Tag: historic preservation

A world-heritage disneyland

On March 15, 2020

The city of Malacca (alternately spelled Melaka) was, for hundreds of years, one of the most important cities of southeast Asia. Located near the southern end of the Malay Peninsula, in what is now Malaysia, the city faces the Straits of Malacca, the sea route from China to the Indian Ocean. In the early 15^th century, a great fleet commanded by Ming Chinese admiral Zheng He passed this way several times. The rulers of the Sultanate of Malacca were some of the first southeast Asian rulers to convert to Islam. In the colonial period, the city was variously ruled by the Portuguese, Dutch, English, and Japanese, before the Federation of Malaya gained independence in 1957.

In more recent times, Malacca has declined in importance, being surpassed by Singapore to the south and Kuala Lumpur to the north. The city’s port was located in its river, but the river silted up and the site was in any event unsuitable for the large cranes needed for container-based shipping after World War II. More recently, the city has reinvented itself as a tourist destination. UNESCO declared the town center of Malacca a World Heritage Site in 2008 (a dual-listing with George Town to the north).

Malacca has been heavily developed for tourism. The town center has a nice hill with a ruined Portuguese church on top, but the developers felt that they also had to build an amusement park-style rotating tower ride nearby for some reason. Immediately adjacent to the historic town center is a giant shopping mall with a huge parking lot. To the north, a monorail runs in a loop along the riverfront. I have a feeling that the urban planning board of Malacca decided to build this particular attraction after watching the “Monorail Song” clip from The Simpsons episode “Marge vs. the Monorail.” (They should have watched the end of the episode.)

View of the monorail along the Malacca riverfront.

Long-tailed macaques (Macaca fascicularis) stalking along the elevated trackway of the monorail.

The monorail is emblematic of how touristy and over-commercialized Malacca has become. It isn’t tacky for the most part, but I don’t feel that the commercialization is respectful of the culture and heritage of this place. The heritage that is preserved has been over-preserved. The ruins of erstwhile empires in Malacca are too obviously stabilized. The graves of heroes of the Sultanate period have been covered with latex paint. A whole bastion of the city’s defenses has been reconstructed, but the interpretive signs act like it is the real thing. Overall, Malacca is so touristy that it feels more like a historical disneyland than one of southeast Asia’s great cities.

Signs like this along the riverfront advise tourists how to take the exact same photos as everybody else.

A rotating elevator-tower near the historic center of Malacca.

A wall announcing that the town center is a World Heritage Site.

Pickled history

By Willy

On January 19, 2020

In USA

In the United States, tomorrow will be a national holiday for the birthday(-ish) of prominent civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1929. Thirty-nine years later, Dr. King was assassinated on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, when he was in the city for a sanitation workers’ strike.

More than fifty years after King’s death, the Lorraine Motel still exists – sort of. The building, no longer a functioning motel, has been incorporated into the National Civil Rights Museum, which opened in 1991 and reopened after a $27-million renovation in 2014. The district around the motel was struggling economically in 1968 when King has shot, but since then it has been aggressively gentrified. (When I visited the neighborhood in late 2014, there was even an American Apparel store a couple of blocks from the former hotel, although it appears to have since closed, along with the struggling brand’s other brick-and-mortar stores.)

The Lorraine Motel, as incorporated into the National Civil Rights Museum.

Like the surrounding neighborhood, the motel is also gentrified. The balcony where King was shot has been preserved, but it is an island of a heritage structure surrounded by a new pedestrian walkway, a parking lot, and new museum buildings. Visiting the motel shortly after the $27-million renovation, I could hardly imagine what the place looked like in 1968.

The fateful balcony where King was shot, marked by a commemorate wreath.

A classic car parked below room 306.

The over-preservation of the Lorraine Motel gives a false impression of what the place was like when King was shot there. Its gentrification elides the very real economic problems the neighborhood was facing in 1968. It is as if the building has been pickled and sealed in a glass jar, without any of its context.

There is a certain sad irony that this has happened to the place where Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot while in the midst of organizing the Poor People’s Campaign, which was to include a march on Washington by the nation’s poor. This irony was not lost on the last resident of the Lorraine Motel, Jacqueline Smith, who was evicted in 1988 before the building was converted into a museum. Since then, she has protested the museum from across the street. “Gentrification is a violation of civil rights,” one of her signs said in 2014. Don’t spend $27 million on the museum renovation and $0 for the poor, another sign said; “Use the money as Dr. King would have wanted.”

The spirit of Gothic and Notre Dame of Paris

By Willy

On April 17, 2019

In Archeology and monuments

Notre Dame on fire. (Source: Wandrille de Préville on Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA-4.0)

On Monday this week, the iconic Notre Dame Cathedral of Paris caught on fire. In what appears to have been a freak accident related to restoration work going on at the time, the cathedral’s medieval wooden roof caught fire and was totally destroyed. Initial news reports indicated that the entire church would be destroyed, but the bell towers were spared and the stone vaults over the nave remain mostly intact.

With this much of the structure remaining, it is obvious that the great church can and should be rebuilt. While the structure was still smoldering, French President Emmanuel Macron vowed that the people of France would rebuild the beloved cathedral.

How to go about the reconstruction is another question. It will clearly be an expensive undertaking that will entail many difficult technical and aesthetic questions. What materials and techniques should be used for the reconstruction? And what should it look like?

Some articles and editorials I have read assert that the church should be rebuilt exactly as it was before, even using the very same techniques used in the 12^th and 13^th centuries, such as erecting giant wooden frames in the nave for reconstructing the damaged sections of the vaults. I do not see the point of this. The High Middle Ages, when Notre Dame of Paris was built, was an era of technological innovation, with extensive use of machinery and even fossil fuels. If they could know, the master builders of Notre Dame would understand if we used steel scaffolding to rebuild their church.

In the same way, I feel that it is important that the rebuilt roof of Notre Dame should not be a slavish copy of the original. The spirit of Gothic architecture is one of creativity and inventiveness. President Macron expressed this spirit well when he declared that Notre Dame would be rebuilt more beautiful than before. Doing otherwise would be contrary to the spirit of Gothic and the High Middle Ages.

Nineteenth-century engraving of Notre Dame Cathedral by Alfred-Alexanre Delauney. (Source: Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

Nineteenth-century engraving of Notre Dame Cathedral by Alfred-Alexandre Delauney. (Source: Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

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Tag: historic preservation (Page 1 of 2)

A world-heritage disneyland

Pickled history

The spirit of Gothic and Notre Dame of Paris

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