Building

Should a City Preserve or Destroy Its Historical Buildings?

                In the past, buildings often reflected the culture of a society but today all modern buildings look alike, every city has its architectural character, but the similarities between cities are more obvious these days than in the past. In most large cities, land is scarce and consequently it is very valuable. This has led to the construction of tall buildings which occupy only a small area of land while providing lots of floor space where people can live or work, whereas the historical buildings took a lot of space without living or working area.

                Buildings of this type are made of concrete and steel and using pre-fabricated materials. They don’t use local materials, such as stone, timber or clay, which used to give cities their individual character.

Cities now a day look very much the same and might not know whether you were in Lisbon, Bangkok or Berlin when you are in the street. Other cities have chosen to design unique buildings to ensure they look different. The twin towers in Kuala Lumpur or Opera House in Sydney and Burj Al-Arab in Dubai are examples of this approach, and I agree with this kind of initiative but not on the historical buildings proportion.

                  I strongly agree that historical buildings must be protected and preserved.   Those are memories of our ancestors, those indicate of the past history of the people and places. Our profound emotions are attached to those and we are sentimentally and emotionally involved with those memories of our ancestors. We preserve the photographs of our great grandparents, and even parents for that matter and also we tend to preserve them for our next generation; and as we occasionally witness those and cherish the memories, we protect old historical buildings too.

                  Secondly, history is the study of the past, focused on human activity and leading up to the present day. More...