HISTORIC WHITE ELEPHANTS
Historic preservationists often appeal to aesthetics: We should save this old house, or old neighborhood, because it's beautiful. (I discuss aesthetic land-use conflicts in chapter five of The Substance of Style, excerpted here.) But what if the old house is not so attractive, even ugly, or at least in bad taste? That's the question raised by this NYT article on the latest land use conflict in Woodside, California:
HAVE you ever yearned to live in Spanish Colonial Revival splendor, rattling around a 17,000-square-foot, 14-bedroom, 13 1/2-bath baronial mansion with deliciously thick stucco walls and an impeccable provenance?
If so, Steve Jobs may have a deal for you.
In what could become America's highest-profile tear-down, Mr. Jobs, the Apple and Pixar chief executive, is seeking this town's permission to hit the delete button on the 1926 Daniel C. Jackling estate, a moldering manse designed by George Washington Smith, the architect who created the look of Montecito and Santa Barbara in the 1920's.
The house, built for Mr. Jackling, a copper magnate who died in 1956, sits on six wooded acres that Mr. Jobs, then 29, purchased in 1983. Preservationists have deemed the house historic, an important example of Spanish Colonial Revival architecture, one that currently stands empty and derelict at the end of a stone-lined cul-de-sac. Mr. Jobs, however, can't abide the place. He recently described it publicly as "one of the biggest abominations of a house I've ever seen."