The Future of Preserving the Past: Defining the Value (and Values) of Historic Preservation

The National Historic Preservation Act celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 2016. The legislation established a set of federal policies for preserving and rehabilitating buildings, sites, and cultural resources deemed historically significant. In the words of Albert Rains and Laurance Henderson in their preface to the report by the Special Committee on Historic Preservation of the U.S. Conference of Mayors that laid the groundwork for the law, these places help maintain “[c]onnections between successive generations.” ¹ The profusion of preservation efforts in the United States over the last five decades testifies to the far-reaching impact of the act. More than 2,500 places have been designated National Historical Landmarks since 1966, while another 90,000 buildings, sites, districts, and structures have been added to the National Register of Historic Places. ² Outside the purview of the act itself, the appeal of rehabilitated historic dwellings and commercial spaces—like the popularity of heritage tourism—reflects a widely shared desire to perpetuate what Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen called the “presence of the past” in American life. ³ Yet as a record of the structures and spaces a society hopes will endure, historic preservation also looks to the future. The landscapes of metropolitan areas reflect the successes of the preservation movement. Yet our urban environments also illustrate the limits of preservation as a tool for envisioning the future.

Take Chicago. Forty buildings and sites in the city are National Historic Landmarks. As of 2015, 363 sat on the National Register. (In suburban Cook County, the figures are 12 and 168, respectively. ⁴ ) Countless other old structures not formally designated as historic also survive. Design aficionados exploring Chicago can behold architectural gems from various eras: Daniel Burnham’s Monadnock Building and Marshall Field and Co. Building; Louis Sullivan’s Auditorium Building and Carson, Pirie, Scott Building; Holibard and Root’s Chicago Board of Trade Building; Bertrand Goldberg’s Marina City; Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Illinois Institute of Technology campus buildings and Chicago Federal Plaza; Bruce Graham and Walter Netsch’s Inland Steel Building; and Netsch’s University of Illinois at Chicago campus. Visitors can also make pilgrimages to the Printing House Row District, the Pullman Historic District, the Prairie Avenue District, and multiple historic districts in the city’s so-called Bungalow Belt, among others. During the past five decades, Chicago has diligently stewarded many of its beautiful, notable buildings and distinctively designed neighborhoods and districts, giving the city a well-earned reputation as a municipal leader in the preservation field. In 2000, then-Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley even received an award for Outstanding Achievement in Public Policy from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which, incidentally, maintains a field office in the preserved Monadnock Building. “Chicago’s preservation movement has jumped lightyears ahead,” declared the president of the National Trust. ⁵ The city’s handsome, historic urban landscape draws tourists, propels commerce, and—since the early 2000s—has attracted middle- and upper-class white residents back to the city their parents and grandparents abandoned. ⁶ The majestic slice of the city viewed from the Chicago Architectural Foundation’s river tours presents Chicago as its boosters would like it to be seen—a prosperous, cosmopolitan hub of commerce and culture.

Alongside this record of successful preservation is a parallel record of destruction. Across large swaths of the city, it is the absence of preservation—in a broad sense—that is most striking. In the years since the passage of the National Historic Preservation Act, Chicago neighborhoods far from the Loop have experienced the wrenching economic and social consequences of decline, especially in communities of color. Between 2010 and 2015 Chicago’s central area grew by more than 42,000 residents, but the much larger—and largely African American—far South Side area lost nearly 50,000 residents. ⁷ The story is similar on the city’s West Side. Preservation enthusiasts visiting what remains of the original Sears, Roebuck complex—a National Historic Landmark—in North Lawndale pass through a neighborhood struggling with the consequences of economic disinvestment, predatory lending, punitive law enforcement, violence, and official neglect—all heavily inflected by race. ⁸ As of 2012, 43.1 percent of North Lawndale households lived below the poverty line. The neighborhood’s per capita income of $12,034 was nearly $16,000 below the city average and more than $53,000 below that of the Loop. ⁹ North Lawndale is hardly an outlier on the West Side. Madison Street, which bisects the city from the lakefront to the western suburbs, transports one from the historic skyscrapers of the Loop through low-income, majority-African American neighborhoods of East Garfield Park and West Garfield Park that still bear physical scars and vacant lots stemming from the uprising that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, two years after the passage of the National Historic Preservation Act. ¹⁰ After traversing the neighborhoods many Chicagoans try to ignore, Madison Street crosses into Oak Park, the leafy suburb known for its lovingly preserved Frank Lloyd Wright structures, four of which enjoy National Historic Landmark designations.

The differences among the Loop, the West Side, and Oak Park are stark. They illustrate how sharply class and race inform decisions about what is worthy of preservation. The ongoing work of preserving Wright’s Oak Park buildings represents a veneration of architectural vision, ingenuity, and beauty. It also expresses a desire to safeguard the structures as monuments to the renowned architect. This is all for the good. At the same time, however, residents and community organizations on the West Side of Chicago must struggle mightily to preserve the social and economic fabric of neighborhoods in the face of market forces and public policies that are, at best, indifferent to their survival. The area now faces a new threat in the form of gentrification, which has taken hold in the West Loop and Near West Side and threatens to creep westward, pricing residents out of their neighborhoods. ¹¹ In 1966, With Heritage So Rich called for tools to protect vital historic resources “from the corrosion of neglect or the thrust of bulldozers.” ¹² Congress obliged. Fifty years later, many vulnerable communities in Chicago and elsewhere rarely see these preservation tools applied to them.

Two recent books examine both aspects of preservation. One demonstrates the vital service preservation performs by saving old places; the other highlights the equally vital services the preservation movement could be performing. Richard Longstreth’s edited volume Frank Lloyd Wright: Preservation, Design, and Adding to Iconic Buildings recreates the process by which designers (including Wright himself), occupants, and other stakeholders confronted the daunting prospect of altering the renowned architect’s structures. These case studies reveal a productive tension between the ideals of preservation and the needs of present and future occupants. Max Page’s Why Preservation Matters considers what kind of principles the preservation movement would need to adopt to move beyond saving “great” buildings and begin devoting more energy to sustaining neighborhoods like North Lawndale. Read together, the books question how the values embedded in traditional historic preservation could aid a more ambitious movement devoted to securing a better future for places like Chicago’s West Side.

Both Frank Lloyd Wright and Why Preservation Matters examine the practices and values that constitute historic preservation. They devote little space to theorizing, focusing instead on how to apply preservation principles in the brick-and-mortar world. Page is an historian and activist. Most of the contributors to Longstreth’s volume are architects, curators, and preservation professionals—several of the whom participated closely in the projects they discuss.

Six sat on the board of the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy—the nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving and maintaining extent Wright structures—at the time they wrote the essays, as Longstreth notes (p. xi). The books qualify as labors of love, reflecting deep commitments to preservation. Both Frank Lloyd Wright and Why Preservation Matters are prescriptive, charting a course for the future of preservation.

Yet the volumes approach preservation from different perspectives. The contributors to Frank Lloyd Wright interrogate preservation as a set of design practices. They offer a guide to protecting the legacy of Wright and, by extension, other iconic architects. Page, on the other hand, unravels the cultural, economic, and political threads that inform the preservation movement. He challenges the field’s assumptions while entreating preservation to act as “an even greater progressive force” than it has in the past (p. ix). At the same time, Frank Lloyd Wright and Why Preservation Matters are complementary in that both explore the values inherent in preservation. The notion that protecting old buildings and places reflects particular values is not new. Many scholars have established the links between preservation, commemoration, and group identity going back to the earliest efforts to save aspects of American heritage. ¹³ Page also investigated early examples of preservation in his and Randall Mason’s 2004 edited volume, Giving Preservation a History: Histories of Historic Preservation in the United States. ¹⁴ Yet Frank Lloyd Wright and Why Preservation Matters look forward as well as backward. In the Wright volume, de Teel Patterson Tiller contends that preservation should “speak to the future about what was important to us at this time, what we thought about, what mattered to us” (p. 46). Likewise, Page argues that Americans need preserved places “not only as a reminder of past events shaping their national identity, but as a gathering place for debate about the future of that identity” (p. 28). The authors cast in sharp relief the question of what values today’s preservation projects will yield tomorrow.

The essays in Frank Lloyd Wright wrestle with the problem of modifying the architect’s buildings. Frank Lloyd Wright fills what Longstreth identifies as a scholarly void by examining the structural life of Wright’s buildings after their completion (p. 1). Like all buildings, Longstreth observes, Wright’s must “satisfy the evolving needs of their occupants if they are to remain viable” (p. 2). At the same time, any alteration of Wright’s structures must preserve the integrity of the original design, Longstreth argues. The volume examines eleven such efforts, including several conceived but never executed. Two framing essays provide a theoretical foundation for the remaining chapters. Longstreth’s “The ‘Dilemma’ of Adding” and Tiller’s exploration of the proper approach to designing alterations of historic places argue for the compatibility between preservation and contemporary architecture. Longstreth contends that the preference of many preservationists for additions that blend in with the original is wrongheaded. Rather than replicate the original vision, architects would do better to employ a present-day idiom that harnesses “at least some of the path-breaking spirit that inspired its forebear,” Longstreth writes (p. 34). Tiller amplifies Longstreth’s argument, conceding that while the “destructive nature of modernism” in the era of postwar urban renewal helped catalyze today’s preservation movement, the “intergenerational design dialogue” in historic contexts is preferable to weak imitation (pp. 45, 46).

The defense of contemporary design in these opening chapters leaves unanswered a question Longstreth poses in his introduction: “How Wrightian can additions, alterations, or adjacent work be?” (p. 2). The remaining chapters take up that question, documenting the process by which designers negotiated the tension between historical context and present-day priorities. Sidney K. Robinson’s essay on Taliesin—Wright’s studio and residence outside Spring Green, Wisconsin, completed in 1911—and Anne Biebel and Mary Kieran Murphy’s essay about the Hillside Home School—a building and campus adjacent to Taliesin—examine Wright’s efforts to enhance his original vision for the two properties. Robinson and Biebel and Kieran demonstrate how Wright worked to balance functions, forms, and spatial relationships as he planned additions and entirely new structures. In contrast to the view that historic buildings should remain frozen in time, Robinson observes that “change became integral to the life of Taliesin virtually from its inception” in 1911 (p. 51). Contrary to his reputation for disregarding the needs of occupants, Wright’s plans for additions at Taliesin between 1912 and 1914 (shelved after arson destroyed the residential wing) and his completed additions to Hillside in the 1920s and 1930s demonstrate his interest in the relationship between design and human activity. In these early chapters, however, the architect was also the occupant.

After Wright’s death, modifying his structures became a matter of preserving the spirit of the original design without hampering present-day functions. The strongest essays in Frank Lloyd Wright foreground the relationships among architects, clients, occupants, and other stakeholders. A tension emerges between contributors who suggest stakeholders in preservation projects should be more deferential to architects and those who argue that architects should be more solicitous of stakeholders. Tom Kubala’s chapter on the addition his firm designed for Wright’s First Unitarian Meeting House outside Madison, Wisconsin, provides the most robust case for the latter position. The essay details the firm’s consultations with a spectrum of stakeholders, including the congregation, an outside preservation group, a day care tenant, city, state, and federal officials, and an advisory panel of Wright experts. Kubala notes that the process yielded nearly unanimous congregation support for the project and suggests that it also led to a stronger design. “[T]he client,” he concludes, “became our best critic, not letting us stray too far into abstraction or architectural conceptualizing” (p. 194).

Dale Allen Gyure’s chapter on Wright’s Florida Southern College campus is more critical of the client. He offers a sharp reproach of the institution’s modifications to Wright’s campus design between the 1960s and 1980s. The changes met the contemporary needs of the college but failed to preserve Wright’s vision, Gyure argues convincingly. The additions diverged from Wright’s 1938 master plan for a campus providing what Gyure terms an “experience of mystery and surprise,” with buildings shrouded by a canopy of citrus trees and visually oriented toward nearby Lake Hollingsworth (p. 109). The result was a built environment in conflict with itself and with the natural environment. Neil Levine’s history of the Gwathmey Siegel addition to the Guggenheim Museum offers an even stronger rebuke of institutional disregard for Wright’s vision. The essay excavates the conflicts leading up to the 1992 opening of the ten-story addition of mostly gallery space adjacent to Wright’s famous spiral rotunda. Levine suggests that the Guggenheim executed a bait-and-switch, presenting the project as a needed “restoration” of the existing structure rather than as an addition. While restoration connoted good stewardship of the original building, Levine argues that the new building tarnished the design context of Wright’s work. Levine also charges that Gwathmey disingenuously presented Wright’s original design as, in the author’s words, “incomplete and unresolved” and suggested that the addition remained faithful to Wright’s early plans for an adjoining tower (p. 140). Too many knowledgeable observers, Levine concludes, played along. The result was a “rewriting and even subverting” of history (p. 129).

A similar obfuscation of the past anchors Thomas Templeton Taylor’s chapter on the effort to preserve Wright’s Westcott House in Springfield, Ohio. What began as a grassroots effort to save an endangered building became a project of historical erasure. Designed by Wright in 1907, the Westcott House straddled the line between what Taylor calls “two Springfields”: a wealthy neighborhood on one side and a district of working-class homes on the other (p. 261). Taylor stresses that the adjacent houses antedated the Westcott home and constituted a crucial part of its context. Wright designed the building “to be one with its setting, not to overpower it” (p. 270). Yet the for-profit corporation established to restore the Westcott House purchased and in 2010 demolished the adjacent working-class homes as part of a redevelopment project to generate revenue for the restoration. The demolition deprived Wright acolytes of the opportunity to see his work in a context distinct from the “demographically and physically cohesive” suburbs in which he often worked early in his career (p. 262). Even more damningly, the decision to sacrifice a piece of Springfield’s working-class history to protect the home of a wealthy industrialist highlights a troubling set of assumptions within the preservation movement about what deserves saving. The loss of any Wright structure would be abominable. Yet the priority placed on safeguarding the work of great architects—and, by extension, the history of their elite patrons—betrays the continuing valorization of wealth and power within the preservationist field.

Preservationists have for years advanced a different view of what preservation should mean and what it can do. Max Page’s Why Preservation Matters synthesizes this work and expands on it. Like the contributors to Frank Lloyd Wright, Page has produced a deeply personal book, written in the first person and drawing on stories from his own family’s history and that of the western Massachusetts region where he lives. In surveying preservation in action, Page also highlights the work of today’s most innovative preservationists, many of whom contributed to his recent publication, Bending the Future: Fifty Ideas for the Next Fifty Years of Historic Preservation in the United States (edited with Marla Miller). ¹⁵ Part of the “Why X Matters” series from Yale University Press, the book reflects on “the role of preservation as a force in public life” (p. 16). To understand why preservation matters, Page begins by considering why we preserve. He defines preservation as the process of “bringing old places and living people into contact and dialogue” (p. 41). Page contends, however, that people often bring unrealistic expectations to their encounters with the past. He dismisses the desire for an “allegedly pure encounter with the physical past” as a “fools’ errand” (p. 33, 34). The instinct to preserve a place or building too often assumes that by “honor[ing] the original we might recover a lost world and its values” (p. 42). To the contrary, Page argues that preservation provides a set of ideas and practices for drawing on the past to fashion values for the present and the future. Preservation matters to Page because it helps communities secure economic justice; pursue environmental sustainability; confront shameful, painful histories; and marshal beauty in the service of justice. Making this vision reality requires a social and political mobilization in which Americans would “return the ‘movement’ part of their preservation movement” (p. 14). It would place preservation advocates on the front lines of today’s most pressing conflicts. Page poses a stark challenge: “For what are preservationists willing to be arrested?” (p. 95).

One issue on which Page would like to see preservationists take the lead, and perhaps be arrested, is economic justice. He concedes that critiques of the preservation movement from both the left and right as “elitist and irrelevant to the pressing, desperate needs of urban areas” have merit (pp. 78-79). As an example, he points to the irony of the National Trust for Historic Preservation honoring Chicago’s former mayor in 2000 for saving historic places at the same time the city acquiesced to the University of Illinois’s demolition of Maxwell Street Market, a key site of working-class Jewish and African American history, as part of a campus expansion. Such episodes highlight the preservation movement’s tendency to reinforce the economic status quo. Yet Page argues that a different model is possible. He calls for preservation to “be reconfigured as a social justice movement” (p. 80). Doing so would mean establishing a new relationship between preservation and the market. Page laments that preservationists have “traded social protest for a place at the table of mainstream economic development strategies,” an approach that emphasizes growth over equity (p. 95). Transforming preservation into a tool for social justice would mean focusing less on securing tax credits for historic rehabilitation, which are only available to “income-producing” properties, and more on forging coalitions to resist “displacement and disinvestment” (p. 93). Such coalitions, Page suggests, should advocate for forms of ownership that challenge the logic of the private market—public housing, rent control, communal land trusts, and cooperatives. As a model, he points to Project Row Houses, a nonprofit organization in one of Houston’s oldest African American neighborhoods that nurtures arts-based community development, social services, and affordable housing. ¹⁶

Resisting the logic of the market is also a precondition for another part of Page’s proposed agenda: sustainability. He argues that combating climate change provides a compelling reason to prefer preservation over the real estate industry’s wasteful cycle of demolition and rebuilding. Using preservation as a tool to combat climate change would compel preservationists to become “guilty of the charge they have long been accused of, but of which they were previously innocent . . . they must demand that Americans preserve most buildings” (p. 121). In contrast to simply saving iconic structures, Page argues that preservationists must defend structures not widely accepted as beautiful. Fostering sustainability will also require preservationists to embrace contemporary elements, even “ugly” ones, in an otherwise faithfully preserved historic context, Page argues. He points approvingly to the decision of the Hancock Shaker Village in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, to place solar panels near its main entrance. Yes, the conspicuously twenty-first century installation pierces the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century aesthetic of the museum’s buildings and grounds. Yet the Shakers, Page notes, embraced environmental stewardship. The solar panels are thus in keeping with the spirit of the historic site. As with his proposals for economic justice, Page’s vision for preservation-based sustainability challenges both the supremacy of private markets and prevailing practices of the field. The two chapters form the heart of his argument about the need for preservation to become a “progressive force” (p. ix).

The two final chapters of Why Preservation Matters are less sharp-elbowed regarding the preservation movement, in part, because Page addresses topics largely accepted by preservationists. His chapter on “difficult places” discusses interpretive efforts in Berlin, Buenos Aires, and—closer to home—the Manzanar National Historic Site, a former Japanese internment camp in Lone Pine, California, to demonstrate the role preservation can play in reckoning with the most damning episodes in our collective past. Pointing to the work of preservationists, curators, and activists affiliated with the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, Page argues that confronting the history of difficult places can be a catalyst for justice in the present and future. If “humankind’s worst histories” can generate a better society, so too can beauty (p. 161). With his final chapter on beauty, Page ends where traditional preservation long began. He examines how the experience of beauty provides the “germ of a democratic sentiment” and can “build a common bond” that becomes the antecedent to more just communities (p. 172). Page once again argues for finding beauty in things dismissed as ugly or even in something nonphysical—in a particular formulation of values that then become “rallying points for future action” (p. 173).

Page calls for planting new values—the importance of community and the fair distribution of material goods—in the soil of preservation. In advocating for saving nearly all structures, including eyesores, and dislodging the market from the center of historic preservation, Page forcefully challenges preservationists. The contributions to Longstreth’s volume reflect, in many ways, the approach against which Page writes. Traditional preservation practices have been very good to Wright’s buildings, twenty six of which enjoy National Historic Landmark status. ¹⁷ Many other buildings and districts deserve to be saved. Many other histories merit preservation besides those designed or inhabited by famous, accomplished people. Still, the preservation of Wright’s beautiful buildings is an unqualified good.

Page suggests that beauty can be harnessed to a set of values that radiate outward into the communities of which the buildings are a prominent part. Kubala’s description of the relationship between design and community at Wright’s First Unitarian Meeting House affirms the role traditional preservation can play in the service of Page’s vision for a more just world. Longstreth’s volume misses an opportunity to examine how preservation speaks to the architect’s broader vision for organizing society, a vision on display in the Museum of Modern Art’s 2017 exhibition, Frank Lloyd at 150: Unpacking the Archive. ¹⁸ What do Wright’s urban master plans or his Broadacre City concept reveal about his views on the relationship between architecture, preservation, sustainability, and equity? What can Wright’s design principles do for the residents of Chicago’s West Side? Page sees an urgent need for preservationists to collaborate with such communities. His proposed agenda demands transforming American public policy and restructuring economic relations. Why Preservation Matters leaves the reader to wonder whether Page thinks those changes must precede the growth of a new preservation movement or whether preservationists themselves must be the vanguard. In either case, it is a tall order. Page calls for nothing less than a political revolution, to use a phrase in vogue since the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. The future of historical preservation, like its past, will travel the road of politics.