Ashby says many nineteenth-century buildings have been successfully rehabilitated, though often at great expense. Likewise, 1950s and 1960s buildings need updates, but the challenges are technical as well as aesthetic. Modernism was “a period of invention and experimentation, and some of these experiments have failed,” Ashby says. Today, what do we do with buildings made of Zenitherm, asbestos, and Formica?
And, as Ashby points out, the biggest problem is one of perception: “When we see things that are familiar to us from our childhood, we tend not to think of them as heritage.” Peering at Trent’s Science Building, third-year student Carolina Santana captures a popular attitude in one dismissive phrase: “There’s no beauty at all.”
