Is a little history worse than none? (Hume on facadism)

[jje1000]

Bringing this back from the dead, but an interesting 2005 article on the fight between idealism (rationality) and pragmatism evident in facadism.

The Ethics of Facadism
Pragmatism versus Idealism
Robert Bargery

https://www.buildingconservation.com/articles/facadism/facadism.htm (Archive)

So much for definitions. What then is the problem? Is it really necessary for the facade of a building to reflect what is going on behind? Equally, where it is not possible to retain a building in its entirety, and the loss of at least its interior is unavoidable, why shouldn’t the exterior be saved? On one level, after all, retaining an historic facade seems sensible, as it retains fabric of public or cultural value and allows the developer carte blanche, or something like it, to develop private space that meets his own immediate requirements. The controversy arises, of course, from the lack of relationship between interior and exterior. This may be thought to highlight the loss of purpose of the historic building, to draw attention to its essential redundancy. But the problem goes deeper than that. At its heart it is about rationality.

Facadism is about leading the eye a chase, wanton or not. Certainly, it creates a tension between what is perceived and what is real. Yes, an unavoidable sense of absurdity creeps in when a facade is left adrift, shored up by scaffolding, awaiting a new building behind it; and yes, the eye, attuned to expect some relationship between fenestration and interior space, is disturbed when fluorescent lights reveal an historic facade to be fronting nothing more than vast open-plan offices. Facadism does offend against the purely rational. It involves deliberate obfuscation. At its most basic level, facadism is not really truthful.

What of 21st-century architecture? Its practitioners are often among those most censorious of facadism, but their moral outrage comes dangerously close to hypocrisy: in much contemporary architecture, facadism, or what amounts to facadism, is effectively introduced from the outset. Ever since the invention of the curtain wall, a good deal of new-build involves the hanging of prefabricated facade panels off a standard steel frame holding up a standard floor plate. As a result, what is nowadays built behind a facade is almost inevitably at loggerheads with the facade. It is at loggerheads structurally, for example where reinforced concrete supports masonry. It is at loggerheads spatially, for example where an open-plan layout is set behind a facade of hole-in-the-wall windows that imply a cellular organisation of space. And it is at loggerheads formally, because the roof is often not regarded as an integral part of the building and additional floors are built within mansards that bear no relation to the facade.

This practice of tacking a front onto large floor plans is effectively built-in facadism. The facade is essentially a separate, freestanding element that is developed in isolation, or theoretically could be. Its organic connection with the interior is limited; when the steel frame of the building is erected, it is anyone’s guess what prefabricated panels will be added. They could be classical in detail, as at Juxon House near St Paul’s, or they could be beautifully-detailed glass, as at the new Bowring Building next to the Tower of London. So facadism, in all but name, is ingrained in modern architectural thinking. This radically diminishes the force of the modernisers’ argument against retaining historic facades; doing so, after all, is simply a modified form of conventional architectural practice.

This is an important point. The most sustained recent assault on facadism came with the Revise PPG15! campaign in 2002, led by Rogers himself, together with Richard MacCormac and Richard Coleman. It is perfectly possible to understand their frustration when transparently mediocre buildings are kept as urban wallpaper. But what comes across, even from the illustrations they themselves use to support their case, is that facadism often fills a vacuum caused by a lack of truly satisfying modern alternatives. Whenever we see a building demolished, we expect something worse to replace it, and with some justification. Facadism may stifle architectural opportunities, but the onus must be on architects to provide, consistently and reliably, buildings that are rich enough to engage the senses and repay repeated attention, in the way that all good art does. The poor quality of much modern design provides the oxygen that sustains facadism, and for that architects have only themselves to blame.

Interesting notes that I find relevant in light of recent issues regarding Toronto's high-rise architecture.

Until a richer architectural vocabulary is developed, facadism will continue to be used as a lazy way out. And indeed there can be a good deal of laziness in facadism, particularly the kind that preserves mediocre facades. For the developer, it may be an easy escape from controversy, an act of vacuous piety designed to absolve him from the sin of demolishing a good building that should have been saved in toto. This was particularly true in the interwar years. Since then, the laziness has more often come in not thinking hard enough about a building and relapsing into a soft option. Is the existing structure behind the facade really too dilapidated to save? The answer is no, almost never. Is it acceptable for planning authorities to pretend that the old building is still there and at the same time rake in higher business rates they get from larger buildings with higher rateable values? Again, probably not. Facadism that simply gives aggressively commercial development a sheen of respectability or allows planners to deceive themselves that they are preserving heritage is often the product of lazy, complacent thinking, and it is no bad thing to be jolted out of it.

Once architectural quality is dealt with, a second practical consideration is contextual value. Some facades may have no especial intrinsic merit but may contribute significantly to a townscape or streetscape. This is most often true of classical facades, simply because the canons of classical architecture respond to hierarchies in public space. Thus the giant order was not as a rule approved for domestic buildings; but if a domestic building was on a public square, such as the Place Vendôme in Paris, the public function of the building took precedence. In other words, the building is seen primarily as a composition whose public face derives from its context. Some facades do indeed have a public role that is more important than their private role as an envelope to the building behind. Indeed, so much have facades been seen historically as part of the public sphere that in Paris and Brighton they were sometimes built to complete a public space - and stood for several years on their own before a developer came along and put up a building behind them. If we have lost that sense of facade as pure theatre, it is partly because, as Jonathan Meades says, we have a diminished sense of theatricality; but it is also because the private has become more important than the public, and public space is less valued. Neither is necessarily a good thing.

Commentary on facades and facadism.