Historic Preservation: Empathy or Action?

Richard Sennett in his book, Authority, writes about paternalism as an authority of false love.  Building in places with Historic Preservation Review Boards or in neighborhoods with Home Owners Associations requires an additional set of concerns become part of the design process.  The building design is no longer simply between the architect and client to be implemented by the contractor with the blessing of the building permit reviewers and inspectors who confirm it meets safety and other codes.  Now a third party takes on a sort of paternalist involvement.  The question becomes, is this true or false love, and of what?

Older, well-built communities often protect themselves from inappropriate development by electing to form a historic district agreeing to guidelines for change.  The first premise of new work in historic districts asks if it is visible from public space; that is, how will the project participate in the public realm.  The existing circumstances will necessarily change by introducing something new.  Some districts insist of faithful replication of existing forms and materials in order for the new project to fit seamlessly with the existing as if it had always been there; others appreciate that communities evolve over time and only ask that new work be compatible and blend well without needing to match.  Executing this intent requires a forum for review by the local community.

Public hearings for projects in historic districts allow the general public to voice their concerns about the proposal.  In a democratic process, each person is given an opportunity to say what they think.  The reviewers express empathy, but seldom require significant change especially if the architect and owner have made an effort to meet with community members.  Individuals who expect Boards to act on their comments are more likely to feel patronized than satisfied.  Boards, often made up of volunteers, have priorities, and individual worries are superseded by their interest in the greater good.  What is forgotten is what I have so casually identified as the “general public,” who are really the local people with the deepest knowledge of the place, its light and sounds, motions and activities, and its patterns of seasonal change, because they live there.

What is a review board’s ultimate interest?  General urban growth can only be guided and controlled on a case-by-case basis.  They consider if the proposal contributes to the public realm giving less priority to the architect’s program and the client’s cost.  They also give less priority to neighbors comments as complaints that are generalized as an unwarranted fear of change.  Those who think the Board will champion their point of view are disappointed to find that even though they have been heard, they have not effected change.  The Board is championing the city first, then the people.  While I would never want to live in a place that prevents such public forms of expression, is it enough to have forums when the effort is likely to be futile?  Empathy that seldom produces action will eventually produce apathy.  The Historic Preservation Review Board is paternal – the father of city and its civic life – but if it loves the built forms over its people, then the love is false.

Trinidad

It’s called Bake & Shark, except that the soft Trini accent makes it sound to me like Bay n’ Shar.  These are the open air shacks along Maracas Beach on Trinidad’s north coast.  The most popular place – Richard’s Bake & Shark – has been there for about 30 years and is known for having the best fresh condiments:  garlic sauce, bandanya, kutchela, grated mango and everything spicy.  The home-made roll, a sort of savory pita, is piled with fried locally-caught shark and then you add the sauces you like, all for less than $5 US.

Teaching landscape architecture changes the way you travel.  You notice the unusual native plants, of course, but you also are continuously aware of the cultural and environmental situations as they differ from home.  A tourist on vacation may think that concrete houses built on stilts are charming, but actually you see their design as responding to extreme conditions of intense rainfall, aggressive termites and relentless sun.  Oriented more for the prevailing breeze than the omnipresent view, they have large roofs to collect the rainfall channeled into cisterns, large overhangs for shade, no metals that rust quickly, and displayed prosperity with painted stucco surfaces.

The public works are equally straight forward.  Going from Port of Spain through the Northern Range to the beaches, the road is cut into an almost vertical mountainside.  It is only wide enough for two small cars to pass each other carefully, and are accompanied by power lines (no street lights), and a continuous concrete water channel on the uphill side.  Cars automatically slow at intersections where they have to cross rain gutters that serve as a sort of speed bump.  Along this 20 km winding road are two bridges with long spans that could only be made with short elements – truss and cable suspension – the type of heavy construction materials that can get up such a steep and tightly curving mountain road.  The biggest leveled area was reserved for a football (soccer) field that kindly included a covered viewing stand.  Along the way was a single police station in its official bright blue color, a country chapel and cemetery, and no gas stations.  Two shops had clear names:  one was called Tea Bar; the other simply Cash Bar.  More common were private high-walled and gated estates that seemed strangely silent and uninvolved.

Also in the north is the Asa Wright Nature Centre, a 1500-acre conservatory, eco-tour destination and tropical research facility whose main building has sixteen foot high ceilings and a deep, shady veranda that overlooks a bird sanctuary with seventeen species of hummingbirds among many ususual creatures and plants.  When the early nineteenth-century British landscape writer J.C. Loudon identified the highest achievement possible for a landscape design as one that attracts the fleeting, could he possibly have imagined sitting on a mahogany stool in a tropical rainforest and watching aqua, iridescent blue and orange hummingbirds, all  of which hung in the air within view?  Surreal, but authentic.  Very different from floating in the Hyatt’s infinity pool overlooking the Gulf of Paria, which is nice but more an experience that smacks of an intellectual construct when compared to feeling shark in my belly.

The power of listening

A great deal of attention is paid to communicative skills and the technological devices that support them.  Designers in particular focus on their drawing skills relying on them to investigate their ideas thoroughly, to convey the proposal’s content clearly, and to represent the information for future construction accurately.  When their visual thinking is accompanied by articulate verbal capabilities, well, everyone sighs with relief assuming that here at last is the rare person who will accomplish much because both sides of their brain are fully functioning.  Of course, even this fortuitous occurrence doesn’t guarantee easy results when what is needed is creativity and imagination.

Learning, as Andrew Jackson Downing said in the mid-nineteenth century, is a matter of accomplishments and acquirements.  The curious student investigates the facts of a subject asking who, what, when, where, how and why.  Scholarly habits of research hone techniques of inquiry equipping students with skills that can be applied to future work.  Gradual and steady improvement is expected with outputs measured, exams graded and presentations evaluated, and yet one acquirement is critical to future professional success.  Unfortunately, academic pedagogy is usually silent on the matter.

Listening.  Real listening.  Deep, hard listening.  It’s very difficult.  It’s made more difficult due to the constant bombardment of information and made more unlikely with society’s relentless overvaluing of self-expression and self-promotion.  Dialogues that have self-affirmation and self-esteem as their objective cannot avoid also being self-referential.  The point of listening, on the other hand, is to allow your thoughts to match the pace of the other.  When listening, you must set aside your own mental patterns and rhythms, and enter into another way of being.  Philosopher Eugéne Minkowski in his book, Lived Time (Evanston, 1970, 129) said this, “I belong to … differs from having in that it does not center the whole universe around me but on the contrary makes me enter into that universe.”

Listening is a willingness to enter into that other universe, and by doing so, to belong to it.  This means that we need to suspend our intentions and our productions for experiences that are beyond our control.  The curious believe the risk is worthwhile; the confident know it; it’s the impatient who have trouble.  While the impatient can calm down with some effort; it’s the devious who are particularly dangerous.  Pseudo listeners reveal themselves in the charming yet ultimately disinterested attention that is calculated to appear committed to the dialogue, but actually camouflages their single indulgent intent of seeking validation.  To those, the benefits of listening are impossible to attain.  To those who struggle to become better listeners, the desire to learn, to care and to belong to the world of others is a most worthy goal.  This effort and ability is the fundamental advantage a design professional brings to a design process that embraces community involvement.  Only by listening can the designer enter into their universe and to belong to it.

The ladder of profundity

Teaching graduate students is different.  Economists have opinioned that the current recession has prompted adults to return for an advanced degree given the gloomy job market, and this is true to a point.  However, when a person decides to pursue a first professional graduate degree in a design field – architecture and landscape architecture – they are declaring two things.  The first is that they want to be one; that is, an architect or landscape architect.  Secondly, they are not only willing to embark on an endeavor that just begins with earning the degree, but also that achieving their ultimate goal will commit them to years of internship upon graduation and multiple exams for licensure.

More subtly, the graduate student is also declaring something else.  They are willing to make a change.  Whatever their undergraduate and subsequent work experience, they recognize it was not work that still interests them.  They want something different for their lives.  From a highly personal frustration of being a creative spirit with little means of expression, to the altruistic attitude of being passionately concerned about human constructions and the planet’s environmental health, these students willingly commit to a serious engagement that will change their lives.

Those who teach graduate students delight in their various experiences, something that most undergraduate are simply not old enough to have developed much, while at the same time, they find their unique and varied positions a challenge to guide forward.  This necessarily means the student will take unpredictable paths to find and to climb what I call the ladder of profundity.  No matter a student’s current capability, one goal of graduate education should be the evolution of their thinking.  Unfortunately, this is sometimes disguised as a satisfaction with skill in technical advancements, which is of value, but surely they want more.  They also want to cultivate the craft of their imagination to see the world differently, and to effect change meaningfully.

Given such lofty intentions, what means do professors have to facilitate learning?  Obviously this starts with who they are:  their backgrounds, interests and motives for teaching.  It also includes the competent ability to reach students with varied learning styles.  Most importantly, it requires engagement to accompany the student in their metamorphic change with its vagueness, unpredictability and often discomfort.  Faculty who do not appreciate the courage such change requires, should not be teaching graduate students.  Likewise for professors who are afraid to change themselves.  While great programs have guidelines in place with clear markers for technical and creative achievement, they also recognize that personal development in design fields is uneven, and that they may graduate a student who has not mastered all aspects of the profession.  This is the different between a profession and a discipline.  While graduate school is one step in acquiring professional competence; it is actually more charged with equipping the student with the means to pursue the discipline profoundly.  One thing is for certain:  no one ever slips down this ladder as part of the graduate school experience, but how well they climb and how far they get is the fascinating responsibility of graduate school faculty.