Historic Preservation in the Year 2399

Highways, gas stations, and the fight to protect the average American strip mall?

Last week, Preservation Detroit, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving Detroit's historic places, released a letter that urged its city council to designate the Renaissance Center, an iconic lakeside skyscraper completed in 1977, as an historic district. The group believes that the Renaissance Center is a “unique and integral part of Detroit’s civic and architectural history, prominently featured in images of our downtown skyline and nearly as recognizable as the Old English D.” Preservation Detroit’s letter was in reaction to recently-announced plans from General Motors and the Bedrock firm for a massive redevelopment of the site; a plan that is only possible with hundreds of millions of dollars of local and state assistance.

The Renaissance Center – or the RenCen as it’s colloquially known – is the headquarters of GM. It is a beast of a building that includes a large, open air atrium with greenery in concrete planters, a hotel, offices, restaurants, and a shopping center. Built at a time when it was desirable to create cities within cities, it allows visitors to enjoy the feeling of being downtown while avoiding the wild, violent streets and its mercurial denizens – a safe, predictable refuge for the suburban dollar.

In my many trips to Detroit, I’ve only been to the RenCen once. It was a brief walkthrough and revealed a building that could in no way claim to be humming with activity and vivacity. Rather, it felt stale and outdated. Cumbersome to get in and out of, around and past. It's hard for me to look at its cylindrical towers, connected at the base with a preponderance of frosted glass, hung from exposed steel beams, and see anything but an office complex built in 1977; modified a thousand times over until it feels like your grandmother's midcentury kitchen with its modern stainless steel refrigerator poking out into the room a little too far; sitting proudly next to the yellowed plastic intercom system that hangs from wall; butting up against the early-aughts cream-colored Corian countertops that do not, as the salesperson vehemently promised, “look like new, forever!” The RenCen has a mishmash, hodgepodge, fix-it-as-it-breaks vibe. It's a baciagaloop of a building, in my estimation. But it’s also recognizable and by that token, judging from Preservation Detroit's letter, beloved?

From my impressions of the complex, you may think that I fall hard on the opposite side of Preservation Detroit’s argument. I don’t. I recognize that something can be important because of what it represents and not because of what it is. I also recognize that some people think that what the RenCen is – a recognizable skyscraper built twenty years into Detroit’s decline – is great all on its own. I’m not drawn to this story because I have a strong opinion on what should happen to the building. I’m drawn to the story because of the questions it brings up about the future of architectural preservation in America.

A short digression: In the 1960s, Jane Jacobs saved New York City’s West Village from Robert Moses and his proposed highway project that would have cut lower Manhattan in half. Because of Jane, we can still enjoy the West Village much the same way (if not for the same price) that the beatniks and the hippies did in the 50s and 60s. We see the brownstone and rowhouses and understand the value in what she saved. We can stroll with a coffee in hand on a crisp fall day and delight in the quaint hubbub of a city built before the advent of the automobile.

Now though, with the march of time, we are entering a phase in architectural preservation that must contend with the automobile. Our future historical landmarks will have been built at a time when the majority of Americans used cars to get around. The RenCen is an urban example of this. Its notoriety as an iconic Detroit skyscraper obscures its core character: it’s a big building built above a huge parking garage, designed to be experienced in isolation from its surroundings. In this way – different from Jane Jacobs and the groups of urban preservationists all over the country who fought to protect inner city neighborhoods – the RenCen brings up a philosophical question about the nature and meaning of preservation. Who is it for and why? What are we preserving? Are we saving the RenCen because of what it means to the people of Detroit or what it means to the world? Are these the same things? Is architectural significance (i.e. recognizability) alone enough to warrant an historical designation?

The interstates that cut through most of our American cities are significant, and by many metrics valuable, but, in a few decades from now, are they worth preserving? Why? The standard American stripmall is significant. A gas station can be significant. I have fond memories of the Circle M by my childhood home with its stale cigarette smell and mechanical slot machine.

What will preservation societies fight to preserve in the year 2399? Will there be impassioned letters published in the newest media outlets arguing for Amazon’s first distribution warehouse to receive an historic designation? Will we turn suburban office parks across the country into historic districts so that the process of removing a dropped ceiling tile will result in monthslong reviews by the dropped ceiling subcommittee of the Historical Society for Preservation of Late 20th Century Bullshit. In one hundred years time, what will we find significant?

What Jane Jacobs did for the West Village was to preserve a neighborhood that was vibrantly functioning. It was alive with residents, businesses, and a culture that still reverberates through our consciousness today. The built environment itself was not the aim of her movement. Her aim was to preserve a lifestyle that worked for humans because it was scaled for humans.

There is a flip side to her work, though. Fast forward to today and you will find a West Village association so intent on preserving the area that all attempts at affordable housing are scullied by an elite class of monied property owners. The millionaires and billionaires who inhabit those beautiful brownstones are hellbent on changing nothing, thereby preserving their property values. This is where preservation and progress meet.

Looking at preservation into the future, I see American late-20th century constructions as built for machines (cars, planes, and soon enough, robots!) at machine scale. In my estimation, this makes them less worthy of preservation. They are objects to be considered, relics of a bygone era. But they worship the machine and alienate the human.

Palm Trees?

When it comes to the RenCen, the situation is complicated. Of course, the corporations want endless tax cuts and subsidies without making any meaningful promises to the tax payers. In part, Preservation Detroit’s aim is to push the project into an historical designation that will stall work and create a more robust review process. What a more robust review process will render is anyone’s guess. If I had to guess, I’d wager that the project will stall for years until ultimately nothing of any public good gets constructed. Ultimately, GM will announce that it is moving its headquarters to Texas and that will be that.

We’ll have to see what happens in Detroit. Time will tell. Ultimately though, I can’t help but ask myself what we mean to do when we designate a structure as historic. Is the physical structure that we seek to preserve? Is the value that it once had? Is it nostalgia? Or is it a means to an end? A way to protect ourselves from a world that moves too quickly to understand the implications of its own actions. I seek progress and I support preservation. Two sides of the same coin.

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