Inevitable

Jim Dalrymple, writing for (pro(vo)cation), has a great piece about the tension between preservation and progress:

It also illustrates one major problem with the debate over historic structures: we’re mostly concerned with preserving existing buildings, when instead we should be equally interested in erecting potential new ones. Or said another way, we should be as outraged when someone throws up a cheap, shoddily designed building as we are when a beautiful old building comes down. Development is ultimately inevitable but horrible buildings are not.

This is almost the exact point I was trying to make when I asked What’s Worth Preserving. The preservation movement gets a lot of its momentum from the terrible stuff we build in place of the beloved structures that get torn down (many for good reason). Make the new development worth building and people don’t feel so bad about losing the old.