Violette de la Selle and Wes Hiatt: Keep the Change

Keep the Change foregrounds the active architectural and urban change in Manhattan’s Lower East Side and Chinatown. To expand the scope of what is typically considered historic preservation, representative buildings in these neighborhoods are drawn across time periods to convey how changes in use and tenancy interact with the building matter, interior and exterior. Composite drawings and documentary photographs of each case study capture the extent of transformation that the buildings sustain—operations on and within the shell. 

The project investigates how to best protect the LES and Chinatown—among the city’s last affordable neighborhoods—from an ongoing wave of indiscriminate demolition in the face of intense development pressures, a dearth of affordable housing, and construction-related carbon consumption. For two centuries, this area in Manhattan has undergone waves of growth and recession with evident transformations to its physical fabric across scales. Nevertheless, many 19th century buildings endure, bearing ample alterations. Keep the Change suggests that the incremental change exhibited here can serve as a model of how to manage the architectural and urban evolution necessary to meet future demands.

Given its breadth and jurisdiction, New York City’s Landmark Preservation Commission (LPC) may offer a desirable legal bulwark against imminent change and the threat of demolition. However, LPC’s process privileges façade restoration above pragmatic considerations such as best use, economic viability, or the conservation of building material. Such an approach is at odds with the way change has defined these neighborhoods for centuries: incessant, ad-hoc interventions being formed by practical matters of economy, self-determination, and individual taste. This dynamic, never-finished condition suggests the need for new preservation policies that may spur, instead of limit, these modes of change.

Safeguarding the LES and Chinatown demands a new model of change management, in which historic preservation, community development, and carbon conservation do not compete but collaborate. The typical building stock registers a series of spontaneous alterations induced by dramatic changes in population, subsequent reformist policies to address overcrowding, and shifts in commercial activity. This evolution points to another method of preservation, one in which mutation and change continually rejuvenate structures for their occupants. 

Keep the Change is the second stage of a two-part research and design project “Changing Change: Integrating Strategies of Preservation and Change in the Lower East Side and Chinatown”. Over two exhibitions and accompanying programming, this project considers how disparate urban policy objectives—related to historic preservation, affordable housing, and environmental resilience—draw on different tactics to reach the same outcome of conserving existing buildings for dynamic use. In so doing, the project claims a role for architects in the broader preservation discourse. As designers, technical thinkers, and skilled coordinators of multiple parties, architects are uniquely positioned to help imagine these buildings’ future.

Keep the Change is supported by the Architecture + Design Independent Projects program, a grant partnership of the New York State Council on the Arts and The Architectural League of New York.

Independent Projects grants are made possible with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State legislature.