The Future of the Past is the main title of a book by Steven W. Semes (W. W. Norton & Co., 2009) that presents a critique of mainstream contemporary architecture, urban design, and (especially) historic preservation. This critique seeks to recalibrate these three fields and unite them under a common “conservation ethic” in which the former separation between historic and contemporary building can be healed and the historic built environment once again appear as “a collective work of art.” To this end, The Future of the Past seeks to promote two closely related initiatives:
First, to reunite historic preservation with the broader architecture and urban design community. We seek to remove the notions that new buildings must always self-consciously “reflect their times” and that “our time” requires architecture that asserts its difference from, rather than its continuity with, all previous design. Instead, the split between historic and contemporary design that has isolated preservation from new design must be healed.
Second, it advances the convergence of historic preservation and environmental sustainability. We support the declaration of Carl Elefante, FAIA that “The greenest building is one that is already built.” Historic preservation is, therefore, an essential tool for sustainable development and the struggle to reduce the causes of climate change. Bringing the lessons of historic buildings to bear on the design of new ones will lead us to “recapture our capacity to build”—in the words of the late Francoise Choay—and to build robust, resilient and adaptable buildings and cities that will endure.
THE AUTHOR:
Steven W. Semes is Professor of Architecture and Founding Director of the Michael Christopher Duda Center for Preservation, Resilience, and Sustainability at the University of Notre Dame. He was Academic Director of the Notre Dame Rome Studies Program 2008-2011 and currently splits his teaching duties between Rome and the main campus near Chicago. With degrees from the University of Virginia and Columbia University, he is the author of The Future of the Past: A Conservation Ethic for Architecture, Urbanism, and Historic Preservation (2009) and The Architecture of the Classical Interior (2004). His most recent book, New Building in Old Cities: Selected Writings of Gustavo Giovannoni on Architectural and Urban Conservation, co-edited with Jeff Cody and Francesco Siravo, was published last year by Getty Publications. His many articles have appeared in The New Criterion, National Trust Forum Journal, Change Over Time, Public Discourse, Common Edge, The Classicist, Traditional Building, Palladio, and Ricerche di Storia dell’Arte. He is a member of US/ICOMOS, the Society of Architectural Historians, and the National Trust for Historic Preservation Leadership Forum and is on the editorial committees of Change Over Time, Opus, and Palladio. Prior to joining the Notre Dame faculty in 2005, he practiced architecture for three decades in Washington, DC, San Francisco, and New York.
