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.