FORM AND FUNCTION II
The word “preservation” evokes images of cathedrals and chateaus, colonial homes and Civil War sites, historic monuments that have a fixed place in the local or national heritage. But as historical research and shifting public tastes identify more and more recent buildings as worthy of conservation, the public is being asked to weigh the intrinsic cultural value of somewhat more ephemeral structures, built for commercial or public use over the last century and now threatened by pressures on real estate and changing business practice.
Preservation is not a new issue. It has been a battle cry in expanding metropolitan areas since the early 19th century, when lovers of Gothic architecture were angered by the perceived “vandalism” of the French Revolution.
First, these are buildings designed in an era when “modern” architecture was seen as the ultimate answer to the problems of technological society – when architecture proclaimed itself free of the burden of history. The aim was not to design monuments, but “machines” for living and working, mass-produced for mass society. The shock is realizing even modernity has a history with its own monuments. Second, the special nature of functionalist designs – “form follows function,” as modernists kept repeating – often created buildings that seem resistant to change.
The Row KL
What Victor Hugo called “The War of the Demolishers” in1832, is still without clear issue. Indeed, it has become evident that there are no real winners in these preservation debates. Wholesale preservation and restoration of building and districts has tended to turn them into species of theme parks, where the activity of looking has replaced the activity of original use. “Adaptive reuse” often destroys a building’s original characters. Comprehensive demolitions and redevelopment usually wipe out all traces of a district’s historic past.
Should we adopt the premise that nothing should alter an architect’s original intention, even if it means preserving a structure no longer useful save as a large museum object? Or should we be blind to historic value, transform at will, and let later generations sort out what was good, bad or indifferent in modern architecture?
Here, perhaps the solution is not to transform the building to fit new functions but rather to reverse the process, and imagine new functions for the old form. Where one activity has ceased to inform a space, another might give it new meaning. This epitome of 60’s symbolic modernism, once the expression-filled instrument of seamless flow between curb and aircraft, may take on new significance as the iconic anchor to the new high-tech hangars for the masses. As a center of business exchange and elegant restaurant service, it could serve today’s travellers.
What is needed is less a costing out of one obsolete structure against its apparently more efficient replacement; less the measuring of an old form against new demands; less even the fierce debates over the aesthetic worth of older buildings, than a creative assessment of a building’s formal values and spatial qualities, in relation to a gamut of possible new uses, followed by a reshaping of these uses themselves. After all, even a new building like Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, has demonstrated that buildings alone can provoke significant economic and cultural renewal. The concept of “adaptive reuse” might then be applied to function, not to form.
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But even with inventive solutions, the basic question remains. To what extent should cities or areas become “museums” of their own past, set in amber for the delight of future generations, as opposed to dynamic centers of growth?
The answer will affect economic development, but will also reflect the shifting values of communities with changing ethnic and cultural identities. It will bring many new kinds of structures – everything from freeway intersections to industrial constructions – within the purview of preservationists.