This week’s column was sparked by a book I’ve been reading: Breakneck by Dan Wang. The book examines how societies advance, particularly the United States and China, but one of its most instructive examples comes from somewhere else entirely.
It’s Japan, and the approach to historic preservation there.
When people talk about historic preservation here in the states, they usually mean one thing — protect what exists. Maintain it. Stabilize it. Don’t change it.
That approach has value, but it’s also incomplete. Preservation can mean something else entirely, and that distinction matters as communities grapple with how to balance history, growth, and adaptation.
A useful case study is the Ise Grand Shrine, one of the most sacred Shinto sites in Japan. First constructed around 690 A.D., the shrine is famous not for how long it has stood, but for the fact that every 20 years it is completely rebuilt.
Not renovated. Not reinforced. Rebuilt from the ground up.
The materials are the same. The design is unchanged. The techniques are traditional. This process has been repeated for more than 1,300 years. The structure standing today is both ancient and brand new, having been reconstructed more than 60 times.
This isn’t a failure of preservation. It’s the point. And I think it’s the one we often miss.
At Ise, the historic asset isn’t the wood. It’s the process. The shrine survives because the knowledge required to build it never disappears. Carpenters are trained by rebuilding it. Skills are passed down through repetition. Craft is preserved through practice, not documentation. No one needs a plaque to explain how it was done, because the doing never stops.
That stands in sharp contrast to how preservation often works in the United States. Here, preservation tends to mean prohibition.
No demolition. No deviation. No alteration beyond what a rulebook allows.
Buildings are locked to a specific historical moment, and communities act surprised when they become too expensive to maintain, too brittle to adapt, or too politically difficult to touch.
We preserve the shell while allowing the skills, trades, and institutional knowledge that created it to disappear. That isn’t preservation. It’s curation — like in a museum.
I often hear people talk about the character of old houses and new ones. If you look at how homes were built or the way they looked in the earliest days of the United States, to the 1800s, then 1900s — there were pretty significant swings.
Stylistically it’s easy to identify homes that were built in different eras of our nation’s history. But after the 1960s things started looking a lot more uniform. That really accelerated after the 1980s and 90s. Compare a home that was built in the 1990s, to one built in the 2000s, 2010s, to 2020s, and the only way to meaningfully distinguish between them will be the degree to which they’ve decayed or aged.
Getting back to that old vs. new character comment and tying it to this idea of historic preservation through action — it’s easy to see how we wound up with what’s often described on social media as “soulless housing.” You know, Millennial Grey everything, open concept spaces, and sparsely decorated homes in design magazines and Pinterest boards.
This is where modern preservation often breaks down. We’ve become far better at stopping change than at carrying tradition forward. By treating historic buildings as untouchable endpoints instead of chapters in a longer story of building and rebuilding, we’ve severed the link between past practice and present construction.
When that cycle stopped — when repetition, craft, and experimentation were replaced by rigid rules and lowest-common-denominator construction — we didn’t lose history. We lost continuity.
At Ise, failure is avoided by design. Each generation learns by doing. In the U.S., failure is often baked in because we expect preservation to succeed without repetition, training, or flexibility. We guard the object while neglecting the process that made it possible.
The lesson here isn’t that every historic structure should be rebuilt every 20 years. It’s that preservation does not have to mean stagnation. If the goal is to carry history forward, freezing it in place may be one of the least durable strategies available.
For communities wrestling with preservation boards, zoning fights, and adaptive reuse debates, the takeaway is straightforward, even if a smidge uncomfortable. Protecting history requires investment in practice, not just protection of artifacts. It requires passing down methods, standards, and expectations. Not simply locking buildings behind glass.
Preservation doesn’t have to mean refusing change, and honoring history doesn’t require locking it behind glass. The lesson here is that preservation can and should be a living practice. One that’s repeated through new construction practices, as much as it is through rehabilitation efforts. Because the knowledge that’s been lost over the last 50 years will eventually be lost for good if it’s not taught or part of how we build new.
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