The Case for Abolishing Historic Building Preservation

Abstract The essay was initially broadcast in approximately 1979 as a radio feature by a Berlin radio station and subsequently published in 1980 in ARCH+, a magazine for architecture and urbanism that was founded in 1967 by students and faculty of the University of Stuttgart. The essay argues for abolishing any official, municipal, and state-wide politics addressing the preservation and conservation of historical buildings. After briefly surveying the contemporary tendency to list ever more buildings threatened with demolition by urban developments, Hoffmann-Axthelm analyzes the history of preservation in Germany. The loss or disappearance of a clear notion of the historical identity of monuments in the early twentieth century prompted many preservation initiatives later in the century, even for buildings such as workers’ housing, factories and similar, which were not traditionally regarded as monuments. Yet what looks like a success story is, in reality, often the usurpation of preservation efforts by municipal and state-wide politics in conjunction with the construction industry and financial interests, a knot that cannot be untied but only cut by abolishing any official politics of preservation of historic buildings.