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Change Over Time
A N I N T E R N A T I O N A L J O U R N A L
O F C O N S E R V A T I O N A N D
T H E B U I L T E N V I R O N M E N T
S P R I N G 2 0 1 33.1UPCOMING ISSUES
Interpretation and DisplayF A L L 2 0 1 3
The Venice Charter at 50S P R I N G 2 0 1 4
VandalismF A L L 2 0 1 4
Climate Change and LandscapeS P R I N G 2 0 1 5
Ruskin ReduxF A L L 2 0 1 5
National Park Service CentenaryS P R I N G 2 0 1 6
Change O
ver Time
S
PR
IN
G
20
13
Copyright © 2013 University of Pennsylvania Press.
All rights reserved.
Published by the University of Pennsylvania Press,
3905 Spruce Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104.
Printed in the U.S.A. on acid-free paper.
Change Over Time is seeking papers for the upcoming themed
issues Vandalism (Fall 2014) and Ruskin Redux (Fall 2015).
Please visit cot.pennpress.org for a more detailed discussion of
these topics and deadlines for submission. Articles are generally
restricted to 7,500 words or fewer. Guidelines for authors may be
requested from Meredith Keller (cot@design.upenn.edu).
None of the contents of this journal may be reproduced without
prior written consent of the University of Pennsylvania Press.
Authorization to photocopy is granted by the University of
Pennsylvania Press for individuals and for libraries or other users
registered with the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) Transaction
Reporting Service, provided that all required fees are verified
with the CCC and payments are remitted directly to the CCC,
222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923. This consent does
not extend to other kinds of copying for general distribution, for
advertising or promotional purposes, for creating new collective
works, for database retrieval, or for resale.
2013 Subscription Information (USD)
Print and electronic:
Individuals: $35.00; Students: $20.00; Institutions: $70.00.
Single Issues: $20.00.
International orders, please add $18.00 for shipping.
Electronic-only:
Individuals: $31.50; Institutions: $63.00.
Subscriptions are valid January 1 through December 31.
Subscriptions received after October 31 in any year become
effective the following January 1. Subscribers joining mid-year
will receive immediately copies of all issues of Change Over Time
already in print for that year.
Please direct all subscription orders, inquiries, requests for
single issues, and address changes to: Penn Press Journals,
3905 Spruce Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104. Telephone:
215.573.1295. Fax. 215.746.3636. Email: journals@pobox.
upenn.edu. Prepayment is required. Orders may be charged to
MasterCard, Visa, American Express, and Discover credit cards.
Checks and money orders should be made payable to ‘‘University
of Pennsylvania Press,’’ and sent to the address immediately
above.
All address changes and other business correspondence may be
sent to the address immediately above.
Typographic cover artwork by Kerry Polite.
Visit Change Over Time on the web at cot.pennpress.org.
EDITOR IN CHIEF
Frank MateroUniversity of Pennsylvania
GUEST EDITOR
John Dixon HuntUniversity of Pennsylvania
ASSOCIATE EDITORS
Kecia L. Fong Institute for Culture and Society,
University of Western Sydney
Rosa Lowinger Rosa Lowinger & Associates,
Conservation of Art + Architecture, Inc.
EDITORIAL ASSISTANT
Meredith KellerUniversity of Pennsylvania
EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD
Nur AkinIstanbul Kultur University, Turkey
Erica AvramiWorld Monuments Fund
Luigia BindaPolitecnico di Milano, Italy
Daniel BluestoneUniversity of Virginia
Christine BoyerPrinceton University School of
Architecture
Jukka JokilehtoUniversity of Nova Gorica
David LowenthalUniversity College London
Randall Mason University of Pennsylvania
Robert MelnickUniversity of Oregon
Elizabeth MilroyWesleyan University
Steven SemesUniversity of Notre Dame
Jeanne Marie TeutonicoGetty Conservation Institute
Ron Van OersWorld Heritage Institute of
Training and Research for Asia and the Pacific (WHITRAP)
Fernando VegasUniversidad Politécnica de Valencia
S P R I N G 2 0 1 3
V O L U M E 3
N U M B E R 1
I S S N 2 1 5 3 - 0 5 3 X
Change Over Time
Change Over TimeRunning an ad or special announcement in Change Over Time is a great way to get publication, program, and meeting information out to those in your field. Change Over Time is a semiannual journal focused on publishing original, peer-reviewed research papers and review articles on the history, theory, and praxis of conservation and the built envi-ronment. Each issue is dedicated to a particular theme as a method to promote critical discourse on contemporary conservation issues from multiple perspectives both within the field and across disciplines. Forthcoming issues will address topics such as Interpretation and Dis-play, The Venice Charter at 50, Vandalism, and Ruskin Redux.
2013–14 Advertising Rates
Ads are inserted at the back of each issue and on cover 3 (inside back cover). Only cover 3 positioning is guaranteed.
Half Page: $200 Full Page: $300 Cover 3: $350
Issue Closing Dates
Mechanical Specifications
Half Page: 5¼” x 4” Full Page: 5¼” x 8¼” Cover 3: 6” x 8½”
All journals are black and white and printed offset on matte stock. Ads must be emailed as print-optimized PDF files.Images should be scanned at a resolution of 300 dpi.All fonts should be embedded (type I fonts recommended).Halftones are shot at 133-line screen. No bleeds.
Submission Address and Contact Info
Send reservations and materials, formatted according to specs, to:
Dave Lievens, Editing & Production CoordinatorUniversity of Pennsylvania Press3905 Spruce Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104-4112Email: lievens@upenn.edu; Fax: 215-746-3636
A complete ad rate card may be downloaded at cot.pennpress.org by selecting the “Advertising” link from the left menu bar.
Artwork Deadline
8/30/13
3/29/14
ReservationDeadline
8/16/13
3/15/14
PublicationDate
10/31/13
4/30/14
Season & Theme
Fall 2013Interpretation
and Display
Spring 2014 The Venice
Charter at 50
Copyright © 2013 University of Pennsylvania Press.
All rights reserved.
Published by the University of Pennsylvania Press,
3905 Spruce Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104.
Printed in the U.S.A. on acid-free paper.
Change Over Time is seeking papers for the upcoming themed
issues Vandalism (Fall 2014) and Ruskin Redux (Fall 2015).
Please visit cot.pennpress.org for a more detailed discussion of
these topics and deadlines for submission. Articles are generally
restricted to 7,500 words or fewer. Guidelines for authors may be
requested from Meredith Keller (cot@design.upenn.edu).
None of the contents of this journal may be reproduced without
prior written consent of the University of Pennsylvania Press.
Authorization to photocopy is granted by the University of
Pennsylvania Press for individuals and for libraries or other users
registered with the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) Transaction
Reporting Service, provided that all required fees are verified
with the CCC and payments are remitted directly to the CCC,
222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923. This consent does
not extend to other kinds of copying for general distribution, for
advertising or promotional purposes, for creating new collective
works, for database retrieval, or for resale.
2013 Subscription Information (USD)
Print and electronic:
Individuals: $35.00; Students: $20.00; Institutions: $70.00.
Single Issues: $20.00.
International orders, please add $18.00 for shipping.
Electronic-only:
Individuals: $31.50; Institutions: $63.00.
Subscriptions are valid January 1 through December 31.
Subscriptions received after October 31 in any year become
effective the following January 1. Subscribers joining mid-year
will receive immediately copies of all issues of Change Over Time
already in print for that year.
Please direct all subscription orders, inquiries, requests for
single issues, and address changes to: Penn Press Journals,
3905 Spruce Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104. Telephone:
215.573.1295. Fax. 215.746.3636. Email: journals@pobox.
upenn.edu. Prepayment is required. Orders may be charged to
MasterCard, Visa, American Express, and Discover credit cards.
Checks and money orders should be made payable to ‘‘University
of Pennsylvania Press,’’ and sent to the address immediately
above.
All address changes and other business correspondence may be
sent to the address immediately above.
Typographic cover artwork by Kerry Polite.
Visit Change Over Time on the web at cot.pennpress.org.
EDITOR IN CHIEF
Frank MateroUniversity of Pennsylvania
GUEST EDITOR
John Dixon HuntUniversity of Pennsylvania
ASSOCIATE EDITORS
Kecia L. Fong Institute for Culture and Society,
University of Western Sydney
Rosa Lowinger Rosa Lowinger & Associates,
Conservation of Art + Architecture, Inc.
EDITORIAL ASSISTANT
Meredith KellerUniversity of Pennsylvania
EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD
Nur AkinIstanbul Kultur University, Turkey
Erica AvramiWorld Monuments Fund
Luigia BindaPolitecnico di Milano, Italy
Daniel BluestoneUniversity of Virginia
Christine BoyerPrinceton University School of
Architecture
Jukka JokilehtoUniversity of Nova Gorica
David LowenthalUniversity College London
Randall Mason University of Pennsylvania
Robert MelnickUniversity of Oregon
Elizabeth MilroyWesleyan University
Steven SemesUniversity of Notre Dame
Jeanne Marie TeutonicoGetty Conservation Institute
Ron Van OersWorld Heritage Institute of
Training and Research for Asia and the Pacific (WHITRAP)
Fernando VegasUniversidad Politécnica de Valencia
S P R I N G 2 0 1 3
V O L U M E 3
N U M B E R 1
I S S N 2 1 5 3 - 0 5 3 X
Change Over Time
Change Over TimeRunning an ad or special announcement in Change Over Time is a great way to get publication, program, and meeting information out to those in your field. Change Over Time is a semiannual journal focused on publishing original, peer-reviewed research papers and review articles on the history, theory, and praxis of conservation and the built envi-ronment. Each issue is dedicated to a particular theme as a method to promote critical discourse on contemporary conservation issues from multiple perspectives both within the field and across disciplines. Forthcoming issues will address topics such as Interpretation and Dis-play, The Venice Charter at 50, Vandalism, and Ruskin Redux.
2013–14 Advertising Rates
Ads are inserted at the back of each issue and on cover 3 (inside back cover). Only cover 3 positioning is guaranteed.
Half Page: $200 Full Page: $300 Cover 3: $350
Issue Closing Dates
Mechanical Specifications
Half Page: 5¼” x 4” Full Page: 5¼” x 8¼” Cover 3: 6” x 8½”
All journals are black and white and printed offset on matte stock. Ads must be emailed as print-optimized PDF files.Images should be scanned at a resolution of 300 dpi.All fonts should be embedded (type I fonts recommended).Halftones are shot at 133-line screen. No bleeds.
Submission Address and Contact Info
Send reservations and materials, formatted according to specs, to:
Dave Lievens, Editing & Production CoordinatorUniversity of Pennsylvania Press3905 Spruce Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104-4112Email: lievens@upenn.edu; Fax: 215-746-3636
A complete ad rate card may be downloaded at cot.pennpress.org by selecting the “Advertising” link from the left menu bar.
Artwork Deadline
8/30/13
3/29/14
ReservationDeadline
8/16/13
3/15/14
PublicationDate
10/31/13
4/30/14
Season & Theme
Fall 2013Interpretation
and Display
Spring 2014 The Venice
Charter at 50
PAGE iv................. 18386$ CNTS 02-28-13 12:34:07 PS
ChangeOverTime
A N I N T E R N A T I O N A L J O U R N A L
O F C O N S E R V A T I O N
A N D T H E B U I L T E N V I R O N M E N T
S P R I N G 2 0 1 3 3.1PAGE i................. 18386$ $$FM 02-28-13 12:33:58 PS
PAGE ii
CONTENTS
2 Editorial: What Is Wrong with NostalgiaAnyway?J O H N D I X O N H U N T
E S S A Y S
12 Nostalgia, Architecture, Ruins, and TheirPreservationG I O VA N N I G A L L I
28 Nostalgic Dreams and NightmaresD AV I D L O W E N T H A L
56 The Spirit of Campus PastW I T O L D R Y B C Z Y N S K I
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2
56
64
82
102
64 Gardens, Memory, and History: TheShakespeare and Modern Elizabethan GardenR E B E C C A W. B U S H N E L L
82 Melancholy, Memories, and Six Nostalgias:Postquake Christchurch and the Problemsof Recalling the PastJ A C K Y B O W R I N G
102 The Use of History in LandscapeArchitectural NostalgiaR A F F A E L L A FA B I A N I G I A N N E T T O
116 ‘‘Certain Old and Lovely Things, WhoseSignified Is Abstract, Out of Date’’: JamesStirling and NostalgiaM A R K C R I N S O N
R E V I E W
136 Literature ReviewR O S A L O W I N G E R A N D M E G A N C R O S S
S C H M I T T
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ChangeOverTime
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2
PAGE 2
EDITORIAL
What Is Wrong with Nostalgia Anyway?
JOHN DIXON HUNTUniversity of Pennsylvania
‘‘Such, Such Were the Joys’’ (with the editor’s apologies to Rober t Graves for titling this image). F. S. Lincoln.Governor’s Palace, Colonial Williamsburg, 1935. (Special Collections, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Library, TheColonial Williamsburg Foundation)
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Nostalgia haunts us. Its incidence is widespread, beyond its particular role in historic
preservation, not least because loss is a human condition and in learning to confront it,
nostalgia may play a vital role. It may occasionally enliven our lives and may even sustain
new ventures. Anyone who reads Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, Ford Madox
Ford’s Parade’s End, or Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, will encounter a
variety of places, historical moments, or characters, where nostalgia has decisive, as well
as frustrating, impacts. Powell’s hero, relating his life forward and backward, from the
early twentieth century to the aftermath of World War II, confronts ‘‘an historical period,
distinct and definable, even though less remote in time,’’ yet finds himself often unsuccess-
ful in rationalizing ‘‘what exactly the change was.’’ Places and people ‘‘cut a savage incision
across Time,’’ yet too many characters find that a ‘‘present recital [of places or people]
could in no way affect the past.’’1
The memory has many mansions, and one of them may surely be occupied by our
nostalgias, even though we cannot prevent them from squatting in the remainder. Nostal-
gia takes many forms and many colors, and David Lowenthal in his essay here absolves us
from elaborating any further agenda of them: his wonderful litany—sometimes forensic,
sometimes ironic, sometimes (just sometimes) celebratory—takes us through most of the
varieties: imitation, plagiarism, fantasy, melancholy, grief, longing, regret (relished but not
acted upon), sentimentality, reverie (‘‘marinating in memory’’2), and utopianism (a future
predicated upon an imagined past). Some of these are indeed nightmares, others are
dreams that may delight and hurt not. Nostalgia can grip the child in France ‘‘who wishes
he were crying on the Italian side of the Alps,’’ or the lover lamenting a lost love:
I will not, Helen, rescue you from Troy,
I would not waste ten years upon the chase,
Seeking to stamp the image of the past
Upon a future which could never last [ . . . ]
Once under lanterns I drank wine with you.
Now I would rather posses that, than find
Lanterns were gutted, the glasses cracked,
And shabby waiters offered wine that lacked
A certain texture I recall to mind.3
H U N T E D I T O R I A L 3
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4 C H A N G E O V E R T I M E
PAGE 4
Personal nostalgia (that ‘‘certain texture’’) does not damage anyone except perhaps the
obsessive nostalgist, even if, determined to find a lost Helen, he may discover that his
effort is not worth the detour. One cannot live in the past, with any comfort or sustenance;
but it may help to visit it, though perhaps we need another term for this remembrance of
things past.
It is what we may call public rather than personal nostalgias that need our attention.
And here, as both Giovanni Galli and my editorial title suggest, it is by no means all wrong.
There are political moments when nostalgias feel sick and signal a rottenness at the heart
of a culture: the Nazis’ program against Jews, homosexuals, and gypsies had its absurd (if
its context were not so horrific) counterpart in ruling against certain plants (rhododendra)
and against certain landscape designs, as Gert Groening and Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn
have chronicled.4 In this issue, too, we see how Italian fascism distorted the history of
Italy’s garden forms to ‘‘create’’ a national and cultural historiography at odds, as Raffaella
Fabiani Giannetto explains, with what had emerged in that country’s more subtle garden
design.
On the other hand, remembrance of things past may well be invoked to sustain
exemplary modern design, even if designers themselves do not appeal directly to nostalgia.
Here landscape architecture in France (Bernard Lassus) and Lebanon (Kathryn Gustafson
and Neil Porter), along with architecture from Philadelphia (Robert Stern) and Stuttgart
(James Stirling), reveal their undoubted reliance upon thoughtful historical research in
which nostalgia has not been gainsaid.5 It is all very well to ‘‘strip away the crust of habit
and convention’’ and ‘‘get behind the veneer of language,’’6 but we still need language,
habits, and conventions once the crust or veneer has been removed. And these are often
derived from the past.
Yet there is other work that hovers precariously between the absurd and the plausible
(if only for local conditions). Rebecca Bushnell has some glorious fun with the creations
of Shakespeare or Elizabethan gardens in the United States; but she reserves, rightly, her
greatest skepticism for the recreation of a famous Elizabethan garden in England of the
1570s. Kenilworth Castle’s recreation is doubtless buttressed by sound historical research,
but it looks cheap and awful; the texture of its nostalgia is unconvincing, even if (or maybe
because) actors in period costumes rehearse Queen Elizabeth’s visit to the Earl of Leicester
in 1575. Perhaps that is all ‘‘innocent fun,’’ a good place for what the British call an ‘‘out-
ing,’’ a nod to the immense appeal for historical drama from Merchant Ivory to Downton
Abbey; but the tastelessness of this particular nostalgic rehash is strident. A more compel-
ling example of garden recreation has to be when the Dutch government decided to rees-
tablish the late-seventeenth-century gardens of the Paleis Het Loo at Apeldoorn in the
l980s. True, that was an abundance of engravings of the original site, which couldn’t help
Kenilworth, and beneath a pastoral landscape that had covered the first Het Loo in the
early nineteenth century were fragments of basins and other remains on which to draw for
its reconstruction. It still caused unease in specialists,7 yet it does reaffirm and establish a
key monument of seventeenth-century Dutch culture and politics, which can hardly be
said to sustain the Kenilworth enterprise.
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Historic preservation occupies a public and political arena. It always deals with the
past, for that is its proper territory. It is also from the past that we derive and reinvent
the forms in which we must continue to live. Preservation has a difficult task. It seeks
both to make the past visible and understandable again in the present and to make us
aware of it as a historical event. These are, in effect, two conflicting moves. And it is also
necessarily performed in communities with often wildly different perspectives.
The preservation that attends to the destruction of whole cities (Germany after
World War II, Syria now) activates a host of nostalgias. Jacky Bowring’s discussion of
Christchurch, New Zealand, after double earthquakes destroyed the city, makes this ago-
nizingly clear. She confronts the options for remaking the ravages of the earthquakes the
more urgent because she lives and works there (on top of that she’s a landscape architect).
Yet her inquiry is complicated by her rich identification of the various forms that nostalgia
takes. Too much analysis makes practical decisions harder.8 Christchurch was itself a nos-
talgic remake of England, and too much nostalgia gets in the way of change. It can help to
deny a painful present, or it can promote commodifications of the damaged city in memo-
rabilia and videos of what was lost. But even becoming a ‘‘ruin park,’’ replete with associa-
tions, like those that filled the ruins of Rome for Joachim du Bellay or for Byron who can
‘‘replenish the void’’ with his dreams of the past,9 it is hard to see how those memories of
Christchurch will survive both the gradual loss of collective memory and the need for a
new city to live in, which itself will contrive new associations.
Rybczynski’s ironic play with Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, confronts us with
a key instance of academic nostalgia—do we desire the spirit of campus past or the campus
‘‘Yet to Be,’’ whether in ‘‘ivy league’’ colleges, Gothicized, cloistered and turreted, or at
Thomas Jefferson’s University of Virginia, with its Italianate colonnades and classical
facades?10 For many American universities, their campuses require, de rigueur, ivy walls
and dreaming spires. An alumnus of Oxford or Cambridge may squirm at what Nikolaus
Pevsner called the Tudorbethan nostalgias of places like Yale University;11 but late into the
seventeenth century many Oxbridge colleges also continued to erect and mimic medieval
buildings, an appeal to earlier seats of medieval learning, to established curricula, and not
least to their exclusively male inhabitants still used to thinking of a cloistered life (fellows
of colleges could not marry). By the early twentieth century, English and American curric-
ula and both students and faculty bodies had changed considerably, yet the preference,
above all in the United States, was still for a collegiate ambience, a nostalgic hope that
learning is better acquired in buildings that mimic Oxbridge. New universities in Great
Britain (Sussex, York, East Anglia) managed, not always happily, to evade the clutch of
ivied walls. In America, alumni campus reunions (for some, a sort of nostalgic return
termed ‘‘homecomings’’) clearly relish these settings—perhaps more than the students did
when they were there (another nostalgia acquired in time).
There is surely no harm in invoking the past in universities that promote ancient as
well as contemporary learning. And to preserve older revivalist buildings is also in the
spirit of many towns and cities. To choose a Federal style for the modern McNeil Center
at Penn carries with it a gesture to the study of early American culture that goes on
H U N T E D I T O R I A L 5
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6 C H A N G E O V E R T I M E
PAGE 6
inside the building, and, as Rybczynski argues, Stern’s design echoes much in the city of
Philadelphia itself, along with its widespread use of red brick. The degree to which univer-
sities allow modernist intrusions of form or materials into their campuses is extremely
varied: the contrast between the old and the new can be quaint, even absurd. A doorway
at Davenport College at Yale is carved with Kitchen in gothic script and a low bas-relief
shows a capon on a carving dish—but between these items has been placed a blue security
light! Yet the intrusion of more visible modern items than blue security lights onto cam-
puses—the concrete jewel box of Yale’s Beinecke Library, two wonderful and very different
Louis Kahn buildings—contrasts with the revivalist work that suggests a better historicist
perspective, a resonant example of ‘‘the aesthetic ideas of our times.’’12 Yet an elegant, new,
and crisp modern hotel, The Study on the Yale campus, nonetheless still provides its guests
with a postcard of books on library shelves labeled ‘‘Dreams’’!
As has already been broached, we need a more subtle understanding of the past vis-
a-vis the present: Powell’s hero confronts a historical period that is nonetheless ‘‘distinct
and definable,’’ and to understand the ‘‘aesthetics of our times’’ means distinguishing it
from other times. Galli focuses on a variety of different preservation themes and items.
Preservation needs to know its past as well as its present. In trying to understand differ-
ences between old and new buildings, cities and gardens, we might invoke the long and
demanding essay, The Birth of the Past (2011), where Zachary Sayre Schiffman argues that
we really only very recently learned about the historical past—dating it to the Enlighten-
ment, for which he gives credits to Charles de Secondat Montesquieu. The Renaissance
desire, for instance, ‘‘to resurrect the classical culture—to make it live again—was not
historical.’’13 Whereas we tend to take the past for granted, Schiffman argues that it is our
sense of difference between past and present that gives birth to the past. (And, we might
add for preservationists, it allows us to register these differences.) When we recognize
that difference, the past can then be seen to be enmeshed in a context with spatial and
temporal reference points that established a specific habit of mind. Different historical
entities exist in different historical contexts (Yale’s Tudorbethan, Louis Kahn). A firm his-
toricism makes nostalgia more visible and easy to see it for what it is, since when we have
the understanding that each culture has its own habits and customs, we cannot easily—as
did the Renaissance—transpose its past into our own. When we can separate the past
from the present, it is because, as Schiffman writes, we see how every event was enmeshed
in ‘‘a web of relations that define it as unique and, at the same time, typify it . . . a product
of its own unique process of development.’’14 This ‘‘web of relations’’ that defines the entity
as unique, ‘‘a product of its own unique process of development,’’ makes it harder to
replicate that at another time and place. That is both the bane and the challenge of nostal-
gia. A true and rich historical knowledge of the past confounds a present inclination to
borrow something uncritically for the present, for the simple reason that its original ‘‘web
of relations’’ is absent. If the past is conceived with a full awareness of that web, it is—to
say the least—awkward to live with nostalgia uncritically.
Lowenthal contrasts the search for places like home (the essential meaning of nostal-
gia, as Galli also explains) with our more recent obsession with past times independent of
................. 18386$ $CH1 02-28-13 12:34:33 PS
any specific place or placefulness. Hence perhaps the current obsession in the Republican
Party during 2012 with earlier times and persons. Yet time affects places themselves, for
it impinges on how we return to them, whether in imagination or in fact. I remember
going once to see the house where I was born and lived for my first ten years and was
astonished, as a grown man, to realize how small it was. After the Trojan wars Odysseus
wanted to get to his home in Ithaca, but in his ten-year absence his wife Penelope was
harassed by suitors, his estate plundered, and his father grew old. So maybe the Greek
poet C. P. Cavafy was right to say, in his ‘‘Ithaka,’’ that, as the road back there is long and
full of adventures, it is much better to think of Ithaka as a nice excuse: it ‘‘gave you your
lovely journey, / Without that you would not have set out. / Ithaka has no more to give
you now.’’15 Nostalgia may pull one homeward; but on the way there we may well and
usefully be distracted and sidetracked by fresh concerns: what nostalgia can teach us on
the homeward journey about the present makes the past valuable, allows us to find it
acceptable and probably helps to make it new.16
Places (buildings, gardens, landscapes) are far more palpable than appeals to time,
because we (or some of us) have been there, can envisage them, and may even embrace
the possibility of a return to a real place. Gardens, more perhaps than other items, are
susceptible to nostalgia; they are Eden, Paradise, the perfect place, the locus amoenus,
retreats from the busy, pushing world of mere circumstance. Even when a modern designer
like Garrett Eckbo designs an aluminum garden, the ALCOA Forecast Garden in 1959,17
its planting and seclusion still smack of withdrawal. Yet the fondness for returning to
gardens, as that great novel, Le Grand Meaulnes, teaches us, is less than satisfactory, like
Kenilworth Castle. Places are also fraught with visible change, where our nostalgic sense
of a past cannot be fudged. For hundreds of years northern people have evinced a huge
and compelling nostalgia for the Mediterranean, often unspoken and uncritical. Yet the
places we envisage in our imaginations are nowadays increasingly less ‘‘real’’ than its actual
shores overwhelmed with ribbon developments, beaches stacked with tourist ‘‘amenities,’’
and islands bent on accommodating ‘‘authentic’’ local housing.18
It is rare for anyone not to harbor some nostalgia, whether it is declared or hidden.
But a personal nostalgia can be transformed, or can retreat into, some more public and
questionable activity. The famous historian A. L. Rowse dedicated himself rigorously and
thoughtfully to the world of Elizabethan England, but by the end of his career he came to
‘‘hate the guts of the modern world, everything about it, even its good points.’’19 Ian
Hamilton Finlay saw gardens as ‘‘attacks rather than retreats,’’ designed to take his gardens
into the modern understanding of tradition, classicism, and secularization and beyond the
mere banality of the suburban garden plot.20 Radical gardeners, whether in community
gardens or garden suburbs, reject mere nostalgia: ‘‘Neither nostalgia for a pastoral past,
nor Luddite in its sensibility, the inner-city community garden movement restores a
nature banished from the industrial city. . . .’’21 Lord Burlington created his house at Chis-
wick in emulation of Palladio, specifically the Villa Rotunda22: but it was less, if at all, a
nostalgic stroll down memory lane than a deliberate attempt to oppose a new and classical
architecture to the baroque extravagances of Hawksmoor, Wren, and Vanbrugh.23
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The Pre-Raphaelites may have wished simply to discover in the mediaeval world a
congenial source of inspiration, ‘‘anachronism pure and simple, unsullied by what we have
come to know as historical knowledge.’’24 But, beyond their paintings and their poems,
they also contrived to contribute to a world of interior design that became a clear state-
ment of modern concerns: hence William Morris argues that ‘‘your convention must be
your own, and not borrowed from other times and people; or, at the least . . . you must
make it your own by thoroughly understanding both the nature and the art you are dealing
with.’’25 Conversely, W. B. Yeats rejected a ‘‘coat / Covering with embroideries / Out of old
mythologies,’’ and thought ‘‘there’s more enterprise / In walking naked.’’26 We still embroi-
der our walls and fabrics with Morris’s designs, because for some it affords an aura of a
late-nineteenth-century aestheticism, both a cultivated nostalgia and a justified rebuke to
either the stuffy, over-padded world of Victorian interiors, or alternatively to the austere
rigors of modernist design. Others may simply like Morris fabrics for their own sakes. Nor
are personal nostalgias, if that is indeed what they are, necessarily predicated upon a regret
for lost time: I myself love marmite (pace Lowenthal); but not because I wish I were back
in the aftermath of war in the 1940s; I simply love the taste, and this has nothing to do
with a Proustian relish for the madelaine (so probably not nostalgia, only a weird taste!).
If a relish of nostalgia is, as Mark Crinson suggests, ‘‘a betrayal of the present,’’27 it
takes a far more strenuous effort to escape from the past and bring home from it some-
thing useful and to relocate it afresh in the present; it ceases to be nostalgie tout pure and
becomes, on the one hand, a proper historical understanding of the past, or on the other,
the basis of new work and ideas. Some early work by James Stirling and James Gowan
clearly drew upon Stirling’s north English world of back-to-back street terraces and Victo-
rian brickwork, and the architects ‘‘played archaizing games’’ (‘‘concrete mantelpieces and
water spouts’’) with their housing;28 the resumption of these older forms and vernacular
functions in new contexts transformed the nostalgia.
I’d be reluctant to abandon the term nostalgia. But we do need to use it more subtly,
and acknowledge that it is an essential element of historical inquiry.29 We need to analyze
more that nostalgia may ‘‘not [be] a consequence of nostalgic urban planning but of eco-
nomical recession.’’ Or again: ‘‘who in the world of sophisticated thinkers does not repudi-
ate nostalgia? And who does not end up yearning, even so, for various Golden Ages of
yore?’’30
When the original library catalog of the Library Company of Philadelphia was con-
structed, it was formed around the somewhat unusual categories of Memory, Reason, and
Imagination.31 This triad excludes much that modern bibliographers would accept as useful
categories; but memory helps us to recall the fullest historical past, reason helps us to
access it for the present, and imagination to create something new. Those skills should
help nostalgia without destroying its capabilities.
References1. Respectively, The Kindly Ones (1962), 85, 102, 164, 177.2. Daniel Gilbert, ‘‘Times to Remember, Places to Forget,’’ New York Times, December 31, 2009: A25,
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cited by David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1985), note 123. The culinary metaphor does add new relish to the dish.
3. W. H. Auden, ‘‘Mountains,’’ in The Shield of Achilles (London: Faber, 1965), 20; J. D. Hunt, ‘‘NothingCertainly,’’ in Riverside Poetry 4, ed. Horace Gregory, Josephine Miles, and Howard Nemerov (NewYork: Twayne, 1961), 70.
4. Gert Groening and Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn, ‘‘Some Notes on the Mania for Native Plants inGermany,’’ Landscape Journal 11, no. 2 (Fall 1992): 116–26.
5. See also the article cited in Note 13 below.6. James Corner, ‘‘Ecology and Landscape as Agents of Creativity,’’ in Ecological Design and Planning, ed.
George Thomson and Frederick Steiner (New York: Wiley, 1997), 80–108.7. I should confess that I was briefly on one of the restoration committees for the reconstruction of Het
Loo.8. See the discussion of Old Havana in Matthew J. Hill, ‘‘Reimagining Old Havana,’’ in Deciphering the
Global, ed. Saskia Sassen (London: Routledge, 2007), 59–77.9. See G. Dickinson, Du Bellay in Rome (Leiden: Brill, 1960), and Byron, ‘‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,’’
canto IV, stanza v, and passim.10. UVa is something of a special case, with the huge national significance of its founder Thomas Jeffer-
son, his architectural layout of the Grounds, and the demands of a growing and flourishing modernuniversity; see Daniel Bluestone, Buildings, Landscapes and Memory: Case Studies in Historic Preserva-tion, specifically chapter three, ‘‘Captured by Context: Architectural Innovation and Banality atThomas Jefferson’s University’’ (New York: Norton, 2011), 40–770.
11. See Andrew Ballantyne and Andrew Law, Tudoresque: In Pursuit of the Ideal Home (London: ReaktionBooks, 2012).
12. Quoted in Witold Rybczynski, ‘‘The Spirit of Campus Past,’’ Change Over Time 3, no. 1 (Spring 2013):62 and note 5.
13. Zachary Sayre Schiffman, The Birth of the Past (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 8.14. Ibid., 12 and 3.15. As quoted by E. M. Forster, in the translation by G. Valassopoulo, in Pharos and Pharillon, 77.16. Cf. Ezra Pound’s Make It New (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1935), where the old (‘‘It’’)
is renewed.17. Marc Treib and Dorothee Imbert, Garrett Eckbo (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997),
87–82 and images.18. See the final chapter, ‘‘The Last Mediterranean, 1950–2010,’’ of David Abulafia, The Great Sea: A
Human History of the Mediterranean (London: Allen Lane, 2012).19. Quoted in Alan Stewart, ‘‘A Crisis of Fate,’’ The Times Literary Supplement (May 25, 2012): 15.20. Finlay’s ‘‘Unconnected Sentences on Gardening’’ are variously available: they are reprinted in my
Nature Over Again: The Garden Art of Ian Hamilton Finlay (London: Reaktion Books, 2008), 39 (Fig.28).
21. H. Patricia Hynes, A Patch of Eden: America’s Inner-City Gardeners, quoted in George McKay, RadicalGardening: Politics, Idealism, and Rebellion in the Garden (London: Frances Lincoln, 2011), 167–68.
22. Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole (Ithaca, NY:Cornell University Press, 1992). For the supposition that Burlington was a secret supporter, even spy,for Bonnie Prince Charlie and his attempts to invade Britain, see Jane Clark, ‘‘The Mysterious Mr.Buck,’’ Apollo (May 1989). For a critique of Burlington’s Palladianism see Timothy Mowl, William Kent(London: Cape, 2006), especially chapter 6 and seriatim. It is, however, worth comparing Burlington’sPalladianism with Alexander Pope’s ‘‘imitations’’ of Horace in the 1730s, for both sought to make anold, new, rather than merely nostalgic.
23. It may also have been a covert operation in support of the exiled Stuart prince, seeking to return toa hundred-year-old architecture from the time of Inigo Jones under the long-past Stuart monarchy.Burlington’s motivations, whether political or architectural, have an interest for historians, and somehave derided its Palladianism; but the building itself and its landscape are no longer to be assessedmerely on the grounds of nostalgia.
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24. Schiffman, The Birth of the Past, 8.25. ‘‘Making the Best of It,’’ in Hopes and Fears for Art (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1882), 152.26. W. B. Yeats, Collected Poems (New York: Scribner, 1996), 142.27. ‘‘The Uses of Nostalgia: Stirling and Gowan’s Preston Housing,’’ Journal of the Society of Architectural
Historians 65, no. 2 (2006): 234, where he also cites Odysseus, breaking from the thrall of Calypso’spleasure to return home to the ‘‘finitude of life.’’ Yet ‘‘betrayal’’ is often as hard as it is easy.
28. Ibid, 220.29. See E. B. Daniels, ‘‘Nostalgia: Experiencing the Elusive,’’ in Don Ihde and Hugh J. Silverman, Descrip-
tions: Selected Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy 11 (Albany: State University of NewYork Press, 1985).
30. The first remark is by Joyce Carol Oates, ‘‘Going Home Again,’’ Smithsonian (March 2010): 78 (cap-tion); the second from a review by Paul Berman in a review of Irving Kristol’s The Neo-ConservativePersuasion, communicated by a colleague (but without a reference).
31. Thanks to James N. Green, who presented this triad at a symposium at the University of Pennsylvaniaon March 31, 2012.
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Change Over Time
A N I N T E R N A T I O N A L J O U R N A L
O F C O N S E R V A T I O N A N D
T H E B U I L T E N V I R O N M E N T
S P R I N G 2 0 1 33.1UPCOMING ISSUES
Interpretation and DisplayF A L L 2 0 1 3
The Venice Charter at 50S P R I N G 2 0 1 4
VandalismF A L L 2 0 1 4
Climate Change and LandscapeS P R I N G 2 0 1 5
Ruskin ReduxF A L L 2 0 1 5
National Park Service CentenaryS P R I N G 2 0 1 6
Change O
ver Time
S
PR
IN
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20
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