Word: preservationist
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...Cambridge at large, welcome a building that deliberately adds nothing ot the life of the Square, shutting out everyone but paying guests? Finally does anyone expect Graham Gund to design anything less silly and overpriced than his gatehouse at Johnston Gate? (And anyone who thinks of Gund as a preservationist and friend of the community should recall that he is also a very wealthy developer and read up on his current attempts to muscle a commercial development onto Arrow Street over city objections...
Gifford, a former president of the preservationist Harvard Square Defense Fund, said she fears that the existing proposals will "canyonize" Brattle Square...
...great change of heart. The change has been so complete that it is difficult today to remember how recently people were blithely ripping out and throwing away the warp and woof of America's cities. In only 20 years, marvels James Marston Fitch, an internationally known preservationist, "the whole balance has radically changed in our favor. I'm astonished at what a complete turnabout there has been in the whole climate of public opinion...
...rediscovery, however, is not merely a matter of fashion and status seeking. It is more visceral than that. "We feel better," the architecture critic and preservationist Brendan Gill has written, "when we find ourselves in the presence of the past, with its evidence of the mingled aspirations and disappointments of our ancestors." Walking along an old street among old buildings, the implicit history and sense of continuity are both reassuring and invigorating. The graceful proportions of facades are not arbitrary but the result of craft wisdom worked out over generations of trial and error. The scale of buildings and streets...
Preservation has its indirect costs as well. The owners of protected landmark structures, prohibited from tearing down their buildings, are deprived of the potential profit of building something bigger or more commercially successful. Thus Preservationist Fitch suggests that governments subsidize owners "who are unfortunate enough to own properties of significance." According to Fitch, "If the state demands that they preserve the buildings, then they should be aided in that activity...