INTRODUCTION

In 1989 the Board of the National Council for Preservation Education decided to follow the suggestion of one of its directors, Richard Longstreth, and hold future annual meetings at one of its member institutions. The discussion at these meetings has focused on the need to meet curriculum deficiencies in such areas as preservation law, building materials conservation, and the evaluation of the landscape. More at the heart of the historic preservation curriculum, regardless of the discipline or level of the audience, are the ethical concerns in the field. Curiously, although a variety of charters, standards and guidelines have been issued, comparatively little published material exists regarding the application of these principles.

To help fill this void, the National Council sought the support of the National Park Service and selected three prominent preservationists to address those assembled at the annual meeting in Indianapolis, Indiana. Professor Richard Striner is perhaps best known as an advocate in the District of Columbia, where he served as the President of the Art Deco Society of Washington. Prof. W. Brown Morton III, former Chair of the Historic Preservation Department at Mary Washington College, was the co‑author of the Secretary of the Interior's Standards. Dr. De Teel Patterson Tiller, Chief, Preservation Planning Branch, National Park Service, offers his thoughts from his nearly unique position in the federal government with a keen eye toward educating the tomorrow's preservationists. It is hoped that those who did not have the opportunity to attend the Indianapolis meeting nevertheless learn from and enjoy these perspectives.

Respectfully submitted,

Michael A. Tomlan

HISTORIC PRESERVATION

AND THE CHALLENGE OF ETHICAL COHERENCE

Richard Striner

Assistant Professor

Washington College, Chestertown, Maryland

Imagine yourselves invited to a Halloween party for preservationists. I propose to entertain you with some horror stories, so allow your imaginations to run wild. For sheer gothic horror, imagine the following preservation scenarios:

1) A staff member who formerly occupied a prominent position in the preservation office of a major city is hired by a zoning and development law firm. A major responsibility of this position with the law firm is the orchestration of paid anti‑preservation testimony in contested cases. This individual continues to be treated with the utmost respect and deference by most members of the city's preservation movement. The law firm proudly refers to the individual as its "architectural historian."

2) A consultant who frequently accepted fees for anti‑preservation testimony is hired as the chief preservation planner by a city with one of the oldest locally‑designated historic districts in the United States.

3) The owners of an ensemble of turn‑of‑the‑century townhouses pre‑empt a preservation campaign by smashing the fronts of the houses with sledgehammers. One of these property owners is subsequently revealed to be a member of the board of directors of the city's principal non‑profit preservation organization.

4) An attorney serving on the board of a citywide non‑profit preservation group takes a case in which he advocates (on behalf of his client) the demolition of a building listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Not one single member of the board of directors of the preservation group appears to see anything amiss in this action, even though the demolition is widely opposed by others in the preservation community. This attorney is subsequently appointed to a commission with major preservation and planning responsibilities. The attorney is appointed as a representative of the preservation movement.

5) Two former Vice Presidents of the National Trust for Historic Preservation give anti‑preservation testimony in cases where the preservation campaigns have elicited support from a wide array of scholars and preservation organizations, both private‑sector and public‑sector.

6) A historic building is sold by the federal government to a private owner and the sale includes deed restrictions that apply the Secretary of Interior's Standards to any proposed rehabilitation. A developer subsequently proposes a scheme that is grossly at odds with those standards. A hired expert retained by the developer argues that the historic building's integrity is sufficiently compromised that the Secretary of Interiors Standards do not apply. This hired expert turns out to be a full‑time employee of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation and one of the people responsible for creating the initial deed restrictions on the property.

7) The owners of a historic theatre oppose preservation but offer to save the facade. The preservation advocates reject this proposal. Within a week before the local landmark designation hearing, the staff member of the local preservation office who was originally assigned to write the staff report on the case is replaced (without explanation) by another staff member who proceeds to write a staff report claiming that the theatre auditorium is a completely separate building from the front portion of the theater The theatre's front portion is accordingly designated a landmark building but the auditorium is not designated. The auditorium is demolished, and the mutilated remnant survives as a truncated facade. The theatre building, of course, had always constituted one inseparable entity.

Did you enjoy this Halloween party? Did the stories make your flesh crawl? You have probably had about enough by now, and you are ready for the ghouls to depart. You are waiting for the Halloween revelers to take off their hideous masks and resume their everyday appearance. But this is their everyday appearance. Every one of these preservation horror stories was completely true. Every day can turn out to be Halloween for the preservation movement in many parts of this country.

These honor stories ‑‑ aside from the obvious instances of conflict‑of‑interest or official malfeasance ‑‑ present us with some very serious ethical questions upon which the preservation movement has not achieved

consensus. Many of us would say that the behavior reflected in these stories is disturbing; some of us would go so far as to say that the behavior is appalling. This is all a matter of opinion. But can any of us say without equivocation

that the troubling behavior depicted in these stories is morally and ethically wrong? If so, what basis do we have for advancing these sorts of moral judgments in preservation matters?

One thing seems to be clear: historic preservation is rife with behavior that calls the fundamental values of the movement into question. One is left to wonder: can the preservation movement effectively respond to this challenge from within its own ranks? The answer to this question may determine to a great extent the success ‑‑ or the failure ‑‑ of historic preservation in the years to come.

Certain problems of preservation ethics are nothing more than problems of age‑old human weaknesses. Take the problems of conflict‑of‑interest and malfeasance: as long as human nature remains what it is, we will have to be prepared for the sort of people who may yield to temptation ‑‑ or coercion. In high‑stakes real estate battles the temptations can be overwhelming: more money than the struggling young professional can easily ignore. Even well‑established preservation veterans may yield to temptation if the times get tough and they happen to find themselves at loose ends. Moreover, when the times get tough preservation professionals in government and public service may yield to political pressure and distort professional analyses instead of taking the courageous (and indeed the only honorable) courses of action: blowing the whistle or quitting. Of course this is easier said than done: the flip side of financial temptation is fear for one's job security. For this reason, the preservation movement should be ready to provide the sort of counter‑pressure that could strengthen the resolve (and strengthen the hand) of preservation staff when they are subject to political pressure. Such people should be able to look their political straw‑boss directly in the eye and say, "the orders you are giving me will backfire ‑‑ every preservationist in town will start screaming if this course of action is pursued."

But as most of us know ‑‑ too well ‑‑ the preservation community cannot be counted on to act with appropriate forcefulness. A genteel weakness prevents preservationists from facing up to ethical challenges as often as not. However confrontational the old‑fashioned picket‑sign tactics of the preservation movement might be, there is also a very strong (and perhaps compensatory) counter‑tendency within the preservation subculture that can emphasize the need to "be nice" regardless of the cost. Preservationists are frequently stupefied in the face of betrayal. They react to ethical horror stories with weak and spineless observations like‑"Isn't it frustrating?" They are terrified of breaking ranks in the

social minuet‑terrified of what their peers might think if they failed to greet a wayward colleague with a fixed smile and a ritualistic "Nice to see you."

There are several ways to remove this stigma from expressions of principled anger. We can turn, for example, to comparisons with other advocacy movements whose forcefulness and determination may sometimes put us to shame. We can avail ourselves of certain time‑honored tests for determining unethical conduct: a new articulation of behavior that constitutes conflict‑of‑interest and official malfeasance would assist the preservation movement tremendously in maintaining high moral standards. We can even turn to the classics: "Those who are not angry at the things that they should be angry at," said Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics (Book IV, Chapter 5), "are thought to be fools." Aristotle stressed that moral anger need not become excessive; it can be highly appropriate in target, duration, and intensity. Hence Aristotle's observation that "the man who is angry at the right things and at the right people... as he ought, and as long as he ought, is praised" among people of sagacity.

But in some respects these are easy issues to resolve: issues that derive from the age‑old problems of integrity, honesty, and character. There is nothing at all unique to the preservation movement in these sorts of challenges. Whatever its particular strengths and weaknesses and foibles, the historic preservation movement is faced with the same degree of challenge in this realm as any other movement.

We had better admit, however, that beyond these timeless issues of personal integrity, the preservation movement is faced with a number of ethical problems that are not at all easy to face, let alone resolve. These problems derive from a fundamental lack of consensus within the movement regarding some of the most basic objectives and principles of historic preservation.

A great many people in historic preservation routinely confuse two very different objectives: the preservation of our heritage and the enhancement of our physical environment. Let us hasten to affirm that there is nothing necessarily wrong with the attempt to make these missions overlap. The problem arises when people regard them as inherently complementary, or inherently one and the same. But they are not the same thing at all ‑‑ a fact that has profound repercussions in the world of preservation ethics. However paradoxical (if not downright heretical) the proposition may appear, the work of heritage protection and the

work of environmental enhancement may at times become antagonistic to each other. And the refusal to confront this painful truth has been a source of great stress within the ranks of committed preservationists.

Most of us can easily agree that the fundamental goal of historic preservation is the work of heritage protection. We fight to save historic resources because we believe in values that transcend the here and now. We have a stewardship mission on behalf of other generations. We intervene in business‑as‑usual in order to pass along a valuable legacy. Preservationists agree with Edmund Burke's observation that society is a "partnership .. between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born"

This goal of heritage protection may obviously overlap with the goal of environmental enhancement. Most of us are drawn to historic buildings for reasons of personal affinity. As people and as citizens we naturally associate our love for certain types of historic buildings with a broader range of personal and civic preferences. The cause of preservation, moreover, can be strongly advanced if the rehabilitation of historic resources is attractive to the general public. It behooves us for obvious reasons to make the retention and reuse of historic resources an appealing proposition. Lastly, and most importantly, the environmental settings of historic resources are themselves, at times, fully integral parts of the legacy we seek to preserve.

Well and good: at its most successful, historic preservation has reconciled the inter‑generational partnership described by Edmund Burke with the famous Jeffersonian dictum that "the earth belongs to the living." Small wonder that historic preservation is so frequently linked with the cause of "scenic beauty," or ‑‑ in today's vocabulary ‑‑ with the cause of preserving a humane scale in streetscapes, with the protection of our "sense of place," with the guardianship of exquisite and fragile environments, and with the propagation of "people values." Related to this ‑‑ when offered in the rubric of education ‑‑ is the impulse to use historic preservation as a method for advancing the work of aesthetic connoisseurship: as a method for saving the "best" examples of architectural "styles," for promoting a better understanding of "good design," and for fostering a broader appreciation for (and discernment of) "style."

For all of these reasons, there are times when the missions of heritage protection and environmental enhancement appear to be easily synonymous.

The danger arises when we start to presume that our own aesthetic values are eternal ones, and that our efforts to enhance the environment are ipso facto crusades for the needs of all generations, past and future. It is precisely when we make this presumption that we start to endanger ‑‑ and even betray ‑‑ our deepest preservation ideals.

The enhancement of our physical environment is always to a certain extent a matter of subjective values. There may be certain environmental values that are close to being universal and even timelessly objective ‑‑ but others arc notoriously subject to change. Standards of "good design" could be debated endlessly. Some of the most treasured historic buildings in America today were once universally reviled. In the fast half of this century, for instance, the legacy of Victorians, was subjected to savage and almost universal vilification. The canons of environmental enhancement were cited insistently in campaigns to improve the environment by stripping away Victorian "ugliness." Many of these campaigns were in other ways laudable: consider the case of the Senate Park Commission, whose environmental enhancement of the nation's capital through the McMillan plan of 1901‑02 is rightly regarded as a splendid contribution to the legacy of Washington, D.C. and the entire nation. But the price for this infusion of "City Beautiful" enhancement might well have entailed the destruction of an equally splendid Victorian legacy unless preservation values had eventually intervened. The Smithsonian Castle building and the adjoining Arts and Industries building would both have been destroyed in the original McMillan scheme. The moral of the story is obvious in hindsight, and so is the lesson for ourselves: taste is subjective and it runs in cycles, wherefore we are sometimes obliged to defer to the needs of other generations when our own predilections may threaten the existence of a place that has historic significance.

So I return to my initial point the point that two legitimate objectives in the built environment ‑‑ the espousal of our own aesthetic preferences and the duty to defer to the needs of other generations when heritage protection is at stake ‑‑ may at times become antagonistic. The occasional tension between these equally legitimate social objectives is the source of a pervasive problem in the realm of preservation ethics, a problem compounded by the fact that very few preservationists are even willing to acknowledge it. The very idea that there could be any tension at all between the goals of heritage protection and the goals of environmental enhancement is almost unthinkable to many preservationists. To be sure, we are certainly willing to admit that the needs of people in our

own generation may conflict with the needs of other generations: every preservationist who ever confronted a developer has made the inevitable plea to respect the rights of posterity. What is awkward and unfamiliar to us is the possibility that we ourselves may threaten the rights of other generations when we blur the distinction between our right (as citizens) to shape the built environment and our mission (as heritage protectors) to rise above personal taste on certain occasions. The neglect of this issue has resulted in a failure that can justly be described as a breakdown of ethics: a failure to articulate properly the needs of self as they relate to the needs of others. It accounts for the extraordinary speed with which guardians of heritage can turn with an air of utter nonchalance into the most pernicious of destroyers. It accounts in part for the spectacle of preservation veterans campaigning as "expert witnesses" against the preservation of buildings that are less than architectural masterworks ‑‑ buildings whose retention, we are told, would somehow "lower the standards of the preservation movement."

There is another contributing factor in this situation. the relative paucity of academic historians involved in historic preservation. On a certain level, of course, almost every preservationist acknowledges that the mission of heritage protection is linked to the serious study of history. We save historic buildings not only because we happen to like them but also because we are entrusted with a duty to pass along significant evidence of history to our descendants. We know that historic buildings are a form of documentation and that the preservation of significant parts of our built environment relates to the broader mandate to study and interpret and teach about the history of our society. We know all this: but how often do preservationists consciously reflect that it may be just as wrong to obliterate historic buildings for reasons of personal taste as it would be wrong and foolish to expunge from the written historical record an account of incidents or institutions of which we do not personally approve? The problem is that social and cultural historians generally spurn the field of historic preservation‑and vice versa. Such academicians unfortunately tend to presume that historic preservation is the purview of architects and architectural historians and generally speaking, the preservation field gives precisely that exclusionist impression. There is no escaping the fact that the professional subculture of historic preservation is excessively architect‑driven and the broader preservation subculture is excessively connoisseur‑dominated. Most troubling of all, the field of architectural history ‑‑ with all due respect to the architectural historians who

study vernacular design and its social context -‑ remains heavily composed of individuals who scorn the study of anything less than elite masterworks. The result can be a serious inversion of values whereby our heritage mission is subverted into a genteel rampage for "good design" however we happen to define it.

An extraordinary example of the sort of design mania that vitiates the heritage mission of the preservation movement occurred in a major city about a half dozen years ago. The local non‑profit preservation organization agreed to the demolition of a major contributing building within a historic district on the condition that they would be allowed to participate in the design of the new building that would replace it. The new building, allegedly to be designed in the idiom of the building that it would replace, would supposedly constitute a "superior" version of the aesthetic principles embodied in the original historic building. The architect who designed the new building argued that his building was actually "better" for the historic district than the historic building. This architect was ‑‑ and is ‑ widely praised for being "sensitive" to preservation. Many people refer to him as a "preservationist."

This type of "preservation connoisseurship" becomes even more excruciating when the understanding of what constitutes "architecture" degenerates to the level of mere motifs and ornamentation. An example of this occurred at a recent public hearing before a local regulatory commission at which the preservation staff of the local government argued that the roof of a historic building was "not an architecturally significant element" ‑presumably because it did not possess ornamental qualities reflective of a "style " In this manner a building that was a unique historical document ‑‑ a historic resource exuding the authentic qualities of the long‑vanished period in which it was created ‑‑ was mentally reduced from a unified entity (a building) to a disconnected series of visual motifs. Even the developer's architect chuckled that the roof of the historic building seemed like a rather significant architectural element to him: it kept out the rain.

These cases are powerfully illustrative because of their sheer grotesquerie: they are not illustrations of dishonesty at all; they are illustrations of confusion. But the sort of perversity revealed by these case studies is far more prevalent within the preservation movement than many might care to acknowledge. Consider the fact that for a great many years the preservation movement has promoted an absurd dichotomy between the attributes of historic resources that are said to possess purely "architectural significance" and the

attributes that are supposed to possess purely "historical significance" ‑‑ as though the realms of architecture and history can be totally divorced from each other. But it should go without saying that history encompasses everything in human experience of which we have a record ‑consequently, it should go without saying that history, in a certain fundamental way, encompasses architecture.

I submit that if we wish to uphold and perpetuate our mission of heritage conservation, we are urgently obliged to return to first principles. Specifically, the time has come for us to put the architects and design enthusiasts back in their proper place ‑‑ politely but firmly. The time has come for us to put history ‑‑ in all of its humanistic and interdisciplinary glory ‑‑ into a position of moral primacy. We must vigorously re‑establish the validity of social and cultural history in the interpretation of buildings. Otherwise the buildings themselves may quickly dissolve into nebulous aggregations of motifs and ornaments for cultural dabblers to pick apart according to their whims.

The harshness of this prescription should not be taken to imply that the ethical challenge of historic preservation is uniformly easy or unambiguous. To the contrary: there are times when the most conscientious preservationist will have to engage in soul‑searching. On the one hand, we have to confess that our own editorial readings of architecture may well turn out to be as much the stuff of human vanity as any other aspect of our existence. The gods laugh ‑‑ and without a doubt, the contemporary buildings that strike us as vulgar will eventually enter the realm of our society's heritage if they survive. Uncomfortable as this thought may be, there is consolation in the knowledge that life is after all a great deal bigger than us and our personal taste. It is endlessly instinctive to re‑read the intolerant polemics directed against the legacy of Victoriana through the mid‑twentieth century.

But on the other hand, our most saintly devotion to the rights of other generations can never negate the fact that we, as citizens, possess a few rights of our own. Surely we have the right to see our personal preferences in urban design and aesthetics play a role in our own communities, at least to a certain extent. There are times when we feel it is perfectly proper to engage in a bit of pruning and weeding of the built environment. There are times when every one of us will smile with pleasure as we watch the wrecking ball smash an edifice we happen to loathe and despise. We are all bedeviled by the buildings we regard as eyesores, buildings that strike us as being outrageously mediocre ‑‑ or outrageously

intrusive and arrogant. Are we not duty‑bound to confess that this is sometimes the case?

The problem, of course, is the challenge of determining how to strike the right balance between our own legitimate needs and the needs of other generations. This problem is especially severe when buildings from the recent past become the subject matter of historical survey work. When historical analysis approaches a bit too close to our contemporary passions, the most benign motivations of others may seem to be malignant threats to the heritage resources that are nearest and dearest to us. An exchange of viewpoints in two recent issues of the S.A.H. Forum ‑‑ the bulletin of the Society of Architectural Historians' Committee on Preservation -- is especially illustrative in this regard.

The controversy started with an essay exploring the significance of twentieth‑century commercial buildings that are rapidly disappearing from the American landscape ‑‑ pioneer examples of motor‑age shopping centers in particular. This article elicited a scathing reaction from a self‑proclaimed preservationist who blasted "the preoccupation of some architectural historians and preservationists with salvaging each bit of instructive ugliness of our built environment." The very act of asking questions regarding the significance of certain twentieth‑century buildings seemed to this person a "flatulent distraction" from the work of "community enhancement." "We are being told to embrace every piece of detritus as part of the living record of our commercial culture," the critic complained. The act of saving even one example of a vanishing building type (regardless of where the particular building is located) seems equivalent in the view of this critic to demanding that every single example of the building type ‑‑ "every piece of detritus" ‑‑ be retained upon the North American continent in perpetuity. This spectacle of an all‑or‑nothing fight to the death between "my preferred heritage" and "your preferred heritage" is clear and depressing evidence of the direction in which the preservation movement may be heading unless we start to articulate the issues of preservation ethics with greater clarity.

The ethical climate in which preservationists function must do ample justice to the types of questions upon which sincere and dedicated preservationists will disagree. Preservationists with genuine scholarly credentials may nonetheless honestly differ regarding the historic significance of a disputed building or site. Preservationists with unimpeachable records of dedication to the movement may sincerely disagree regarding the extent of rehabilitation that is justified in a

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