An Argument for Facadism - I think...
I truly love architecture. To me it is one of the most meaningful symbols of us as people. It tells a story about the time it was built and what was important at that time. At the same time architecture is aspirational, it projects our dreams for how society should be. We can see all of this is buildings of Victoria as well. One of the more controversial practices within architecture over the last many year is facadism and it touches on all of these aspects and in some ways actively confronts them. I know that people have strong feelings about facadism and I do as well. To be honest I am not even sure about how I feel about it right now as I write this.
Facadism is the architectural practice of retaining the outside walls of an old building, while the inside is rebuilt, sometimes to the point of the new building extruding from the sides or the top of the old building. It is most often used in a derogatory way, used to comment I think mostly on the in-authenticity of the final product. This derision is more acute when the focus is a heritage facade.
What I think rubs many of us the wrong way when we are talking about a heritage rebuild where only the outside facade is maintained, is that the core of the building, where people actually used to live, has been stripped away. In the end your are left with only the pretty face along the street that those passing by enjoyed. I feel this raw antagonism too. A large part of me wants heritage buildings, all of them, to be like a mint 1967 Mustang with all original parts. Just like the car, update any part of that building to a more modern standard though, it loses its true self. But I also recognise that this is an impossible ideal, particularly for a building. Unless we freeze a building the day it is completed and don’t let anything happen to it, within a week it will likely have begun to lose its true authenticity. Someone will change a paint colour or add a set of curtains that don’t fit the style. Give it any longer and walls start coming down or in the case of some buildings, whole floors are removed (The four storey building in this link on the right still exists on Yates Street but it doesn’t look like that anymore). Beyond that, the actual use of the building may change. Some of you will know that I am actually a big fan of adaptive reuse and with that example, I start to shift my position in favour of facadism. If I am not just okay, but celebrate a good adaptive reuse of a building, then how can I not also support a high quality rebuild that only maintains the facade? Neither are authentic any longer and both maintain, in part, the appearance of the building.
When considering where you fall on the facadist spectrum, you definitely need to consider the benefits of it in the urban context as well. The first benefit is obviously the maintenance of the facade. This means that the original building will for the most part still appear to exist as it always has. This, to a larger or smaller extent, will be based on the planned changes within and around the old building. Again with the same proviso, this means that the context of the building will likely remain much the same. There won’t be a substantial change in how the pedestrian experiences the building standing next to it. I recognise that in some extreme examples, the old building is maintained just as piece of a much larger building and this changes its context completely. You can see this in Victoria at the Era building on Yates. Still in both of these examples the maintenance of the facade is a benefit. The city maintains some of its built context and some of its history while also allowing new building to occur.
Hanna Facade as a piece of the Era building on Yates Street
A second benefit of facadism is that it opens up a larger amount of the city to redevelopment. But facade preservation comes at a cost to the developer as well. Supporting the facade compared to saving the whole old building is generally cheaper, especially when the developer is adding density to the site through additional floors or a new wing to the side. Preserving entire buildings, if they actually exist in a way they can be restored to their original built form, is only practical in a few instances, though I would say most likely as a museum. More often an element will be preserved while the rest of the building will essentially be a facadist redevelopment. A great recent example locally is the Janion Building on Store Street. Most of that building is now completely new on the inside, but the grand old hotel staircase was preserved. It should be noted that the Janion project recently won a heritage preservation award. I think that the Janion is a great project and just what that part of Victoria needed, it is not an authentic representation of the original 1891 hotel however. We have so many similar examples, Morley Soda Factory in Waddington Alley, the Dragon Alley project in Chinatown, the City Lights Building where Canoe is today. These are all now loved buildings but they are all clear examples of facadism.
We are now looking at the potential development of the Duck’s Building along Broad Street and one of the major cries we are hearing already is that the project is merely facadism, but what else should it be? There is almost nothing of the original building left inside so what is the preservation argument here? A facadist redevelopment will reinforce that outside skin while creating a modern usable space on the inside. Likely any other option will mean the building is eventually abandoned. Keep in mind this building is about a block from the now empty lot where the Westholme Hotel stood.
Two blocks to the south of the Duck’s Block we can see an entirely other take on the facade, the recreation. When you look at the Bay Centre Mall you will see many ornate facades and many of them are fairly accurate representations of buildings that used to exist on the site of the mall. While I appreciate having the mall downtown, I wish that it had been a more modern facade, recreations are for Disneyland, not the downtown core of a city.
It has been a process that I have gone through to get to the belief that maybe facadism is often the best option. It retains the character of an area and potentially breathes new life into it while it is certainly not authentic, it is perhaps better than the building being left to decay or torn down. Where do you fall on the facadist spectrum?
The fake facade of the Driard Hotel at the Bay Centre Mall