An article in the February 4, 2024 Sunday New York Times described how one of the three pyramids at Giza had originally been clad in granite to create a smooth, rather than a stepped, surface. Egyptologists were not sure what had happened to the surface stones of the smaller Menkaure Pyramid over many centuries. Some were laying at the base, some were likely buried in the sand, and some were scavenged for reuse at other sites. The museum leaders are now debating whether the granite should be collected and returned to the site to recreate a “restored” pyramid.
This has been a classic argument among preservationists for many decades. We discussed it in the Introduction of our book Historic Preservation: A Guide to Its History, Principles, and Practice. The following excerpts recount the diverse opinions of nineteenth century preservation philosophers John Ruskin and Viollet le Duc.
“Writer and critic John Ruskin posited older buildings should not be restored. A society has no right to improve, or even restore, craftsmanship of another era. As he explained in his classic book, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, “It is impossible, as impossible as to raise the dead, to restore anything that has ever been great or beautiful in architecture. Old buildings should be left to look old….The greatest glory of abuilding is not in its stones, or in its gold. Its glory is in its Age.”
“In contrast, Viollet-le-Duc’s restoration philosophy was based on the principle that important monuments should be rebuilt….To restore a building is not only to preserve it, to repair it, or to rebuild, but to bring it back to a state of completion such as may never have existed at any given moment.”
We reflected further in our book with a classic case from early America: “It could be argued that the restoration of Colonial Williamsburg subscribed loosely to Viollet-le-Duc’s philosophy in the sense that all post-1775 changes and additions to the original town were planned to be removed. Whether Williamsburg is an example of a site being brought back to a state of completion such as may never have existed at any given moment has been the subject of debate for many preservationists.”
Should we restore or grow old gracefully? An interesting question we could apply to ourselves personally as well.
We invite you to learn more about historic preservation through a podcast discussion we had recently about our two careers as preservation architects, historians, and authors. Urban planner Stephanie Rouse and professional preservationist Melissa Gengler, both from Lincoln, Nebraska, invited us to discuss how we created the content for our book, Historic Preservation: An Introduction to Its History, Principles, and Practice. The questions were varied and comprehensive and they were interested in how the content had changed over twenty-five years through four editions. We noted first that preservation seen only as preserving old buildings is very limited in scope; it’s much more than that, much broader than that. They asked us to describe some of the most memorable and exciting experiences we have had in preservation.