Futurist rhetoric in us historic preservation: A review of current practice

Historic Preservation is an inherently retrospective discipline. The evaluation of the tangible manifestations of the cultural environment surrounding us is solely based on hindsight. At the same time the heritage profession has espoused a futurist stance by arguing that the heritage sites need to be managed and preserved in a spirit of altruistic stewardship for the benefit of future generations. This paper examines the notion of “preserving the past for the future”, will assess its ubiquity of the phraseology and attempt to trace its origins and diachronic development. It will posit that the steep rise in popularity of futurist positioning statements, titles of publications and slogans on heritage posters is connected with a public perception of uncertainty about the present and the immediate future, and a concomitant “flight” into the largely nostalgic perception of the past.