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The historic preservation field is aggressively promoting itself as "green." Adaptive reuse of historic buildings is now widely considered a sustainable development practice. As with architecture in general, however, sustainability in preservation is too often narrowly framed around environmental issues such as the conservation of materials, energy, and water. Commonly accepted definitions of sustainability recognize two other components: economics and culture. Rarely does the preservation field consider sustainability as an entire system of interrelated environmental, economic, and social relationships, as envisioned by the Brundtland Report of 1987. This article offers several reasons for the preservation field to engage in the full spectrum of sustainability concerns, including economic and social issues. It then reexamines one of most famous case studies in the canon of historic preservation in the United States-Faneuil Hall Marketplace in Boston-to consider the extent to which sustainability was addressed as a system of interrelated relationships. In conclusion, it suggests that preservation could be made more sustainable by drawing connections among several existing concepts, findings, and methods developed by Randall Mason, Setha Low, and others.
You cannot ever really turn back the clock, or have things as they were. The appropriate resolution of the hard realities of necessary change are what preservation is all about. And yet every "appropriate" solution kills the old buildings a little bit at the same time that it keeps them alive - a practical and philosophical paradox.1
Adaptive reuse involves many decisions- often compromises- about modifying historic buildings to accommodate new uses, a point emphasized by Ada Louise Huxtable, the influential architecture critic for the New York Times, in her review of Boston's Faneuil Hall Marketplace, which reopened to enormous crowds during the summer of the United States' bicentennial in 1976. The well- documented success of Faneuil Hall demonstrated, to the extent no other project had before it, that preservation was financially feasible, socially desirable, and environmentally responsible. In the contexts of the environmental movement and the energy crisis of the 1970s, preservationists promoted adaptation of old buildings for new uses as a form of recycling. While preservation saves and recycles, however, Huxtable's quote suggests that sometimes other valued aspects of old buildings are destroyed in the process. She sensed that adaptation had changed Faneuil Hall's traditional...