HISTORIC PRESERVATION Of The Built World ~ 1995ed ILLUS

Historic Preservation
Curatorial Management
Of The Built World

by
James Marston Fitch 

.

Published by the University Press of Virginia, copyright Charlottesville and London 1995. Having 433 indexed pages, illustrated with numerous photographs and drawings. Bound in illustrated 6.5 by 9.25 inch hard covers, showing only light edge wear, otherwise binding still internally tight and strong, contents clean and bright, and overall in very good condition.

(text taken from preface...)

The maturation of historic preservation in America has been a cultural process, decades in the making. It might be said to have begun, as a conscious organized movement, when Ann Pamela Cunningham met with a group of Virginia gentlewomen to form the Mt. Vernon Ladies Association in 1859. And it might be said to have come of age a century later, during the 1960s, when the first national legislation in support of historic preservation was passed by the U. S. Congress and when the nation's first academic program in historic preservation was established at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture and Planning.

During that period, preservation has grown from the activity of a few upper-class antiquarians, organized to save a few monumental works of architecture, to a broad mass movement engaged in battles to preserve urban districts, "Main Street," and indeed whole historic cities and towns. As the scale and complexity of preservationists' work has expanded, so too has their understanding of the built world they have been struggling to save. Thus, from concentrating upon the cosmopolitan structures of the powerful and wealthy, the preservationists have come to appreciate their interconnectedness with the vernacular and folkloristic fabric of which they are a part. The preservationists' exclusive attention to urban buildings has broadened to include farm and village architecture and the countryside generally. And from an emphasis on buildings, they have come to understand the equal importance of the gardens, open spaces, and streets around them-that is, of the connective tissue that binds the built world into an organic, life-sustaining whole.

The most recent period has been significant in another respect since it marks the entry of professionals (architects, landscape architects, art historians, archaeologists) into the field which hitherto had been filled almost exclusively by antiquarians: that is, by laymen who, whatever their training or erudition in other fields, were usually amateurs in architecture and building. (We use the term amateur in its original signification, as one who does the work for love of it and not for pay.) It is this participatory aspect of the field which has always given historic preservation its power and which, in the last decade or so, has enabled it to become a dominant force in architecture and urbanism.

As a matter of fact, the success of the historic preservation movement has had quite unanticipated consequences for the practice of architecture itself. More than any other factor, it has made the styles of the past respect able in a profession in which, for over half a century, they had been in disrepute. It has thus created a climate of opinion in which historicizing eclecticism (now called Postmodernism) became a fashionable mode of design. It is ironic indeed that the preservationists have contributed, however unwittingly, to a movement like Postmodernism, which advocates the purely decorative use of past styles of architectural expression in new construction. Whatever errors the preservationists may have made in the past, the deliberate fabrication of facsimiles and reproductions of historic artifacts has never been part of their program. To the contrary, their battle has always been to save the original, the authentic, the prototypical so that future generations would be able to see what the past was really like. No one could have put it more succinctly than Anne Pamela Cunningham in her farewell address on June 1, 1874, to the Mt. Vernon Ladies Association: "Those who go to the house in which [Washington] lived and died wish to see in what he lived and died.... See to it that you keep it that way."

But the restoration of old buildings for their historical associations and aesthetic value has also had unanticipated consequences of another and higher order. For the restored buildings have demonstrated a regenerative impact upon their immediate environs, similar to that of healthy cells when new skin is grafted on to damaged or distressed tissue. This effect can be observed in many cities where extensive historic restoration has occurred. For example, in Boston and Seattle, where comparatively modest schemes for the restoration of old public markets have broadened spectacularly into the regeneration of the entire urban fabric surrounding them. And this has included not merely additional old buildings not originally scheduled for rehabilitation, but also the construction of many new ones. In the case of Boston, one can say that a scheme that began with the restoration of the old Quincy Market has initiated a process of urban regeneration that now extends across the whole northeastern quadrant of the central city. In the case of Seattle, the successful battle to save and restore a popular market has similarly led to regeneration of the largely abandoned waterfront behind and below it....
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