Form Follows Form
Interesting post on Metafilter about the Farnsworth house, a historic house in Illinois that was recently bought by local preservationists: “One of the arguments deployed in favor of protecting the house was the concern that a buyer would move the house from its current location. If the buyer moved the house, the argument goes, it would be divorced from the setting and surroundings for which it was designed, damaging its integrity as it were. However, the preservationists want to strip the house, not of its location, but its function, i.e., being a house.” Perhaps an argument that A2 architecture authorities should keep in mind, not just about individual houses, but about the function of the town as a whole.
Heh. The water company owns about a third of the land in my state (I have no idea why they need so much land, but I’m glad….) and some of the land they own has old houses on it that they used to maintain and rent out. Apparently they’ve tired of the landlord business, so, for the last few weeks, they’ve been advertising takeout houses in the newspaper — if you can cart it away, you can have it for free.
(For those of you who own very big trucks, this might be the answer to your prayers… I’m sure that the houses would find the fields of North Campus to be perfectly suitable. The water co. might even throw in a fortune cookie).
posted by Anna on December 15th, 2003 at 8:18 pmOops, sorry, that should have been COUNTY, not state. I don’t know how much land water company own state-wide (a lot).
posted by Anna on December 15th, 2003 at 8:47 pmLarry said that he’d work on compiling a list of questions to ask in historical preservation stories for me when I met him at the meetup. He’s probably got an interesting take on this.
posted by js on December 15th, 2003 at 9:03 pmjs
JS, I have been thinking about that question.
What you asked was, given an argument between neighborhood folks or preservationists and developers, how you could tell the merits of the situation. But it’s a bit like asking how you can tell who’s “right” in a contested divorce, or a presidential election, without looking at the substance and applying one’s own values.
I’ll discuss this more in my blog.
posted by Larry Kestenbaum on December 16th, 2003 at 11:10 amI’m not an admirer of Mies, but I’ll concede that the Farnsworth House has some historic or architectural significance, and that its original location would be a factor — perhaps more so than most buildings.
The notion that International Style buildings could or should be considered as historic is still quite new; they didn’t build for permanence, and even advocated that a 30 year life cycle for buildings be enforced by law. You could even argue that preserving the Farnsworth House betrays its ethic of impermanence.
But that would be silly. We use and enjoy the cities and structures left to us by past generations, but we are not bound by the intentions of their builders.
And even when preservation of a building or site is legally mandated — including by Ann Arbor’s historic district ordinance — the use of the building is not. Many important historic structures have been adapted to uses very different from the ones they started with.
I wouldn’t be interested in visiting the Farnsworth House Museum, but probably somebody would. Maybe a whole lot of somebodies.
posted by Larry Kestenbaum on December 16th, 2003 at 11:35 amWell, more to the point, I want a series of questions that can be asked in order to obtain more than a superficial reading of the situation. As for a divorce, there are legal standards (of which I have no true knowledge or immediate interest), and in presidential elections there is always availible a slew of anaysis on what likely outcomes are based on the candidate’s positions. Since I have a bit more experience with that, those questions are easier for me to evaluate. Clearer now?
posted by js on December 16th, 2003 at 11:59 amjs