Review: Historic Preservation Theory: An Anthology, Readings from the 18th to the 21st Century

Jorge Otero-Pailos’s collection is an important contribution to historic preservation’s intellectual infrastructure. Many well-known texts are included; others are presented in valuable English translation (e.g., works by Camillo Boito and Gustavo Giovannoni, who are both important to my own teaching). Other pieces are novel and revelatory (Countee Cullen’s 1925 poem; Francis Lieber’s 1863 wartime policy), and some well-known works are reset in the context of preservation’s intellectual history (from Walter Benjamin and Martin Heidegger to Kevin Lynch and Jane Jacobs). In comparison to previous preservation theory anthologies and analyses, Historic Preservation Theory is a leap ahead in number, variety, and geographical-disciplinary-perspectival diversity. The collection rightly and assertively goes beyond the literature on preservation per se, linking developments in preservation thinking to other narratives of architectural culture, cultural policy, and intellectual history. The anthology is unquestionably valuable, diverse yet directed in its choices, and well crafted. However, the question that persisted...