The past is always with us, the future is in our hands

I saw the recent TV programme about the rebuilding of Notre Dame after the horrendous fire. The attention to detail was extraordinary. They attempted, and seemingly succeeded, to exactly replace everything destroyed with a precise replica. It was an astonishing achievement technically but also a defiant one emotionally.

I remember the opening of the new Coventry Cathedral and feeling an overwhelming sense of failure. The Luftwaffe had won, the building they burned to the ground was gone forever except for a few memorial bits left. The new Cathedral bore no resemblance to its predecessor. Like it or not it wasn’t a confident “We will not be beaten” statement. It was “You won”.

Making a judgement about what to preserve/replace and what to demolish is subjective. Fortunately we didn’t have to make it with St Paul’s Cathedral which miraculously survived the Blitz. Would we have rebuilt it stone for stone? Coventry suggests perhaps not.

We are all guardians of the past and creators of the future, with architecture especially but also in a myriad of the daily decisions we make. We cannot learn from the past if we destroy it and we cannot influence the future if we forget that in part we are responsible for how it evolves in the decisions we make today.