As is the case in any profession, architects have their standard complaints: “The client does not understand me.” “The budget is too small.” “The engineer is unresponsive.” But some of us—those who deal with old buildings and state funding of historic preservation projects—regularly proclaim, “These historic preservation people just don’t get it.”

Preservation organizations and policies are crucial for meshing our history with cultural change. Historic districts, historic commissions, and state historic preservation offices (SHPOs) are populated by good, thoughtful people—people who also, often, happen to be religious zealots. Being an Episcopalian (virtually an anti-zealot), I can spot them. But here, the zealotry is not about any supernatural deity, but rather about worshiping whatever is old. 

For those preaching historic orthodoxy, anything older is always better than anything newer, regardless of its condition, value, and cost of potential salvation. I know this from 40 years of working to execute scores of projects that could be labeled “historic preservation.” I’ve won grants and awards for this work, including one this year. And yet when a building must adapt or die, I have become an apostate in the eyes of those who are members of the Church of the Old.

The renovation of churches has been a part of my practice for three decades, and the work is fraught with collisions between tradition and necessary changes. Often, fixed seating has to be removed because it inhibits the building’s flexibility for uses beyond traditional services: meetings, performances, meals, etc. Altars and pulpits change as liturgy changes.

There have also been times when I have had to rebuild, rather than renovate, a home that was not protected by a historic district or designation. Our work for Habitat for Humanity involved saving a home, which earned both a grant and an award. Nearby, the 1800s portion of another home was impossible to maintain because of its condition and egress dimensions. We then designed a new home, sympathetic to the one we had to remove; before construction, I consulted with the local historic organization that I have been a part of for 20 years. But despite the home’s unprotected status by district or designation, some were outraged when the existing home had to be removed. 

A perfect example of this zealotry is illustrated below. 

A blank 1950 stained maple plywood-and-battens wall was deemed to be a “historic resource” by the local SHPO office. We were never going to remove it, but to provide for Americans With Disabilities Act access, we had to cover 1 foot of the wall base on one side and 2 feet on the other side with a ramp. And we were required to have a 3-foot barrier and code-compliant-height railing on that new low structure. We made all of the work clearly new in line with the Secretary of Interior guidelines for distinction between new and old. But the SHPO office was very unhappy. So we worked with the state building inspector to minimize any covering of it and still provide a railing and barrier for an ADA-compliant ramp.

The internal rationalization of any religion creates a bureaucracy of justification. Here, because of these heresies, my State of Connecticut Historical Architect designation was rescinded by the local SHPO office; the title had been bestowed upon me a decade earlier. When I looked into filing a Freedom of Information Act request about how the recission was made, I discovered that the term “Historical Architect” had been completely redefined and (I believe) eliminated by the Connecticut SHPO office and reduced to a list.

My wee travail was a blip in the collision between architects who love and evolve history in buildings and those who do not believe in evolution. Religious wars have long overwhelmed good intentions. So it often is in the religious warfare between stylistic purities in these preservation battles.

The historicist religion inveighs an orthodoxy that often baffles those of us who understand the real Bible of Historic Preservation: The Secretary of Interior’s Guidelines for Historic Preservation, now explicated into many documents. The majority of us who have religion in their lives are both tolerant and questioning. Mainstream religion is not the sole font for determining heretics and apostates. But in the Church of the Old, there is a bright line between the holy and the damned, determined by one commandment: Whatever is Old is Holy, and whoever removes anything Old is Evil.

The gist of the collision between actual archeology and implied and imitated historicity is often faith-based: making the “science” of preservation and the “art” of aesthetics irrelevant in the base worship of the “old.” Thus it becomes style over substance. In this divide between old being sacred and change being necessary, the most superficial of stylistic judgments replace thoughtful reflection. Rather than center on the undeniable value of history, the holy wars of historic preservation often parallel the orthodoxy of modernism. The legacy of 20th century modernism is best summed up in Adoph Loos’ famous quote: “All ornament is crime.” The mutually exclusive apostasies between preservation and modernism cease to have any thoughtful discernment beyond the value of one aesthetic over another. Our aesthetic preferences convey no inherent moral judgment, unless there’s a religious conviction that either history or expression are holy—and if that is the case, styles become mutually exclusive.

Life on earth cannot avoid history; it is as completely essential and universal as gravity. History is time, and time does not live in the past or the future, although it is bracketed by them. The Church of the Old is not about history, it’s about the purity of frozen human intention. Here, architecture strives to be cast in amber, when the rest of the world is not. Museums are essential to holding our past in this world, but denial of this world either creates museums or brings the old into a dance with the now. This is not relativism, but the anti-aesthetic truth of time does not deny the value of either creation or preservation. History is not the truth. Neither is innovation. We create, surrounded by history and facing the unknown future. A death grip on any aesthetic that denies that reality is religion, prosecuted in the faith of an unfathomable truth.

Featured image: Christ Church Cathedral, Hartford Ct., 2022 renovation, built in 1829, Ithiel Towne, architect.