In a message dated 7/12/2001 9:41:11 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
[log in to unmask] writes:

> I feel that the Fed was an excellent candidate for facade cleaning.  The
>  heavily soiled sandstone randomly mixed with lightly soiled, virtually
clean
>  limestone, created a black and white checkerboard that was visually very
>  distracting from the architechural lines of the building.

So... I was wondering ... do we like it because Americans like things cleaned
up better than we like seeing the (dirty) layers of history? I was reading
about maintenance of historic buildings in Italy somewhere ... gleaming new
replacement limestone balusters next to dirty original balusters were not an
aesthetic problem. Everyone knew that old buildings need fixing now and then
and "differentiating new from old" included the seeing the difference between
clean-new and dirty-old.

'Course then there was the Jubilee and everything got cleaned up in Rome.
London has scraped away much of its soot over the past 20 years. Trinity
Church has been purged of its paraffin. We may have regained the vision of
the original architects in the process, but I think we have lost something,
too. Not that I want all my historic buildings dirty black, but there's
something authentic about all that crud. OK, OK, I know it's bad for
buildings. And I appreciate how beautiful they look when they're all snazzed
up. But it is also impressive to be able to see how much we have improved our
air quality since those bad bad times. It presents quite the counterpoint.

-- (cough) Julip