Why Preserve?

Why Preserve? Bob Stipe says the question is not often asked

Physical resources link us to the past

Because we have lived with these forms and they have become part of us.

We seek to preserve landscape, architecture, and art for their intrinsic values as works of art.

We believe cities have a right to be beautiful.

To maintain difference, individuality, and personal identity in a time of rapid and confusing change.

As relations to past events, eras, and people whom we feel should be honored and understood

Because preservation can serve important human and social purposes.

What purposes social purposes might historic preservation serve?

Imagine the development of a preservation movement

Realization that there is a past worth keeping

Recognition of the need to protect

Usually a catalytic experience

Initial efforts toward shrines of religious and secular elite

Government action that extends protection

Government action that extends funding

Creation of a professional community to administer

Expansion to preserve a wider swatch of architectural and landscape resources—as well as

resources associated with people and places.

Is valuing the past an un-American act?

HP is part of the intellectual movement to protect the environment from casual and short-sighted despoliation.

We do not, as one might think "save the past." The past is wholly beyond our reach, we cannot call it back, nor can we know its more ephemeral parts.

We act to preserve the present--objects made in the past, but surviving in the present, slowing, but not ever completely stopping the physical forces that are slowly changing all matter.

The present is what we have, the past is interpretation and the future is imagination.

The goal of HP is to improve the quality of life today, and to conserve the diversity that has survived through time for present days in the future.

How can the question be answered?

The Past is a Foreign CountryPrior to the nineteenth century people did not think of the past in

anyway different than the present.In this time, in a sense before the past, objects and deeds served as examples but not as memorials. The idea that the past validates the present was a "new" way of viewing the past.

This new view (antiques) made it something to cherish and value--even as it made it unattainable.

David Lowenthal tells us--"If recognizing the past's difference promoted its preservation, the act of preserving made that difference still more apparent. The past is foreign country whose features are shaped by today's predilections, its strangeness domesticated by our own preservation of its vestiges."

What does the past offer?

What are the dangers of the past?

In America the “preservable past” is most often a question of historical, not aesthetic criteria.

There is not one American past. Many ethnic, regional, social and economic groupings find different pasts important and relevant for preservation.

What should guide preservation of the past?

Personal taste has no place in government decisions about what should be preserved. Why?

Would an early McDonald’s Restaurant, built in 1955 be worthy of consideration?

Des Plaines, Illinois, 1955

What should guide preservation of the past?

What should be the standards against which we decide what to maintain and what to replace? Is this a valid question?

The act of selection is a political act. Under the American system the community regulates the actions that benefit or harm the entire community.

What Threatens the Past?

Maintenance deficiency

Economic and social changes

Insufficient conservation standards

Tourism-related issues