Now we start to get down to some serious stuff ... 

if you don't make your building look like it did when it came out of the box 80 (150 or 230) years ago, then surely your money has been wasted.

or

If it doesn't look like a new 'old' building (or is that an old 'new' building) then you haven't fixed it properly.

So, we all know that story.  But why is it so?  
Maybe I'm trying to self-immolate here, but I'd like to suggest that it is because the architectural conservation movement has led the public down that path (at least in the US and Australia - Europe has slightly more history, and I suspect the whole process in the Old World is rather more pragmatic than in the New Worlds).  

We've manipulated our clients (and let our clients manipulate us) so that the buildings we work on end up looking good, thus being more likely to get us good press (and thus more work) and along the way maybe convince more people that more buildings are worth saving ... GREAT!

But now when people want to make their buildings look good, in a manner which they think is acceptable (and which a mason who thinks 3 cents a day is a living wage is capable of doing for them) we get stuck into them.  Maybe what we really need to do is to show the public a few major buildings with lumps missing and say ...

"Look at these.  We are preserving these buildings as they are, because the process of deterioration is important.  We can learn from this just as we can learn from the architectural style and detail which we have carefully restored in these other buildings".

After all, the Burra Charter (Australian adaption of the Venice Charter) says that you will do the minimum required to retain the significance of the building ... or something like that anyway.

I think Mike Edison was trying to say that there is a place for every approach.  I think Christopher has a problem with 'all' the brownstones being covered with stucco and people thinking that they are doing the right thing.  Maybe they need to be shown some of the alternative approaches that Mike Edison alluded to. 

So why not get out there and advocate an alternative approach.  Demonstrate in the street for building preservation.  Leave them as they are.  Graffiti on the walls, stains beneath the sills, lumps falling on the sidewalk ....

Oops, back where we started from.

Time I closed down my email, left you guys alone and got some sleep.  Its been a long day with far too many postings about brownstone from me.

david

>>> Met History <[log in to unmask]> 7 May 1999  10:17pm >>> wrote:

2.  Out of the same 1000, how many are responding to any real failure -
except of imagination?

Christopher Gray