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We replaced our old buildings with glass boxes and called it progress
I taught in three universities and each one eventually demolished something handsome to build an atrium. The new structure photographs beautifully and echoes like a cave. Nobody learns any better inside it. A city used to be a record of what its people valued. Now it is a portfolio. The Victorian bank, the small library, the corner shop, all come down, and what rises in their place is the same blue glass slab with a coffee chain on the ground floor. It could be anywhere on earth, which is precisely the problem. I am not asking for nostalgia. I am asking for the modest admission that a building can be old and still better than whatever replaces it. My former colleagues called this reactionary. I called their buildings forgettable, and I had tenure, so I got to say it out loud.4