This month’s issue, in which we explore contemporary ideas and projects surrounding historic architecture, is all about raising questions. What criteria make old architecture worth saving? Is it desirable, or even possible, to restore a historic building or neighborhood to its virgin state—or should preservation reflect layers of history? What inspires an architect to successfully adapt an old structure without resorting to the kind of historicist motifs that only cheapen a genuine regard for the past?
Some surprising leading figures from the world of architecture are engaging with historic buildings today, including Herzog & de Meuron, which made its mark with iconoclastic contemporary design. “Modernism had thought of history as an impediment to the goal of creating...a new future,” says Jacques Herzog in an interview. “If we had been born 10 years earlier, we would have been more profoundly influenced by a still-intact Modernism.” In its native Basel, Herzog & de Meuron has added to the 19th-century Museum der Kulturen by building up not out, with a whimsical roof that is sympathetic to yet idiosyncratic in the historic cityscape. In the magnificent 19th-century Park Avenue Armory in New York City—now being reimagined largely as a contemporary art and performance space—the same firm has recreated Victorian wallpaper and other details as a sort of mirage rather than a literal quotation. It’s what architectural scholar Jorge Otero-Pailos calls in an essay an “echo of...the lost original.”
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