each nation, then developed their own notions about where they came from, what mattered to them in their past, what was ancestral to them, what made them different from their neighbors. Heritage conservation is still suffused by quarrels between us and them. Many today dwell on the importance of our shared universal heritage as crucial to the well-being and perhaps even survival of humanity. But for most people most of the time global heritage counts for
little next to their own particular personal and group heritage, zealously guarded against alien others—us against them. I will talk first about why I think we should conserve. Then I will say something about why we should not conserve. And then I’ll discuss some dilemmas posed by these opposing views. First, we have to conserve because conservation is innate to human nature. We’re pack rats. We pile things up. We collect. We save. We hoard. Why do we do this? Because we’ve learned that we need to save in order to survive. We store up food and clothing and other goods to survive physically. We store up skills and habits and memories to survive socially. And we define ourselves by our possessions. Historians and philosophers from Herder on have noted how people speak of themselves in terms of their possessions—that “I am what I own.” “A man’s self is the sum of all he can call his,” wrote William James in Principles of Psychology (1890). In an era 9
of patriarchal privilege, James listed “his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands and horses, and yacht and bankaccount.” Even lacking the yacht, we prize what we possess, and praise it because it is ours.
imperative, biologically, and essential to our being. There’s no escaping it. Third, we preserve, and need to preserve, because it makes us feel good. We take pride in roots. We protect what we value. We try to ensure that things that we love do not decay or fall ill, but endure as long as possible. Hence we strive to keep what we admire and resist erosion, neglect, vandalism, plunder.
Secondly, we have to conserve because only by being aware of our indebtedness to the past and stewarding it for the future can we give meaning to the present. In his Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) the sociologist Émile Durkheim pointed out that “Each generation inherits a treasury of knowledge that it did not itself amass.” We come into this world living in houses that we did not build, speaking languages that we did not create, using tools that we did not fashion, relying on all kinds of things handed down to us by our forebears. Each of us is the inheritor, the beneficiary, of millions of years of DNA, of thousands of years of civilized history, of tens of thousands of hours of our own life history. These legacies underlie everything we do and are essential to our lives. We could not survive without them. So conservation is not only innate, psychologically speaking. It’s
Fourth, we conserve because we feel impelled to save things for some larger purpose than ourselves. Perhaps this is best expressed in Horace’s phrase, “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.” (It is sweet and right to die for one’s country). This is not simply a patriotic slogan. It expresses what it is to be part of a community, working for a cause that transcends our transient selves, whether it’s for our descendants, our neighbors, our fellow countrymen, or the world as a whole. Life’s meaning is immeasurably enhanced by concerns that outlast the brevity of our individual lifespans. 10
Finally, we invest conservation activity in artifacts, buildings, and memories that we feel do not die the same death that we do, but that outlast us, and should outlast us. Edward W. Forbes, the first conservator at Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum, believed that the Sistine Chapel deserved conservation more than any human being. Mortal humans were succeeded by other humans, whereas there was only one Sistine Chapel and could never be another.
Those are some reasons for conserving. What are the reasons for not conserving? First, we should recognize that it’s not just people who die. Everything dies. Nothing is permanent. Nothing is eternal. The Christian dichotomy between time and eternity was based on a notion of an eternal after-life. But it was an after-life somewhere else, not on this terrestrial globe. That ideal of eternity is sometimes applied by conservators to the objects that they love. And yet they know that there is no way to prevent their eventual demise. Since nothing survives forever, the notion of keeping anything forever is a counterproductive delusion. We need instead to focus on how things change over their finite life-spans. Stephen Cairns’ and Jane Jacobs’ Buildings Must Die (2014) looks at buildings in terms of what they’re like when they’re first constructed, and as Ruskin put it, as what they might look like in a hundred or several hundred years’ time, still later as ruins and eventually as mere traces or nothing at all. Everything perishes. Everything that’s created is created out of the ruin of something else. The butterfly is the ruin of the
Harold Nicolson, the English diarist and statesman, said he was willing to be put up before a firing squad if he could thereby save the world’s painting and sculptural masterpieces. He would give up his two sons for the sake of saving a Rembrandt. As Nicolson put it, “I can get another baby any day. But I can never get another Dresden Raphael Madonna.” No one asked his sons if they agreed. But our awareness of our own mortality is mitigated by our desire to ensure that things that have inspired us and countless others should continue to survive, to inspire future generations. 11
chrysalis. The adult is the ruin of the child.
Third, conservation thwarts our frequent need to banish the past because it hurts too much. Or it’s too tragic. Or it becomes a suffocating burden, preventing innovation, stifling creativity, making it difficult to create new things, new ideas, new remedies for improving or even saving the world.
Conservation and preservation are intimately conjoined. Conservation entails destruction because two things cannot occupy the same space at the same time. To create we must destroy. The same holds true for memories. All memories decay. Old memories are continually altered and replaced, to a considerable degree, by new memories. Old ideals are replaced by revised and new ones. Everything is malleable, except our futile faith in fixity.
Fourth, to make our own mark on the world, we need to expunge some of the marks of those who went before us. Vaclav Havel wrote in To The Castle and Back, “I’m convinced that my existence has ruffled the surface of Being, and that after my little ripple, however marginal, insignificant, and ephemeral it may have been, Being is and always will be different from what it was before.”
Secondly, we need not conserve because the notion that cultural heritage is irreplaceable, in the way I described earlier, is true only of individual artifacts and structures. It’s not even remotely true for heritage as a whole. We’re continually creating new heritage, new precious objects, new valuable structures, new entire landscapes, new memories, which replace the old ones as the old ones become less significant or vanish entirely from view. Heritage is an ever-renewable feast, not like fossil fuels never to be created again in large measure in the foreseeable future.
Fifth, we ought not conserve too much, lest we forget that we’re continually dealing with new circumstances, new environments, new landscapes, new climates. Consider climate change. For future planning we cannot simply plug in traditional ideas, existing buildings, existing landscapes because everything is rapidly changing both environmentally 12
and in the minds of successive occupants. And we have to be capable of taking on board the changes in ourselves as well as the new circumstances that impinge on us.
strong in England as to make the very word heritage obnoxious, the Ministry of Heritage morphing into the Department of Culture, Media, and Sport. Prime Minister Tony Blair’s minders made sure that he never stood in front of an ancient monument lest people feel that he was out of touch with today.
In considering our changing selves, what comes to mind is the plea of the inhabitants of Dijon, France, a generation ago. When they were told that the French government had in mind to conserve the city as a precious historical artifact, the citizens of Dijon rose up and said, “Don’t save the stones. Save us. We are what matters in this place. If you save the stones and ignore us, you will have nothing but a mortuary left.”
Regressive heritage is savaged in The Onion magazine’s tribute to the “Eighth Wonder of the World—the Gap Between the Rich and the Poor.” Of all the epic structures the human race has devised, none is more staggering or imposing. The vast chasm of wealth, which stretches across most of the inhabited world, [is] by far the largest manmade structure on Earth. Said a World Heritage Committee member, “It’s an astounding feat of human engineering that eclipses the Great Wall of China, the Pyramids of Giza, and perhaps even the Great Racial Divide.” Untold millions of slaves and serfs toiled their whole lives to complete the gap. The work likely began around 10,000 years ago, when the world’s first landed
This is what Rem Koolhaas means when he excoriates historic preservation as a stifling suffocating force, a metastasizing cancer that not only covers too much of the globe, but keeps in place monuments to history’s vile follies. The pyramids reek of incest and slavery, Versailles of absolutism, the Old Testament has its roots in blood lust and sexism. It’s hard to think of a major structure that was not birthed in evil. The feeling that preservation is regressive has become so 13
elites convinced their subjects that construction of such a monument was the will of a divine authority. Its official recognition as the Eighth Wonder of the World marks the culmination of a dramatic turnaround from just 50 years ago, when popular movements called for the gap’s closure. However, owing to a small group of dedicated politicians and industry leaders, vigorous preservation efforts were begun around 1980 to restore—and greatly expand—the ageold structure. Said Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, a long-time champion and benefactor of the rift’s conservation, “There’s no greater privilege than watching it grow bigger and bigger each day.”
what had happened. The same is evident today in the Balkans, as it was until quite recently in Ireland. It was the Irish who conceived the concept of MOPE—the “Most Oppressed People Ever.” Country after country since has thought of itself as more oppressed than any other. “There is only one nation of victims,” writes an Israeli journalist in this vein. “If somebody else wants to claim this crown of thorns for himself, we will bash his head in.” Memories of past oppression become a justification for oppressing others today. To regain national health, one must forswear, if not forget, the traumatic injuries of the past. Time has changed the balance between conserving and not conserving, as it has between cleaving to tradition and lauding innovation. The early Christians denounced innovation as heretical. Change was anathema, a sin against God’s creation. This view long persisted in Christian doctrine. While Catholics denied fundamental change, Protestants condemned the changes that had perverted the Church from its original purity, and demanded reversion to original principles. But the undesirability of change was
Finally, oblivion may be not only termed desirable but essential to statecraft. Nations need to forget old enmities that threaten to tear society apart. Thomas Hobbes, after the 17th century English Civil War, and Ernst Renan, after the French religious massacres, taught that to overcome the terrible memories of these horrific histories, citizens would have to forget 14
the cardinal principle of both traditionalists and reformers. Change was so abominated that those who were largely promoting it pretended not to be doing so. Erasmus, whose lifelong task was to revise the Vulgate Bible on the basis of his newly translated texts, continually claimed only to return to earlier truths. “I’m not inventing anything,” Erasmus said. “I’m going back to first principles. I’m restoring what used to be.” And many innovators persuaded themselves as well as others that what they were actually doing was not changing but restoring the past.
world begins to influence us, and this goes on till we die.” Emerson, who was notoriously impatient with the past, admitted that even “the originals are not original. There is imitation, model, and suggestion, to the very archangels, if we knew their history.” Just as many denied change while embracing it, others denied stability while actually furthering it. Perhaps the most poignant aspect of late Victorian and Edwardian England, in a period of profound economic and political change, was reverence for tradition not only among the aristocracy and the landed gentry, but among the emulative new industrialists. They were self-denying, like today’s wearers of heritage watches: “You never actually own a Patek Philippe. You merely look after it for the next generation.” So too these British magnates plowed their profits back into the social future. As the economist Maynard Keynes put it, it was never “…jam today. It was only jam yesterday and jam tomorrow.” They were so concerned with ancestors and their descendants that they entailed their properties for generation after generation. They planted trees that
Increasingly prized in early-modern science, innovation was elevated from vice to virtue by Enlightenment savants and Romanticist litterateurs, as a necessary concomitant of personal genius and of secular progress. Yet even the most ardent disciples of progress long considered change, however desirable, chimerical or inconsequential. Socrates held that all discovery was mere recollection. There was nothing essentially new under the sun, “There is all this talk about originality, but what does it amount to?” asked Goethe. “As soon as we are born the 15
only their grandchildren would see coming into full bloom. They rented premises on 99-year leases that only their great-grandchildren would come into the benefit of. And yet, these were among the most change-worthy and progressive figures in recent history.
visit the library at All Souls College, Oxford, to look up a will of its founder, Christopher Codrington, a West Indian planter who’d owned an island I was studying. I corresponded for months with the librarian. He invited me to visit, seated me at a Dickensian desk, brought me the will and various other papers. And he came back 20 minutes later and said, “By the way, you’ve used this library before, haven’t you?”
The classical historian Francis Cornford’s Microcosmographia Academica (1908) satirized Cambridge and Oxford traditional excess. Young academics should learn how to counter untoward demands for reform, to ensure that change never took place. Any proposed reform could be rejected as having previously been tried and found wanting. Or being a good idea for which the time was not yet ripe. Or exciting demands for further reform. From this it became clear that “Every public action which is not customary, either is wrong, or, if it is right, is a dangerous precedent. It follows that nothing should ever be done for the first time.”
And I said, “No, I haven’t.” He said, “Oh, I’m sorry. Then, you can’t use it now, I’m afraid.” So I said, “How does anybody ever use it for the first time?” He said, “Well, if you know an All Souls Fellow….” I did know a Fellow. He was hauled away from afternoon tea to identify me. The problem with the world of heritage conservation is that everybody understands that we should not conserve everything but very few say so, because
I found when I came to live and teach in England that this policy was still essentially adhered to. I needed to 16
heritage is such a sacred cow that nobody dares to cull things. The only conservators I know who regularly get rid of stuff are archivists, because they’re inundated with papers they’re legally forced to take. And they know they can’t keep most of them because there’s not enough space or money for sorting. So they make a 2% rule: 2% of what we get, that’s all we can keep. If only archaeologists and architectural historians thought the same way, how much better off we might be!
vital cultural diversities. We should treasure those diversities in a world that needs alternative gazes against mounting pressures toward uniformity and homogeneity. I agree essentially with that arch-conservative, Edmund Burke, who insisted in his book denouncing the French Revolution that society was a compact—a compact among the living, a compact, also, between the living, those who are dead, and those who are not yet born. Because society is not built in an instant. It’s a creation that requires many generations. Most human institutions, many human artifacts, most human structures require more than one generation. If we rely wholly on novelty we’re fated to evanescence, like insects who survive just a day.
That said, there are risks in not conserving. If you change too fast and get rid of too much, you lose the groundwork of memory and of empathetic recognition built up over time, for things, for ideas, and for people as well. It’s all too easy to tear things down. And it can be done quite rapidly. The iconoclasts are always with us. And they work fast. It takes much longer to build things than to destroy them. The ongoing loss of languages is one such endangered realm. We don’t create new languages fast enough to match the pace of loss of existing tongues. And the old ones embody and embed a whole world of
Several vital new developments that are changing attitudes toward conservation and destruction strike me as hopeful harbingers for the future. One is that science has become historical. We increasingly see the whole world, not just humanity, as undergoing historical change. We understand that the cosmos 17
has a history, that Earth has a history, that life has a history. And everything in those histories is contingent in much the same way as human history. The chronicles of nature are not bound by eternal unchanging laws. They are unpredictable, nonstochastic, largely unknowable in advance. Not only don’t we know what is going to happen in the future, we don’t even know what is possible, what might happen in the future. And we need to bear in mind that we are creatures not only of the uncertainties of time, but of the uncertainties of our own making, within time, as we change the environment, change our culture, change our history even as we seek to conserve—because conservation is also change. Whether we act or choose not to act, we alter the fabric of the future in unpredictable ways.
better than we used to. And we’re more and more aware of the history and consequences of our own impacts. We now inhabit what is called the Anthropocene (or sometimes the Plasticene), an epoch unlike the geological eras of the remote past. Humans have been changing the world and, indeed the cosmos for all we know, for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years—first, as hunters and gatherers with fire, then as agriculturalists and miners and industrialists, then with the bomb and awareness that we can and may destroy not only all humanity, but all life, and latterly with the knowledge that we can actually do something to prevent catastrophe if we put our minds and our hearts to it. Third, within the world of design, and this is after all a design school, there’s been a sea change in the way people look at buildings, objects, landscapes not as static and permanent, but as ever-changing, ever-creating and re-creating. We are not concerned only with the original or best state of something, but with the entire history of structures, buildings, works of art, peoples, as they go through life, as they go
Why do I say this is hopeful? I find it hopeful because it prevents the engineers from doing us in, from contriving a world that is unlivably determined and inhuman. Yet we’re also understanding ecology and nature 18
through time.
those changes.
Conservators are more and more aware that conservation is never forever. There’s never a stopping point. Once begun, conservation must go on and on and on, not only because the circumstances around an object or a memory keep changing, but because the aims and attitudes of those using it keep changing. The sense of a fluid palimpsest has overtaken the notion of any sort of permanent structure. Everything is in flux and is handled as known to be in flux.
In History after Apartheid: Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa, Annie Coombs tells how South Africa House in London was furnished, during apartheid, as a monument to the virtues of slavery and to the rule of white over black. The décor of every room was saturated with celebratory reminders of that oppressive regime. And when the regime changed, and apartheid ended, South Africa’s new High Commission staff came in, horrified, and said, we’ve got to sweep all this dreadful stuff away. But English Heritage, which rules the heritage roost in Britain, said, “You can’t change this. It’s an English listed building. And everything in and around it is protected. Nothing can be taken away or altered.” So what did they do? They kept it all. But they overlaid offensive racist items with corrective materials. On top of murals extolling African slavery are transparencies documenting slave sales and beatings and tortures.
Finally, it becomes increasingly acceptable that conservation is about people, as well as things, sites, and cities. And we become vitally concerned with the differences between them and us, natives and immigrants, the elderly and the young, people of divergent cultures, all the differences that make change both difficult and necessary. And we need to understand the histories of these changes in how we deal with objects, buildings, landscapes, other people, and of the collective memories that embed
Rather than dismantling monuments to past idols and 19
ideas we now find abhorrent, it’s more effective—and truer to history—to keep them and add on to them, in palimpsest fashion, items from their history that highlight subsequent altered views. Penn State officials squirreled away the statue of sainted football coach Joe Paterno after Paterno was found to have turned a blind eye to locker-room sexual abuse. What a missed opportunity! They could have installed a sinister statue behind it, whispering in Paterno’s ear, “Mephistopheles”.
questio
questi
We may commend oblivion as forgiveness in governance, as enjoined by Hobbes and Renan. But we should not flinch from our national memories. Just as Germany is incomprehensible with Goethe but without Goebbels, America cannot be understood with Lincoln but without slavery. Let us retain but embellish the structures and strictures we inherit, amending them as we go along. By so doing we make the past part of the conservation of the future, rather than something that has to be abolished so that the past can become the future. 20
ons [question]
[David Lowenthal]
ions
I have an observation and a question. When you were talking about Vaclav Havel, I found myself thinking about—and I don’t know to the extent to which this is actually true—the notion that Native American people would move through a landscape without leaving a trace I offer that as an observation of a different way of living without the need to have monuments and, maybe, other artifacts.
A hugely difficult problem, especially when there are so many monuments. Look at the Washington Mall, with so many monuments on it now that there’s hardly room for anything else. So what do we do about all the new monuments that we need? The monument to women has not yet been even thought about enough to come. Every group wants to have their monument on the Mall because it’s the most important place. So this is partly a problem of space. And it can’t always be solved by the device of overlaying to create a palimpsest. Maya Lin’s [Vietnam War] monument has been hugely successful, probably because it is a space rather than a structure for the most part.
But the question is—and you touched on it at the very end—I found myself thinking about two statues. One, a statue of [Confederate general] Nathan Forrest in Memphis, Tennessee, which a friend of mine, who founded the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel is interested in getting rid of. And the statue to the White League, in New Orleans, [commemorating post-Civil War white supremacy]. So how do you decide which of these monuments might be not in the 2% and it’s time to get rid of them? And which are ones that could be adapted in the interesting ways that you suggest? There’s no easy answer.
On what you said about moving silently through the forest. This was a notion advanced by whites who wanted to take Indian land. And they could do so more easily if they were able to say that Indians didn’t really live permanently on the land, but just moved through it as nomadic hunters rather than settled agriculturalists. Today the notion of Indians 21
as ecologically non-intrusive has become a kind of celebratory myth of accord with nature. But it actually was originally invented to denigrate and get rid of Indians.
anything to it. Already, through the gaze, we are, in a subjective way, recoding what that physical artifact is.
[question]
The meaning is more easily transformed when you destroy an object and preserve the fragments, as is the case with the Berlin Wall, and as was the case with the fragmented Bastille during French Revolution. And the fragments of the Berlin Wall have since been turned into different kinds of memoria than they were originally. But then, take the Pantheon in Paris. It has undergone so many metamorphoses of meaning—successively cherished as Christian shrine, Enlightenment emblem, monument to national unity, Temple of Humanity—that it becomes an object lesson in the mutation of historical meaning. And there’s the further problem of a building that originally is intact and then falls into ruin, and becomes appreciated as a ruin, either in terms of the morality of decay or for its aesthetic qualities or its links to a dead past, remembered with mingled affection and aversion.
[DL]
To pick up on the South Africa House in London example, one of the faculty here, Krysztof Wodiczko, famously projected onto the tympanum of South Africa House a swastika [Perspecta 26, 1990], a very powerful statement about the perception of the building during apartheid. You speak a lot about the object, the artifacts, and not so much about the way in which something is inscribed within a social, a subjective practice of some kind. And the artifact is never the same once it’s inscribed within a different social setting, a different subjective practice. The Berlin Wall is no longer the Berlin Wall after the fall of communism. It just becomes a monument to the Berlin Wall. And equally with South Africa House, you haven’t got to even add 22
in a church in Milan. In the 12th century Milan fell to Frederick Barbarrosa with the aid of Archbishop Rainald of Cologne. Rewarded with his choice of holy relics, he took the prized bones of the Three Kings, most precious as relics connected with Jesus. Eluding the papal forces that that Pope Innocent III sent to waylay him, Rainald got the three coffins safely to Cologne. Enshrined in a sumptuous gold vault in the new cathedral, the Three Kings became a royal cult. After being crowned, the Holy Roman Emperors came to Cologne to venerate the Three Kings. Only much later did the Milanese began to protest that they’d been robbed, and demanded them back. Why did it take them so long to complain? It took them so long because Milan had never had them. The whole story, from St. Eustorgio on, had been invented by Rainald, to make Cologne important and promote imperial power and sacred connection.
[question] As a historian, I would like to ask you to reflect on the element of fiction in conservation, in memory. There are many examples of monuments to people who didn’t exist, to celebrate distortions of actual reality. People often use the past and sometimes the present, to promote invented memories.
[DL] Fiction can be highly desirable. The fictitious Three Kings are a wonderful object lesson in the utility of non-existent relics. The remains of the Three Kings were among the relics supposedly discovered by Helena, who was the greatest archaeologist in the world. Centuries after things happened, she was able to find sacred sites and relics—the stable where Mary gave birth to Christ, the twelve stations of the Cross, Calvary, the True Cross, the nails, the lancet, the Holy Sepulchre, and so on. Among these were the relics of the Three Kings, which Constantine allowed Saint Eustorgio to carry away in an ox cart from Constantinople in 314 and were then deposited
The relics of the Three Kings were a fiction that proved useful to Cologne and, eventually, also to Milan and to Florence where festivities celebrating the Three Kings became important to civic patrons 23
and populaces.
[question]
It’s not only the funny aspects of fiction that matter. Fiction enables us to understand how things work. Let me cite Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. His city of Clarice recurrently burgeons and then decays, gets rich and then poor. And when it’s poor, its denizens recycle its splendid structures and sumptuous fabrics for mundane purposes. “Brocade curtain ended up as sheets; in marble funerary urns they planted basil; wrought iron gratings torn from the harem windows were used for roasting cat meat on fires of inlaid wood.” When Clarice prospers again ornamental things are rescued, “… preserved under glass bells, locked in display cases, set on vellum cushions,” and admired in museums, serving new aesthetic and memorial purposes. From fictions like Calvino’s we get a more vivid sense of how functions alter and evolve in the real world than from true histories.
You were quoting Hobbes saying that one must forget and, especially, nations must forget. But I come from a country, Israel, that requires its citizens to remember. The people who brought to fruition the idea of Israel were basing it on the memory of the Holocaust. And every year, around April or May, thousands of kids from high schools all over the country go to tour the death camps in Poland. And there, one thing they’re always told is that “You have to remember and never forget!” That’s the sentence that every kid knows, and every kid grows up with. And it serves a lot of national notions. My grandmother never let me go. She wants me to forget. The question is, when is the right time to forget?
[DL] This is a hugely important and unanswerable question. The Holocaust has profoundly affected the whole course of not just history, but the way in which history is taught, because it has made memory so 24
important. Memory, said the French historian Pierre
[question]
Nora in the first volume of his monumental survey of
My question is about extinction. You spoke in terms of your outlooks, on conservation and preservation, that ecology is enabling an understanding of how to engage the future. And I’m wondering, amidst the sites, cities, and species that you’ve discussed how to potentially form this future. Designers need to understand how they can not only prevent extinction, but also potentially multiply these species. How do designers—planners, architects, policymakers—in the era of Anthropocene extinction of species engage the future of conservation?
French heritage, Les lieux de mémoire, is essentially less significant than history in terms of how people think about the past. History overtakes memory, conquers memory. A decade later, memories of the Holocaust had become so profoundly important in global governance, in dealing with horrific injustice, in influencing every reparation movement, Nora reversed his opinion. He now saw memory flooding history. And history is practically drowned out because we are all saturated in Holocaust and similar barbaric memory. The immediacy of memory in the testimony of eyewitnesses impinges on the
[DL]
objectivity, or distancing, mandated by history.
Ecologists concerned about the extinction of other creatures owing to the accelerated rate of change in nature, on account of climate change, and on account of human action, increasingly think not in terms of species, but of ecosystems or, indeed, of the general process of evolution. And that the
I suppose in Yugoslavia, one might say let us get rid of the 14th century if we can, because it causes only grief. And the 14th century is far enough back so that there are no grandparents or even great-grandparents around to complain of being neglected. 25
general evolutionary process should be allowed to continue, as it does in nature, rather than via a designed engineering program, which carries many risks of unintended consequences that have not been examined sufficiently. But while the notion of species conservation may now be thought to some extent inadequate and outdated, it remains essential for engaging popular support because people smitten by the plight of the pandas are not ordinarily massively interested in the salvation of entire ecosystems.
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designed by Somayeh Chitchian MDes Critical Conservation ‘13 Doctor of Design ‘17
C CC C Harvard University Graduate School of Design Cambridge, MA 02138 gsd.harvard.edu