It seems incredible that a mid-century marvel like Geller I should fall victim to redevelopment while a government agency nearby intervenes to prevent someone from replacing an old front door with a similar-looking new one. In the world of historic preservation, however, a loose relationship between a building’s historical value and its likelihood of being protected is all too common. — The Atlantic
The recent loss of Marcel Breuer’s first post-war Geller I design on Long Island is used to highlight the tension between developer-friendly preservation laws in smaller communities like Lawrence, and the prevailing approaches to preservation controlled predominantly by city dwellers and their “superficial attempts to reframe historic preservation as a progressive endeavor.”
Harvard Doctoral candidate Jacob Anbinder takes a broad look at the (highly political) history of American preservation efforts, which, he says, have shifted in recent decades to become an exclusive domain of the Democratic Party and its “growing base of white-collar professionals attempting to reconcile their material interests with their egalitarian ideals.”
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