Jargon Watch: Urban Taxidermy
From the archives, a look at a problem with preservation.
I was interviewed by Patricia Kell of the National Trust for Canada for their new “Heritage is Living” podcast, and listened to it on the train home from Montreal on Sunday. I was embarrassed to hear at about 40 minutes that my brain froze! I was talking about “urban taxidermy,” a term coined by architect and landscape architect Robert Allsopp, and I couldn’t remember his name. Bob is a friend and was actually in the next train car at the time. I went back to apologize, and today, I hit the Wayback Machine (of course, it had been deleted from Treehugger) to find the article I wrote about him and the term back in 2016. Sorry, Bob!
There are many reasons why old buildings are such an important part of the fabric of our cities. One reason I keep writing about is that they support all kinds of businesses; Jane Jacobs noted that cities need “a good lot of plain, ordinary, low-value old buildings, including some rundown old buildings.” That’s where the rents are lower and where the tattoo parlour or record store can survive. Fighting to preserve old buildings is not about being a nostalgist or NIMBY, as it is often claimed these days; It is about preserving a walkable, vibrant streetscape where people want to be.
In Toronto, there is an interesting experiment going on, where the front 30 feet of existing old buildings are preserved (so it is much more than just façadism) and new condos are built behind and above, in an attempt to preserve the streetscape. But does it work?
Writing in Toronto’s NOW magazine, landscape architect, planner and architect (yes, he is all three) Robert Allsopp of DTAH writes that while we may be saving bits of our old buildings, we are losing the true character of the street. He calls it Urban Taxidermy.
My definition of urban taxidermy: the art of preserving, stuffing and mounting buildings for lifelike effect to simulate an intrinsic social, cultural or commercial vitality.
Urban taxidermy seems to be the most popular current compromise between complete heritage preservation and massive, wholesale redevelopment. Instead of facades, we are keeping large pieces of a building's fabric, but what remains gives only the illusion of a vital, fully functioning, street-related structure. What once sustained street life is being replaced by inert material.
Collectively, these "dead" buildings offer a streetscape diorama. They show well on Google Street View but have little capacity to generate the social interaction of street life when the only access is through the mall. Like a diorama, they require suspension of disbelief.
Is it worth keeping these buildings? Yes, of course, but do we have to kill, stuff and mount them for them to survive? They are more than historical artifacts, bricks-and-mortar facades with finely detailed sills and cornices. They are part of an economic, social and cultural ecology that cannot be disassembled.
This is such a hard one. On the one hand, it is a clear demonstration to those market urbanists who despise heritage preservation as an impediment to development that you can have both; on the other hand, what are we actually preserving? Bricks and mortar or the things that make the street interesting and vibrant?
Perhaps in a few years when all the condos built on top are fully occupied, they will have the population density to support more interesting uses than just banks or drug stores. Something lively, like a Red Lobster.
See also Why our cities are becoming a corporate monoculture
This was pretty much the established “preservation” technique in Moscow in the late 1990s which to my surprise was still much as it had been for a century. I eventually realized that the USSR did not have the resources to rebuild its new capital while also reforming the economy and society, fighting its Civil War, a World War, and a Cold War. It’s still seen in Washington DC as well interacting in curious ways with the building height limits.