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.