Marcel Breuer’s 1968 proposal for an office building over New York City’s Grand Central Terminal. The City’s Landmarks Preservation Commission “found the proposal inappropriate, saying that the design seemed an aesthetic joke.” In contrast, Byard says the “plain, stone-clad Bauhaus block was a characteristically serious expression of commercial modernism.”

book review

Preservation's Identity Crisis

The Architecture of Additions: Design and Regulation
by Paul Spencer Byard
W.W. Norton & Company, New York, NY; 1998
Reissued in paperback, 2004
191 pp.; softcover; 232 photographs ; $29.95
ISBN 0-393-73021-2

Reviewed by Steven W. Semes

The preservation movement is having an identity crisis. The grass-roots movement that began about 40 years ago as a populist reaction against the destruction of our historic cityscapes by urban renewal and Modernist replacement buildings has now become institutionalized, politicized and bureaucratized. Inevitably, perhaps, conflicts have developed between the original impetus and the present administration of the official apparatus. In cities like New York and Charleston, it can seem that the preservation authorities are less interested in defending the integrity of our cultural resources than in promoting contemporary Modernist architecture by approving unsympathetic additions to landmark buildings and historic districts. Changing attitudes in current preservation thinking are clearly articulated by a widely influential book that has become, in effect, the Bible for many current preservation professionals and policy-makers.

Originally published in 1998, Paul Spencer Byard’s The Architecture of Additions is now available in paperback. A leading voice in contemporary preservation, Byard is both an architect and an attorney, and has been an active public advocate for preservation issues since the 1970s. A partner in the firm of Platt Byard Dovell White Architects LLC in New York City, he also directs the graduate program in historic preservation at Columbia University. Byard has also been active as an expert witness before the New York Landmarks Preservation Commission and has helped shape established policy and thinking in preservation circles nationwide. As such, he is in a position to have a tremendous influence on the direction of preservation in the 21st century. In this book, however, we find a presentation of preservation issues that undermines the intellectual framework of cultural resource conservation itself.

Byard’s book is intended as an amicus curiae brief for preservation activists, architects, students or members of public bodies charged with evaluating proposed new buildings in historic settings. He begins by proposing a philosophical argument on behalf of what he sees as responsible intervention when new construction is called for, and then offers about 60 case studies showing examples of how new buildings have been combined with significant pre-existing architecture. The case studies are selected to present a variety of different building types, scales, styles, contexts and historical periods, and demonstrate a variety of attitudes toward the insertion of new architecture into older settings. A concluding chapter revisits the philosophical argument and offers a kind of mission statement for preservation activists and professionals.

The author’s stated aim is to establish an objective basis for making “principled judgments” about how new architecture should relate to old; that is to say, judgments that are “rational, predictable, and enforceable” with respect to preservation law. His criterion for making such judgments is that the “protected meaning” or the “expressive identity” of the older building or setting should retain priority over the expressed meaning of the new intervention, within what he calls a “combined work.” Byard argues for this view of meaning because he finds it a more objective basis for judging such combined works than an appeal to aesthetic values or arguments about taste. For Byard, the meaning of a work of architecture is determined by “devoted observers” (i.e., by specialists like himself) who can identify the “public worth” of landmark sites. This identification rests largely on non-architectural social, political, economic and cultural values, as well as on the familiar categories of standard art and architectural history, rather than on any specifically visual criteria.

In my view, Byard’s philosophical argument, while plausible on its surface, conceals fundamental conceptual problems that become more evident in the case studies, where his analyses of actual projects undermine his own stated objective to arrive at “principled judgments” that could stand up in court. In fact, his own judgments in the case studies are rarely principled, and demonstrate the kind of arbitrary and prejudicial evaluations that he says he wants to avoid and which the courts are unlikely to uphold.

On the contrary, the book moves from questionable premises, to faulty reasoning, to misapplication of its own principles, and frequently descends into factual error. Finally, Byard’s presentation betrays a shocking lack of knowledge of the aesthetic intentions underlying the historic architecture he examines. This is especially the case with Classical design, which he tends to dismiss without detailed description or analysis. Allow me to review just a few of the author’s case studies to illustrate his approach.

Consider McKim, Mead & White’s 1909 addition to Isaiah Rogers’ 1842 New York Merchant’s Exchange, in which they superimposed a Corinthian colonnade above Rogers’s Ionic one. Byard dismisses the addition, saying the later architects reduced Roger’s columns to “anonymity” because “Rogers’s columns lost their novelty.” But who attributes “novelty” to a row of Ionic columns in the first place? The placement of a Corinthian order above an Ionic one is a typology dating back to ancient Rome, and McKim’s doing so brilliantly demonstrates the malleability of the Classical language. The addition allows Rogers’ original building to expand and incorporate change within the formal boundaries of its original style, creating a model of continuity.

In contrast, the author praises Jean Nouvel’s 1993 addition to the 19th-century Classical volume of the Lyon Opera. But Nouvel’s vertical expansion is not an outgrowth of the earlier building’s own architectural grammar – as McKim’s was – but a jarringly contrasting, multi-story metal and glass bulk under a massive barrel-vaulted roof. The new volume resembles a train shed incongruously superimposed upon the old opera house, and seems to crush the moderately scaled building below. Byard prefers this more dissonant approach, noting with approval Nouvel’s use of red-lamped lighting fixtures in the arcades of the opera house, giving the older building the air of a “bordello.”

The author also directs his critical judgment at Thomas Jefferson’s Lawn at the University of Virginia (1819-1826), with additions and rebuilding of the Rotunda by McKim, Mead & White after a fire in 1895. Byard blasts Stanford White and his university clients for closing the “Western” vista at the end of the Lawn, which formerly opened to the mountains and the “frontier” beyond, turning its back on Europe. Byard finds in Jefferson’s siting a romantic and symbolic gesture, but says White’s work contradicts the meaning of Jefferson’s design, reorients the Lawn and clothes it in a “pompous and conventional” Beaux Arts style evoking American imperialism. Readers familiar with the Lawn will immediately see Byard’s error: The vista down the Lawn opened to the south, not to the west and, far from turning his back on Europe, Jefferson’s buildings are a “built treatise” bringing the best examples of European Classicism to the New World for Americans to study and emulate. Byard’s judgment is here based entirely on a factual error.

I can’t help wondering to what extent Byard’s put-downs of McKim, Mead & White’s work (in the Virginia project and in a handful of others) may be a factor in the recent approvals by the New York Landmarks Preservation Commission of highly unsympathetic additions to the Morgan Library, the Harvard Club and the Brooklyn Museum, all beloved works by America’s preeminent Classical firm.

Byard saves his most savage criticism for contemporary architects who dare to respect and continue the pre-existing style in their additions to pre-Modernist historic settings. At Downing College, Cambridge, William Wilkins’ Greek Revival pavilions framing a broad lawn were left incomplete early in the 19th century. From the 1930s to the 1960s, Sir Herbert Baker added new corner pieces at the ends of Wilkins’s ranges and extended a broad façade across the end of the quadrangle, displaying an “architectural self-effacement” deferring to Wilkins. Quinlan Terry’s two buildings from the 1990s, however, “distract” from Wilkins work. Byard describes them as “eye-catching theme pavilions of aggressive self-importance [whose]…self-absorbed elaboration…[and] noisy pretense of correctness…[demonstrate a] misunderstanding of the buildings around them.” Terry’s additions represent in Byard’s eyes a “dilution of the identity of the old, where it is hard to tell where the old ends and the new begins…[or] which is being celebrated – the original inventive achievement or something that seeks the benefit of its success like a parasite.”

The key concept here is the expression of “difference,” which for Byard is crucial to the meaning of the new addition. The author assumes, without critical examination, that the architect today cannot make new architecture in continuity with the stylistic traditions of historic architecture, and any suggestion of such continuity is, in Byard’s view, illegitimate. All one can do is point out the difference between “then” and “now.” Byard calls new traditional design “imitation architecture” and cites Williamsburg as a negative example: The restorers buried “the surviving foundations [that] could have evoked…American transience” [their presumed meaning] but instead the reconstructed buildings “claimed to be equivalents of real lost buildings…minimizing the difference that made the real thing worth honoring in the first place.” Note again that the source of the new structure’s worth, what makes it “real,” is its expression of “difference” from the old, not inherent artistic merit or interpretive value.

By way of contrast, Byard describes Modernist abstraction as disassembling “oppressive conventions about the expression of buildings” inherited from the past with a “purge of conventional architectural ornament” that exposes “an ethical core of meanings.” The juxtaposition of historic and Modernist “expression” illuminates the “impact of architecture upon architecture.” Combined works should therefore express this “difference” between new and old, reflecting the changed reality after Modernism, which – history being progressive – cannot be reversed. Any attempt to offer an alternative, or to set aside the conventions of Modernism is seen as a “conservative search for reassurance in the old.”

Byard’s focus is clearly on promoting Modernism’s oppositional stance with respect to historic architecture, and he sees contemporary proponents of that stance – including himself – as an ongoing revolutionary vanguard. What he does not say is how an addition characterized by Modernist “difference” can maintain the “priority” of the meaning of the historic original structure while at the same time subverting the older building’s basic aesthetic objectives.

The opposition between Modernism and traditional architecture finds literal expression in several examples of Modernist interventions in pre-Modernist settings, among them the renovation of the Medieval Castelvecchio complex in Verona into an art museum by Carlo Scarpa in the early 1960s. Byard characterizes Scarpa’s attitude toward the medieval castle as follows: “abstraction literally cutting away [the old castle].…Scarpa mines it, in both the geologic and military senses.” The old structure is “to be subdued in a demonstration of the power of the art that is its new master…displaying the innards of the walls…an exploded diagram…torn from the castle in a show of architectural power amounting to violence, as if only a bomb could subdue the immense resistance of the old fortress…[but it is all] beautifully composed and detailed.” Byard says “the resulting combined work became a collaboration between the new and old” and serves as “an obvious paradigm” for future treatment of historic buildings.

In truth, Byard’s characterization of what Scarpa did is irresponsible, for Scarpa’s archaeological approach to restoring surviving bits of layered and unresolved medieval construction and removing 20th-century interpolations, was anything but violent. Even if it were accurate, Byard’s giddy recounting of this supposed violence against historic fabric cannot seriously be proposed as a paradigm for preservation of any sort, but simply gives comfort to those who would destroy cultural resources for the sake of current fashion.

We cannot ignore Byard’s interpretation of the case of the Maison Carré in Nîmes, France, the best-preserved ancient Roman temple outside Italy, and the adjacent new museum, the Carré d’Art, by Sir Norman Foster from 1991. Byard describes the Maison Carré as “that dense, definitional lump of classicism.” That is all he has to say about one of the foundational buildings in the history of Western architecture. Rather than seeing the Roman temple as a seminal model for Classical architecture and elucidating its lessons for the architect, the author reduces the beautiful antique building to an empty verbal formula.

At the client’s insistence, Foster’s first proposal for a municipal art museum across from the temple was to retain the surviving façade of a 19th-century Classical opera house that completed the fourth wall of a public square surrounding the Maison. (The opera house had burned down some years before.) The Roman temple stands in the center of the square, the enclosing Classical fabric preserved as a “simulacrum” of the original Roman setting. This scheme was abandoned (Byard says with “courage and practicality”) and the opera house façade was destroyed.

Byard applauds this act of demolition of historic fabric, an astounding thing for someone claiming to be a preservationist to do. Freed from the limitations of the old façade, Foster then offered a “replacement object derived with great sensitivity and intelligence from the Maison.” Despite radical contrast in materials, Byard finds Foster’s museum “recognizably similar” to the Maison, which it addresses from the side, its “ancestral elements…transformed by 20th-century technical and tectonic possibilities.” In my own view, no amount of rationalization can justify the contempt for historic architecture evidenced by Foster’s scheme and Byard’s defense of it.

Byard rightly devotes considerable attention to the example of the 1964 proposal by Marcel Breuer Associates for a 60-story office tower atop the 1913 Grand Central Terminal in New York. The project is important because it was the basis for a landmark 1978 Supreme Court decision upholding the City of New York’s preservation laws as constitutional. Byard admits that Grand Central is “one of the icons of New York’s identity” and one of the most famous Beaux Arts buildings in the world. He notes that the terminal was originally planned as the centerpiece of a complex of office buildings and hotels rising around it. Foundations and elevators were prepared for a later tower that was not built.

Byard calls Breuer’s proposed addition “a fine example of ideas about office tower design then in good currency” and “a version of the Seagram Building prototype” balancing the new building over the terminal “that now became its ornate and different Beaux-Arts base.” The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission took a different view of the matter, calling Breuer’s design “an aesthetic joke.”

For Byard, the issue raised by the tower proposal is the status of the “protected meaning” of the landmark. The new tower physically loomed over the old terminal, staking “an apparent claim of superiority for its newness and a corresponding condescension to the old terminal below.” Byard seems grudgingly to support the Commission’s position, but his reasons are murky. The decisive factor for him is that the “meaning” of the new tower overshadowed too aggressively the “meaning” of the terminal. He seems to reject the Breuer proposal, not because it was a preposterous outrage upon a beloved landmark, but because it was lacking in nuance.

I don’t think Byard’s argument would have carried the day before the Supreme Court 30 years ago, and it is certainly unconvincing now. How his reservations in this case are different from his praise of other equally aggressive examples of Modernist additions to historic buildings remains fatally unclear. If “violence” is an acceptable paradigm for Carlo Scarpa at the Castelvecchio, why not in the Breuer case, too? How is Breuer’s proposal different from Norman Foster’s Hearst tower, approved by the same Commission some 40 years later, and now under construction? Would the Commission approve the Breuer proposal if it were made today? Many people think it would, and that should cause profound alarm in grass-roots preservation circles today.

The role of Byard’s arguments in shifting the Commission’s focus from historic preservation to Modernist promotion needs to be investigated further. Aside from obvious stylistic biases, I believe the problem lies in the philosophical approach outlined at the outset of the book. Despite Byard’s claim that the meaning of an architectural work is “inherently objective,” the author’s own judgments in his case studies demonstrate just how subjective the attribution of meaning can be. His evaluations are not based on historical study of the actual building, detailed knowledge of its artistic conventions or construction techniques, the intentions of its designers or even what the building looks like. He offers no consistent criteria or scale of values for making these judgments. The author’s approach disregards issues of building conservation, largely ignoring the requirements for responsible care of vulnerable resources. In the end, Byard’s “meaning” is based on little more than his own glib reduction of the protected building’s architectural character to a simplistic, and sometimes inaccurate, verbal formula. Principled judgments are simply impossible on this basis.

I would like to propose an alternative view. We preserve buildings, districts and landscapes, not to protect meanings, but to protect cultural resources and their specific material and aesthetic properties. More importantly, in the case of many landmarks, we preserve them as evidence of a living tradition, a culture of building that continues in the work of practitioners today. Protected sites are models for continuing that culture and that tradition into the future. New traditional design is imitative, but not “imitation,” being no less real than the historic buildings that are their models. In truth, we protect cultural resources for the same reason we protect natural resources – because we need them in order to live in a healthy environment.

Continuity should be our goal, especially in urban settings. There is no need to express “difference” between the new and the old, because there may not be any “difference” worth expressing. It is the character of our historic places, not how well they express pre-conceived historical characterizations, that people rightly care about. We don’t need the architecture of our time, but the architecture of our place. It all comes down to a simple sense of respect rooted in knowledge.

Paul Byard’s The Architecture of Additions is not an appropriate guide to making principled judgments about the impact of new architecture upon old and everyone concerned about maintaining the integrity of our historic landmarks and districts should view the book, and the actions of those inspired by it, with profound skepticism. Meanings can be evoked by photographic or drawn documentation, historical markers and bronze plaques marking the former sites of demolished buildings, but only the buildings themselves, properly protected and conserved, and free of alien interventions by architects with their own narrow “expressive agendas,” can teach us how to build more beautiful cities. If more beautiful cities are not the primary goal of historic preservation, then perhaps we should just give up and let the developers pave paradise and put up a parking lot; or worse, let the Modernists raise a collection of shards, fragments and blobs celebrating their “difference” from a now-vanished world.TB