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| Renovated Brownstone Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn urbanology.org |
In yesterday's post, we talked about the role of place and memory using Tom Mayes's article "Why Do Old Places Matter? Memory" from his ongoing "Why Do Old Places Matter" series. Today we are going to look at the role older buildings play in the continuity of a place. Our guide is Kaid Benfield's blog post "Older buildings, continuity of places, and the human experience," for the Natural Resources Defense Council staff blog Switchboard.
Kaid Benfield starts his post with this statement, "I have been trying trying to understand what makes historic places special to so many of us." Historic places are a rarity in the United States and it seems that for the past several decades, what passes for vernacular architect (strip malls, subdivisions, office buildings) have become uniformly bland boring boxes. Mr. Benfield concedes, "While that isn't literally true-some exciting buildings are being designed and built, some nourishing new places are being fashioned-the best of our older buildings and neighborhoods have a distinctiveness in them, almost by default." However, Mr. Benfield suspects is something operating at deeper level. Something that pulls toward older places because they center us in the time space continuum. There is emerging scholarship that tells older functions better. Regardless, there is something very powerful about an older building or place that has us wrapped in their spell.
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| Vignette of Avondale Estates, Georgia avondaleestates.org |
Continuity of place
Kaid Benfield begins with his definition of continuity of place. He writes,
We've all had the experience of being in a setting that has been changed in a major way-by demolition of a groups of buildings or by the rise of new ones-since the last time we were there. Sometimes the change can occur in as little as a week. Things seem off, disorienting, anxiety-provoking as we try to get our bearings and tap into our memories of what used to be. When continuity is disrupted, it can be jarring.
To underscore this point, Mr. Benfield cites Tom Mayes's post for the Preservation Leadership, which spoke about the positive associations with continuity:
[T]he idea of continuity is that, in a world that is constantly changing, old places provide people with a sense of being part of continuum that is necessary for them to be psychologically and emotionally healthy. This is an idea that people have long recognized as an underlying value of historic preservation though not often explained. In With Heritage So Rich, the idea of continuity is capture in the phrase 'sense of orientation,' the idea that preservation gives 'a sense of orientation to our society, using structures, and objects of the past to establish values of time and place.'
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| Historic Detroit-area neighborhood blog.preservationleadershipforum.org |
We have a mental need to experience that we are rooted in the continuity of time. We do not only inhabit space, we dwell in time...Buildings and cities are museums of time. They emancipate use from the hurried time of the present, and help use to experience the slow, healing tim of the past. Architecture enables use to see and understand the slow processes of history and to participate in time cycles that surpass the scope of individual life.
There is something very fascinating about the statement "Buildings and cities are museum of time."
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| Colorful brooms in East Los Angeles James Rojas citylab.com |
International academic scholarship supports the idea of place attachment and continuity. Humans crave consistency in the places they inhabit. The slightest of change can have a disruptive effect. In researching this post, Mr. Benfield came across a paper by Professor Norisdah Ujang on "Place Attachment and Continuity of Urban Place Identity." Prof. Ujang's thesis is "that uniform concepts of planning and 'the commodification of place'-everything looking like everything else-weakens identity and attachment to particular place." The researchers of the study surveyed 300 users of Kuala Lampur's three main shopping streets, concluding "that familiarity of a place contributes to a feeling of psychological comfort, while 'psychological discomfort and strong emotional expressions' are 'strongly felt as a reaction against physical changes and unfit interventions.'"
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| Greenville, South Carolina Dan Burden/PBIC switchboard.nrdc.org |
Another key element of the shared architectural legacy is the fact that it is a shared experience. Collectively, we experience and are comforted by the continuity of an older place. Think town squares and the court houses, your place of worship, your school, even that funny old Spanish colonial house down the block from where you grew up. Those places, however aesthetically pleasing, are part of the ties that bind us and would come apart if they were ever rapidly changed. In short, it is not just my legacy but your legacy too.
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| The Gamble House (1908) Charles and Henry Greene Pasadena, California oldhouseonline.com |
Cultural engagement is a very important part of continuity of place but, at the same time, a little different. Unfamiliar older places, which we have no sense of continuity, can also exert a powerful good experience. Think of coming upon Horyu-ji in Japan or an ancient settlement in India for the first time. These places are magical for the very reason because it is your first time experiencing it, no sense of continuity. Rather than being a source of comfort, they challenge our imagination to conjure up images of what might have passed-a feeling of "if these wall could talk," foster a connection of a culture long past in a way we might never have imagined. They teach us and provide us with tools for a greater world view-"a view that taps into past wisdom-that we can then bring to more contemporary experience."
If you noticed, Blogger chose The Gamble House in Pasadena, California for this section. While choice may have been random, the house is an engagement of a California long gone, when the state was coming into its own. Walking through the house, you realize that people lived their lives here, doing all the things people did in 1908. There is a palpable sense of "if these walls could talk." Today it is owned and managed by the University of Southern California, which runs a scholars-in-residence program and offers tours on the weekend. It is interesting to watch how people behave when they walk through it the first time, afraid to touch or breath on something. Yet, they forget that someone lived here, put their feet up on the furniture, spilled things on the carpet. That is a life.
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| Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York gopixpic.com |
Jane Jacobs was absolutely right. Take that Robert Moses. A report released by the National Trust for Historic Preservation titled, Older, Stronger, Better, confirmed that older, smaller places are a source of urban vitality. The National Trust used statistical analysis of the built environment of three major American cities: Seattle, Washington D.C, and San Francisco, finding "...that established neighborhoods with a mix of older, smaller buildings perform better on a range of economic, social, and environmental metrics than do districts with larger, newer structures." The important point here is the diversity that older buildings bring to an urban neighborhood. Citing the report, Kaid Benfield writes:
Buildings of diverse vintage and small scale provide flexible, affordable space for entrepreneurs launching new businesses and serve as attractive settings for new restaurants and locally owned shops. They offer diverse housing choices that attract younger residents and create human-scale places for walking shopping, and social interaction.
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| Rochester, Michigan Hazel Borys plus.google.com |
Older districts have more population density and more businesses per commercial square feet.
Older, smaller buildings support the local economy with more non-chain, locally owned businesses.
Older business districts offer greater opportunities for entrepreneurship, including women and minority-owned businesses.
Cultural outlets thrive in older, mixed-use neighborhoods.
Older, mixed-use neighborhoods have higher Walk Score and Transit Score ratings
Older buildings attract more young people and a more diverse age group.
There is more nightlife on streets with a diverse range of building ages.
While the findings are more skewed to an urban context, the methodology is quite rigorous and definitely worth checking out at http://www.preservationnation.org.
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| Queen Street Toronto. Canada Julia Campbell citylab.com |
At the risk of stating the very obvious, Mr. Benfield writes, "...we don't need data to demonstrate the performance of older buildings: their continued existence already proves that they are here, in fact, been sustained over times. That said, we do have data, at least with respect to environmental sustainability."
Specifically, a study released by the Preservation Green Lab in 2012 revealed that "it can take between 10 and 80 years for a new, energy-efficient building to overcome, through more efficient operations, the negative energy and climate change impacts caused in its construction process." The research methodology studied six different building types, in four climatically diverse cities in the United States: Portland, Oregon; Phoenix, Chicago, and Atlanta. The data was assembled and analyzed for six different types of building use (or reuse for older buildings). The building types included: single family home, multi-family buildings, commercial building, mixed-use, "urban-villages," schools, and warehouse conversions. The study also looked at the affect of geography, energy performance, electricity-grid mix, building type and lifespan have on the overall environmental performance of new construction and older buildings.
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| H Street, Washington D.C. huffingtonpost.com |
Building reuse typically offers greater near-term environmental savings than demolition and new construction. For five of the six building types considered in the study, it can take 10 to 80 years for a new building that is 30 percent more efficient than an average-performing existing building to overcome the negative climate impacts related to the construction process.
Benefits are maximized when building reuse is practiced at scale. For example, retrofitting, rather than demolishing and replacing, just one percent of Portland's office buildings and single family homes over the next decade would help meet 15 percent of Multnomah County's total CO2 reduction targets over the next decade.
The greatest environmental benefits of reuse are achieved by minimizing the import of new construction.
What is the environmental edge that older buildings have over newer ones? Older smaller buildings were built to be more in tune with climatic conditions than newer buildings. This is evidenced in the thickness of the walls, the height of the ceilings, proper ventilations, and sensitive solar orientation
Place continuity is about managing change in the built environment so that an older smaller building retains its historic fabric without being encased in amber. Managing change must be deliberate and thoughtful so that it accommodates changing use in a respectful manner. Change is good, change can nourish experience without diminishing the experience.
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