Reading Old Buildings: Architecture's Argument

This is the first of three exercises intended to draw you further and further into a critical understanding of what historic preservation is about: what buildings tell us by their expression that is interesting and important and that we should preserve because we can learn from it today.

You will be allotted a building from the list proposed for Problem 1 and will be expected to prepare a written and graphic presentation of what it is about and, more importantly, what it says about what it is about. If it is a rowhouse, for example, it will be about how people were housed in its time - how indeed were they housed? What did they get to live in, who provided it and why? - and then how this particular house set about convincing a share of the people needing housing to choose it rather than another house. What can we learn not just about how people used to be housed but about what they valued - what they wanted their house to be and to say about them? How interesting, instructive and important for us is what we can learn from it now?

This first problem is not a research problem: it is based on observation and experience. You must spend time face to face in reality with your building, getting to know it and figuring out how it does what it does and says what it says. Your building is crucially a fixed, enduring real thing that confronts us with its argument so long as it stands and that you and we all take in directly by experience. How big is it? How is it organized? What is it made of? Does it stand out? What did it do to impress you and make you like it? The Studio Workbook you will be supplied indicates some questions you will want to ask. It is not definitive. It is designed to help you cover the ground. The discipline of finding out history and being as accurate as you can be about it will be the focus of the second problem. For this problem, the point is to begin to observe and be critical - to be accurate about the what and why of what you see.

As you address your building and begin to understand what it is about, you need to draft a short, succinct written description of what it is and is about - you should ultimately be able to do it in a paragraph focused on two or three sentences summarizing its significance - and then find ways to illustrate graphically to yourself and to others what the building is and what it argues about itself. An important part of this first problem will be to help you begin to develop the tools that will help you explain and argue for the meaning and importance of a building. Photography is basic, as something both to record and to manipulate for rhetorical purposes. Drawing if you can do it or want to learn is the classic tool for analysis and illustration. As a contemporary student, you have the extraordinary riches of the computer to help you record and present facts and interpret them graphically. The period of the first problem will include work on these possibilities and resources, as well as consideration of other explanatory devices like the School’s model collection. Your pictures or drawings or computer images will help you understand what you think as you work, and will let others help you as you work. They will ultimately make clear to others what you think they should understand.

The time for this problem is short. Even in the short period, however, you will be expected to get through the entire analytic sequence, including some sort of judgment of importance: why your building should matter to us today. The object is to introduce you to the basic analytic act of historic preservation: what is this building about, what is the proposition it is making to you and how much does it matter? The outcome of the problem is one 24” x 36” graphic presentation board based on your written description that will get across in a three to five minute public presentation the significance of your building and your judgment about it. Your board and your presentation should be informative and persuasive. You and it will be making the case for the preservation of your building.

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