**WHEN SCHOOL BUILDINGS MATTERED TO PEOPLE** as more than containers of kids and technology, when they were considered part of our civic and social infrastructure, they were designed to anchor their communities and built to last. (Santa Monica Malibu School District McKinley Elementary School, Santa Monica, CA, ca 1927 with the proposed addition indicated)

A representative of the LA Conservancy, a prominent local historic preservation advocacy organization, puzzled us recently when at a public meeting she confidently proclaimed that a building we are designing which will sit next to an unremarkable but still worthy-of-preservation 1920s-era school building in Santa Monica, CA “will without a doubt have a negative impact.” Santa Monica situates in a gorgeous geographic setting, it enjoys a wonderful climate, and it is an affluent city, but it is hardly Paris or Rome. It came into its own as a city in the 20th century, and is not strictly speaking a city, more a collection of auto-oriented streets and free-standing, too-far-apart buildings. Most of its buildings are ugly and like cities from Manhattan Beach to Mountain View so is Santa Monica -- as are those parts of cities on the East Coast and in Europe that were built in the latter half of the 20th century (Yes, you Boston, and you too, Paris).

**PRESERVATION OF CULTURAL HERITAGE** is different from historical preservation in that it seeks to build upon cultural patrimony rather than avoid, ignore, imitate, or petrify it. (Mission Inn, Riverside, CA 1902, left; Riverside Main Library, Riverside, CA 2021)

In Rome in the 1500s the Vatican’s building program included Donato Bramante’s many additions such as the Cortile del Belvedere and Michelangelo’s dome and in the 1600s Bernini’s piazza in front of the re-built basilica. The new basilica replaced the one that had been there since Constantine. A thousand-year-old-plus building, the most sacred in the Christian world, and many neighborhoods were wiped out to accomplish these projects. Change is hard, Bramante was known as “the destroyer” (“il rovinatore”) by the locals. But while the expenditure split the church (Luther was as upset by money as theology), the effort was a sophisticated one whose outcome we now value.

**SANTA MONICA THRIVES** by virtue of its geography and climate, one of the most beautiful in the world. (Palisades Park, Santa Monica, CA, above; Santa Monica Bay and Beach, Santa Monica, CA, below)

**LIKE MOST CALIFORNIANS** most of what Santa Monica’s inhabitants have built has had minimally positive and mostly negative impact on that which nature has provided. (Various office buildings, Santa Monica, CA)

**WERE IT NOT FOR ITS NATURAL SETTING** there is nothing to be found in Santa Monica that would distinguish it from thousands of other generic places in the state, country, and world. (Various multi-family residential buildings, Santa Monica, CA)

**THE GIFT OF HINDSIGHT** would yield were we to simply pay attention and learn from experience the capability to transform a place like Santa Monica into a tolerable one (McKinley School’s surroundings, Santa Monica, CA above; Campo Marzio, Rome, Italy, below).

As the capabilities, efficiencies and economies of building technologies improved what was once a slow accumulation of labor-intensive small-scale interventions that became the “historic cores” of cities was cast into the past. Famously, Haussmann under Napoleon III leveled medieval-era neighborhoods at the center of Paris to create what we now know as its historic core even though it was all accomplished as recently as the late 19th century. That was only the beginning. The enthusiastic forces of modernism, driven by cynical attitudes toward cities and adolescent longings for innovation unleashed massive unsophisticated demolition and rebuilding efforts. Post-war urban renewal wiped out pre-industrial and 19th century neighborhoods across Europe and the US.

**THE REBUILDING OF THE VATICAN** in the 16th and 17th centuries that completely replaced the complex that had been there for more than a thousand years as well as the entirety of its neighborhood was seen at the time as progress. (The Vatican before 1500, above; The Vatican after 1600, below)

**MICHELANGELO’S DOME UNDER CONSTRUCTION** can be seen looming over the more than 1,000-year-old Romanesque era basilica that was about to be wiped from the face of the earth (Sketch by Giovanni Antonio Dosio)

Not everyone was on board. In some European cities legislation that codified the preservation of “monuments” was established as early as 200 years ago. In the 1800s reactionary voices especially in England warned against the immense transformations of city and country wrought by burgeoning industrialism. Among these the purist John Ruskin was the most prominent arguing for not only keeping hand-made pre-industrial buildings but preserving them in their aged and battered state free of any kind of machine-aided restoration effort. The destruction of McKim, Mead and White’s Penn Station and its awful replacement in the 1960s inspired the preservation of Grand Central Station and birthed the historic preservation movement in America.

**JOHN RUSKIN** was among the most outspoken of 19th century voices in England in defense of pre-industrial architecture and human powered craftsmanship driven by the premonition that industrial scale and wholesale interventions in city and country would decimate cultural patrimony (Stones of Venice, John Ruskin, 1851)

**INDUSTRIAL SCALE REDEVELOPMENT** of central Paris came just in time and not too late to have benefited from experienced and sophisticated intervention strategies that sought to improve cities. (Medieval neighborhoods of central Paris destroyed to make way for Haussmann’s interventions above; Paris at the completion of Haussmann’s interventions ca 1876, below)

**ROBERT MOSES WAS NO BARON HAUSSMANN** influenced as he was by distorted views of modern urban theory and an obsession with the automobile. (The neighborhoods of the upper west side destroyed, above, to make way for Lincoln Center below, New York, ca 1956)

The movement has intensified in tenacity and scope since then and it has become personal. No building built in southern California in the last 100 years was hand-built nor is most of what is considered historic here of very high architectural or symbolic value and a lot of it destroyed 19th century predecessors that were hand-built and of historical value. (Modern architecture, the great destroyer, is now considered historically significant and worthy of preservation.) Instead, what’s going on is what art historian Ernst Gombrich has identified as the Law of Compensation, meaning the more rapidly and drastically our environments change, the less evidence we see that whatever is new is better, the more we compensate by digging in our heels to keep things the same. We employ preservation tactics to preserve personal memories and soothe nerves. We want to petrify our environments because we are petrified.

**THE 1960S ERA PENN STATION** that replaced the original Penn Station was hardly progress and a mistake. (Original Penn Station, Manhattan NY, McKim Mead and White, ca 1910 above; Second Penn Station, Manhattan, NY ca 1963, below)

**JACQUELINE KENNEDY ONASSIS** lent her star power to the effort that would prevent Grand Central Station from the fate of Penn Station, the outcome of which is pretty much universally admired (Jacqueline Onassis with New York City Mayor Ed Koch, ca 1978 left; the restored Grand Central Station, ca 1998, right)

**UNITED STATES SECRETARY OF THE INTERIOR** historic preservation standards require that buildings built in the vicinity of buildings certified as “historically significant” must be 1) identifiably separate from the original; 2) reversible, meaning capable of removal and 3) deferential with the result that accomplished architects such as Steven Holl compose additions that are mostly underground and read like landscape enhancements disconnected from and having nothing to do with the original building. (Nelson Atkins Kansas City Museum Addition, Kansas City, KA, 2007 above; Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Addition, Washington DC, 2019, below)

**NO WONDER** the petrification of attitudes toward what’s new sets in when we witness the arbitrary interventions of thoughtlessly considered proposals that are imposed upon neighborhoods (Proposed hotel on the Sunset Strip, West Hollywood, CA, Morphosis, 2019 above; Proposed office tower in Hollywood, CA, MAD Architects, below, 2022)

**MCKINLEY SCHOOL** in Santa Monica, CA is a solid reinforced concrete structure that was built in 1927 in a modest Spanish Mission or (according to the historic resources consultant) Italian Renaissance style and is one of the city’s oldest surviving buildings (Santa Monica Blvd frontage above; Chelsea Avenue frontage, below)

There are no 1,000-year-old religious monuments in Santa Monica, nor did Abraham Lincoln ever sleep there but the rapid and ugly development that has taken place there for almost eighty years has been disorienting and distressing. Most people in Santa Monica and elsewhere are anti-development because indeed there is no evidence that any new development will not have a negative impact. Historic preservation laws and preservation activists assume with certainty that whatever gets built near a so-called “historically significant” building will have a negative impact and we can’t imagine that there are architects who are even interested in if not capable of the kind of innovation guided by what we might call the Law of Compatibility (“first do no harm”), the kind that seeks to create contemporary architecture with a positive impact not so much in conflict with our past as in conversation with it.

Petrified /May 13, 2022 by Johnson Favaro

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