Preservation+and+Thinning Rem+Koolhaas

Today there’s a huge increase in nostalgia – we all respect the past more than ever – but also a corresponding reduction of memory. It is easy to think of preservation as the opposite of development: there are architects, who make change, and there is preservation, which resists change. But preservation itself has become an element of radical transformation without us realizing it.

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We found two moments when preservation was first raised as an issue. The first was two years after the French Revolution in France and the second was at the height of the Victorian Industrial Revolution in England. There is a significant connection between revolution and preservation, because the moment you have to change everything you also have to consider what stays the same.

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Listed Cultural Heritage

CALIGRAPHY 2009: Chinese calligraphy ORAL HERITAGE 2008: The Oral Heritage of Gelede, Nigeria DANCE 2008: Tango, Argentina FOLK SONGS 2008: Albanian Folk Iso-polyphony, Albania CONCENTRATION CAMPS 1997: Auschwitz, Poland DEPARTMENT STORES 1993: Colwell Dept. Store, USA FACTORIES 1993: Engelsburg Ironworks, Sweden AMUSEMENT RIDES 1980: Coney Island parachute jump,USA OFFICE BUILDINGS 1979: Flatiron Building, USA BRIDGES 1966: Brooklyn Bridge, USA

We then noticed that preservation became common practice at the beginning of a whole wave of modernization and invention. Rather than see preservation as the opposite of modernity, this enabled us to see preservation as a part of modernity.

RELIGIOUS BUILDINGS 1844: Notre Dame restored ANCIENT MONUMENTS 1819: France's Ministere de lÍnterieur attains budget for preservation of remains of classical antiquity 1882: Stonehenge listed in Britain's Ancient Monument Act HISTORIC TOWN CENTERS 1849: Carcassonne is protected and restoration started HOUSES 1896: The Clergy House, UK LIGHT HOUSES 1966: Boston Light, USA CEMETERIES 1975: Mt. Auburn Cemetery, USA RAILWAYS 1979: Avon Valley Railway, UK CASINOS 1990: Water Witch Club Casino, USA CULTURAL LANDSCAPES 1995: Rice Terraces, Philippines HIGHWAYS 2002: Long Island Parkway, USA STORY TELLING 2008: The Art of Akyns, Kyrgyz Epic Tellers FESTIVAL 2008: Gangneung Danoje Festival, Korea PROCESSION 2008: Processional Giants and Dragons, Belgium and France HANDCRAFT 2009: Craft of Aubusson tapestry, France

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Expansion of typologies being preserved from Beijing Preservation study with Harvard, 2003 (updated 2010)

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Expansion of scale If you look at what we preserve, we started with ancient monuments 150 years ago, then we began preserving buildings, and now we preserve everything from concentration camps to amusement parks. The scale of what is preserved gets progressively bigger.

BUILDINGS 1844: Notre Dame

BUILDINGS + SET BACK

1913: French Law stipulates 100m protected area around major monuments

DISTRICTS

1973: SoHo District in New York Citry designated as historic landmark

CULTURAL LANDSCAPES 2000: Blaenavon Industrial Landscape designated a World Heritage Site. 3290 hectares

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2000 Expansion of the scale of preservation from Beijing Preservation Study with Harvard, 2003

There is now a radical moment where if you add all the territories that have been declared “World Heritage Site,” you get four percent of the world’s surface, which is twice the area of India. World Heritage is a country, and a major country, one of the largest in the world, and yet all this activity takes place completely beyond the radar of the architectural profession. Expansion of preservation is also a political issue that hasn’t been theorized yet.

Current World Heritage Sites around the globe from Beijing Preservation study with Harvard, 2003

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When we think of preservagtion, we have only primitive tools based on two models – to retain authenticity, which in fact means ruins, or to restore to a previous condition.

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Classical opposition between authenticity and restoration, Beijing Preservation Study with Harvard, 2003

The two models are essentially European. The first one is a the Romantic model.

Ancient Rome, Piranesi, 1756 Ancient Rome, Piranesi,around around 1756

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The second is a Rationalist model. The irony is that since the entire world now has World Heritage sites, the European approach to preservation has become fundamentally inadequate.

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Reconstruction of Carcassonne, France, Viollet-le-Duc, 1844

Carcassonne, France

Therefore, given the current discussion on preservation we simply cannot capture or deal with an issue like the East German parliament in Berlin. At the moment the Wall fell, the parliament was condemned to death. It has now been dismantled, simply because the very narrow values of preservation dictate that we only preserve buildings that are significant architecturally, for their aesthetic or historical values. This excludes anything that is part of recent architecture.

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The issue is even more interesting and difficult in a building like the Haus der Kunst, which is a museum built in the ‘30s by Nazi architects explicitly to show Nazi art (of course you have many equivalents of such architecture from Stalin’s era). This museum still exists and we have to think of a way of dealing with it.

Haus der Kunst, Munich, 1937

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But it’s impossible to deal with it because what do we do? Do we restore it to its former Nazi splendour and look for the right marble and the right stone to restore it? No one so far has the right answer to this question.

Haus der Kunst, Munich, 2008

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What is also highly ambiguous is that secretly, we really love the quality that the Nazi aura gives to this space...

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... and we use it to give our contemporary art additional value.

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In the Nazi building, which is itself really bad art, we like to show the good art of the current moment. We ourselves are unable to deal with this ambiguity.

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When we first started to preserve in the late 19th century, there were 2000 years between what we preserved and the now. In 1900, the gap was already shrunken to 200 years, and now we are in a situation where what we preserve is almost coinciding with the present. Preservation is no longer something you look at in retrospect. You don’t say, “That is nice, let’s keep that.” Preservation becomes a prospective activity, it becomes a prediction.

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The time between creation and preservation is rapidly shrinking, almost overtaking creation. From Beijing Preservation Study with Harvard, 2003

Interestingly enough, that is something that happened to one of my projects, a Villa in Bordeau. I finished a house and it was immediately declared a monument so it could not be changed anymore, even if the family living there wanted to change something.

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Preservation is also taking place in the eastern part of the world and we simply don’t have the tools or the conceptual apparatus to deal with the conditions there.

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We all love the historical heart of Beijing, we all talk about the hutongs, the original form of housing, and we all accuse the Chinese regime of being insensitive to this architecture. But how could you possibly preserve anything in a hutong? If you look carefully, this wall is from the ‘50s, some tin and some plastic from the ‘60s and ‘70s. The lifestyle seems to be completely independent from the physical entity. What do you preserve in a case like this?

Hutong in Beijing, 2003

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This is another example of what happens when a site is declared Unesco World Heritage. This was an old city in Libya made entirely from clay. When it was declared a monument, a new city was built next to it.

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Everyone drained to the new city and therefore life in the old city completely disappeared.

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The same is true of the agriculture outside the city, which disappeared when it was declared a monument.

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In many cases, becoming a World Heritage Site is a death sentence because we are unable to conceptualize how a monument can maintain a degree of evolution inside its preserved conditions.

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We are beginning to discover a common theme to many of these different issues, a phenomenon we call “Thinning” for want of a better name (but maybe we conclude it is a perfect name). All of the phenomena I have discussed suggest that we are suffering a compromised and diminishing ability to inhabit our world and to make sure that our world evolves in a coherent manner.

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By thinning I mean that larger and larger territories are inhabited by our culture but the intensity of use is diminishing.

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Sometimes this intensity of use is low because things are in construction. In China in particular you see ghost towns but they are not a sad proof of uselessness. Instead, they are simply the presence of a future usefulness.

Pearl River Delta development in the ‘90s From Great Leap Forward study with Harvard, 2002

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In cases like this, infrastructure is an announcement of future inhabitation. Landscape is already indicated but it’s not inhabited.

Pearl River Delta From Great Leap Forward study with Harvard, 2002

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In Dubai, there is a significant gap between intention and reality. I was in Dubai three days ago and the only thing I looked for was signs of inhabitation in finished buildings. I didn’t find a single sign so I had to rephrase my ambition to look for signs of irregularity, things that weren’t completely perfect anymore.

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In these towers I found signs of irregularity, probably indicating some degree of use, but I cannot be sure. We have entirely finished cities that suggest an incredible density but they don’t achieve it and they’re also not intended to ever achieve it. More and more cities are inhabited on a provisional basis. It’s a kind of hedge city, a city that hedges against a disaster elsewhere.

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This is another search for irregularities. We have a collective infrastructure to make a city but precious few signs of inhabitation. Dubai is a crucial example of what’s happening in the world: there’s a huge amount of building but we are simply incapable of inhabiting all these conditions in a classical urban way. It’s urban life lite.

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I was in Damascus yesterday and there, the same phenomenon is painfully present and painfully obvious. This is a shoemaker. He inhabits a space that is less than a metre and a half square, so really, really tiny. It’s actually dimensioned to accommodate the machine and the man himself. I would say that this is a perfectly plausible way of inhabiting a city – it’s certainly urban, every square inch is used.

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This is a similar but larger commercial space in Damascus called a caravanserai, a trading hall. This one is in use, which means that a number of men are involved the entire day in removing things, putting them somewhere else... There’s an incredible intensity of use.

Damascus, 2010

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Our way of preserving the caravanserai is to replace it with a boutique. There are some handbags, some shoes, some fashion, and barely any visitors, barely any labour, just a boy and a girl with pretentious faces managing the situation. It is a process of thinning the caravanserai becomes a place which we are somehow unable to inhabit.

Damascus, 2010

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It’s also dubious as a form of preservation because we secretly modernize.

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Damascus, 2010

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Similarly, in a formerly busy part of the city turned into a cultural center, awful Venezuelan art serves as a substitute for life or thinking.

Damascus, 2010

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We have a myth that the world has now become urban – statistics say that more than 50 percent of the world’s population lives in cities. I seriously question that statistic for the reason I just showed. Maybe people inhabit cities on a theoretical level, but what is the effect on the places these people have left behind? What is happening to the countryside? Are there the same processes of abandoned authenticity taking place? And are processes of preservation also falsifying the conditions in the countryside?

The Alps

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There is a stunning presence, even in nature, of art, something that used to be completely unnecessary. Public art is shamelessly expanding, getting bigger, invading spaces that were previously free of art.

A village in the Alps: public art

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Here is a village as it was 10 years ago. The original population has left, presumably to the city...

Thinning in the Alps: old development and expansion

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Today, the village has become bigger, and we can observe a process of villages being abandoned but growing.

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The people who live in these growing villages are not living there full time.

A village in the Alps

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They restore and preserve space by the use of minimalism and extreme good taste, achieving quasi-authenticity within highly-defined rules of what you can do and what you cannot do. It is a theoretical life that rarely coincides with real life.

A village in the Alps

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This is blatantly not a used interior. In the best case it is used for two weeks every year. In the garden, everything is perfect, everything works - the only problem is that it doesn’t have any reality.

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A village in the Alps

To make matters even more complicated, the demographic of such a society reveals that more and more foreigners are required to sustain it.

Population pyramid of the European Union

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This is a Swiss meadow, but the tractor driver who maintains the mountain came from Sri Lanka.

Swiss countryside

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This is the new condition of the countryside, inhabited by a different “team.” What I hope I’ve been able to say is that we’re in a phase of a completely global phenomenon and we’ve not even begun to develop an intellectual apparatus for understanding it and for operating within it.

A village in the Alps

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