To Save The World We Built (April 1987 | Volume: 38, Issue: 3)

To Save The World We Built

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Authors: Selma Rattner

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April 1987 | Volume 38, Issue 3

Twenty years ago nobody thought much about saving old buildings. The phrase urban renewal had an optimistic, forward-looking sound to it, and entire urban centers were razed with little thought of what might be lost in the process. Today communities across America are fighting to save their architectural heritage. James Marston Fitch, more than any other individual, has championed that cause. Born in Wash- ington, D.C., he grew up in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in a family proud of its pre-Revolutionary American ancestors but numbering among its members many whom he considers failures. At the age of fifteen he entered the University of Alabama intending to become an engineer. The following year he transferred to the architectural program at Tulane, but financial reverses forced him to leave after two years and find a job. At the beginning of his career he designed traditional houses; later he became a staunch advocate of the modern style. In 1954 he began teaching the history of architecture at Columbia University, and ten years later he instituted the nation’s first graduate curriculum in historic preservation there, creating the prototype for the dozens of programs that now exist.

Fitch is currently director of historic preservation at the architectural firm of Beyer Blinder Belle in New York City.

 
Now I am a curator of antiques, not a designer of replicas.
 
 

You began your career designing eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century-style buildings, then turned against them to become a committed modernist. But in recent years you’ve again become involved with traditional idioms. Why?

When I began, the only mode of design given students in the Beaux-Arts system of teaching architecture was the idiom of the past. That restriction led to my rebellion against the whole apparatus. Now, fifty years later, I am working again with artifacts designed in these older idioms, but with the crucial difference that now I am a curator of authentic antiques, not a designer of replicas. Under no circumstances would I design a replica for a new site as I did in the beginning of my career. Of course, there are times when a preservation project requires the insertion of a new element, which- while being clearly new—must also be congruent. Two of my firm’s recent projects—the South Street Seaport Museum and the proposed Hearst Tower—illustrate that principle.

What made you stop designing traditional buildings?

I began to recognize the contradiction between designing houses in the traditional styles and having to conceal within them all the new technology. My first published piece, which appeared in Architecture in 1933, dealt with this subject. I had recently finished a replica of the famous Natchez mansion Auburn, which had many aspects that pleased me in 1933: the woodwork, the vaulted plaster, the beautiful handcrafted freestanding spiral stair with no metal supports, the handmade sand-finished brick. This was also the first house in Nashville