Preserving the Moderns

These days, historic preservation isn’t all about baroque domes and Corinthian columns. Most important Modernist buildings are now pushing 50 (or more), and while they may look sleek and cutting-edge, like any other built environments, they inevitably need maintenance for both aesthetic and structural reasons.

But preserving this type of architecture invokes a special set of problems and considerations. For one thing, signs of age that might even enhance some traditional structures tend to make Modern buildings look cruddy.

The Penn program has played a role in conserving a number of landmark Modernist structures, including Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1959 Guggenheim Museum and Philip Johnson’s New York State Pavilion, built for the 1964 World’s Fair.

For the Guggenheim, the Architectural Conservation Lab (ACL) helped evaluate a body of research seeking to understand Wright’s realization of his design and to offer recommendations that would guide the restoration effort, especially when it came to remedying the severe cracks appearing in the building’s walls.

“It was designed such that its structural reinforcements and its shape caused regular and severe cracking,” explains Frank Matero, professor of architecture and chair of the Department of Historic Preservation. While expansion joints typically help prevent such cracking, there is nothing typical about the Guggenheim, he points out. “Wright and the client wanted to design a building that would be like no other, that would represent the principles of the non-objective paintings that it held, so he insisted upon a continuous, absolutely seamless surface.”  

After sorting through the extensive recommendations that a cadre of consultants had already made, the Penn team helped nudge the conservation efforts in the right direction, backed up by ample historical and technical data.

“In the end we recommended an approach and a series of products that would allow the cracks to open and close with minimal visual distortion,” says Matero. “Technically I think the [now-completed] restoration has succeeded, but there are still aesthetic issues—the present color is unfortunately not what Wright chose, for instance. For a building of this significance, this is no small matter.”

In the case of the pavilion, conservation efforts targeted the floor—a football-field-sized terrazzo roadmap of New York State [“All Things Ornamental,” Sept|Oct 2006]. Working in partnership with the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation and the National Endowment for the Arts, the ACL staged an exhibition at the Queens Museum of Art and began efforts to stabilize the deteriorating landmark, widely considered an important work of Pop Art.

These Modernist projects “challenge many of the principles and tenets that define conservation, because those all predate Modernism by quite some time,” says Matero. “One of the main difficulties is that both the original appearance of these buildings and their technology is often difficult to sustain. So it’s been a really interesting ride for conservators and preservationists. How do you save design intent and physical fabric when the building displays obsolescence or unproven technologies? It’s not to say that earlier buildings were not ephemeral, but you didn’t necessarily have such a strong functional manifesto attached to them, as is the case with much Modernist architecture.”

Matero also questions the wisdom of maintaining Modernist buildings in a perpetual state of immaculate newness.

“Why can’t we accept a 50-plus-year-old building looking its age the way we can with an 18th- or 19th-century building?” he asks. “The newness value is at the top of the list right now, but it seems to me that 50 years ago, people who were over 50 were quite comfortable in their skins. There should be more of that kind of thinking about these buildings.” —D.P.

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Map quest (left): Stabilizing the heroic Texaco road map of New York State, designed by Philip Johnson for the 1964 World’s Fair, before lifting the tiles for restoration.