Access Provided by UNIVERSITY OF THE ARTS, LONDON at 02/10/13 8:11PM GMT

LITERATURE REVIEW
NATHANIEL ROGERS
Beyer Blinder Belle Architects & Planners LLP

Figure 1. Dresden Museum of Military Histor y, Dresden, Germany. Original building completed in 1896, with
addition by Studio Daniel Libeskind, completed in 2011. (Bundeswehr/Bienert, 2011)

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Is there any subject within the eld of architectural conservation more fraught than new
design in historically sensitive contextsmore specically, additions to historic buildings
or historic districts? Within the vast topic of adaptation, the addition, as both a primary
means of adaptation and its clearest outward form, consistently serves as the focus of
heated debate. The addition is also a public concern insofar as it fundamentally impacts
the protection of historic building exteriors, which is a consistently legislated and regulated activity (this is far less often the case for interiors).1 Adding to historically signicant
fabric can therefore be seen as a broad-strokes kind of adaptation in which we, the public,
almost always have a conrmed interest.
When it comes to additions, there may arguably be a kernel of consensus. We might
frame the ideal intervention as a creative response that acknowledges the dening character of heritage while enriching and, in some measure, redening or re-presenting that
same character. But how this intervention is philosophically situatedhow it operates
specically in relation to contextamounts to a broader set of cultural debates. These
range from disagreements over conservation ethics and contemporary considerations of
authenticity to modernism and how we read history itself.
With these larger issues still contested, discourse on additions remains inchoate. During the 1980s controversy over Michael Gravess proposed addition to Marcel Breuers neoexpressionist Whitney Museum, then-New York Times architecture critic Paul Goldberger
suggested that the expedient resolution would be to construct a limestone, Beaux-Artsstyle building; Breuers 1966 structure would become the addition.2 For casual observers, the assumed roles of a stridently differentiated modernist intervention and the neighboring original landmark, now looking oppressed, would be familiar ones. Goldbergers
suggestion underscored widespread attitudes on modernisms practical limitations in
relating to historic fabric. But it also revealed public suspicions of a preservation practice
that by its recent theories had legitimated such approaches. The cynical notion of a newly
professionalized preservation eld now acquiescent to, or even somehow aligned with,
modernisms destructive iconoclasm probes the complex disjunction between conservative
impulses that have long formed the basis for preservations grassroots on the one hand,
and its mid-twentieth-century development as a theoretical discipline, on the other. The
driving issue of the disjunction in simplied terms is this: Is historic fabric safeguarded
through the extension and reinforcement of its specic character, or do we defend material
authenticity by making clearly legible the hand of subsequent intervention? The addition

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project (and I use project to mean a larger endeavor of critical investigation rather than
an architectural proposal) has been at the eye of this storm for decades. How additions to
historic buildings and districts ought to look in relation to context, or what they should
do for heritage, are matters that extend well beyond protecting material culture as this
task has been typically framed. How we agree on what constitutes enhancement, disgurement, or derivation has broad implications for nothing less than the consensus narrative of architectural history and the means by which we sustain the vitality and essence
of valued historic environshow we, in effect, preserve.
Given the breadth of these consequences, the anthology of critical literature on additions is surprisingly slim. At the same time, however, the addition has also proven to be
terrain for comparatively more focused accounts; the library of literature on adaptation is
vast and correspondingly amorphous. (Various subcategories of the genre range from the
typical technocratic manuals on retrot to primers on grassroots advocacy, and the sporadic interests of historians in material culture and collective memory as these intersect
within the built environment.) One yearns for more scholarship that situates adaptation
and specically the addition as a creative and conservative act within a larger theoretical
context, and the absence of such study has no doubt prolonged the confusion. The Architecture of Additions: Design and Regulation, by Paul Byard (W. W. Norton, 1998), would by its
very title seem to offer some relief. Byard (19392008), a lawyer, architect, and prominent
preservation theorist, was a beloved educator in Columbia Universitys historic preservation program for generations of practitioners. His efforts in the lecture hall and in this
book returned the addition to the critical conversation (it had languished somewhat in
the years before), and the text is an admirable attempt to frame the problem and capture
its scope for a new generation.
After all, the complex theoretical, political, and disciplinary context for the dominant
addition-making paradigms of the last century span a set of inuences as diverse as those
of the preservation eld itself. There is the apparent dichotomy between Ruskins antiscrape and Viollet-le-Ducs idealizing restoration doctrines, nineteenth- and twentiethcentury notions of the zeitgeist, the theoretical foundations for modernism, various midcentury charters, the theorizing of Cesare Brandi, and so on, all the way to the U.S.
Secretary of the Interiors 1977 Standards for Rehabilitationthe countrys de facto
addition policy despite its obvious focus on renovation and rehabilitation. The Standards
proscribe changes that create a false sense of historical development, while dictating
that new work should be clearly differentiated from the old but at the same time compatible.3 This tersely expedient set of phrases afrmed, in policy terms, a largely reexive doctrine of material-centered authenticity and historicism-dictated differentiation; to
traditionalist-minded cynics, compatibility has seemed little more than a sop. The last
three decades various developments in architectural discourse and the emergence of
place, memory, and tradition as fundamental design premises, as well as the growing
recognition of midcentury heritage as something worth protecting, have only further
complicated matters. Today, the interested layperson can hardly be faulted for puzzling
why the Standards dictates are assumed to be self-evident, or what it even means to

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make an addition in the rst placea complex act that is both preservation-oriented and
architectural, and necessarily owes allegiances to both elds.
Here, Byard would seem to lend a willing hand. He writes with an easy clarity as he
introduces the notion of adding as a particular type of design response, and he relates a
broad range of issues. But Byards clear aspirations make the books shortcomings all the
more dismaying. The text fails to cohere around an articulated framework of evaluation
despite its discursive presentation of more than fty-seven case studies, from St. Peters
Basilica to combined works of the twentieth century. Byards narrative voice implicitly
claims a certain level of objectivity, but too much of the theory underlying an inherent
bias is taken for granted, at least without a necessarily robust discussion of the historical
context for such bias. (In effect, the addition as an abstract matter of theory and policy
seems to fall from the sky with the controversy over the 1960s Marcel Breuer tower proposal for Grand Central Terminal.) That the book developed out of student research projects in the additions seminar Byard conceived of and taught at Columbia no doubt
contributed to some of the unevenness.
In some sense, however, the principal strength of the work may lie in Byards tireless
optimism. In his view, the best additions are not merely an inevitable exigency of time; as
undertakings of artistic production, they offer the continually renewed promise of societal
enrichment. However such combined works arise, they represent in the best instances
the work of successive intelligences taking advantage of and adding to existing expressive
material and generating in the process valuable new combined meanings.4 This notion of
an expressive architecture is driven by a legal conundrum rooted in the speech of
buildings: the 1968 New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission decision that
blocked the Grand Central tower proposed by Breuer stands for the proposition that an
addition that says the wrong thing to a protected neighbor can be forbidden, a serious
consequence indeed.5 The expressive identity of a buildingwhat buildings sayis the
meaning offered by the building to any interested observer taking in the various impacts
of its form and ornamentation and integrating them into an understanding of the proposal the building as a whole makes to the observers intelligence.6 Of course, this is
neither static nor one-directional: buildings, serving in the real world, inevitably acquire
new and different proposals of meaning all the time;
Protecting their expression requires a capacity to appreciate the interaction of the
successive proposals buildings inevitably make about themselves and about each
other over timethe impacts of architecture on architectureand to make principled judgments about the way they should change in light of the publics enduring
need to have access to particular protected meanings. The judgments must be principled, not just expressions of likes and dislikes, so that they can be arguable, predictable, and otherwise entitled to the force of law.7
The emphasis is not on the protection of expression per se but on the protection of the
meaning conveyed by expression.8 Byards aim through the text was to establish a frame-

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work for evaluating additions from a policy or legal perspective. In this effort, his introductory and closing arguments are compelling passages that stand alone as contributions with
relevance for future practice and policy. The bulk of the case analysis, while well-researched
and illustrated, is at once too specic and too abstracted to cohere and be truly useful
beyond discrete narrative.
While Byard is seemingly reticent in Additions to forge an explicit agenda in the question of stylistic congruity, he was a conrmed adherent to the historicizing, effectively
modernist side of the philosophical debate. (His second chapter explores The Expressive
Possibilities of Modernism, while his critique of the supercial compatibility and pervasive imitation of pastiche architecture is unsparing.9) A new work by Steven W. Semes,
The Future of the Past: A Conservation Ethic for Architecture, Urbanism, and Historic Preservation (W. W. Norton, 2009), is rmly situated in the opposing camp. The central concern
for Semes is aesthetics; the venue, historic urban settings. This lengthy, richly illustrated
text is easily the single most comprehensive and ambitious contribution in recent history
to be written on the problem of adding; depending on where you sit on the various
debates, it also may be the most contentious. Semes may frame his primary focusa new
conservation ethicnarrowly, but the implications are necessarily broader, and despite
his stated caveats to the contrary, some of the terrain he covers cannot avoid resembling
the somewhat timeworn battlegrounds of style. (To his credit, Semes, a National Park
Service veteran and associate professor at the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture, has clearly arrived at some specic conclusions about the way architecture should
be made.) It would be all too easy, however, to dismiss some of the more strident polemics
out of hand as crank indictments of the modernist approach and miss what is ultimately
an absorbing and highly relevant argument, forcefully argued and substantiated. Nonetheless, the work is ultimately a manifesto, a revisionist corrective to the last eighty years of
dominant preservation doctrine and the perspectives espoused by gures that the eld
has generally upheld as progressive and even enlightened theorists (Cesare Brandi, Carlos
Scarpa, and James Marston Fitch, for instance). Semes takes relentless aim at the ostensibly discreditable way that these perspectives have been institutionalized and entrenched
within a doctrinaire orthodoxy at levels of policy, practice, and academia.
The authors overarching argument amounts to a simple and logical proposition: continuity and wholenessand the safeguarding of these idealsrightfully ought to be the
design and preservation elds fundamental aims when considering new work in historically signicant context. As further evidence, Semes avers, we need only look to the millennia of human history and nature itself to see that continuity, far more than rupture,
denes the essential mode of existence. What supports that initial proposition of his,
however, is a rather more complex set of contentions. If (1) the modernist language can
be proven by its operative theories and forms to be fundamentally antithetical to historic
architecture and erosive to its character, if (2) contemporary considerations (and dismissals) of traditional design reside on a set of fatal misunderstandings, and if (3) the dominant notion of the zeitgeist can be thrown into doubtthat the tragic but seemingly
intractable ethical dilemmas constructed by historicist readings are ctitious and histori-

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cism itself largely counterfactualthen the range of acceptable avenues for new design in
historic context is radically expanded. Moreover, if this set of arguments is proven out,
then the more traditional nonmodernist approaches that persisted on the margins of
midcentury discourse become more than just intellectually legitimate alternatives to the
prevailing paradigm. Together, they represent a fundamental realignment in the practice
of addition-making that forms the new conservation ethic of the books title.
Clearly, these are formidable ifs, and readers will judge the degree to which Semes
is successful. He is undoubtedly thorough. The books rhetorical structure is a serial one,
beginning with traditional architectures principles and its modes of operation as they
contrast with the modernist paradigm, followed by a social history that traces the development of dominant strands in preservation philosophy and architectural historiographyspecically the historicist viewpoint and the adoption of Cesare Brandis applied
ethics in conservation. Where the preservation and design elds have ostensibly reduced
their addition-making choices to a dichotomy between false history or a differentiated
architecture of our time, Semes reframes the question of sympathetic aesthetics, presenting and evaluating a spectrum of design approaches that span from Literal Replication
to Intentional Opposition. Invention Within a Style, the second of his four broad categories, is plainly advocated as the most sensible and sensitive strategy; it is one, he writes,
with a long history . . . [it is] what most architects have always donediscontinuity and
deliberate contrast having been more the exception than the rule except during those
atypical moments when architectural culture pursued the deliberate cultivation of difference. 10 Abstract Reference and Intentional Opposition, which could be said to constitute the typical range of sanctioned approaches, are crippled by substantial challenges. The
inescapable critical dilemmas borne by the divergent aims of locality and a universalizing
modernism confront the former, while in the latter, the imposition of conspicuous contrast that alters the preexisting characterirrespective of the purported meaning of the
new or old buildingsis very likely to be inconsistent with the fundamental aims of preservation.11
There is no mistaking Semess rejoinder to Byards principle of expressive meaning
here, and it underscores the larger philosophical differences between the two authors and
their approaches. Where Byard advanced a scholarly view of buildings rooted in historical
connotationbuildings as documents of their times and of a particular ethosSemess
argument is fundamentally empirical and occasionally populist: The visual dissonance
between the ancient Roman temple of the Maison Carre in Nimes and the adjacent [1991]
Carre dArt designed by Norman Foster, he writes, is a fact that no amount of further
education will change.12 What Byard called the harmless confusion of Kevin Roches
consummately deferential 1993 addition to the Jewish Museum of New York, Semes champions as an achievement, proof that a building which reinforces the character of a valued
1908 building can be built today, all theories and criticisms to the contrary notwithstanding.13 In Semess narrative, somewhere between the rich dialog of nineteenth-century
restoration ideals and the hardened approaches of the postwar era, mainstream preservation lost its way.

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Semess revisionist look at this history offers a reexamination of Viollet-le-Duc and

the French preservation tradition (which took a holistic view of the monument, tending
to value the persistent form over a narrow focus on preserving the aged material
alone) and Ruskin (wrong about the inviolability of historic material, and the impossibility in principle of restoration).14 He also sheds light on a third, pragmatic approach (illustrated in the work of Gustavo Giovannoni and the Italian School) that was marginalized
by the French-English debate but resolved the cross-Channel dichotomy through an essential focus on urban context and urban scale.15 The succession of twentieth-century preservation charters that witnessed and abetted conservations transformation into an
increasingly professionalized technical endeavor was at the same time a litany of blunders.16 The architectural profession abandoned the conservation of historic sites to the
care of historians, archeologists, museum curators, art conservators, and other specialists
. . . the new preservation culture had little interest in the continuance of architectural
traditions, but only in the stabilization and preservation of the artifacts produced by those
traditions . . . now superseded by modernism.17 It was an era, as scholar Jorge OteroPailos has conrmed, of mutual repression.18
Such specialization, mingled with modernist historical narratives and informed by
the emerging eld of art conservation ethics, amounted to twentieth-century practices
that, in Semess view, essentially renounced what had been the core traditions of the eld.
Charter provisions that both proscribed conjectural restoration and required that new
construction bear a contemporary stamp effectively cut off historic buildings from the
building cultures that produced them, even when those traditions remain operative in
the present, resulting in a growing collection of isolated and decontextualized fragments
throughout the world.19 A critical reappraisal of such doctrinaire assumptions may therefore be long overdue, particularly in the United States, where, despite weak national preservation policy, the tremendous inuence of the 1977 Secretary of the Interiors Standards
for Rehabilitation generated a cultural tendency for specic preservation activities on a
national scale. Some of these activities, Semes argues, have relied on critical misinterpretation. Standard Three (a false sense of history) had nothing to do with Brandis notion of
lacunae, while Standard Nine never details the criteria for differentiation or compatibility,
leaving practitioners to meet the latter by relying on abstract relationships; differentiation
has principally been addressed by using a readily identiable modernist style.20 Genuine
compatibility, according to Semes, is something manifestly grounded in formal grammar
and syntax, not mute abstract qualities.21
So how to legitimate this compatible approach on a theoretical basis? In Additions,
Byard was dismissive of the revival of representational building in the last decades of
the twentieth century, typied in the work of Robert A. M. Stern and others, which developed and advocated old conventions as if they represented a recoverable expressive orthodoxy.22 But Semes advances the convincing and essentially reasonable argument that
style, that bugaboo of both historiography and preservation, can be understood in at
least one sense as utterly independent of period or any overriding conception of history
or progress.23 A style, Semes writes, gives varied but coherent expression to certain

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perennial concerns under particular circumstances . . . a style establishes the likelihood

that a certain form will be used to communicate certain content.24 Between style and
language, language is the more fundamental reality of the two: it is the grammar of forms
independent of rhetorical or narrative content (i.e., the classical language deployed and
redeployed in various styles with distinct expressive contents).25
Semes rejects the linkage of style with historicist notions of era; Meyer Schapiro
famously argued that era in its most inclusive sense was simply another of the art historical understandings of style.26 Semes identies his focus, traditional architecture, as the
umbrella term for all those practices of design and production rooted in local building
cultures or inspired by Western classicism, in contrast to the universalizing and abstract
ideals of the modernism that arose as a reaction against them.27 Ultimately, traditionalist may be a more accurate term. The doctrines intellectual framework, rather than an
anachronistic premodernist sensibility, is categorically enabled by postmodernisms theories. By its very engagement in the larger contemporary discourse, traditionalisms practitioners are denied the opportunity of pursuing such languages and styles with the same
unselfconscious continuity that they might have done a few centuries earlier. The dilemmas of modernism and its winding course are today historical fact. Resultingly, the traditionalist platform must always be framed in explicit rejection of the modernist paradigm,
as a return to the notion of geographical or cultural belonging. (This is true, traditionalist
claims on modernism as an aberration in the historical record notwithstanding.) Traditionalism is therefore an intrinsic strand of our unmistakably postmodern era. In its fracturing of expectations about period style, as one scholar has put it, postmodernism critiqued
historicism and facilitated the rise of the traditionalist approach as a legitimate strand in
the contemporary design dialog.28 In line with Schapiros denition of style, Semes himself
challengesif not the idea of a zeitgeist per sethose dening assumptions of what it is
or has been, based on narrow readings and specic agendas: Contemporary design can
no longer be identied with a single style . . . [The architecture of our time] is whatever
we choose to make it as it emerges from the conditions of contemporary practice.29
In the same way that Anthony Vidler, Karsten Harries, Marshall Berman, and other
theorists (as well as countless practitioners) have argued for the critical extension of the
modernist project in the contemporary era, Semes would seem to argue for a revisit of
postmodernist radicalism, and here I wonder if his framing of the debate elides present
circumstances; todays reality may be at the same time more messy and less dominated by
doctrinaire battles than the world he depicts. By the same token, Semess use of modernist to describe that portion of contemporary practice that includes todays avant-garde is
itself rather slippery ground. If we use Semess denition of style and language, then the
language employed today may variously be modernist in its conception of space, material, and form, but ties to the specicity of site, and the marked distrust of internationalist
utopias also surface in current modes of practice (some argue they never left). As Reyner
Banham underscored in 1955, historiansnot practitionershave created the idea of
a Modern Movement.30 This fundamental truth has led Anthony Vidler to ask more
recently what the historian does, not qua historian, but for architects and architecture.

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Or rather, what kind of work should architectural history perform for architecture and
especially for contemporary architecture?31 This knotty and intriguing reality is sidestepped in The Future of the Past, and the recurrent hegemonic narrative of a centralized
modern movementin broad brush strokesis generally taken for granted and deployed
again.
This is not to say that the empiricism of Semess approach is not witheringly incisive,
as in his exploration of the visual and tectonic relationships between so-called modernist
additions and historic context. The central difference between addition-making before and
after modernism, for Semes, is that if traditional composition is concerned with composite form, modernist design is concerned with assembled shapesobjects juxtaposed rather
than composed. In contrast to the classical analytique, the paradigmatic modernist formal
device is the collage.32 This device, in the authors view, permits the designer to confront,
but not to weave together, disparate kinds of architecture.33 The resulting, more critical
problem, however, is that unity by contrast is an oxymoronic approach [that] often
results in a new building [that were it not] juxtaposed with adjacent historic structures,
would be of little visual interest, while the preexisting traditional buildings are seriously
compromised by the intrusion of a discordant neighbor.34 For Semes, collage and the
deliberate estrangement of the objet trouve go hand-in-hand: despite the seeming objectivity of the scientic approach to conservation that prioritizes material authenticity at
the expense of formal design, it nevertheless betrays a Romantic fascination with the
isolated fragment or the ruin as a metaphorical expression of the irrecoverable past.35
(We have J. B. Jackson to thank for explicitly positing the necessity of ruins within the
landscapethat the very act of conservation demands that interval of neglect).36 The
core of Semess argument is that an excessive emphasis on material authenticity, which
accompanies conservation as a technical endeavor,
reinforces the historicist alienation of the past from the present as the remains of a
bygone time become sacred relics, precious but untouchable. . . . The cumulative
effect of the historicist inuence on preservation practices is the decontextualization
of historic buildingsthey become museum artifacts instead of remaining part our
living world. Loss of continuity and integrity in historical character, therefore, becomes
the inevitable consequence of the preservation activity itself.37
Semes makes the compelling case that the eventual conclusion to the modernist preservation approach is an arid world, one bereft of the same community enlivening environments the eld declares itself to be protecting. But the tragic and seemingly intractable
dilemmas provided by this historicist outlook is little more than logical fallacy: It is not
our time that demands contrast between the new and the old but an aesthetic theory and
a philosophy of history that have long since proved inadequate.38 What if style, he asks,
is a genealogical rather than a chronological phenomenon? The differentiation
between new construction and historic fabric would be the natural consequence of

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the different designers, interests, and varieties of craftsmanship involved in the

development of a site over time, rather than a self-conscious dramatization of the
differences between contradictory conceptions of architecture.39
The overwrought didacticism Semes indicts here, for however many successful projects it
has informed, has also unquestionably engendered innumerable horrors that various
designers over the past century have insisted, as one scholar put it, were essential in
order to maintain an image of difference.40 For the future, a healthy dose of skepticism
toward such declarations is probably a good thing.
The range of design responses that Semes rather reductively lumps under the
umbrella of juxtaposition has been examined in countless other places with varying success, but one particular text that withstands scrutiny with contemporary relevance is Vittorio Gregottis 1991 Dentro larchitettura, translated into English by Peter Wong and
Francesca Zaccheo and published in the United States in 1996 under the title Inside Architecture (MIT Press).41 Gregotti, from roughly the same generation of Italian architects as
Aldo Rossi and Renzo Piano, aligned himself early in his career with the structural rationalist tradition then owering in postwar Italy, seen especially in the work and theory of
Carlo Scarpa and Ernesto Rogers (Gregottis mentor at Casabella during the 1950s).42 Inside
Architecture examines the modernist project and particularly its future prospects in a postmodern era. It was written at a time of instability in architectural discourse, when the
1970s insurgence of conservatism had ushered in a wave of second-order transformations
based in historical memory; meanwhile, the mass culture of the positivist postwar decades
had leapt several orders of scale. In his chapter On Atopia, Gregotti writes that compared
with the neotechnical and neopositivist internationalism of the midcentury, the internationalism that we experience today is different.
As is often stated, it represents an internationalism of nonmaterial nancial currents, of scientic and technical information, and of mass communication, with their
respective laws of behavior and consumption. Some argue that this system has
become so rambling, widespread, and mobile that it avoids any possibility of centralized control, and this may be good. But it also avoids any possibility of democratic
control, any perspective on the common good, even any rational planning, and this
is certainly very bad.43
This phenomenon has formed the background for countless conferences and general soulsearching within the architectural discipline over the last decade, so its worth noting
Semess argument that the self-conscious search for an architecture uniquely expressive
of our time is handicapped by the absence of any single set of ideas or interests that clearly
and uniquely denes our time in contradistinction to previous eras.44 This is a venerable
but fundamentally different notion of the history of human development. Either everything is different today (each era is characterized by unique demands and sociocultural
structures), or as Semes and others have argued, there is virtually nothing new under the

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sun, no condition or creative act truly unprecedented.45 Robert A. M. Stern once decried
the absurd Modernist belief in an exclusively present-oriented art, a delusory timelessness that is a kind of artistic purgatory encouraging architects to attempt a new architecture every Monday morning (surely hell itself!).46 Modernists, for their part, have
typically predicated their approach on the pursuit of an architecture relevant to the era
that attempts to address its various ethical demandsthe unfailingly idealistic experiment
to make reality work, as one designer averred.47 In the end, perhaps, ones attitudes on
how additions should look, or their fundamental meaning, really comes down to ones
attitudes on the legacy of modernism. And do you choose to critique from within, or assail
from without? Is the project still ongoing?
Gregotti occupies an interesting place as a recent-term reformer from within. As for
the topics of preservation and adaptation, Gregotti most directly addresses these in his
chapter On Modication, offering the notion of the architectural project as essentially
an act of modication. No new architecture can arise without modifying what already
exists, he writes; the project as modication also tells us that each situation offers a
specic truth, to be sought and revealed as the essence of the goal, and as the truth of
both the site and the geography that embodies the sites particular history.48 This framing
of modication has gradually assumed a special importance as the conceptual instrument
that presides over the project of architecture, and despite its widely varying interpretations it is arguably the most elemental shift witnessed by design theory in the twentieth
centurys later decades.49 With modication comes the conception of belonging (to tradition, culture, place, region), in opposition to the tabula rasa . . . isolated object, an innitely and indifferently divisible space:
The efforts of the architectural avant-garde have always been to pursue novelty as a
value in itself, fostering special ties with the idea of the manufacturing process, of
which architecture becomes the mimesis. But the notion of belonging instead
embodies an interest in the continuity found in the history of the discipline, and in
the idea of place both as identity and as impure material. The notion of belonging
develops transverse relationships for which project design primarily represents a
process of modication: one that attracts and organizes the debris contained in context, and that constructs from those pieces asymmetry, varying density, and the
values of diversity.50
Gregotti outlined two responses to the notion of specic contextin the rst, the
answer is mimetic, stylistic, seeking conciliation, something of the approach Semes
advances.51 The second response produces not conciliation but juxtaposition; within it
the transformation of relationships itself takes on the value of a language, or a tendency
to form languages.52 The treatment and conception of juxtaposition here, as a broadbased, open line of inquiry, is very distinct from that in Semes. And arguably it may
encompass all we can ever do. (Adjudications of the juxtaposable, Michael Sorkin once
wrote, or what goes with what, comprise the main artistic activity of postmodernity.53)

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For Gregotti, who adhered to both the modern project and Heideggers poetical notion of
architecture as a metaphysical act of making present, stylistic, and territorial contexts
appear to be much the samesite material to be recomposed, so the literal extension of
some style preexisting on the site fundamentally misinterprets the role of architecture.
The project must recognize the present impossibility of any natural coincidence with the
site, Gregotti writes,
The quality of architecture lies above all in the quality of that noncoincidence. From
this perspective, ideas such as eld, enclosure, and the denition of an interventions
limits become important. One can work by dislocation, grouping, forming new hierarchies, altering the positions of chosen materials within a specic contextual eld.54
At least to the casual observer, Gregottis approach shares something in common with the
philosophy undergirding critical regionalism, the movement that emerged in the 1980s to
which Gregotti has typically been linked. The movement was essentially a back-to-basics
critique of modernism that sought to reconcile the universalizing promises of the avantgarde technical outlook with notions of specic geographical context and regional cultural
identities. But Gregotti openly questioned how to avoid the perils of this approach: Even
where such regionalism denes itself as critical, how do we avoid becoming imprisoned in
the character of a place, in empirical operations that reduce the project to a work of readaptation, in the dissolution of architectural form into a complete defense of context?55
He saw the stakes as increasingly highsince the eighties the typical situation in Europe
has involved building within the built, [and] what exists has everywhere become our patrimony.56
This particular transformation was the alluring fodder for architect Rem Koolhaass
provoking exhibition Cronocaos, rst exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2010 and reprised
at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York for a few short weeks in the spring
of 2011. Koolhaas, long-reigning enfant terrible and the father of the ironic, clevernessprizing Dutch model of architectural practice, has long had a determined quarrel with
the preservation empire, and the exhibition format was primarily a means of open-ended
critique that could nonetheless convey various specic and idiosyncratic content. The
extraordinarily rapid and accelerating growth of preservation regimes (Koolhaas calculates
that 12 percent of the planet now falls under natural and cultural preservation systems)
is the cause for his alarmnot for what is being memorialized but for what is being
sanitized, distorted, or selectively expunged from collective memory under an engulng
banner of conservatism. For Koolhaas, the conservative impulse is inherently subjective
and perilously biased, a reality he attempted to overcome (with questionable seriousness)
in his arbitrarily zoned preservation master plan for the city of Beijing in 2003.57 The
scheme proposed geographic bands of total conservation, alternating with areas of no
protection, regardless of actual fabric.
The message of Cronocaos is that vast geographic and cultural territories are now
under the diffuse administrative control of systems that, lacking a set of consistent strate-

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gies and policies and generally unengaged by architects and designers, have broad implications that are scarcely recognized or understood. At the same time, the current trend is to
preserve ever more, with fewer and fewer decades passing required to demarcate what is
historic. (Heritage, as Gregotti had observed, is both a steadily increasing concern and
direct metaphor for our lives today.)
Koolhaass rather apocalyptic vision is somehow reminiscent of some of Semess more
plaintive declamations, though outwardly the two agree on little. But both depict an army
of well-meaning but misguided activists who, despite their zeal, are by their actions doing
material culture fundamental disservice. For Semes, who seems to delineate heritage narrowly, dominant practices and current trends predict a future where the historic character
being protected is reduced by subsequent addition and adaptation to only the merest
shadow, fragmented, quarantined, and fetishized. For Koolhaas, who never really denes
what constitutes heritage at all, the temporal boundaries between construction, neglect,
and preservation appear certain to collapse in the near futurenew buildings will be
preordained to become patrimony almost before their very completionand we enter a
nonsensical age of chrono-chaos. Dark days indeed. At least for Semes, the situation
shows some recent sign of improvement.
Ultimately, as I read on the topic, I nd myself wondering, beyond the notion that
ones attitude on the modernist legacy is a litmus test for additions theory, if it really
comes down to a question of balance. Style may not be chronologically determined, but
Alois Riegls notion of art-value is certainly time-dependent. Its dynamic nature through
generations helps explain the inherently politicized nature of additions, and architectural
expression of a critique on the past may, even in Semess approach, be unavoidable.
Granted, the ritual patricide that was accepted custom in midcentury additions to historic
buildings has not (like much midcentury architectural detailing) aged well. But it is caseby-case whether a landmark is really imperiled; there is a distinct difference between oedipal theatrics and the genuine domination of the thing itself. Charles Garniers noweponymous Parisian masterwork (comprehensively explored in Semess text) is under no
real threat from French architect Odile Decqs latest neoexpressionist insertion within its
porte-coche`re.58 Semess highly perceptive approach to the design of additions is a welcome
contribution to the conversation and the catalog; a comprehensive critical defense for his
preferred strategy has long been missing and one hopes it will not fall on deaf ears. But is
it heretical to also think that sometimes, just sometimes, the right juxtaposition can be
interesting and enlivening enough?

Acknowledgments
For their generous support I am indebted to Frank Matero, Pamela Hawkes, and Randall
Mason, but in particular to David De Long for all of the assistance, constructive criticism,
and wisdom he tirelessly provided in his capacity as my thesis advisor during the 201011
academic year. I was fortunate enough to hear Paul Byard speak publicly twice while he
was still alive, and I credit him with conrming my initial interest in the problem of
additions; as all who knew him would agree, his enthusiasm on the topic was infectious.

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Further Reading
Modernism, Postmodernism, and Historical Legacies
Berman, Marshall. All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. London: Verso, 1985.
Frampton, Kenneth. Ten Points on an Architecture of Regionalism: A Provisional Polemic (1987).
Reprinted in Architectural Regionalism, edited by Vincent B. Canizaro, 37485. New York: Princeton
Architectural Press, 2007.
Harries, Karsten. The Ethical Function of Architecture. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997.
Jameson, Fredric. A Singular Modernity Essay on the Ontology of the Present. London: Verso, 2002.
Jencks, Charles. Cannons in the Crossre. Harvard Design Magazine no. 14 (Summer 2001): 4249.
Otero-Pailos, Jorge. Architectures Historical Turn: Phenomenology and the Rise of the Postmodern. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.
Rudolph, Paul. Writings on Architecture. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008.
Spector, Tom. The Ethical Architect: The Dilemma of Contemporary Practice. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2001.
Vidler, Anthony. Histories of the Immediate Present. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008.

Design and Historic ContextGenerally

Cantacuzino, Sherban. Re-Architecture: Old Buildings/New Uses. New York: Abbeville, 1989.
Dibner, David R. Building Additions Design. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1985.
Klanten, R. Build-On: Converted Architecture and Transformed Buildings. Berlin: Die Gestalten Verlag, 2009.
Van Uffelen, Chris. Re-Use Architecture. Salenstein, Switzerland: Braun Publishing, 2010.

Critical Work on Design and Historic Context

Ames, David L., and Richard Wagner, eds. Design and Historic Preservation: The Challenge of Compatibility
(papers presented at the Third National Forum on Historic Preservation Practice: A Critical Look at
Design in Historic Preservation). Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2009.
Byard, Paul. The Architecture of Additions: Design and Regulation. New York: W.W. Norton, 1998.
De Long, David G. The Design of History. Fine Arts 1998, American Academy in Rome (1998): 3839.
Diamonstein, Barbara Lee. New Uses Old Places: Remaking America. New York: Random House, 1986.
Fitch, James Marston. Historic Preservation: Curatorial Management of the Built World. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1990.
Fitch, James Marston. Selected Writings on Architecture, Preservation, and the Built Environment. New York:
W.W. Norton, 2007.
Koolhaas, Rem. Historic Preservation is Overtaking Us. Future Anterior 1 no. 2 (Fall 2004): 13.
Longstreth, Richard. The Dilemma of Adding. Keynote Address, Annual Conference, Frank Lloyd Wright
Building Conservancy, Cincinnati, Ohio, 23 September 2010, unpublished manuscript.
National Trust for Historic Preservation. Old & New Architecture: Design Relationship. Washington, D.C.:
The Preservation Press, 1980.
Otero-Pailos, Jorge. Historic Provocation: Thinking Past Architecture and Preservation. Future Anterior
no. 2 (Winter 2005), iii, Editorial.
Sorkin, Michael. Forms of Attachment: Additions to Modern American Monuments. Lotus International
no. 72 (1992): 9095.

From the Viewpoint of Historians and Sociologists

Bluestone, Daniel. Buildings, Landscapes, and Memory: Case Studies in Historic Preservation. New York: W.W.
Norton, 2010.
Crinson, Mark, ed. Urban Memory: History and Amnesia in the Modern City. New York: Routledge, 2005.
Glazer, Nathan. From a Cause to a Style: Modernist Architectures Encounter with the American City.
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007.

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Kubler, George. The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University
Press, 1962.
Lynch, Kevin. What Time Is This Place? Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1976.
Schapiro, Meyer. Style. (1962 essay) reprinted in Schapiro, Meyer. Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style,
Artist, and Society. New York: George Braziller, 1994.
Trachtenberg, Marvin. Building in Time: From Giotto to Alberti and Modern Oblivion. New Haven, Conn.:
Yale University Press, 2010.

References
1. The regulation and protection of historic building exteriors is enabled in the United States by constitutional police power as a matter of public welfare. The sovereignty of private ownership within the
depths of nonpublic buildings effectively shifts the dynamic from one of theory, policy, and regulation
to one of best practices suggestion when it comes to stewarding historic interiors. Moreover, for
whatever reason, renovation has always been a less contentious act, perhaps because of the broad
recognition that building interiors serve relatively more functional uses and are updated accordingly.
2. Paul Goldberger, For the Whitney, Adding Less May Result in More, New York Times, 11 August
1985.
3. Standard Three and Standard Nine, Secretary of the Interiors Standards for Rehabilitation, quoted
in Steven W. Semes, The Future of the Past: A Conservation Ethic for Architecture, Urbanism, and Historic
Preservation (New York: W.W. Norton, 2009), 138.
4. Paul Byard, The Architecture of Additions (New York: Norton, 1998), 14.
5. Ibid. 9. Grand Central, completed in 1913, had originally been designed with the possibility of later
expansion upward. However, the New York City Landmarks Commission ruled against the Breuer
scheme as unsympathetic to the original. Penn Central sued, arguing that their inability to use the air
rights constituted a regulatory taking and they were owed just compensation. The Supreme Court
found in the citys favor in 1978, afrming the police power of preservation policy.
6. Ibid., 12.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid., 14, 159.
9. Ibid., 16062.
10. Semes, The Future of the Past, 187.
11. Ibid., 224.
12. Ibid., 91.
13. Ibid., 180.
14. Ibid., 120, 123.
15. Ibid., 125.
16. Ibid., 133.
17. Ibid., 140.
18. Jorge Otero-Pailos, Historic Provocation: Thinking Past Architecture and Preservation, Future Anterior 2, no. 2 (Winter 2005): iii, Editorial.
19. Semes, The Future of the Past, 136. The 1931 Athens Charter included no acknowledgment of, in
Semess words, craft and stylistic traditions that may have survived into the present (Semes, 133),
while the Venice Charter of 1964 conrmed the ascendant scientic approach in its insistence
that restoration must stop at the point where conjecture begins (quoted in Semes, 135). That the
authenticity of the monument was perceived to lie in its material and date rather than in its form
was consistent with the authors positivistic, materialistic view of art (Semes, 136), and the Venice
Charter, drafted when it appeared that historic architecture would never again inform contemporary
practice, was equally a product of its era (Semes, 137). Most critically, for Semes, the Venice Charter
explicitly decreed that additions to historic environs must be distinct from the architectural composition and must bear a contemporary stamp (quoted in Semes, 135).
20. Ibid., 138. Changes that create a false sense of historical development has typically been understood
to proscribe so-called false history, but the original intent, according to Semes, was to prevent the

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21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.

29.
30.

31.
32.
33.
34.

35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.

42.
43.
44.
45.

46.
47.
48.
49.

practice of cobbling together relocated architectural elements to create historical parks, Semes,
138. Standard Nine quoted in Semes, 139.
Ibid., 141.
Byard, The Architecture of Additions, 161.
Semes, The Future of the Past, 72.
Ibid., 71.
Ibid., 72.
Meyer Schapiro, Style, Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society (1962; reprint, New
York: George Braziller, 1994).
Semes, The Future of the Past, 43.
Glen Adamson, co-curator of Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 19701990, Victoria & Albert
Museum, London (September 24, 2011, to January 15, 2012), quoted in Architects and Artisans Blog,
September 20, 2011, http://architectsandartisans.com/index.php/2011/09/postmodernism-styleand-subversion/.
Semes, The Future of the Past, 3440.
Reyner Banham, The New Brutalism, Architectural Review 118, no. 708 (December 1955): 355,
quoted in Anthony Vidler, Histories of the Immediate Present: Inventing Architectural Modernism (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008): 5. Vidler afrms Fredric Jamesons claim that modernism itself as
a concept and ideologymodernism as we tend to know it todaywas largely a product of those
postwar years (Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present [London:
Verso, 2002], 169; quoted in Vidler, 5).
Semes, The Future of the Past, 3. Italics are my own.
Ibid., 99.
Ibid., 104.
Ibid., 111. Andres Duany [prominent New Urbanist] argues that Modernist buildings to be successful must be located within traditional urban fabric. They are parasitic, (Andres Duany, Modernist
Buildings out of Place, Charleston Post-Courier, November 8, 2005, quoted in Semes, 111emphasis
is Semess.)
Semes, The Future of the Past, 152.
John Brinkerhoff Jackson, The Necessity of Ruins (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980),
101102.
Semes, The Future of the Past, 152. Italics are mine.
Ibid., 29.
Ibid., 152.
David De Long, written correspondence with the author, 2011.
The volume was a comprehensive reection on various themes Gregotti explored while editor of the
Italian architecture journal Casabella, beginning in 1982. Vittorio Gregotti, Inside Architecture, trans.
Peter Wong and Francesca Zaccheo (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), cover.
Kenneth Frampton, foreword to Inside Architecture, by Vittorio Gregotti (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1996), viiviii.
Gregotti, Inside Architecture, 76.
Semes, The Future of the Past, 153.
That virtually no building ever designed can truly be said to be unprecedented is a reality shared by
both traditional and modernist architecture, although this reality is only admitted by the former. . . .
What has changed is our technology and the ways that its advancement shapes the way we live and
think . . . [yet] high technology . . . no longer determines a priori how buildings ought to look, if
indeed it ever did (Semes, 153).
Robert Stern, Robert A.M. Stern: Buildings (New York: Monacelli, 1996), 18.
Elia Zenghelis, The Aesthetics of the Present, Deconstruction in Architecture (Architectural Design
Special Issue, ed. Andreas C. Papadakis, 1988), 26.
Gregotti, Inside Architecture, 67.
Ibid.

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50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
57.
58.

218

Ibid., 68.
Ibid., 69.
Ibid.
Michael Sorkin, Forms of Attachment: Additions to Modern American Monuments, Lotus International 72 (1992): 91.
Gregotti, Inside Architecture, 70.
Ibid., 71.
Ibid., 70.
See Rem Koolhaas,Historic Preservation is Overtaking Us, Future Anterior 1, no. 2 (Fall 2004): 13.
Semes, The Future of the Past, 4552. The project referenced is Decqs 2011 LOpera Restaurant, a
two-story provisional insertion placed within the unenclosed volume of Garniers porte coche`re.

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