Everything in the world has a U-shaped value curve. Most valuable when it is new, at some point it loses value, may even become worthless. Down the track, it will become priceless and irreplaceable. Note 'value' here isn't strictly monetary, it can be cultural as well.
Dropping buildings in the midst of the U never gives things the chance to recover and move past fashion. Most buildings discarded are due to the design being old and out of date. But old buildings in a city plant the cities history in time and allow it to tell a story. Remember that 'Gothic' cathedrals were so named because the term was in regular use as a description of something vulgar. The Notre Dame in Paris was at one stage due for demolition until the story of Quasimodo re-inspired the public to keep it - the restoration is still ongoing.
Buildings can be re-purposed and still keep their charm. The mistake is in discarding things just because they are old.
It's very true that not all old things are worth keeping, but the benefit of the doubt must go to the building until the current fashion has moved into the past.
Also, in the case of Berlin, a lot of damaged structures have been reinforced and kept standing as they were at the end of the war. It reminds the city of what can happen if continual efforts towards peace are not made. These scars on the landscape are a constant reminder of the cities turbulent past, and help develop a sense of the story of the city while walking around.
Buildings are the ultimate encapsulator of society - it's where we live, die, make decisions and create history. As such they have a special importance in being kept to tell that story to newcomers.
Much of the Northeast has this flavor. I dunno if you've ever been to the Boston area, but many of the buildings have this same sense of history to them. In the leather district, you've got former tanning factories which became porn studios which became software offices and yuppie lofts. In Maynard, you have old textile mills from the industrial revolution, which became DEC in the 50s and 60s, which became Monster.com in the dot-com boom of the 90s, which are now used for web2.0 startups and consultancies. In Lowell, you still see the old textile mills and canals alongside the remnants of the Wang Labs towers and newer businesses.
From what I know of NYC, it's much the same, with bohemian lofts where old tenements once stood.
That's one of the things I miss most about New England, having moved out to California. Here, everything is cookie-cutter suburbia, built in a hurry during the 70s and 80s. There's none of the charm or history of the Boston area. I can walk around downtown Lowell and say "This is a charming city, even if it's a little economically depressed." I can't really say the same about San Jose, even though it's cleaner, safer, and much more well-off.
I've actually had an office in the 'carpet factory' in Toronto, which was an industrial revolution age textile mill, amazing building, white pine roof beams that were easily 1 1/2' on a side in the section that we were in.
Fortunately some of those buildings remain, but an enormous number of them got torn down.
> That's one of the things I miss most about New England, having moved out to California. Here, everything is cookie-cutter suburbia, built in a hurry during the 70s and 80s.
San Jose was founded in 1776. The houses in my neighborhood were built in 190x, mine in 1902.
All of the "mission" cities date from about that time. They're all full of old buildings. (Yes, there are Victorians in Monterey.) Heck, the Sacramento and Central Valley are full of towns that date from the 1850s.
The southern part of Manhattan Island (below all the streets with numbers, like Wall Street) still has a very "old-world" street layout, and if you imagine shorter buildings down there, it's definitely laid-out pre-car. I'm smitten by how twisty and close-in everything is when I get down to that part of the city. Probably due to that, it's also a bit more walkable in certain ways than the rest of the island.
Some of the old Spanish settlements in the South, and especially the old part of San Juan Puerto Rico are very old world feeling.
The numbered street grid in Manhattan was laid out at the beginning of the 19th century. The reason there are so many streets and so few avenues was to facilitate river-to-river movement of freight. The reason for the standardized grid was to make land development more predictable (it's also called the speculative grid for that reason).
> Everything in the world has a U-shaped value curve.
On this point, a good thing to do is to keep some of the ubiquitous everyday things when you want to throw them away. Especially outdated technology like, say, old mobile phones. In 50 years they will become a rarity.
True, but you have to count in your holding costs. Even a roman penny (whatever the equivalent was) is not worth that much because there were so many made. Yes, it's worth more now than it was back then, but if you consider the holding costs for that long, it's a losing proposition.
Holding costs you ask? Well, if you pay $10000 sq/ft/yr for your house (renting, buying, whatever) then it 'costs' you a fraction of that to keep stuff in boxes. Then, there is moving costs, insurance costs etc. I know this is an inane example, but the point is to make people realise that hoarding stuff has very real costs, one of which is the 'mental space' that it takes. We all know the feeling that comes from throwing stuff in the bin - that's the other side of the ledger to hanging onto it.
My point being that buildings are worth keeping, as are mobile phones to a mobile phone enthusiast. But we shouldn't just hang onto stuff because it might be worth something one day.
As an extreme example; 2 weeks ago a friend of mines floor collapsed under the weight of his record collection. Not that most people try to store ~50k - 100k records in one room, but it does show how limited our ability to store stuff is.
Dropping buildings in the midst of the U never gives things the chance to recover and move past fashion. Most buildings discarded are due to the design being old and out of date. But old buildings in a city plant the cities history in time and allow it to tell a story. Remember that 'Gothic' cathedrals were so named because the term was in regular use as a description of something vulgar. The Notre Dame in Paris was at one stage due for demolition until the story of Quasimodo re-inspired the public to keep it - the restoration is still ongoing.
Buildings can be re-purposed and still keep their charm. The mistake is in discarding things just because they are old.
It's very true that not all old things are worth keeping, but the benefit of the doubt must go to the building until the current fashion has moved into the past.
Also, in the case of Berlin, a lot of damaged structures have been reinforced and kept standing as they were at the end of the war. It reminds the city of what can happen if continual efforts towards peace are not made. These scars on the landscape are a constant reminder of the cities turbulent past, and help develop a sense of the story of the city while walking around.
Buildings are the ultimate encapsulator of society - it's where we live, die, make decisions and create history. As such they have a special importance in being kept to tell that story to newcomers.