Preserving Our Places, Preserving Ourselves

“It is my wish that you preserve in its original splendor all that is ancient and that whatever you may add will conform to it in style...” So declared the barbarian Theodoric the Great, newly minted king of Italy around the year 500. He was bemoaning the destruction of Rome and reinstated the ancient office of curator statuarum to protect the carved marbles of the Eternal City from vandals, thieves and lime-makers. Theodoric instituted a short-lived reconstruction program that temporarily staved off Rome's millennium of decline and cultural hibernation. Preservation not only connected the present with the past, but was a means by which the triumphs of his predecessors, in art, science and culture, could make positive contributions to the future. Perhaps the Ostrogothic king was a visionary who sensed that the upheavals of fifth century Rome threatened the very cultural underpinnings that defined its power and progress, and which had ultimately made it worthy of invasion in the first place. We too stand at the edge of such a cultural precipice.

Our own cultural dark age looms not as a result of political turmoil, but as the natural outcome of technology, modern finance and globalization. This trifecta has allowed many of us in the industrialized world to live relatively comfortable lives: food is cheaper than ever before, buildings are assembled at astonishing speed and we can instantly access any morsel of human knowledge while lying on a beach. We define ourselves as 'consumers': of food products, of manufactured goods, of housing, and of media and content. However, this consumer ethos has meant the loss of much cultural knowledge, because our lives are so mediated by the products of a global marketplace, rather than of an immediate, responsive community. Our connections to the physical world increasingly lack the idiosyncrasies of human agency and creativity: their universal gloss is rootless and abstract.


This is perhaps no more evident than in the built environment. Modern real estate development, which is the fortuitous concoction of a rationalized construction process, reliably cheap energy and capital financing, has propagated a creeping sameness in architecture, and by extension, our interaction with the physical world. Our cities are largely built by diffuse, corporate entities rather than by the people that inhabit them, untethering our building culture from the restrictions of a place and its inhabitants. We are left with a built environment that might be described as 'anyplace', or as no place at all.

Perhaps this is why people get upset when an unremarkable older house disappears: its very ordinariness gives meaning to that place by helping to define it. It may be the particular colour of its brick, or its relationship to the street. In neighbourhoods of older housing stock, it is possible, for instance, to trace the evolution of particular architectural characteristics because local builders would influence each other, refining and sharing techniques. This produces a cohesiveness in the streetscape, and the loss of one of its constituents is a blow to the cultural memory unique to that place.

The early Italian preservationist Gustavo Giavannoni used the term “architectural prose” to describe the minor architecture of a city. This is the background urban fabric that defines a place, a record that marks the presence of the myriad anonymous agents that have shaped it. Such prose is harder to find in newer construction, and not solely because of its young age. Rather, the scale of building, whether in the sheer number of units or in the size of structures themselves precludes the human imprint, except in its most abstract sense. Even in smaller projects, the mass-produced materials and (often) catalogue design cannot replicate the sedimentary quality of human agency that has marked urban settlement throughout its history and that inscribes it with cultural meaning.

Canadians are notoriously self-deprecating, a characteristic that makes cultural identification fraught. Icons such as the maple leaf and hockey are important, to be sure, but are rather low-resolution touchstones that speak to a very diverse populace spread over a large country. The finer details of regionalism which are associated with say, Sichuan Province or Tuscany are simply not possible, because we have not had enough time to discover who we are, collectively. It is for this reason that a broader ethic of preservation that includes the ordinary and vernacular is so vital: it provides a cultural foundation that cannot be replicated by the often universal and banal qualities of modern construction. For a diverse population wrestling with identity, the import of architectural preservation can not be understated because the built environment is the stageset for our divergent and common narratives.



Finding value in our built environment isn't just about identifying the monuments to our history. While we understandably take great pride in our iconic or historically significant structures, we must not conflate 'historic' with 'heritage'. The former speaks to association with important events or person, while the latter refers to our collective inheritance – of settlement patterns, technique and vernacular styles, of materials and rootedness in place. This distinction is important in developing an approach to preservation because it recognizes that heritage reaches beyond the historic house museum, and is found in the mundane and the human, in subtleties and intangibles.

As our interaction with the physical world is increasingly mediated by a globalized culture of products and design, it is vital that we recognize our inheritance in what we decide to keep, and of equal importance, in what we decide to build. We need to reestablish the architectural continuum with our past, with this place and its people, that has been obscured in the past fifty years, while moving forward. Otherwise, as John Steinbeck's displaced Oklahomans asked, “How will we know it's us without our past?”