One of the most hotly contested battlegrounds in the debate between avant-garde modernists and new traditionalists concerns new construction in historic settings, whether additions to protected buildings or infill projects in historic districts. Traditional architects and neighborhood activists have found common cause in opposing aggressively modernist new construction in such settings proposed by high-profile “star” architects. That such interventions are winning approval from leading preservation authorities is dismaying, but the reasons given for these decisions are even more disturbing.
 
Robert Tierney, Chairman of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, referring to a recently proposed modernist neighbor for an early twentieth-century Georgian Revival townhouse in Manhattan’s Upper East Side Historic District, declared that such an intervention might be considered “a landmark for the future” and visibly “of its time, of the twenty-first century.”¹ Rather than seeing the Commission’s role as defender of the character of the historic district, the Chairman apparently sees its role as promoter of avant-garde architectural experimentation. For Tierney, the architect’s design—the façade features a four-story-high blank slab of limestone and is in every respect except size in conspicuous contrast with its historic neighbors—represents “our time” in ways that, presumably, an addition in the style of the original building would not. Other recent additions to New York landmarks, such as Norman Foster’s Hearst Tower and Renzo Piano’s additions to the Morgan Library, have been similarly justified, despite their jarring contrast with their respective monuments. It is the contrast itself, the difference expressed between “our time” and “that other time” which seems so exciting to these preservation authorities. Guardians of historic centers in other cities, notably Charleston, have followed a similar logic, apparently in the belief that new construction more in character with the historic setting would produce an unwanted uniformity, reducing the city to a “simulated architectural environment” or museum.²