The View from Afar: The Other between Cliché and Change

Frequently, the heritage media are quite revealing in what they do and don't say. Knowledge of what is relevant to the others is good, but understanding has to be proportional to the reported facts. In this sense, on these postcolonial times, it is revealing what the metropolitan power has to say about the state of the art in its largest, anachronistic colony.

Puerto Rico, a Caribbean island that manages to house four million ethnically diverse people in just thirty-five hundred square miles, is one of the world's few territories that is ruled from afar without true participation in the affairs of its rulers, in this case safely ensconced in the marble pavilions of Neoclassical power on the banks of the Potomac. That very same city is the seat of the United States' main heritage preservation organization known as the National Trust (for Historic Preservation) though they seem to be taking a liking to be known rather by the brief and cutely rhyming sobriquet Preservation Nation. The Trust - or PN, if you wish - featured PR as its main article in its bimonthly magazine, Preservation. It carries the unassuming title "Guarding the Glories of San Juan".

PR has a remarkable archidiversity; if you don't think so check my article The Essence of Puerto Rican Historic Architecture located in this blog's archive!... but to many Americans Puerto Rican heritage starts and ends in Old San Juan, so the article's title is predictable. The writer, a certain Eric Wills, whose profile we don't get to know because of a New Year Resolution-obsessed editor, barely transcends this San Juanism (or, more correctly, a San Juan-plus-landmarkism) even if he talks briefly with a so-called Ponce architect about the island's second city. With him at his flat, they gloss superficially over the pork-fueled government initiative to "improve" the infrastructure there and to do a so-called "revitalization" through incentives that may be wiped out because the island's government is badly in hock, like a losing high-stakes casino gamer who has bet out his house.

Wills gets a wind of the protest over Paseo Caribe, a major controversy related to public domains along the shore and the protection of the context surrounding the San Jerónimo fortress, a built-out-on-the-water bastion which architecture is nearly unique among dozens of shore fortifications built by the Spaniards in the Americas and the Philippines. Paseo Caribe is one of these kitschy so-called mixed use developments for the rich with exclusive shops for superfluous merchandise and seven-figure apartments in the most vulgar Miami-ese tradition. PC, a case that can speak volumes - heck, complete encyclopedias - about the situation of urbanism and preservation on contested lands, is condensed into four paragraphs of a fortuitous encounter with the protest camp next to the near-finished project, an interview with the developer (something that I'd have skipped given that man's "reputation") and a generality that civic participation will be more significant in preservation policy in PR.

The most human and interesting part of the article is the interview with the Big Man of PR preservation, Mr. Ricardo Alegría. Alegría ("Happiness") is the story of a life engaged in defending heritage and memory against overwhelming odds, and his biography can tell nearly all there is to making heritage a relevant part of society. But again, enforced magazine-article brevity betrays the need to expose this charming, intense life story. Expediency takes the author to two restoration projects that supposedly mirror new directions in Boricua preservation. But one of them is a sugar estate, and scores of them have been preserved Caribbean-wide so this is not but a catch-up, join-the-club manouevre, though the restoration of a 19th-century mill with its steam engine to working condition is no mean feat that, again, gets little space.

This leaves us with the San Juan old aqueduct. Here the article high-gears it with the impressionist sketch of an early urban infrastructure project, part of those traditionally forgotten parts of collective memory. And the promise of difference entices the reader... but, alas, time's up! So, the social component of preservation that is the promise of this article, the role of preservation in identity construction and as a tool of "growth" management in a dense, tropical society, got the short shrift (again?).

Had I the chance to be interviewed by Mr. Wills, I'd have harangued him into going deep inside the island to see how the defense of landmarks and archaeology is being more and more used as a weapon to challenge misguided, harebrained "development" schemes. I'd filled the space between his ears on how heritage is progressively becoming a fundamental building block of local and Puerto Rican pride, as the standard of the cause is now brandished not by professional architects or highfalutin' academics, but by common workers, schoolteachers, househusbands/wives, artists, and people from varying walks of life. A single case like the ultimately failed attempt to save the midtown San Mateo sector in San Juan could explain in ample perspective the potential of heritage to transform not only cityscapes but also lives!

Puerto Rico is a somewhat atypical case of a subaltern society within the global order, for many years cowed into passive acceptance of cultural mores of a strong, "young", dominant world power with the wherewithal to brainwash masses of people. It can serve as an illustration that identity can be painted over, hidden, pushed into the ground, or plastic-surgeried into a denial of its former self... but it keeps coming back, and obviously with a vengeance. The endless interpretations of the lone-star-in-a-blue-triangle flag, reproduced on head and butt alike; the improvised poets that turn out decimas (a type of poem on 10-line stanzas) in multitudinary, Eisteddfod-like ceremonies; the perpetual congregation of neighbors and friends even within the hostile ambience of malls and offices; the noisy Xmas caroling with rhythmic, hand-clapping trullas and delicious bootleg rum showing up everywhere there's a party; the incredible decoration of anonymous subdivision-house facades - well, there is a veritable INSURRECTION going up in Puerto Rico, and even if it lacks the apparent seriousness of a Palestinian intifada, it is even more determined in getting its own way.

And, like it or not, historic and archaeological preservation, Boricua-style, cannot be understood outside the context of this insurrectionary climate. Those that think that Puerto Rican preservationists are genteel-gentleman-and/or-lady clubs saving symbols of a patrician world are shooting way off the mark. And this "other" keeps being a mysterious, arcane enigma to First Worlders who just shrug and live happily with their clichéd views and comforting, exceptional images of the consumer symbols of exotic travel, another byproduct of the tourism "industry"... As they'll think: "Let me sleep dreaming with my Taj Mahals, Pyramids and Temples of the Sun, let the rest of the world fix itself as it may!"

And the insurrection of the Other's identity will, sooner or later, fix itself... getting back to and over them.

CUBA: AN EXEMPLARY CASE OF PRESERVATION! (part 1)

Some may ask why my homage to Cuba and a full HALF-CENTURY of Revolution has appeared first in my English language blog. It's because this Caribbean island country can show other more prosperous places how to work historic preservation as an integral part of an ongoing social project in which land uses are planned on basis of social needs (though I recognize that the money shortage and the American blockade have hamstrung Cuba's capacity to respond to the needs of its people).

When exactly fifty years ago to this day Fidel Castro proclaimed victory over the venal dictator Batista and a few days later rode triumphant into Havana's boulevards, Cuba was to witness a real sea change in its social order. An agricultural nation barely eking its way by selling underpriced sugar to Western hemisphere nations became in time a more diversified economy with import-substitution industries and a vast improvement in the quality of life of the famished peasants. The tentacles of Mob investment in the hotel and casino business were severed: Cuba was no longer to be a playground for Mafiosi and their beneficiaries. (This in my belief is why the USA's blockade and boycott of relationships with the Castro government has been so tenacious.)

Cuban cities were impoverished backwaters except for Havana, which was beginning to flood with vulgar, glitzy buildings for tourism. (Not all, though: for example, Max Borges's Tropicana club is a veritable masterpiece of poetry in reinforced concrete.) The Cuban capital was beginning to see high rise towers among the traditional scale of 2- to 5-story brick buildings built cheek-to-jowl creating an unique, dense and interesting ensemble in the Old Havana and Havana Central quarters, seat of most 19th century and older buildings.

Although scarce resources were allocated in priority to ameliorating the lot of the peasants and cane workers, who were in time introduced to previously unheard-of luxuries like running water and electricity, preservation of old Cuban cities was from the beginning of the Revolution an irreductible part of the nation's cultural policy. Little information was then available: Joaquín Weiss, an architect, had written a multivolume book on Cuban Spanish Colonial buildings, but other facts were still buried in musty archives, interred away from the gaze of historians and preservationists.

By the mid sixties, general censi had been made of Old Havana and the eastern city of Santiago, Cuba's second most important conurbation. Between the mid sixties and mid eighties a full preservation team would be implemented covering not only these two cities but also a host of other smaller cities and towns, and even rural areas like the Viñales Cultural Landscape, related to tobacco, in the western Pinar del Río province. Those two decades saw an exponential increase in interest in preserving Cuban heritage and hundreds of systematic inventories were performed all over the island. The harvest of all this process has been phenomenal: FOUR World Heritage urban areas (Havana in 1982 was the first one; also Trinidad, Cienfuegos and the most recent one, Camagüey), two cultural landscapes (Vi­ñales, and the first coffee cultural landscape in the Caribbean in the eastern mountains) and the San Pedro fort in Santiago.

Add to all this several dozen protected historic towns and thousands of other buildings over all of Cuba's geography and it's not hard to see that the country needed a specialized center for education, outreach and technical assistance. In 1980 the Cencrem (Spanish acronym for National Conservation, Preservation and Museology Center) was established in the former Santa Clara convent in Old Havana's heart. It now educates Cuban and foreign preservation professionals, and in its studios research and practice is done in benefit of local preservation agencies from the Havana City Historian's office (Old Havana's overseers) to rural archaeological studies in need of investigations over materials conservation.

The deterioration seen in many historic Cuban buildings is a veritable problem; but giant steps have been taken to mitigate its impact. Cuban preservationists are among the most knowledgeable in stabilization and mitigation techniques for old places "over the top", and their skills have been exported by way of technical assistance overseas and frequent workshops and symposia. Thus the Cuban preservation scene is possibly one of the most dynamic in Latin America, equaled maybe only by that of Mexico - a far larger and more populated country. Summing up this introduction, the Cuban Revolution, a solid half-century old today, has been also a revolution of memory and history in the service of the common good. They are the example to follow!

A New Year's message: H&S in times of H&S - Towards hope

As the tumultuous and, to many, must-be-forgotten year of 2008 closes, heritage enthusiasts see only clouds in the new year 2009. Outside the dramatic losses of natural disasters, war and speculation, much of our significant places are just rotting away in neglect. Since heritage, at least literally, cannot be eaten, drank or used to cure illnesses; nor used to keep the social order, it is not an investment priority for those with power and funds available.

Now, this latent, insufficiently understood emotional and spiritual need is in risk of being set back or simply linger around in a limbo of "future priorities". As a resolution, if any is to be undertaken in this new year, we, the heritage enthusiasts of the world must begin crying out loud about the importance of our eternal and beloved ward of old, significant places in local and global memory. We cannot simply rest while benevolent, though misguided attempts to jump-start the economy and society can try to make old places expendable. Many solons and politicos think that newness and bigness are tantamount to happiness; they miss the picture of familiarity, pride, and roots that the presence of the past can only deliver.

The past is an essential referent; as I said four years ago in the conclusion of an essay about my home country's historic architecture,

Only now the more perceptive professionals are searching for solutions that may recover, among other elements, the lessons of the past, without a nostalgic return to what is already obsolete. But its conservation is an imperative as it gives an unavoidable reference that can be a beacon for intelligent spacemaking in the future.(my emphasis in this quote. Taken from "The Essence of Puerto Rican Historic Architecture", Axis 7 [2004], Institute of Technology, Kingston, Jamaica)

An intelligent habitat that facilitates in many possibilities the fulfillment of humankind needs to be based on accumulated intelligence that only can be gleaned through heritage. Heritage should not be idealized; it shows lessons positive and negative. It is our responsibility to sort the grain from the chaff, but we shouldn't throw away that chaff - it demonstrates an essential component of a process of decision and selection.

And, is preservation cost-ineffective? Serious study by professionals has shown that even rescuing and restoring dilapidated heritage places has a beneficial effect that outweighs nearly all the "excessive" outlays of money needed to recover them. Mr. Donovan Rypkema, a Washington preservation consultant, in fact has demonstrated that heritage conservation is almost uniformly a sound economic decision, as he passionately posits in an address delivered in Alexandria (VA), USA in May 2007. I have seen Mr. Rypkema deliver his lectures in person and he'll recover the die-hard preservationist in you!

People like him are harbingers of hope. We hope with this new year almost upon us that heritage conservation will be valued for its intrinsic and huge moral and cultural value, and allotted the essential human and monetary resources for placing it where it belongs: in the spirit and soul of all of us.

I WON'T wish you a "Happy New Year" - not in my life! Rather, as a New Year approaches, let us make it a HAPPY one. Happiness is not something that falls from above like manna or rain; it is something all of us can fabricate within us by enthusiasm and faith in our cause and our love towards others. Fighting unwaveringly for our precious heritage, we'll make tons of happiness in this and all other forthcoming years.

In memoriam of Harold Pinter: Words of Advice to the World

On Christmas Eve 2008 famed British playwright Harold Pinter (born 1930) passed away. For years his witty, critical and often passionate writings - not just drama, but also poetry and essays - have been a sharp twang of conscience to the world's often hypocritical ways. Pinter was exactly a paradigm for the engaged intellectual, the person that through his creative endeavours wanted to have his readers and viewers interact critically with the reality around them. Being this akin to the mindset that informs H&S, it is not but proper to remember one of his most important allocutions, that one made for accepting the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature.

I excerpt lightly from his acceptance speech and Nobel Lecture:

In 1958 I wrote the following:

'There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.'

I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?

***

I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self love. (...) Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay.

***

What has happened to our moral sensibility? Did we ever have any? What do these words mean? Do they refer to a term very rarely employed these days - conscience? A conscience to do not only with our own acts but to do with our shared responsibility in the acts of others? Is all this dead?

***

I know that President Bush has many extremely competent speech writers but I would like to volunteer for the job myself. I propose the following short address which he can make on television to the nation. I see him grave, hair carefully combed, serious, winning, sincere, often beguiling, sometimes employing a wry smile, curiously attractive, a man's man.

'God is good. God is great. God is good. My God is good. Bin Laden's God is bad. His is a bad God. Saddam's God was bad, except he didn't have one. He was a barbarian. We are not barbarians. We don't chop people's heads off. We believe in freedom. So does God. I am not a barbarian. I am the democratically elected leader of a freedom-loving democracy. We are a compassionate society. We give compassionate electrocution and compassionate lethal injection. We are a great nation. I am not a dictator. He is. I am not a barbarian. He is. And he is. They all are. I possess moral authority. You see this fist? This is my moral authority. And don't you forget it.'

A writer's life is a highly vulnerable, almost naked activity. We don't have to weep about that. The writer makes his choice and is stuck with it. But it is true to say that you are open to all the winds, some of them icy indeed. You are out on your own, out on a limb. You find no shelter, no protection - unless you lie - in which case of course you have constructed your own protection and, it could be argued, become a politician.

***

I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.

If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us - the dignity of man.

So I honor an extraordinary intellectual who, despite not being directly involved in the protection of heritage, has created a body of written and acted works that undoubtedly are part of humanity's shared path in this globe. May Mr. Pinter rest in peace, but his message cannot be left to die in a ruthless world!

Christmas Reflection: The Church of the Nativity as the Classic Palimpsest

As a Christmas Eve message, it isn't any more proper than to focus in the most famous landmark associated with this day of preparation and reflection. In more than one sense, the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem (Palestine) is significant in today's convoluted preservation scene. It illustrates vehemently the process of the Palimpsest: it has been "written" repeatedly over time, built, unbuilt, rebuilt; its current shape may be far from classic canons of order, hierarchy or overall symmetry, but it mirrors the evolution of our view of Christ's Nativity as Christianity's most sacred moment. It is fitting that the landmark that sits upon the site of Jesus's natal manger cries change and gradual transformation all over its facades and interior spaces. The Church reflects properly the history of religion and the way that the Christianized West has seen this basic moment of birth and regeneration, shared with many other unrelated faiths and central to the theologies of all of them.

Colonnades and plain volumes, rich iconostases and simple walls, galleries and passages, spaces with no seeming human logic (but the divine logic is evident!) are all evidence of this monument's rich history. It is a truly collective product of humanity in its quest for trascendence and linking with the world of the sacred!

The most important place of worship tonight should an example of collaboration and tolerance, as it is maintained by the Eastern Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem along with the Franciscan Roman Catholic religious order and the Armenian Church. All operate in a difficult protocol, that is above all a cry for a consensus that makes collaboration between the faiths a necessity, no matter how much intolerance they display against each other, here and elsewhere. This temple has also been in the possesion of Moslems previously.

The Church is, sadly, in the World Monuments Fund's 2008 One Hundred Endangered Monuments List. The WMF aptly comments that this monument to human and divine collaboration is endangered by the current Israel-Palestine conflict. This intractable war over the so-called Holy Land, the venue of Biblical events that have shaped our worldview, has repeatedly threatened this place scarcely five miles (8 km) from the Sacred City of Jerusalem, holy to three competing faiths - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - that somehow hardly tolerate each other. We should view the Church of the Nativity, more than for its deceptively simple and erratic architecture, as a symbol of humanity in seemingly perpetual conflict, contradiction and change; even so searching for the beacon of peace, and a yearning for a better world.

With this message, I wish the best of holidays to all my H&S readers.
Jorge Ortiz Colom, owner of the H&S (Heritage and Society) blog

H&S in times of H&S (Heritage and Society in times of Hope and Sorrow)

After over a year in recess, leading a Perils-of-Pauline existence in my government historic preservation job, things are starting to look up to me. Blogging in these stressful times is not easy for people of my temperament, but I am morally and existentially obligated to share my concerns about the significance of material memory for the spiritual well-being of the world.

The neoliberal fling, the orgy of unrestrained spending, moving and shaking with bucks and bombs, the veritable disaster of an economy and a "political" apparatus gone amok, is at last receding into times of Hope and Sorrow. Hope because the frenzy begins to die down and give way to a slower pace of life and more reflection, and we begin seeing the distant horizon; sorrow because of the suffering inflicted both during the past years and the consequences now seen as a major recession (depression???) seems to come upon us.

Heritage has been a main victim of this process. Iraq, a country of incredible historical and archaeological treasures, the territory where human urban society (Ur) originated, is a mined-up shambles; the Balkans have been scoured repeatedly by warring religious groups. India and Pakistan and assorted terrorists in their territories have targeted significant places and landmarks (witness the Thanksgiving day attacks in Mumbai, where not even the World Heritage-listed Chhatrapati Shivaji or Victoria Station was spared). And the examples multiply worldwide.

Though a sad read, Robert Bevan's Destruction of Memory (London, Reaktion, 2006) should be in the "must" list for all concerned preservationists. Bevan demonstrates through the counter-example of destroyed and absent landmarks the real, overpowering power of heritage as a universal human yearning that expresses a vital need for belonging and presence.

And now to the scourge of violence, we must add the hole of despondency. As the economy shifts into reverse, money for heritage's upkeep dries up and buildings are progressively disrepaired. Abandonment and slumification are again on the increase in historic centres of the First, Third and the few surviving fragments of the Second Worlds. The climate in the preservation community is generally one of damage control, ie how to reduce attrition of heritage places. In my next posts I will begin explaining these phenomena and what can we do to create a different trend that promotes actively the permanence and reconstruction of memory.

On Cultural Landscape, or the Environment as a Palimpsest

The concept of cultural landscapes is in preservation "the best thing since sliced bread". Used creatively, it can propel heritage into a major component of territorial planning decisions. Since its inception in the 1960s, the concept has inserted itself timidly from the conservation of parks, farms and small sections of cities and countryside to a bolder conception addressed to defining networks across whole regions and even countries. The name "landscape" is devious: this is not merely a historic view of the profession and craft of landscape architecture, and it is not either a professional enclosure for the practitioners of that specialty. Cultural landscape study, well understood, cuts across road engineering, architecture of buildings, agriculture, ecology, the social sciences and broader concerns about sustainability and climate change!


Cultural landscapes should be seen as an exercise in establishing relations and reference points. On rural areas, the traces of old foot and bridle paths, the remains of houses, the echo of landmarks at crossings, the location of sources of water, food and materials for shelter - in short, all those seemingly insignificant details - can open up a bounty of information on life in the past and the people's response to the environment. It debunks myths of so called common sense that pass as pseudo-scholarship especially in the built environment professions.


Our environment is the fruit borne by the presence of successive generations of habitants, bearing the scars of change and continuity, ruptures and evolutions. All our environment should be treated as a palimpsest. In the Middle Ages, it was usual to erase and reuse paper because of its scarcity. The sheets, with their scars and marks of previous writers, were knows as palimpsests from the Greek words palein (again) and psen (to scrape), e.g., "scraped again".

And our built environment has been subject in the last century not to a superficial scraping, but rather a drastic plastic surgery looking for modernistic youth. Bulldozers, earthmovers, armaments and induced "natural" disasters remove much of the testimony of past ages. Vernacular architecture scholar Dr. Henry Glassie - in his classic study of Middle Virginia houses - said that the artifact, properly and painstakingly interpreted, is the most truthful and eloquent historical document available.

By dislocating artifacts of the past, we are consciously deleting our history to become "Brave New Men (and Women)" in the Huxleian sense. So, while we can still do so, we must preserve the more carefully treaded palimpsest of historical artifacts in the human and natural landscape and close the door on radical organotomies like the ones witnessed on our countryside and inner cities.

Our landscape as evolved still riddles us with clues of past rumors. By encompassing wide territories we can keep reference points, lines of continuity and surfaces of past artifactual writings. Cultural landscape assessments must be introduced in regional planning studies and in the evaluation of massive "development" schemes. We can't and shouldn't consent to more disrespect to the deeds of our ancestors... let's preserve creatively their testimony in the cultural landscape of our world!