the renovation issue

[MrBern]

Brooklyn brownstones
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/22/garden/22reno.html

Clean and Spare or True to History?

Do you renovate a turn of the century brownstone to its original glory, or do you go modern for teh 21st century life?

 

[TM]

Restoration? Renovation? Remodel? It’s a sticky problem.

One can look at it as a spectrum with two extreme endpoints with a variety of choices in between.

One end point is the point of view of the Getty Conservation Institute. They hold, I believe, that an object should be preserved in its present state and not be allowed to deteriorate an further than it may have done. So you don’t restore, you preserve.

The other extreme might be the example of the Barcelona Pavillion, designed by architect Mies van der Rohe as the German National Pavilion for the 1929 Barcelona International Exhibition. Built as a temporary exhibition structure, it was disassembled in 1930. And then recreated in 1986, a reproduction using no original materials.

Somewhere in between lies the area of restoration, renovation and remodel.

What do you do with, say, the Kaufman House in Palm Springs, designed by Richard Neutra in 1946? Every subsequent owner until present altered and expanded the house, from 2,700 square feet to over 5,000. Should those alterations be preserved? The Getty might say yes, but most disagree. So instead, the present owners returned the structure to exactly the way it was in 1946. Much of the original historic fabric had been lost, so much had to be newly created. It is restored to the original appearance, but it is not original.

Another extreme example is the Maslon House in Rancho Mirage, also designed by Richard Neutra. It was demolished and replaced by a “Tuscan fantasy”. That, I suppose, is a “remodel”.

In the present case of the Brownstone, what also has to be considered is the uniqueness of the historic resource. A Brownstone, by definition, is an example of a Brownstone – a building type. Is it necessary to preserve every Brownstone? No. Brownstones are a very common and numerous building type. It is important to have exemplary examples of such, but the loss or remodel of individual examples is not very important to history. Although those losses add up!

Regarding a remodel of an interior space, I am only aware of three examples in America of an interior space being protected. Those are: the lobby of the Time/Life Building in New York; the Four Seasons Restaurant, also in New York; and the Goldstein Office by John Lautner, in Los Angeles. In America, interior spaces are almost never protected by preservation ordinances. And so owners may do what they will with their kitchen remodels. Naturally, one would encourage remodelers to be sensitive to the original architecture.

Tony