In my 28-plus years in the field I have been through many organizational spasms that attempt to inject regularity and predictability into the task of saving buildings and then repurposing them for the future. Invariably we say “we have to stop spending all of our time putting out brush fires,” which means that we are always REACTING to crises. We get tired of being reactive. This is a normal impulse – we want to be able to work proactively and we want to be able to plan and allocate our work more efficiently.

These are laudable goals and often the efforts are productive. But at some level they are designed to fail, because at some level the heritage conservationist is a firefighter. A firefighter can plan ahead by having the best equipment, a comprehensive survey of the surroundings, and extensive training. But a firefighter cannot predict when and how a fire will break out.

The car grudgingly slows but refuses to halt completely at the intersection, inching forward as I walk,  its bumper harboring death lust for my Achilles tendon.  The heat is stifling.  I miss the civilized European lands where I spent these last five weeks, a residency in Krems,  Austria.  During the Marillen (apricot) festival the last day of our trip the cars got reckless, but these were rentals driven by genetic cousins of the Chicago driver nipping my heel. Usually the pedestrian and cyclist were royalty, stopping even highway traffic with a simple step towards the zebra striped pavement.  I miss that.  The cars were smaller and less frequent.  Here I am pursued by a line of SUVs a block long watching a giant Cadillac idle outside Jewel on Ozone Action Day.  It feels like I am being forced to watch pornography.

The great American modernist architect Barry Byrne commiserated with his Bauhaus colleague Lyonel Feininger in 1926 that the term “modern” was inaccurate and unfortunate. Within a decade the “modern” revolt against style had itself become a style and Byrne and Feininger were proved right. What does “modern” mean when the word connotes the latest thing but has been used to describe such trends for a century? We can use the word “contemporary” to distinguish between current design trends and the “modern” movement of the 20th century, but the problem with both terms is that they slide over time – they are fancy ways of saying “now” and thus are awkward when we make them mean “then.”