If you think about the definition of architecture as the destruction of a place, it radically changes your inhibitions toward the protection of the past.
After all, anything that is built necessarily replaces the absence of that thing. Even a renovation of an existing building changes what was once there and thus "destroys" the space that was created by the old,unrenovated building.
The above images are from a design idea that I presented for a dormitory in Barcelona, Spain in the neighborhood of Gracia. On the site was a one story bar that was quite unimpressive when compared to other establishments in the surrounding area. It was also much shorter than the average building height for the area and lacked many of the qualities that made the neighborhood charming both aesthically and historically. It seemed a good candidate for removal.
In a city that seems to crave public space (on Sunday afternoons every public space is filled with people enjoying walks through the city) I chose to give half of my building footprint back to the plaza and open it up to the public. The building also featured balcony spaces for every flat(typical for mediterranean architecture) and matched both the height and scale of the historically registered buildings on the plaza. My design was met with criticism especially coming from two professors who had lived in the neighborhood who remarked that my design essentially changed the place it was in.
Perhaps this is the point of Architecture. Every place around us is in a state of gradual change that can neither be captured nor frozen and the laws of thermodynamics tell us that the change is necessarily for the worse. Architecture resists that force of decay and entropy to replace the destruction caused by time in nature with shelter for humankind.
