Split Is a Place Which Began as Something Else Entirely From What It Is Today, Yet Eats in the New Clothing of Another Age, More Juxtaposition Than Reinvention.
How will the city of tomorrow adapt and reuse the city of today? I can’t think we ask that question broadly enough, and our day-to-day, property-specific incrementalism can readily overshoot the greatest lessons from history. A hometown just to illustrate transported me from Seattle to Croatia for inspiration about why we should think beyond limited geographies, time frames and lifetimes when we discuss urban redevelopment options.
Recently, the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Seattle-based Preservation Green Lab made urbanist media headlines (including Emily Badger’s Atlantic Cities story) using a report stating the environmental great things about green retrofits of historic buildings, in comparison with new, state-of-the-art, energy-efficient construction. A local church restored as townhouses joined their list of intriguing Seattle adaptive reuse projects typical of national trends.
Almost simultaneously, Seattle Times columnist Nicole Brodeur described a protest-free goodbye to some neighborhood icon in my Seattle neighborhood. A 112-year-old repair garage and offices (demolished last Friday) will soon become the nostalgically named Pike Station, made up of new townhouses, complete with a courtyard and intermixed retail.
The purported upshot with the local story, that the building were built with a good life and the new me is commendable, is clear in the headline: “Sometimes it’s OK to allow an old landmark go.”
How did our predecessors handle these problems in simpler times, when reuse would have been a practical necessity? What can we study from those stories? As our surroundings evolve, will we create incentives and inspiration for transformational places that are sustainable in form, function and attention to the past?
When considering these questions, there is certainly one place that needs a hard look: Split, Croatia. Amid the old town center and ruins with the retirement palace of the Roman Emperor Diocletian, adaptive reuse is obvious. Split is a place which began as something else entirely from what it is today, yet thrives on in the new clothing of another age, more juxtaposition than reinvention. I used to be lucky enough to first visit Split in 1968, inside the old Yugoslavia, and to return often times in the years that followed. Today, if you planning to come in Split you are able to stay in Split hotel.
It’s not a stretch to state that its impressionable story explains my legal work in urban redevelopment. There, the survival and reuse of historic elements tell an invaluable tale of sustainability.
After that 300 A.D., on the site of Split’s town center, workers completed Diocletian’s Palace. Diocletian was the first Roman Emperor to voluntarily abdicate, and retire in the current sense; he viewed the palace being a purposeful respite from power in his home region, possibly for medical reasons.
After Diocletian’s death, the palace was initially a refuge for exiled imperial family members. Then, after destruction with the nearby Roman city of Salona by the Avars and Slavs at the outset of the 7th century, the palace was a shelter for fleeing citizens, later a medieval town, a Renaissance regional center, and in the end a major city, with core aspects of the palace still prominent today.
How was this scene created? In simple terms, the palace, which spanned almost 10 acres, contained enough aspects of classical urbanity-including the gridded crossroads of a military camp (the original castrum and its standard roads, the decumanus and cardo), along with several ceremonial spaces and religious structures-that when repopulated as soon as the destruction of Salona, it became easily adaptable to what we now consider urban uses.
This unintentional convertibility shows a fascinating evolution over time. A mausoleum was a cathedral, the cardo became the winding medieval street that is still today, the crossing with the decumanus and cardo at the peristyle (a classical courtyard beneath the Emperor’s apartments) became a baptistry, public square and historic urban center, along with the Emperor’s apartments became the structural framework of your residential area.
Due to this fascinating progression, Split has drawn visitors for centuries. The Scottish architect Robert Adam profiled its unrivaled preservation of Roman architecture in 1764, through collected drawings, viewable here, often known as inspiration for the Georgian architectural tradition of areas of London, Bath and Bristol.
Within the last century, many excavations and publications by local and American teams have admirably documented the palace’s background transformation (including the often cited work of Jerko and Tomas Marasovic). In the 1970 book, the Marasovic brothers advocated a universal message poor continuing investigation, discovery and restoration to “ensuring…renewed function inside context of a modern urban community.”
The confluence of past and provide discussed here is not often mentioned inside the American dialogue. This is a missed opportunity. I believe that visiting Diocletian’s Palace and reflecting how the old can blend (and, in fact, be adapted to suit) the modern provides incomparable perspective.
This may add value to today’s discussion of familiar building restoration approaches, or perhaps already innovative, largely replacement-style redevelopment of areas just like a former military base, an airport (e.g. the previous Stapleton Airport in Denver), or perhaps an institutional campus. The scale of adaptation in Split confirms how humans may be at home and enriched by large-scale incorporation of history.
In other cities, some historic urban cores survive, where there are many examples, from Istanbul to Venice to Jerusalem. Old towns, often within formerly defensive walls, become functional, large-scale artifacts, some evolved urban areas and some tourist meccas. In contrast to Split, they were always, first and foremost, cities or towns.
Continuing to move forward, we should design and regulate in a fashion that the inadvertence described here becomes more purposeful, enabling sustainable reuse on a broader scale. Examples include zoning and building code provisions that anticipate land assembly and not property-by-property approaches that allow for convertible uses in buildings, a substantial mixture of old and new materials, along with the outright recognition that both public and private spaces can realize new uses over time.
Lenders, often the true drivers of development, should understand the benefits of such reactivated places. Indeed, some states and cities have policies encouraging the concept of adaptive reuse.
Throughout history, cities have fulfilled central cultural, economic and religious roles as both centers of settlement and qualitative measures of human habitat. To reinvent them (or juxtapose the very best of the past), we need to know where we have been and where we are going, at more than a building scale, writes tagza.com.
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