Reconstructing Historic Landmarks

Fabrication, Negotiation, and the Past

Wayde Brown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317235224
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Historic reconstructions have been a consistent part of the historic preservation and heritage conservation movements in the United States and Canada. Indeed, reconstruction has been the primary tool at the most influential historic sites, for example: the Governor's Palace and the Capitol at Colonial Williamsburg, USA, and in Canada, the Fortress of Louisbourg. Dozens of other reconstructions have appeared during the past century in North America, undertaken by individuals, communities, states, and provinces, and by national agencies responsible for cultural heritage. Despite this prevalence, historic reconstructions have received little scholarly attention and the question of what motivated the proponents of these projects remains largely unexamined.

This book explores that question through detailed studies of ten historic reconstructions located throughout Canada and the United States, ranging from 1908 to 2011. Drawing upon diverse archival sources and site investigations, the proponents of each site are given voice to address their need to remake these landmarks, be it to sustain, to challenge, or even subvert a historical narrative, or – with reference to contemporary heritage studies – to reclaim these spaces.

Reconstructing Historic Landmarks provides a fascinating insight into these shifting concepts of history in North America and will be of considerable interest both to students and scholars of historic preservation and indeed to heritage professionals involved in reconstructions themselves.

1 Historic reconstructions

History, theory, and practice

In the afternoon of September 5, 1755, the men and boys of Grand Pré, in the former French colony of l’Acadie, were summoned to the parish church of Saint-Charles-des-Mines. Here, the British authorities read out the ‘Order of Deportation’ – the people of Grand-Pré, and of every Acadian village, would be forcibly exiled from the verdant pastures and rich orchards created by their ancestors, the farms forfeited to the state, and all the buildings destroyed. This diaspora, remembered as le Grand Dérangement, saw the Acadian people dispersed throughout British America, and beyond, never to return to their homes. L’Acadie was erased, or was it? Memories, and especially memories of place, are tenacious, and the memory of Grand Pré and l’Acadie persisted through subsequent generations of the exiled.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem Evangeline was published in 1847, and the memory of Grand Pré was encouraged; in his tragic romance, Longfellow wrote:

Where is the thatch-roofed village, the home of Acadian farmers, Men whose lives glided on like rivers that water the woodlands … Naught but tradition remains of the beautiful village of Grand-Pré.¹

And as the nineteenth century closed, a growing sense of nationalism emerged within the dispersed Acadian community. Grand Pré, and especially the site of the parish church, the foundations barely evident, emerged as a place symbolic of the lost l’Acadie, and a place of pilgrimage.² In 1921, through a curious intersection of Acadian nationalism and a railway company’s marketing program, a reconstruction of the parish church of Saint-Charles-des-Mines was built, on the presumed site of the original.³ The reconstructed church was the focal point of a formal garden, and in the absence of any visual or written record of the original structure, incorporated the form and detail of eighteenth-century Quebec religious architecture. Today, the reconstructed church is a major built element within the ‘Landscape of Grand Pré World Heritage Site,’ and houses two documents with special significance to the pilgrim: a copy of the 1755 Order of Deportation, and a list of the surnames of the Acadian families sent into exile. Together, these documents and the reconstructed church provide a physical aid for the understanding, and experience, of the Acadian narrative, a narrative of paradise and exile, of wandering and return.

Figure 1.1 Percy Nobbs’s proposal for ‘Evangeline Park’

Source: P. E. Nobbs Archive, John Bland Canadian Architecture Collection, McGill University

Figure 1.2 Chapel at Grand Pré National Historic Site

In 1925, just after the Grand Pré church was reconstructed, the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs introduced the idea of ‘collective memory,’ an agreed-upon narrative of the past that serves to maintain cohesion within any group.⁴ In forming collective memories, the group “chooses among the store of recollections, eliminates some of them, and arranges the others according to an order conforming with our idea of the moment.”⁵ Halbwachs believed that, “we recapture the past only by understanding how it is, in effect, preserved by our physical surroundings.”⁶ This suggests a foundation for much of the heritage conservation activity of the past two centuries – selecting ‘historic sites’ that help legitimize one historical narrative, rejecting or even erasing sites that support a conflicting narrative. This framework, however, begs the question of why lost sites are sometimes re-created: do these reconstructed landmarks represent especially crucial events? Are particular themes or patterns illustrated by their use? And how do they acquire meaning for the group?

A discussion of historic reconstructions must acknowledge a range of variables, beginning with site. In many cases, the original site is evident through extant foundations or other building fabric, sometimes discovered through archaeological investigation. Some reconstructions are built on presumed original sites, and some reconstructions have been purposefully located some distance from the known original site. The amount of fabric or physical material surviving from the original landmark also raises the question of when a reconstruction becomes a de facto restoration. The most complex issue, however, is authenticity. In part, authenticity is a function of information, derived most often from archaeological and archival investigations, though sometimes abstracted from similar sites, albeit often misunderstood or incorrectly applied, as at Grand Pré. Even with the most thorough record, however, other issues of authenticity emerge. For example, many landmarks evolved considerably during their lifetime; thus, what point in time should the reconstruction reflect? The assembly itself may be an issue – should the construction process re-create the original, with materials prepared using traditional building methods? Yet another variable is the proponent – who or what entity has undertaken the project, and in Halbwachs’s sense, with what group are they associated? To better understand these variables in the context of reconstructions built in Canada and the United States, it is useful to consider some of the major European precedents, as well as standards and policies developed to guide the process of reconstructing landmarks.

European precedents

Perhaps the most sweeping authority for historic reconstructions was offered by the nineteenth-century French architect Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, in his well-known declaration that:

The term restoration and the thing itself are both modern. To restore a building is not to preserve it, to repair it, or rebuild it; it is to reinstate it to a condition of completeness that could never have existed at any given time.⁷

In his earliest projects, Viollet-le-Duc may not have undertaken complete reconstructions, but certainly made dramatic changes to the fabric, both removing and adding major parts of landmark buildings. At Saint-Sernin, Toulouse, for example, he rebuilt the roof and upper walls of the transept and apse, and introduced totally new elements and silhouettes, described by a latter critic as his “personal invention, in the ‘roman-byzantine’ style.”⁸ In his two final ‘restoration’ projects, however, Viollet-le-Duc embraced reconstruction with enthusiasm, even courage. In 1857, he was asked by Napoleon III to reconstruct the Chateau Pierrefonds, a fourteenth-century castle that was largely demolished in 1617, and enjoyed thereafter as a romantic ruin. With little information beyond these fragmentary remains, Viollet-le-Duc created a fantasy castle, complete with towers, turrets, a drawbridge and a medieval keep, fulfilling all expectations of the romantic and the imaginative. An even bolder statement of his theory of restoration was the reconstruction of the medieval walls of Carcassonne.

The defensive walls of Carcassonne were constructed during the thirteenth century, started even before the city became part of the French royal domain in 1247. There are actually two masonry walls, running parallel, and surrounding the city. The interior wall stretches approximately 1250 meters, the exterior 1650 meters; the interior wall roughly follows the line of the Roman defenses, and incorporates twenty-six towers, while the exterior wall includes nineteen towers, three with barbicans. One of the interior towers also accommodates the major entrance to the town, the Porte Narbonnaise. The project began in 1852 with the reconstruction of this gate, followed by the extensive rebuilding of the walls and towers. Indeed, work continued long after Viollet-le-Duc’s death, under the supervision of Paul Boeswillwald, and was only completed in 1910. Writing of the site, Viollet-le-Duc noted that, “unfortunately, it now presents the aspect of a mere ruin. It is by examining scrupulously the least traces of still surviving constructions that we can reconstitute those fine works.”⁹ Curiously, this method led the architect to employ form and details more typical of northern France than Languedoc, such as steeply pitched, conical tower roofs, covered with slates rather than the tiles more common to the region.¹⁰ In 1997, Carcassonne was inscribed as a world heritage site, in part because of the association with Viollet-le-Duc and his influence on the heritage conservation movement; an earlier nomination, in 1985, based on the value of the ‘medieval’ walls, had been deferred because of the extensive nineteenth-century interventions. In 1882, Henry James visited Carcassonne, and showed a great understanding of Viollet-le-Duc’s work when he wrote:

Viollet-le-Duc has worked his will upon it, put it into perfect order, revived the fortifications in every detail … The image of a more crumbling Carcassonne rises in the mind, and there is no doubt that forty years ago the place was more affecting. On the other hand, as we see it today, it is a wonderful evocation; and if there is a great deal of new in the old, there is plenty of old in the new.¹¹

In Britain, art critic John Ruskin’s influence might seem to have quieted the urge to reconstruct, or to restore, in the dramatic fashion of the French. He espoused a philosophy almost the complete opposite of Viollet-le-Duc’s position, writing in 1849:

Do not let us deceive ourselves … it is impossible, as impossible as to raise the dead, to restore anything that has ever been great or beautiful in archi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Historic reconstructions: history, theory, and practice
• 2 Looking back: Europe and the civilized frame
• 3 Making nations: two histories and a landscape
• 4 Taking stories, reclaiming stories
• 5 Forward, to the past
• Index