Quote:
Originally Posted by Keith P.
It's like most things in life - it depends. Few people would want architectural masterpieces torn down. There are damn few of those in Halifax though. Things like the Dennis fall into the middle ground - old, stone-built (a plus), mildly interesting architecturally, but not well kept up and as anyone who has been sentenced to work in it for any length of time can attest, a lousy, totally obsolete building from a functional standpoint. You can argue that case either way. But when you get into the majority of buildings that are getting torn down, it is an improvement. The reality is that economically it is not practical to save every old structure and restore it. That is the thinking that led to downtown not having anything built in over 20 years, and it is the reality that even those now-old buildings were constructed in during the 1800s and early 1900s - they replaced stables, older buildings from the 1800s whose use had been outlived, etc. You cannot stop progress.
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A building is a shell though, fundamentally, and there's nothing about urban commercial or residential buildings from the past couple of centuries that render them obsolete except building systems like electrical, heating, etc. A well-built structure should last centuries and the interiors can be reconfigured. That's why there are European cities almost entirely comprised of buildings 100-400 years old. That's why
things like this are feasible (I've posted this a zillion times but it's such a great example of a building brought back from a state of disrepair far in excess of anything in Halifax right now).
The Dennis is a good example of that. I have no doubt it was a dismal building to work in in its most recent decades, but the entire interior has been stripped out. There's nothing left--the inside of that building is pretty much a blank canvas.