Back to front ... the historic facade of London's Highbury stadium (left) which will now form part of a luxury property development (right). Photograph: Shaun Botterill/Getty
"Facade-ectomy" - there's a new word. And even if it's actually the opposite of what it means, it's a word that's been gaining some sort of currency recently.
It describes the practice of retaining a building's historic facade, but building something new behind it (technically a "building-ectomy) and it's the becoming the standard technique for replacing damp, crumbling old apartments or offices with glossy, lucrative new ones. The conservation lobby gets to keep its historic character, the developers get to make more money - everybody's happy, right?
Well, not really. Critic Blair Kamin raised the point in the Chicago Tribune this week that rampant facade-ectomies were in danger of turning his precious city into a corporate stage set. "Nobody should confuse this superficial skin job with genuine preservation," he said of a plan to incorporate the facade of the 1920s Farwell Building into a new 40-storey condominium.
It happens all the time in London, too. Just up the road from the Guardian offices, I've been monitoring the progress of Gray's Inn Buildings, on Roseberry Avenue. Not long ago, this grand 19th-century block was a bohemian semi-squat community with a crumbling Blade Runner aesthetic. Now, the facade has been smartened up, and everything behind it replaced with new social housing. For a while, during construction, the facade just stood there alone, the sky visible through its windows. It looked great.
Why not just knock it down and build something brand new? No doubt because it's in a conservation area. While we all want to preserve "historic character" in our external landscape, we don't really want to live and work in it, but is it really possible to compromise like this, or are we just kidding ourselves? If you knock down all of a building except its facade, does that mean you haven't knocked it down at all? Where does the soul of a building lie? And if it caries on, will we ultimately end up with some hollow, Las Vegas-style pastiche of a historic city?
