I don't like watching beautiful buildings fall into decay. Cities like Gary and Detroit, to name a few, are filled with amazing architecture from better days gone by, buildings that are now crumbling in the wake of suburbanization and economic downturn. I recently discovered Forgotten Detroit (via David Koyzis), a web site dedicated to documenting theaters, train stations, hotels and other formerly beautiful spaces that are disintegrating throughout the city.
For example, below is the exterior and the waiting room of Michigan Central Depot, a stunning and imposing train station that hasn't been used since the late 80s.
I recognize that these kinds of buildings are expensive to renovate and that it's most often cheaper to simply build a new structure entirely. And I know that a lot of people think that folks like me are too sentimental about old buildings.
But when we continually tear down historic buildings, we slowly erase tangible links to our past. We begin to forget our stories--and they become less real to us--when we can no longer see them. And it is in our stories that we find identity, so we are, in a sense, losing our identity.
In their place, we build other identity-forming structures that aren't nearly so beautiful and that tell a remarkably different story about what it means to be human.
In the long run, we save a bit of money initially by building new buildings (as these cheaply built buildings will probably cost us more), but we lose our history and identity as people along the way--which just doesn't seem like a good deal to me.
