{"id":1312,"date":"2014-02-14T12:36:47","date_gmt":"2014-02-14T20:36:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/?p=1312"},"modified":"2014-02-14T12:36:47","modified_gmt":"2014-02-14T20:36:47","slug":"john-king-gets-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/?p=1312","title":{"rendered":"John King Gets It"},"content":{"rendered":"

A hatchet-job of a modernization is being proposed for a 1989 Postmodern office building in San Francisco, and John King is objecting.<\/a><\/p>\n

Rightly so. Sure, it looks dated. Guess what? Buildings of that age have always<\/em> looked “dated,” throughout history. A building that’s about 25 to 50 years old (maybe 20 to 40 is a better range) is old enough to be considered “dated” yet not old enough to be considered “historic”.<\/p>\n

It’s not an unsafe structure, or an obviously bad design. It’s just a bit “dated” looking, nothing more. That’s a really bad<\/em> reason for altering its appearance.<\/p>\n

The desire to modernize “dated” buildings is one of the reasons that intact, historically correct period buildings tend to be so rare. This tends to particularly be a problem in the USA, a relatively new country with little sense of history.<\/p>\n

There’s lots of Beaux Arts and Victorian buildings which are beloved today but which were at one time considered dated embarrassments. There’s far more that we regret having torn down or butchered with hatchet-job modernizations.<\/p>\n

I’ve now lived long enough for mid-century modernism to have gone from being “dated” (in the 1980s, at about the same era this building was built) to being considered a classic, historical style of its own. Most of the “tasteful modernizations” of the 1980s are now seen as the hatched jobs I always knew them to be.<\/p>\n

Such regrets should be taken as lessons to be cautious about embarking on modernizing. I’m not saying “never do it”, just “think twice”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A hatchet-job of a modernization is being proposed for a 1989 Postmodern office building in San Francisco, and John King is objecting. Rightly so. Sure, it looks dated. Guess what? Buildings of that age have always looked “dated,” throughout history. A building that’s about 25 to 50 years old (maybe 20 to 40 is a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1312","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1312","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1312"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1312\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}