Dan Becker wrote, “Why is it that we have in this society lost public respect
for existing architecture?”

Decades of defered maintenance, causing everyone to wonder why NYC is suddenly
falling down, may have resulted in part from a subconsious reaction to the
Cold War in that there is little reason to maintain buildings today if you
expect the world to be nuked tomorrow. The same sentiment can be applied to an
appreciation of architecture, including the everyday vernacular, as well as
historic preservation. There is little need to worry about preserving
anything, whether it be buildings or canned peaches, if you have no
anticipation of any future. That we have the nuclear ability to destroy the
earth 14,000 times is cause to wonder, especially since one time would be more
than enough for most of us. (We should look at the trend in reduced family
size, a potential result of the fear of nuclear annihilation as much as from
the benefits of modern technology, and see if there is any comparison to the
reduction in the durable aspects of domestic architecture.) A socio-political
position for appreciation of architecture, and of the built environment, is to
force maintenance of the environment as a positive issue against the negative
and deadly aspects of our culture... in this light preservation of the built
environment may be interpreted as a sublimated anti-nuke, anti-war, peace
movement. Though this may be more speculation than the statistics of our
culture will support. It would be interesting, in exploring this thread, to
compare the number of x-beat, x-hip, x-artist that have pursued craft and
historic preservation counter to the mainstream progress of construction
technology. How many of us on BP have worked on the construction, or
preservation, of a nuclear reactor? How many of us have been politically
active against armed aggression?  Preserving the built environment has a
slight tinge of civil disobedience to it... as it manifests itself counter to
the actions of the politically popular notions of PROGRESS as being good. I do
not believe that wanting a “job worth doing” to also be a “job well done”
makes one a post-Luddite, but I suspect the motivation of many craftspersons
is a desire to find personal meaning in their work. The desire for personal
meaning is not well served by working at McDonalds, on a hi-rise brickline, or
at a GM assembly plant. Personal meaning does begin to occur, respectfully,
when the hands are recombined with the head. I suspect that as we imagine the
world feels more secure in peace, if such feelings do occur, there will be an
increased amount of activity in preservation of existing structures, and more
building of new structures with an idea that they would be intended to endure
through several generations, and not just to be thrown away at the end of a
short life cycle.

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