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Building the Unbuilt: Authenticity and the Archive Author(s): Neil Levine Reviewed work(s): Source: Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 67, No. 1 (March 2008), pp. 14-17 Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the Society of Architectural Historians Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/jsah.2008.67.1.14 . Accessed: 31/01/2012 20:01 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. University of California Press and Society of Architectural Historians are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. http://www.jstor.org Building the Unbuilt: Authenticity and the Archive neil levine Harvard University While the concept of authenticity in the commonly accepted to begin to appreciate the significance of the connection. If sense of scrupulous fidelity to original fabric was rarely the ultimate purpose of preservation is the passing on to later adhered to in nineteenth-century practices, it became an arti- generations of architectural ideas and forms that represent cle of faith in the modern, twentieth-century discipline of meaningful expressions of, and contributions to, cultural his- preservation. Now, in self-professed reaction to the funda- tory, then the status of the archive is profoundly embedded in mentalism and purism of the modern movement, both Jack how one conceives and constitutes such a legacy and thus Quinan and David Fixler propose alternatives to the fetishiza- demands that we fold into the usual conception of the phys- tion of the “architect’s original vision,” as Quinan describes ical, built record a parallel one of drawings and documents. the ideal state of a building at a determined “date of signifi- Indeed, this record can prove to be the more authentic of the cance,” and the “traditional linkage of the concept of authen- two since it is usually immune to the kinds of large-scale and ticity with the conservation of original materials,” as Fixler often radical restorative and reconstructive interventions that defines the urge to retain, at all costs, the original “material- buildings undergo, whether for reasons of neglect, destruc- ity of a structure.” tion, or adaptive reuse. From their very different positions—one is a scholar * * * especially interested in matters of reception and interpreta- Let me start with a couple of obvious points: 1) the word tion, the other a preservation architect focusing on nuts-and- “preservation” is a misnomer and what we usually mean by bolts questions—both Quinan and Fixler agree that the idea the term is something more like restoration, reconstruction, of authenticity must be expanded, relativized, and made more or re-creation; and 2) these different types of intervention flexible in order to accommodate present-day conditions and constitute a sliding scale of reproduction of the past along needs. Both also pose the issue almost exclusively in terms of which the building of the unbuilt recently has come to occupy individual buildings by named architects that are considered a significant place, extreme as it is. It would be great if every- worthy of preservation in large part because of those very one could agree, either at the time things were built or shortly architects’ names. I say “almost exclusively” because Quinan thereafter, that certain buildings were important enough to alludes to a broader question, which is the one I want to be maintained and preserved and that resources were put into address here. that effort. Clearly such has rarely been the case, and build- In remarking on the direct link, even comparability in ings, no matter how valued, deteriorate over time. The ques- terms of authenticity, between the effort in Buffalo to restore tion then becomes what to do short of merely preserving the the Martin House and the related one to construct designs of remains. Two good examples of deterioration were the late Wright not built in the architect’s lifetime, Quinan exposes fourteenth- early fifteenth-century Château of Pierrefonds, as one of the most tortuous, intensifying, and underexplored it existed in a ruinous state by the 1850s, and the Oak Park fault lines in the contemporary preservation/restoration story. house Frank Lloyd Wright built for himself in 1889–90, as it Assessing the authenticity of a posthumous work of architec- was later transformed into a multiunit rental property. Simply ture can have no recourse to a comparison between present to preserve either Pierrefonds, a rare example of domestic and past. Instead, there is only the present simulacrum of a architecture of the late Gothic period, or Wright’s house, his past that never was, an architectural phenomenon that some first notable building, in the condition they were in would might say gives new meaning to the term “Disneyfication.”1 have rendered imperspicuous what they stood for historically. While the posthumous production of a building may at A fundamental goal of preservation has been to give to first seem to bear little or no relationship to the field of a building the appearance that made it seem valuable in the preservation, one has only to think of its effect on the archive first place. Viollet-le-Duc, who restored Pierrefonds, was the 14 JSAH / 67:1, MARCH 2008 most important and prolific figure in the field of his time and tion/restoration effort is now part and parcel of the postmod- arguably its first major theorist. In a celebrated article on the ern construction of modernist history. subject of restoration in his Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architec- To chart more closely the relationship of idea to reality ture française du XIe au XVIe siècle, he wrote that the issue was in the different types of reproductions of the past that have not merely to “maintain” or “repair” a building (meaning, in become common over the last thirty years or so, I will return present-day terminology, to “preserve” or “conserve” it); to the notion of a sliding scale that I referred to earlier. At rather, it was “to reestablish it in a state of completion that one end of the continuum, surely the one having the great- may never have existed at any given moment in the past.”2 est claim on authenticity, is the reconstruction of works that Even more radical than the idealized “date of significance” once existed but disappeared entirely. Somewhere near the criticized by Quinan, Viollet was advocating a kind of middle is the realization of designs that were more or less abstract, transhistorical state of existence, which is precisely ready for construction during the architect’s lifetime, then what he sought to achieve at Pierrefonds, Carcassonne, Notre- abandoned, and then built after his death on the original site. Dame in Paris, and so many other of his “restorations.” And at the far end of the spectrum, the one most removed Such a definition of preservation as creative restoration from any claim to authenticity but also the one that seems to depends upon, and brings to the fore, three fundamental constitute the biggest trend today, is the construction from issues. The first calls into question the relationship between scratch of buildings from designs originally intended for dif- idea and reality: Which is to predominate—historical fabric ferent clients, different sites, and even different programs. or transhistorical ideal? Clearly for Viollet, idea won out. The A prime example of the first type is the Esprit Nouveau second point that his definition brings up is the problem of Pavilion by Le Corbusier. Originally built as a model apart- intentionality. Some assumption of knowledge about origi- ment unit plus exhibition space for the International nal intention is needed to reestablish a meaningful and coher- Exposition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts held in ent link between idea and reality. And third, since such Paris in 1925 and demolished after the fair closed, it was creative reconstruction is of necessity always subjective, no reconstructed in Bologna in the context of an international matter how much physical evidence can be adduced, the arts and crafts exhibition in 1977. Intended to reconstitute a question then becomes one of limits. In other words, how far missing document in the history of the modern movement, can one extend the role of the conceptual or ideational in the the pavilion was built under the direction of Giuliano process of re-creation of the past? Does one limit oneself to Gresleri and José Oubrerie, who had worked for Le what once did exist, or at least what is thought to have Corbusier in his final years, with the cooperation of the Le existed? Or does one allow the realm of the ideational to take Corbusier Foundation. Shortly thereafter, one of the other precedence and thus extend, as Viollet proposed, the possibil- icons of the modern movement that had met a similar fate ities for re-creation to that which may never have physically was restored to its original physical splendor, but this time existed “at any given moment in time”? on its original site. The German Pavilion that Mies van der In the nineteenth century, questions like these—revolv- Rohe built for the International Exhibition in Barcelona in ing around the relation between idea and reality and the 1929, elements of which were apparently returned to problem of intentionality—were fairly bounded by the his- Germany and then lost, was rebuilt by Ignasi de Solà- torical limits of restoration and reconstruction and often Morales, Cristian Cirici, and Fernando Ramos in the first half resolved through a process of what might best be described of the 1980s.

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