Combining them might even be the very responsibility of architecture. Paul always brought to us a sense of tenderness, and a reminder that sharpness and tenderness are not opposites. Preservation is always suspended between life and death-calling on us to get smarter, faster, deeper, longer, sharper, and I would say more tender. Preservation is understood as an always radical act.īy honoring Paul, we celebrate the idea that preservation itself is a forward-thinking celebration of life, that it is a way of looking at something that seems to be fading or gone and incubating new life within it. But for Paul, taking care of a building might mean knocking a wall down and revealing something that wasn’t seen before. He insisted that taking care of old buildings was crucial to the public good. From 1998 to 2008 he was the director of the Historic Preservation Program, coaxing us relentlessly to understand one simple idea-that preservation is a progressive art form, an intellectual and design challenge of the very highest level. Byard Memorial Lecture, in celebration of the extraordinarily eloquent and passionate presence of our dear colleague Paul. Koolhaas’s lecture in September of 2009 marked the first Paul S. These lectures, along with a critical supplement by Jorge Otero-Pailos, help us to understand the urgencies implied in Koolhaas’s thinking on historicity and building as it has developed across the past decade.
This has released a kaleidoscopic array of opportunities and responsibilities. If preservation is overtaking us, as he puts it, then it is doing so by accelerating right through the very heart of architecture, at once perforating our discipline and pulling it forward. No single figure has unsettled the field of historic preservation in recent years as much as Rem Koolhaas.