In those early decades of preservation battles, Industrial Development Complex products were routinely sold as “progress,” because who wants to stand against progress? But progress toward what? And, more important, away from what? Because it’s impossible to determine if the trade is upward or downward if we can’t measure both the value of what we’re gaining and what we’re losing. So it took a while for enough people to realize the game had changed for preservation to move from small bands of heroic early preservationists to the point that municipalities realized they needed to establish, and then regulate, historic districts. This wasn’t a single moment of national epiphany on the morning the wrecking ball first crashed into Penn Station, because the long history of urbanism around the world was a story of upward trades most of the time. Architecture historian Vincent Scully famously wrote, “One entered the city like a god one scuttles in now like a rat.” For some time, the question of whether the little boxes of ticky tacky were a good exchange for the forest and farmlands they replaced, but the destruction of Penn Station was iconic in the magnitude of the downward trade from what was lost to what replaced it, and thus galvanized the modern-day American preservation movement.įor the next couple of decades, grassroots preservation organizations sprang up across the country on the powerful conviction that the Industrial Development Complex that emerged after the war had produced an incontrovertible track record of downward trades, rarely building something better than what it replaced. The station itself was forced underground to make way for Madison Square Garden. This hot mess was built on the site of Penn Station, one of America’s greatest civic buildings, which was demolished in the name of progress. But in time, people began to question the soulless sameness of sprawl, and by the early ’60s the problem reached pop culture with the folk song “ Little Boxes,” which begins, “Little boxes on the hillside / Little boxes made of ticky tacky / Little boxes on the hillside / Little boxes all the same.” If your methods produce a landscape so boring that you have folk singer critics, that’s a problem. Only this time, the widgets weren’t weapons or welding machines, they were houses.Īnd subdivisions carpeting the land with highly repetitive houses were accepted as progress through the 1950s. So the sprawl engines soon began paving subdivisions across farmland, doing what industry does best: making many widgets at high velocity. Europeans colonized the North American continent in little more than a century after the Revolution with countless small bands of pioneers, but this time the method was set to emulate the top-down structure of military command and control operating at industrial scale.
There was no disagreement on the goal the only question was the method.
0 kommentar(er)
