(CS1.2) Preserving the Postmodern Past: Approaches to a Different Kind of Preservation

The preservation of modern buildings has been the subject of vigorous professional debate for the past thirty years. From that debate have emerged several key studies by architects such as David Fixler, Theo Prudon, and Thomas C. Jester, and institutional documents such as APT’s Principles for Practice on Renewing Modernism, and Docomomo’s Eindhoven-Seoul Statement. What all share is a commitment to the received preservation ethos, with modifications, as developed to address 18th and 19th century buildings, which holds that preservation efforts should focus on original building materials, whenever possible, and failed materials should be replaced in kind and on a unit basis. To modify the received approach to accommodate modern buildings, a focus on the ephemerality of many modern materials and how this modifies the application of the received standards was introduced. This shift to accommodate the ephemerality of modern buildings is the basis on which this proposal begins.

While mass-produced materials and assemblies were the basis of modern design, postmodern buildings expressed ideas about architecture that were separate from materiality and structure and used materials to a different purpose. In postmodern construction entire assemblies often fail, and unit replacement is not possible. If materials (or their longevity) did not matter to the architect, what does this mean for traditional preservation and its focus upon the principle of repair and replace in kind? Many of the proponents of postmodernism were young architects, and their sense of building only for the moment clarifies the concept that aging was, in many ways, antithetical to postmodernism.

Postmodernism was largely a literary and artistic endeavor, with the production of actual buildings often lagging far behind. Many of the architectural “monuments” of postmodernism are not buildings, but rather books (such as Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction) and images (such as Stanley Tigerman’s drawings and collages). When used by the postmodernists, materiality was often simply the means to an end, the idea being more important than the object itself, thus in many ways postmodern architecture defies the traditional preservation process. Materials, means of production, and poor assembly create situations where the use of rehabilitation tax credits becomes impossible, and where the principle of “repair in kind” is often necessarily supplanted by “replace entirely with non-historic replica.” If replacement of any of the materials and structural systems is required, should that not be undertaken by the terms the buildings set up for themselves? Or, should we go even further and say that, if these buildings were supposed to act as effective signs in a particular moment in time, space, and culture, they perhaps should not be preserved? If preservation is a form-focused effort and the cultural meaning of that work is lost, does preservation really matter?