11 November 2013 Today’s blobfish, tomorrow’s panda: Lincoln Professor suggests caution with heritage

Pity the poor blobfish. Recently voted the world’s ugliest animal, you probably won’t see it gracing the cover of glossy magazines or assuming the role of mascot for such organisations as the World Wildlife Fund. That place belongs to the panda: cute, fluffy, with an affecting gaze, it positively screams ‘save me’.

The sentiment behind the contrasting aesthetic appeal and subsequent fortunes of the blobfish and the panda has parallels with our relationship to architecture and heritage. That’s according to Lincoln University’s Professor of Landscape Architecture, Jacky Bowring.

Speaking at the Design for Conservation Workshop and Symposium held at Lincoln University last week, Professor Bowring gave a presentation entitled The Conservation of Difficult Heritage: Landscape’s Blobfish in which she argued that it is our values which determine our relationship or feelings about certain buildings, yet these values are anything but universal. Rather, they change over time.

“When you’re cute everybody wants to save you,” she said. “But something may only be seen as unappealing because it doesn’t fit with prevailing concepts of beauty. Values change and, as such, ideas of beauty have been fluid across centuries.”

To illustrate her point, Professor Bowring noted how, as recently as the 1970s, the Christchurch Art Centre was nearly demolished due to the prevailing ideas of the time. It was only thanks to the Civic Trust that it survived. Yet restoration post-earthquakes is now considered of the utmost importance.

To emphasise the point, Professor Bowring also illustrated how these changing aesthetic values reveal themselves in our relationship with the natural world.

“It’s quite possible that a now iconic image such as Mitre Peak could have filled people with horror and easily joined ‘Team Blobfish’. In the early 1700s, for instance, mountains could be seen as a disfiguration of nature. Two centuries later, writers and poets are singing their praises,” says Professor Bowring.

Underwritten in Professor Bowring’s presentation is the need to be more aware of our changing values as they relate to notions of beauty when it comes to the question of conservation and restoration.

“Even if a particular building or style of architecture is considered ugly now, it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t merit conservation. We have a responsibility not to let prevailing views threaten those buildings that fall outside the pale.”

Another way in which landscape or architecture may come to be considered ugly or difficult is through negative historical associations. Examples of this being the now demolished Sunnyside Hospital.

Professor Bowring believes that the sites where the CTV and PGC buildings once stood, for example, will become Christchurch examples of “history that hurts.” The challenge then is how we conserve or represent this space.

“Ultimately, any landscape design related to ‘history that hurts’ will succeed relative to how it makes us feel,” she said.