“Not even nostalgia is as good as it used to be”. - Alan Wicker, Journey of a lifetime. 2009.
Again, and again I am told that “the best use for a building is its original use”1. It is a statement enshrined in UK legislation for the protection of the historic environment and yet if the statement were true, then Covent Garden should be a vegetable market, the Tower of London should be a prison with associated torture chamber and Marble Arch, which is sited on Tyburn, would start to hold public executions. Some might think that is a good idea, however the reply I usually receive is “not in the case of those examples, but generally the statement is true". I beg to differ. Would the Rogers Stirk Harbour & Partners conversion of a Spanish bullring into a shopping centre be better used as a place to 'fight' and kill bulls before a crowd of spectators? The Slave Market in Funchal, Madeira – is the best use for the square its original use? Is a Victorian workhouse that is converted into apartments actually 'better' as a workhouse? The relics of the past may look nice, but in reality you wouldn't want to live in the workhouse, and so unless the building has some significance as a museum; then in Conservation terms, it is simply a balance between the 'quality' of the original building and the design and construction of the conversion. Added to this would be ideas such as the best use for a building is a use that keeps the building in use and in the terms of society, provides something that society is in need of, such as accommodation. Change and subsequent alteration is often the result of obsolescence driven by social and economic reasons and too often statements are repeated to try to prevent change and support generalized views alleviating the necessity for actual thought.
Architects also repeat nonsensical statements, such as ' form follows function''2. Form does not follow function, it follows intention. If an architect intends the form of the building to appear radical, then how the building functions will be subordinate to that intention. This should be worrying in an age of attention seeking buildings, because as Charles Eames said, “ the extent to which you have a design style, is the extent to which you have not solved the design problem” 3.
At the International Committee on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) general meeting in Canada in 2008 there was much talk of 'the intangible spirit of place'. It was a buzz phrase that was repeated by different speakers, and was then repeated later in the committee magazine. 'Intangible' means 'not capable of being touched, not directly appreciable by the mind – unfathomable – but often noteworthy or influential nevertheless'4. The curious thing about the phrase 'intangible spirit of place', is that places and their individual components such as buildings are not intangible They can be 'touched' they can be 'appreciated by the mind and so could this phrase just be a way of avoiding doing enough homework to be able to explain to someone why something should be preserved? There is a very good argument here, that if someone cannot state why something should be protected, then they are probably not the person who should be trying to protect it. We can all agree that elements of the built environment deserve protection, but should there not be some rigor in how that protection is determined?
Most of the buildings and places that Conservation seeks to protect came into existence before planning and conservation and curiously many places have become worse since. There may be multiple reasons for this but surely formalized preconceptions bound by a set of generalized regulations play a part in the resulting environment, or why would the legislation and accompanying regulations exist? Sir John Soane altered many buildings at a time when there were no controls to stop him and it is ironic that there are now controls in place to stop anyone altering one of his alterations. If planning and conservation controls existed in his day, then many of the buildings he altered – such as the John Soane museum (Soane's house) in Lincolns Inn Fields, London, would not exist and that would be a great loss to the Capital. The historic built environment is interesting because it has been allowed to evolve unhindered, creating strange juxtapositions, unusual hybrids of past styles that have been over written and altered to produce a complex panorama presented with all the simplicity of an English village.
Nostalgia for past can be seen as comforting, the picturesque nature of a 'timeless' scene conferring the idea of permanence in an ever more transient world. The BBC have produced a program entitled 'Heritage! The battle for Britain's past' (BBC i player) and it is a battle, but is it the battle the heritage lobby would claim? Heritage legislation is very powerful and yet would we legislate so that only old medical practices be used, old cars driven, old radios listened to and old Televisions watched simply because they are 'old' and should therefore be preserved? All of these artifacts may be wonderful designs and interesting as part of the development of technology seen in a museum or documentary, or collected by an enthusiast, and yet most people have opted for modern, up-to-date alternatives. Even those that find the allure of old timber frame buildings compelling as places to inhabit, want kitchens and bathrooms, and indoor toilets, and a water supply and glass windows, and electricity and gas and central heating, and insulation and carpets and telephones and dishwashers and washing machines; and for the Oxfordshire Conservation Officer who said that an old house couldn't have a garage because “that house would never have had one originally”, the house would never have had all of those other modern conveniences and she would be very disillusioned if she woke up in the morning and they were missing. Many 'old' buildings exist precisely because they have allowed adaptation, without those alterations would anyone choose to live there? No longer can people just alter their homes as they had once done in the past. We have effectively created legislation to protect the past by preventing the very things that created it. This is curious, as History is a record of change. If we look at an English timber frame building we may see a massive, over sized brick chimney on the flank wall and this will have been a later addition, an ostentatious statement by the owner proclaiming to their neighbours that they had the latest modern heating system in their house. Today such buildings may appear to many as generically 'old', but their accumulation of alterations to reach their present appearance raises the question of how prescriptive should heritage legislation be? As Goethe wrote, 'history is the fanning of the flames, not the worship of the ashes' 5.
How heritage is presented is selective in the parts of history that it chooses to tell. As a post graduate student I proposed a piece on the resistance to alteration of a group of merchants houses in Bristol, England. What appears as an elegant Bristol street with fine details was built on money derived directly from the slave trade and what was called 'the golden triangle' 6. My thesis tutor informed me that I could not include such information as it was “social history” and yet most historic buildings are conserved precisely because of their social history. Could it be that some social histories show something constructed on human misery and that the movement to protect them falters when faced with the harsh reality of how they came into existence? Do the 'elegant facades' and 'fine details' somehow become less appealing when we start to understand where they come from; and would this change our desire to protect them?
When we look at the old buildings of our built heritage we are essentially looking at the edited highlights as 'bad' buildings do not survive. The buildings are then altered to suit modern tastes, so Nash's terrace at Regents Park (London) is Listed so that it can only be painted a particular shade of White – although when first constructed the buildings were painted Brown 7. The Acropolis, Athens (Greece) is maintained as a permanent ruin and preserved as such, reconstructed to a particular point in time. Like the Greek statues we see today, this is an altered state, an illusionary 'pure' sensibility of what never was – The Acropolis, like Greek statues of the period, were brightly coloured and yet are preserved as naked stone 8.
The above picture 9 shows the construction in 1851 of The Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, the first major steel and glass building in England. If we look closely we can see the building professionals with their drawings, dressed in frock coats and top hats. This juxtaposition shows us the radical nature of this structure. Just as there was with the Millennium Dome by Richard Rogers, there was a debate after the exhibition on what to do with the building and an 'ideas competition' was held. A solution by the architect C. Burton proposed a space saving solution of standing the steel and glass building on its end to create a 1000 ft tower 10 – and the heritage lobby would have us believe that modern buildings are disconnected from the past? For today's design professionals it might seem that 'when I most want to be contemporary the Past keeps pushing in, and when I long for the Past..... the Present cannot be pushed away' 11.
What to do with the redundant Crystal Palace, C. Burton 1851
The Shard, would be an example of why generalized regulations can be out of sync with the reality of a modern structure. The Shard is an overtly modern building and yet from a distance appears more like a very tall Gothic spire. Some may argue with that analogy and yet in the view of London by Canaletti, published in 1753 12, we see a London filled with, what in 1753 would have been, very tall structures that are in the Spire-like form of The Shard. Therefore we have a very modern addition to the London skyline that can be
seen to have a particular historic resonance. 
If we move forward in time to 1889 we can find examples of similar tall structures in London's history, such as the 1,234 ft high tower, with its twelve pneumatic lifts, proposed at Wembley, London as a competitive response to the Eiffel Tower 13.
1,234 ft proposed glass tower, Wembley, London 1889
The Shard may be the tallest building in London and yet at street level, because of its tapered form, it appears less overbearing than many smaller buildings. This does not mean that we shouldn't question the impact of tall buildings in a city such as London, but it does call into question decisions that reject tall buildings simply because of their height. As Richard Rogers said, “The Shard could have been a few floors higher and it would have made no difference to its impact at all”.
Development can have a positive impact on Society, especially in times of austerity and we can see this in examples such as the Rockefeller Center in New York. The Shard does not contain such social drivers to the development as The Rockefeller Center14, although the development does include the regeneration of London Bridge Station as well as accessible pedestrian access. The Shard is a commercially driven building and yet it appears to have intensified the regeneration and popularity of the locality, which suggests that major development can have a positive social impact on an area, even if that was not part of the original intention.
Attitudes against modern buildings in the UK by the Conservation lobby are always slightly absurd as it is not possible to just jump out of history. Modern buildings are not independent of everything that has gone before, that has accumulated to make up this moment in time. A modern building might reference a building from the 1920s, but that building may well be referencing a building that came before it, just because we no longer see the reference does not mean that it is no longer there. Design style is a language and like human language there is room for different languages and what is important is not the language itself, but what is being said. Jonathan Meades recently made an excellent television program about Essex and the Utopian projects that for a short while emerged in the UK and particularly in Essex. As with all Utopian projects they would eventually fail, but isn't it wonderful that someone tried to make things better for people: better living conditions, better communities, a better environment to inhabit than their 'normal' circumstances would allow. It does not matter if such enterprises were linked to commercial activities, designs that contain such an idea at their heart really are worth preserving and promoting.
Conservation of the built environment is important as buildings and places become symbols of cultural identity: Big Ben, The Gherkin, The Shard or Buckingham Palace may symbolize London or England; The Eiffel Tower or the Louvre Pyramid may symbolize Paris; The Colosseum – Rome; The Empire State, The Chrysler, The White House – The USA; The onion domes of Red Square – The USSR; The Forbidden City, The Bird's Nest or the skyline of Shanghai – China, The Taj Mahal – India; A hotel in Dubai, a bullring in Spain or anything by Oscar Niemeyer in Brazil – all contain a cultural identity that speaks of place. With Ceausescu's palace in Bucharest Romania, a building becomes a symbol of an era; a symbol of political ideology that has raised such strong emotions in the collective memory of Romania's people that many have called for it's demolition. If Ceausescu's palace survives outside of recent memory it may become Romania's Versailles or be regarded in a similar way to The Tower of London. Within this list are modern buildings that take their place in history and this should teach us that Conservation is important, but so is modern creativity.
In the debate about the conservation and Listing of buildings my favorite story comes from the architect Cedric Price. When it was proposed that his temporary housing be Listed, he petitioned that they be demolished, “they were never meant to last”, he said.
Alex King is an architect working at Alex King Design / Designalexable, examples of his latest work can be seen at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yGQhlRz8mc
The image of Constable's Haywain with the addition of the Villa Savoye by Corbusier is by Alex King ©Alex King 1995.
'Heritage! The battle for Britain's past' can be seen on BBC i player, with new episodes every Thursday.
1 Planning Policy Guidance, UK heritage legislation. The statement has continued to be used in the subsequent legislation that has followed and is often repeated by heritage professionals.
2 Quote from architect Mies van de Rohe. This is a statement that, for decades, has been repeated by architects. Tom Wolfe in his book, 'from Bauhaus to our house' draws attention to the profession's penchant for repeating phrases with obscure or dubious meaning.
3 Charles Eames quoted by Demetrios Eames, TED talks 2007.
4 Webster's International dictionary 1998.
5 Johann Wolfgang vonGoethe quoted in 'The story of Philosophy' by Bryan Magee. 1998. ISBN 0 7513 3332 8.
6 Bristol slave trade: 'Conquerors of Time' by Trevor Fishlock, 1988, Chapter 7, Page 77.
7 See: Listing for Nash's Terrace, Regents Park, London.
8 The Parthenon, Mary Beard. 2002. ISBN 1 86197 301 2 – no individual quote was used, however this excellent book shows The Parthenon as a structure continually in transition to the point where in 1839 (photograph page 84) a mosque was constructed by the Turkish army in the centre of the building; which only had columns on three sides remaining. When this is compared with the current alterations seen in Dan Cruickshank's BBC report on alterations to the building, it is clear that most of the Acropolis that we see today is a modern construct.
9 Picture of construction of the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park. 1851: Source :Farringdon Historic Archive.
10 Picture Source: The Crystal Palace/Hyde Park/C1851/after the Great Exhibition: Public Record Office, London.
11 Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels. 1983. P 124.
12 Old & New London. Vol 2. Thornbury Archive.
13 Wembley History Society, Grange Museum, The London 'Eiffel' Tower promoted by Sir Edward Watkin MP and his newly formed 'Metropolitan Tower Construction Company'. The glass tower was not the winner of the competition. The winner was an 'Eiffel' tower 'replica' that was 165 ft taller than the original. This was partially constructed, but never completed.
14 Dan Cruickshank, Adventures in Architecture P54-61 and also available as a BBC DVD.
