Heritage: Quasi-Religion or Comfort Blanket?

Our attachment to old buildings bears examining

Notre Dame de Paris will be rebuilt as an identical copy of the original.

I wrote a piece for the Critic this week about the swanky new Battersea Power Station development in London, and the increasingly fashionable status of “heritage” architecture more generally. After being listed as a heritage asset in the 1980s, Battersea Power Station was left to decay, as numerous attempts at redevelopment floundered or ran out of cash. Now it has been immaculately restored as part of a complex of luxury apartments, corporate offices and high-end retail. As I explain in the article, this is not the only recent case where an old building has become the marker of an exclusive lifestyle.

Today I want to consider a more heretical idea. Is it actually a good thing that we care so much about saving buildings like Battersea Power Station?

This question has been on my mind since the summer, when I rifled through some bookshelves in an AirBnB. (If the host happens to be reading this: I didn’t see your rule about not touching the books until afterwards, I promise). And so I started reading The Architectural Interpretation of History by John Gloag, published in the 1970s. Gloag suggests that we can infer a lot about a civilisation from what it does after important buildings are destroyed. It is a sign of vitality, he argues, when rather than simply rebuilding them, a society uses this as an opportunity to build something new and better.  

The Parthenon in Athens, Canterbury Cathedral and St Paul’s Cathedral are among the great buildings that were erected after their predecessors were destroyed by war or fire. If the cultures in question had been as sentimental about keeping the past intact as we are today, we would not have these glorious structures to feel sentimental about.

Thus it is a sign of our decadence that we couldn’t find anything better to do with Battersea Power Station than design what is, in effect, a pastiche of the original structure. The same would have to be said about Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, tragically destroyed by fire in 2019. For just as the Battersea architects went to great lengths to reproduce that industrial building, so the “original” Notre Dame is being created afresh using medieval techniques. Is this not an admission that Europe’s best days are behind it?

This is a wonderful provocation, because it forces us to think about the nature of our emotional attachment to the past, and what is being expressed by the buildings we do and do not build. Gloag’s measure of civilisational flourishing may be simplistic, but it highlights the fact that people in all times see buildings, and monumental buildings in particular, as revealing something important about their society.

The Parthenon, completed in the 430s BC, is the classic emblem of a flourishing civilisation.

One obvious reply to Gloag’s challenge is that we moderns need to consciously sustain links with the past in a way that our forebears did not. In a world of constant change, conserving our history helps us maintain a coherent sense of identity across time. A good illustration of this, as I suggested earlier this year, comes from the Qing architecture of Beijing. The obsessive restoration of those buildings seems to be aimed at healing the wounds of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 70s, when much of China’s heritage was destroyed in a violent campaign to create a new society.

All modern societies are perpetually undergoing a kind of slow-motion Cultural Revolution, as economic, technological and social change cuts us off from the past. So it’s not surprising that we take comfort in old buildings, even when they have actually been reconstructed like stage-sets. Pastiche is our psychological refuge against modernity.

Then again, we shouldn’t be naïve about the stability of past societies. Daring to build something new has always required vision and backbone, as a closer look at Gloag’s examples shows. The decision to build the Parthenon was notoriously divisive in 5th century Athens, partly because it symbolised the city’s transformation into a cosmopolitan, imperial capital. Likewise, rebuilding St Paul’s after the Great Fire of 1666 was a politically sensitive matter, seeing as England had recently been convulsed by a brutal religious war. The authorities tried for two years to salvage the remains of the original Gothic building before commissioning Christopher Wren’s radically new Renaissance design.

Besides, modern Europe has not always clung to its architectural past. In the aftermath of the Second World War, Britain was among the nations that chose not to rebuild bombed cities in their pre-war form, opting in stead for Modernism. This undoubtedly reflected a spirit of optimism and a desire to give shape to the social democratic ideal. As one British architect and town planner put it in 1943: “After experiencing the shock of familiar buildings disembowelled before our eyes… we find the cleared and cleaned up spaces a relief. In them we have hope for the future, opportunities to be taken or lost.” According to Catherine Flinn, there was a widespread consensus during and after the war about the need to modernise urban Britain, whereas “archival research shows no evidence of Britons discussing the potential to rebuild a bombed city as it was.”

Of course Britain’s post-war reconstruction is now regarded as a catastrophe. For some lovers of traditional architecture, the Modernist makeover given to cities like Birmingham is almost akin to the ideological vandalism of Mao’s Red Guards in China. Yet there is a telling lack of curiosity about why the post-war experiments failed, a question whose answers would include material shortages, a misguided embrace of cars, the rise of the city planner as an expert, and bad incentives for commercial developers and city officials. Instead we look with envy at cities that were rebuilt in traditional style, like Germany’s Dresden or Poland’s Gdansk.

Manchester Assize Courts, one of the buildings damaged during the Second World War and never rebuilt.

In other words, it seems plausible that the unique value Europeans have assigned to heritage in recent decades does reflect a pessimistic, defensive attitude to modernity, even a civilisation that has run out of ideas. It’s striking, for instance, that environmental protestors assume the most precious things they can vandalise are 19th century paintings, and even more striking that they are probably right. I defer to no one in my love for Van Gogh, but does anything about this discourse suggest a culture that is capable of a vigorous, imaginative response to a challenge like climate change?

There are two sides to this issue of course, and we could equally ask why contemporary architecture is such that, when the choice arises, restoring a significant old building is a more attractive proposition even in commercial terms. It’s not as if our era lacks a monumental architecture of its own; since the 1990s, when Frank Gehry designed his spectacular Guggenheim art museum in Bilbao, the world’s cities have been falling over themselves to employ star architects to provide “iconic” buildings of their own.

I would say that these structures – consider also the work of Zaha Hadid or Norman Foster, or Anish Kapoor’s sculpture at the London Olympic Park – generally don’t succeed in representing us, or inviting our identification, in the way we feel heritage does. Insofar as they adopt the deconstructive or open-ended language of avant-garde artwork, they seem to question whether it is even possible now for architecture to reflect anything definite about the society it inhabits. This would explain why, even when their technical and aesthetic brilliance is widely recognised, there is public outcry at the prospect of contemporary architects getting their hands on Notre Dame.

Frank Gehry’s Museo Guggenheim Bilbao, a spectacular building that seems to deny the possibility of representation.

But this failure of architecture to speak convincingly of the destiny of society, as Kenneth Frampton has put it, only points us back to the deeper problem of exhaustion. For the silence of monumental architecture does not obscure the reality that it must ultimately be justified in terms of tourist revenue, public relations or returns to investment. This, in turn, points to that fact that our political and cultural institutions seem unable to articulate a positive vision for the future, apart from the promotion of economic growth and competitiveness; a vision of “dynamism” that makes nostalgic stagnation seem highly inviting.

But let us consider one final possibility. Maybe the architects are right, and there is simply no longer any destiny to represent. It’s notable how many of Gloag’s examples of buildings that express flourishing are places of worship; it is through the forms of the sacred that societies traditionally defined their identity and horizons. Europe does not really possess this mode of transcendence now. It could be that it is flourishing anyway, but in some way that lacks a sacred or visionary dimension to be represented. Unless, that is, an emotional attachment to heritage has become our own form of quasi-sacred identification, a way of understanding who we are that conveniently dodges the problem of representing us in the here and now.

This would imply that there is a real imperative to conserve our heritage, and perhaps to be suspicious of the kind of commercialisation we see at Battersea Power Station. But, alas, it still would not help us with the problem of how we should build. For if we all did as Frankfurt has recently done, and replaced our ugly modern buildings with a beautiful medieval pastiche, there would no longer be an ugly modernity to give meaning to the idea of heritage. Rather, heritage would become the ugly modernity.