Today there’s a huge increase in nostalgia –

we all respect the past more than ever – but

also a corresponding reduction of memory.
It is easy to think of preservation as the op-
posite of development: there are architects,
who make change, and there is preserva-
tion, which resists change. But preservation
itself has become an element of radical
transformation without us realizing it.

35
 We found two moments when preserva-
tion was first raised as an issue. The first
was two years after the French Revolu-
tion in France and the second was at the
height of the Victorian Industrial Revolution
in England. There is a significant connec-
tion between revolution and preservation,
because the moment you have to change
everything you also have to consider what
stays the same.

36
 We then noticed that preservation became
Listed Cultural Heritage
CALIGRAPHY 2009: Chinese calligraphy common practice at the beginning of a
ORAL HERITAGE 2008: The Oral Heritage of Gelede, Nigeria whole wave of modernization and inven-
DANCE 2008: Tango, Argentina tion. Rather than see preservation as the
FOLK SONGS 2008: Albanian Folk Iso-polyphony, Albania
opposite of modernity, this enabled us to see
CONCENTRATION CAMPS 1997: Auschwitz, Poland
preservation as a part of modernity.
DEPARTMENT STORES 1993: Colwell Dept. Store, USA
FACTORIES 1993: Engelsburg Ironworks, Sweden
AMUSEMENT RIDES 1980: Coney Island parachute jump,USA
OFFICE BUILDINGS 1979: Flatiron Building, USA
BRIDGES 1966: Brooklyn Bridge, USA
RELIGIOUS BUILDINGS 1844: Notre Dame restored
ANCIENT MONUMENTS 1819: France's Ministere de lÍnterieur attains budget for preservation of remains of classical antiquity 1882: Stonehenge listed in Britain's Ancient Monument Act
HISTORIC TOWN CENTERS 1849: Carcassonne is protected and restoration started
HOUSES 1896: The Clergy House, UK
LIGHT HOUSES 1966: Boston Light, USA
CEMETERIES 1975: Mt. Auburn Cemetery, USA
RAILWAYS 1979: Avon Valley Railway, UK
CASINOS 1990: Water Witch Club Casino, USA
CULTURAL LANDSCAPES 1995: Rice Terraces, Philippines
HIGHWAYS 2002: Long Island Parkway, USA
STORY TELLING 2008: The Art of Akyns, Kyrgyz Epic Tellers
FESTIVAL 2008: Gangneung Danoje Festival, Korea
PROCESSION 2008: Processional Giants and Dragons, Belgium and France
HANDCRAFT 2009: Craft of Aubusson tapestry, France

1800 1850 1900 1950 2000 2050

Expansion of typologies being preserved

from Beijing Preservation study with Harvard, 2003 (updated 2010) 37
 Expansion of scale
If you look at what we preserve, we started
with ancient monuments 150 years ago, then
we began preserving buildings, and now
we preserve everything from concentration
camps to amusement parks. The scale of
what is preserved gets progressively bigger.

BUILDINGS
BUILDINGS
1844: Notre Dame
+ SET BACK
1913: French Law
stipulates 100m
protected area around
major monuments DISTRICTS
1973: SoHo District
in New York Citry
designated as
historic landmark

CULTURAL
LANDSCAPES
2000: Blaenavon Industrial
Landscape designated a
World Heritage Site. 3290
hectares

1800 1850 1900 1950 2000 Expansion of the scale of preservation

from Beijing Preservation Study with Harvard, 2003
38
 There is now a radical moment where if
you add all the territories that have been
declared “World Heritage Site,” you get four
percent of the world’s surface, which is twice
the area of India. World Heritage is a coun-
try, and a major country, one of the largest in
the world, and yet all this activity takes place
completely beyond the radar of the archi-
tectural profession. Expansion of preserva-
tion is also a political issue that hasn’t been
theorized yet.

Current World Heritage Sites around the globe

from Beijing Preservation study with Harvard, 2003
39
 When we think of preservagtion, we have
only primitive tools based on two models –
to retain authenticity, which in fact means
ruins, or to restore to a previous condition.

Classical opposition between authenticity and restoration,

40 Beijing Preservation Study with Harvard, 2003
 The two models are essentially European.
The first one is a the Romantic model.

Ancient Rome,
Ancient Piranesi,
Rome, Piranesi,around 1756
around 1756

41
 The second is a Rationalist model. The
irony is that since the entire world now has
World Heritage sites, the European ap-
proach to preservation has become funda-
mentally inadequate.

Reconstruction of Carcassonne, France, Viollet-le-Duc, 1844

42

Carcassonne, France
Therefore, given the current discussion on
preservation we simply cannot capture or
deal with an issue like the East German
parliament in Berlin. At the moment the Wall
fell, the parliament was condemned to death.
It has now been dismantled, simply because
the very narrow values of preservation dic-
tate that we only preserve buildings that are
significant architecturally, for their aesthetic
or historical values. This excludes anything
that is part of recent architecture.

43
 The issue is even more interesting and dif-
ficult in a building like the Haus der Kunst,
which is a museum built in the ‘30s by Nazi
architects explicitly to show Nazi art (of
course you have many equivalents of such
architecture from Stalin’s era). This museum
still exists and we have to think of a way of
dealing with it.

Haus der Kunst, Munich, 1937

44
 But it’s impossible to deal with it because
what do we do? Do we restore it to its
former Nazi splendour and look for the right
marble and the right stone to restore it? No
one so far has the right answer to this ques-
tion.

Haus der Kunst, Munich, 2008

45
 What is also highly ambiguous is that se-
cretly, we really love the quality that the Nazi
aura gives to this space...

46
... and we use it to give our contemporary art
additional value.

47
48
In the Nazi building, which is itself really
bad art, we like to show the good art of the
current moment. We ourselves are unable to
deal with this ambiguity.

49
 When we first started to preserve in the
late 19th century, there were 2000 years
between what we preserved and the now. In
1900, the gap was already shrunken to 200
years, and now we are in a situation where
what we preserve is almost coinciding with
the present. Preservation is no longer some-
thing you look at in retrospect. You don’t say,
“That is nice, let’s keep that.” Preservation
becomes a prospective activity, it becomes a
prediction.

The time between creation and preservation is rapidly shrinking, almost overtaking creation.
From Beijing Preservation Study with Harvard, 2003
50
Interestingly enough, that is something that
happened to one of my projects, a Villa in
Bordeau. I finished a house and it was im-
mediately declared a monument so it could
not be changed anymore, even if the family
living there wanted to change something.

51
 Preservation is also taking place in the
eastern part of the world and we simply don’t
have the tools or the conceptual apparatus
to deal with the conditions there.

52
 We all love the historical heart of Beijing, we
all talk about the hutongs, the original form
of housing, and we all accuse the Chinese
regime of being insensitive to this architec-
ture. But how could you possibly preserve
anything in a hutong? If you look carefully,
this wall is from the ‘50s, some tin and some
plastic from the ‘60s and ‘70s. The lifestyle
seems to be completely independent from
the physical entity. What do you preserve in
a case like this?

Hutong in Beijing, 2003

53
 This is another example of what happens
when a site is declared Unesco World Herit-
age. This was an old city in Libya made
entirely from clay. When it was declared a
monument, a new city was built next to it.

54
Everyone drained to the new city and
therefore life in the old city completely disap-
peared.

55
 The same is true of the agriculture outside
the city, which disappeared when it was
declared a monument.

56
In many cases, becoming a World Heritage
Site is a death sentence because we are
unable to conceptualize how a monument
can maintain a degree of evolution inside its
preserved conditions.

57
 We are beginning to discover a common
theme to many of these different issues, a
phenomenon we call “Thinning” for want of a
better name (but maybe we conclude it is a
perfect name). All of the phenomena I have
discussed suggest that we are suffering
a compromised and diminishing ability to
inhabit our world and to make sure that our
world evolves in a coherent manner.

58
By thinning I mean that larger and larger
territories are inhabited by our culture but the
intensity of use is diminishing.

59
 Sometimes this intensity of use is low be-
cause things are in construction. In China
in particular you see ghost towns but they
are not a sad proof of uselessness. Instead,
they are simply the presence of a future
usefulness.

Pearl River Delta development in the ‘90s

From Great Leap Forward study with Harvard, 2002
60
 In cases like this, infrastructure is an an-
nouncement of future inhabitation. Land-
scape is already indicated but it’s not
inhabited.

Pearl River Delta

From Great Leap Forward study with Harvard, 2002
61
 In Dubai, there is a significant gap between
intention and reality. I was in Dubai three
days ago and the only thing I looked for was
signs of inhabitation in finished buildings. I
didn’t find a single sign so I had to rephrase
my ambition to look for signs of irregular-
ity, things that weren’t completely perfect
anymore.

62

60
In these towers I found signs of irregularity,
probably indicating some degree of use, but
I cannot be sure. We have entirely finished
cities that suggest an incredible density but
they don’t achieve it and they’re also not
intended to ever achieve it. More and more
cities are inhabited on a provisional basis.
It’s a kind of hedge city, a city that hedges
against a disaster elsewhere.

63
 This is another search for irregularities. We
have a collective infrastructure to make a
city but precious few signs of inhabitation.
Dubai is a crucial example of what’s hap-
pening in the world: there’s a huge amount
of building but we are simply incapable of
inhabiting all these conditions in a classical
urban way. It’s urban life lite.

64
I was in Damascus yesterday and there, the
same phenomenon is painfully present and
painfully obvious. This is a shoemaker. He
inhabits a space that is less than a metre
and a half square, so really, really tiny. It’s
actually dimensioned to accommodate the
machine and the man himself. I would
say that this is a perfectly plausible way of
inhabiting a city – it’s certainly urban, every
square inch is used.

63
65
 This is a similar but larger commercial space
in Damascus called a caravanserai, a trad-
ing hall. This one is in use, which means
that a number of men are involved the entire
day in removing things, putting them some-
where else... There’s an incredible intensity
of use.

Damascus, 2010
66

64
 Our way of preserving the caravanserai is to
replace it with a boutique. There are some
handbags, some shoes, some fashion, and
barely any visitors, barely any labour, just a
boy and a girl with pretentious faces manag-
ing the situation. It is a process of thinning -
the caravanserai becomes a place which we
are somehow unable to inhabit.

Damascus, 2010
67
 It’s also dubious as a form of preservation
because we secretly modernize.

67

Damascus, 2010
68
 Similarly, in a formerly busy part of the city
turned into a cultural center, awful Ven-
ezuelan art serves as a substitute for life or
thinking.

Damascus, 2010
69

68
 We have a myth that the world has now be-
come urban – statistics say that more than
50 percent of the world’s population lives in
cities. I seriously question that statistic for
the reason I just showed. Maybe people
inhabit cities on a theoretical level, but what
is the effect on the places these people have
left behind? What is happening to the coun-
tryside? Are there the same processes of
abandoned authenticity taking place? And
are processes of preservation also falsifying
the conditions in the countryside?

The Alps
70
 There is a stunning presence, even in na-
ture, of art, something that used to be com-
pletely unnecessary. Public art is shame-
lessly expanding, getting bigger, invading
spaces that were previously free of art.

A village in the Alps: public art

71
 Here is a village as it was 10 years ago. The
original population has left, presumably to
the city...

Thinning in the Alps: old development and expansion

72
Today, the village has become bigger, and
we can observe a process of villages being
abandoned but growing.

73
 The people who live in these growing vil-
lages are not living there full time.

A village in the Alps

74
 They restore and preserve space by the
use of minimalism and extreme good taste,
achieving quasi-authenticity within highly-de-
fined rules of what you can do and what you
cannot do. It is a theoretical life that rarely
coincides with real life.

A village in the Alps

75
 This is blatantly not a used interior. In the
best case it is used for two weeks every
year.
In the garden, everything is perfect, eve-
rything works - the only problem is that it
doesn’t have any reality.

76 A village in the Alps

 To make matters even more complicated, the
demographic of such a society reveals that
more and more foreigners are required to
sustain it.

Population pyramid of the European Union 77

 This is a Swiss meadow, but the tractor
driver who maintains the mountain came
from Sri Lanka.

Swiss countryside
78
 This is the new condition of the countryside,
inhabited by a different “team.”

What I hope I’ve been able to say is that

we’re in a phase of a completely global
phenomenon and we’ve not even begun to
develop an intellectual apparatus for under-
standing it and for operating within it.

A village in the Alps

79
80