Regional and Urban Design Committee

This week in a leadership training session I had to explain to young aspiring architect leaders how sustainability and preservation are linked and how both lend themselves to civic engagement. I also made the benefits of preservation a selling point in an interview to obtain a project commission.

On first blush it seems unlikely that architects as designers of "what ought to be" and agents of change would be good advocates for preservation, be it of nature or of buildings. Wouldn't an architect always opt for building stuff instead of preserving nature? Tearing something down for new construction instead of preserving it for tedious rehabilitation?

Large scale demolition in Baltimore's Westside National Register District (photo: ArchPlan)

This attitude certainly was the default mode that reigned for a long time; so long, in fact, that the professional reputation of architects is still soiled by it.  Architects want to build "soul-less" modernist stuff, "monuments for themselves",  they don't mind paving over the world with new towns, office parks and stadiums that look like UFOs, and they certainly don't mind demolition of what the public holds dear but they call kitsch. Just as cities are still recovering from the scars of that approach, architects are still battling this caricature.

This image of the architect is still in many people's mind, even if they have never heard of Le Corbusier's plans to defile Paris or read any of Frank Lloyd Wright's anti urban treatises. This image survived in spite of friendlier depictions of architects in recent movies, and recent decades in which architects have pushed the reset button many times, embraced Jane Jacobs, become porch loving new-urbanists, and elevated the worn look of old lofts to the level of hippest thing in town.

So, aside from this sidebar about the image problem of architects, how can preservation be anything but stagnation? As we shall see, scale is the secret key to understanding the dialectic effects of 

Forest destruction for sprawl in Catonsville (photo: ArchPlan)

preservation, both of buildings and nature.