www.architecturalrecord.com/articles/6012-what-will-happen-to-charity-hospital-and-other-endangered-projects
After decades of gaining strength as a movement, the battle lines have been drawn again, with a significant structure in peril. The Medical Center of Louisiana at New Orleans, popularly known as Charity Hospital, a looming Art Moderne presence in the Deep South, battered by Hurricane Katrina but apparently structurally intact, now faces a more insidious foe—abandonment—together with the demolition of more than 120 structures in a nearby neighborhood currently listed on the National Register of Historic Places. But not without a fight.
The contemporary drama pits big money ($2 billion in much-needed investment for New Orleans to become a 21st-century medical Mecca) and power (the Veterans Administration and the Louisiana Office of Facility Planning and Control) against a hard-hit community, organizing and finding its voice after the hurricane, asking to be heard. No one denies that the city needs the capital investment, or that a medical campus would benefit the larger city and state economy. As in many preservation arguments, however, the value and relevance of an existing property lies at the core of the debate, in this case the 1-million-square-foot hospital designed by Weiss, Dreyfous, & Seiferth and built from 1937 to 1939. Should it be retained or jettisoned? Is any sort of compromise scheme possible?
Today, architects on both sides of the divide are playing a central role at Charity once again. The Foundation for Historical Louisiana partnered with the National Trust for Historic Preservation in commissioning a $600,000 evaluation of the core property by the firm RMJM, which maintains an active practice in both historic preservation and health care (with local architects Waggonner & Ball, and structural engineers Robert Silman Associates, among others). A respected national firm, NBBJ, and local partners have been employed by state authorities responsible for planning entirely new facilities for Charity and the VA on another 70-block campus—located in midtown, and farther away from the central business district—carved, in part, from an existing neighborhood.
“I cannot imagine a more important case for historic preservation,” states Jack Davis, a New Orleanian and member of the board of trustees of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. He cites the RMJM study that shows how transforming the existing structure makes sense economically, reducing costs by $283 million dollars compared to the current plan; saves time (two years, by renovating an unoccupied structure); and keeps New Orleans’s urban core intact while delivering the sought-after, contemporary medical complex.
But Louisiana officials in charge of the proceedings aren’t convinced. In a letter to the state legislature, Jerry Jones, an architect and assistant commissioner of the state’s Office of Facility Planning and Control, wrote that building a hospital that does not equal the programmatic goals set for the new campus “does not make long-term sense.” Jones and others argue that renovating Charity would provide comparatively inadequate parking and ambulatory-care space. It would also preclude flexibility in future building and expansion of the medical center. Ultimately, the state legislature will decide if the plans for the alternate site—and the continued neglect of Charity—proceed as previously planned.
Given the iconic stature of the hospital (founded in 1736) in the history of health care, the building’s importance in the Louisiana landscape, and the ramifications of demolishing houses currently listed as “contributing” on the National Register—as well as the immediate need for medical care—the outcome matters for the city’s, the state’s, and the region’s future. An outside arbiter, such as a university, might bring clarity and credibility to the issues, though in this case, most of New Orleans’s prodigious educational establishment has a vested interest in the outcome.
The Charity dilemma, still unresolved as of this writing, illustrates how preservation has evolved into a vital and necessary discussion in contemporary urban environments. It also demonstrates how, in a French phrase familiar in New Orleans, “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” (“The more things change, the more they remain the same,” for non-French speakers). For centuries, the links to our past and the past’s relationship to our present have provoked heated argument, even passion, which can sometimes galvanize a community and on occasion occlude its vision. The term preservation, and the discipline and movement that accompany it, has shifted with time: Today’s preservationist occupies a different landscape than our grandmother’s.
Preservation’s History
And “grandmother” is right, because women constituted many of the first highly visible preservationists. Independence Hall in Philadelphia may be the first nationally important building saved, but The Ladies, with a capital L, of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association organized by Ann Pamela Cunningham resolutely raised $200,000 in 1853 to save George Washington’s home, Mount Vernon, Virginia, which had fallen into disrepair by the mid-19th century. Their accomplishments spurred others to action and set a pattern for preserving historic properties.
Today, according to Dennis Pogue, associate director for preservation at Mount Vernon, not enough people are grounded in history, nor do they know much about George Washington—who he was or how he lived. An education center and an orientation center recently added to the property now help tell our first president’s story. In addition, using contemporary archaeology as a guide, Mount Vernon has added a reconstructed slave cabin, as well as a blacksmith’s shop and whisky distillery, all aimed at broadening the view of Washington’s world and increasing its relevance to contemporary audiences. “Our sites, if they hope to be relevant today, need to understand and respond to changes,” Pogue states. Plans are under way for a library, in tune with 21st-century needs for scholarship.
While Mount Vernon remains popular with the public, America’s estimated 8,000 house museums and historic properties in general are experiencing a downward trend in visitors. Ron Bogle, Hon. AIA, who heads the American Architecture Foundation, says that house museums have relied on a model drawn from other museums, a “template that doesn’t make sense anymore.” Bogle cites a “shifting ethic for stewardship” of historic properties, such as the Octagon—a building saved in 1897 by the AIA, housing the oldest architecture and design museum in the U.S., currently maintained by the American Architectural Foundation. Historic properties will need to continually change in order to meet new audiences and find new methods of governance and funding. They require a future vision, Bogle declares, not solely a focus on the past.
Since the mid-19th century, preservation has moved far beyond the house museum. Charleston, South Carolina, and New Orleans (again) count as two cities where preservation jumped in scale from individual property to precinct. In 1931, Charleston initiated a process that resulted in historic district zoning, an action that was followed by the establishment of New Orleans’s Vieux Carré Commission in 1936. Local forces such as the American Institute of Architects backed the movement, which flowered, ultimately, into national legislation: the National Register of Historic Places, the National Trust (1949), and the National Historic Preservation Act (1966).
With the Main Street program, started in the late 1970s, preservation became a community development tool, engaging chambers of commerce, mayors, and community development organizations to preserve historic buildings and districts as a catalyst for urban redevelopment. The program, which has strengthened and enriched neighborhoods across the country, now counts over 1,600 communities among its beneficiaries. Subsequently, preservation escaped its urban boundaries and spread into entire landscapes, preserving the larger natural world in a fight against sprawl, conserving parkland and a more complete understanding of context, urban and rural, all the while engaging more people.
Today's Challenges
Far beyond the small, precious numbers who initially saved individual houses, today’s preservation movement has been radically democratized. With the shift in demographics of the United States, and a wider visibility of Hispanic, Asian), and African-American populations, preservation has had to address the philosophical questions of representation, with an increasing need to clearly answer the question: Who is telling the story? Richard Moe, the longtime president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, underscores this fact by saying that “preservation is threatening to become mainstream.”
With each generation, the rationale for preservation tends to shift to reflect changing perceptions and needs. For today’s audience, Moe mentions a plethora of reasons, including sustainability. “Preservation is the most sustainable of the building arts,” he says. Preservationists cite the embodied energy present in existing structures as one rationale that allies their cause with the green movement. In addition, they sometimes refer to a historic property’s regional and climatic adaptation, such as its thermal mass derived from thick brick walls, or its overhanging roofs. As an example of preservation’s relevance for a more recent project, Moe gives the example of a property currently on the trust’s 2009 “11 Most Endangered Places” list—the Century Plaza Hotel in Century City, Los Angeles.
A classic Midcentury Modern building, this geometric arc of a structure was built in 1966 and designed by the Japanese architect Minoru Yamasaki, who would later design the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City (1975). Developers hope to demolish the original hotel and erect two 600-foot towers in its place, a wasteful action, according to Moe: “If we calculated the 800,000 square feet in that building, and the energy it took to manufacture it, the result would be 7 million gallons of gasoline.” He also points out the energy that would be required to tear down, cart off, or rebuild the Century Plaza. At this frugal moment, when economies and limited energy are combining in a perfect storm, and buildings produce an estimated 43 percent of all carbon emissions, sustainability may prove to be preservation’s strongest new argument.
The Century Plaza illustrates the conundrum of scores of buildings from the recent past—those typically averaging 50 years old or less that have been threatened with demolition. Midcentury Modern buildings, which occasionally rose to high standards of design, tend not to be designated on historic resource lists. John Mott, FAIA, a principal at the firm John Milner Associates, which specializes in historic preservation, admits that the problem of buildings from the 1950s and ’60s is often compounded by their construction. “Buildings from the 1950s and ’60s require more scientific thinking,” he says, than comparable structures from the 19th century. The new, flat-roofed buildings often were “not that well built,” requiring our creativity to arrive at new materials and methods to bring them to contemporary standards. One example is Modernist architects’ attempts to blur the line between indoors and out. Their technological means weren’t always up to the task, and old glazing systems often require reconsideration and reconstitution with improved thermal characteristics.
Mott’s remarks on construction quality hark back to the basic arguments propounded by the dean of 20th-century preservationists, James Marston Fitch (see page 41). Fitch, who would have turned 100 this year, was a writer for this magazine and for Architectural Forum, as well as the founder of Columbia University’s master’s degree program in historic preservation, the country’s first. He propounded basic environmental and construction principles in his seminal work, American Building: The Environmental Forces That Shape It (1948/1972). In his preface to the 1972 edition, he decried the fact that “American architecture today pays less attention to ecological, microclimatic, and psychosomatic considerations than it did a quarter of a century ago.”
While Fitch espoused an approach to preservation that avoids too heavy a reliance on sheer technology to solve preservation’s problems, in the ensuing years, large teams of experts routinely address preservation’s current techno-heavy questions. For complex or important projects, such as Mount Vernon, the actual number has swollen to include not only architects, but archaeologists, material conservators, architectural historians, interior designers, and others—all of whom share a preservation background. Frederick Bland, FAIA, the managing partner at Beyer Blinder Belle, the firm Fitch joined after leaving Columbia, amplifies preservation’s role when he says that, ideally, preservation should not be a specialty, but an integrated part of urbanism, in which architecture, urban design, and planning all coincide.
Fast forward to New Orleans. George Skarmeas, AIA, a student of Fitch, served as the preservation architect for the team from RMJM given the task of assessing the existing Charity Hospital structure. Skarmeas, together with structural engineer Robert Silman, proved the building’s structural stability with a thorough “nondestructive” analysis, which used high-tech means such as thermal imaging, ground penetrating radar, and ultrasound. Further questions lay in its adaptability as a state-of-the-art hospital, a question answered in the affirmative by other architects in his company. Skarmeas admits that today, preservation may rely on technical advances and specialized training to address “how historic buildings behave and how to treat them.” Like Fitch, however, he maintains that preservation still involves architecture, “with the same challenges to do good design, sensible design, sustainable design.” He decries a “dogmatic” approach and relies instead on “facts, not emotions.”
Despite technological advances, emotions run high when community development and power politics collide over historic properties. At a time of climatic and economic change, when the built legacy of this country, and the larger world, offers a wealth of preexisting structures in need of adaptation for a new generation, architects will find themselves increasingly called into the fray. Regardless of the outcome in New Orleans for Charity Hospital, and despite the shifting role of professionals in historic preservation, architects will be party to the solution—for good or ill. Richard Moe has the last word: “The important thing is that the ethic for preservation is growing, and it hasn’t always been there.”
