Dealing with Antiquity and Weathering

by Charles A. Birnbaum, FASLA 

Many resource stewards like their buildings, outdoor art, and landscapes tidy, neat, and clean—this is an intriguing goal when we consider that our visitors often have an affinity for sponging walls, distressing furniture, and purchasing antique garden statues, benches, and urns on eBay and siting them in places where they never existed.

As historic preservation professionals, when we remove gritty layers of the industrial revolution-era soot from a pink granite Gothic church, re-gild a City Beautiful-era statue, or install a manicured lawn where a compacted, dusty ground plane was once present, do we take into consideration the appearance of the overall property during the period of significance or do we aspire to create cleanliness and order? Do we have an adversity to patina?

Nowhere in the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards is the concept of patina or weathering addressed.

Is this patina, or weathering process, additive or merely subtractive? Do nature’s forces add to rather than detract from the meaning of a structure or landscape?

This question was addressed by Mohsen Mostafavi and David Leatherbarrow in their book On Weathering: The Life of Buildings in Time (1993). Here, the authors’ central discovery was that weathering makes the “final” state of construction necessarily indefinite, and challenges that conventional notion of a building’s completeness. In sum, by accepting the inherent uncertainty and inevitability of weathering, and viewing it as a continuing force in the building process, rather than one that is antagonistic to it, the authors suggest we re-think technical problems of maintenance and decay, with a focused consideration of their philosophical and ethical implications.

One project where the antiquity of time was addressed was the Ajuga Botanical Gardens in Lisbon, Portugal. Here, just before a wholesale cleaning of its Italianate walls was to occur, a chance discovery of an extensive population of lichens was made—in fact, a number of the lichens discovered were considered rare and worthy of conservation. As a result, the decision was made not to clean the walls, to allow the patina to remain, and to instead manage the lichen population with peacocks. When viewing the balustrade walls in the context of the newly planted shrub and flower beds, one might suggest that the preservation and protection of the weathered walls have allowed visitors to comprehend that the gardens are in fact the oldest in the country, dating to the late 18th century.

Visualize the Forum of Rome as you ponder the following passage from Charles Dickens’ Letters from Italy, written more then 150 years ago:

            To see it crumbling there, an inch a year; its walls and arches overgrown; its corridors open to the day; the long grass growing in the porches; young trees of yesterday, springing up on its ragged parapets, and bearing fruit: chance produce of the seeds dropped there by the birds who build their nests within its chinks and crannies; to climb into its upper halls, and look down on ruin, ruin, all about it…is to see the ghost of the old Rome, wicked wonderful old city, haunting the very ground on which its people trod. It is the most impressive, the most stately, the most solemn, grand, majestic, mournful sight conceivable. Never, in its bloodiest prime, can the sight of a gigantic Coliseum, full and running over with the lustiest life, have moved one heart, as it must move all who look upon it now, a ruin. GOD be thanked: a ruin!

It is my hope that as we go forward we broaden our perspective and further integrate our young discipline into the broader design and historic preservation communities. In this process let us look forward and look back to early work that will hold answers and provide the essential inspiration as we grapple with these ambitious and exciting challenges for the next decades to follow.