Topic 65

65. Should a city try to preserve its old, historic buildings or destroy them and replace them with modern buildings? Use specific reasons and examples to support your opinion.

DIFFERENT DECEISION IN DISTINCTIVE CIRCUMSTANCES

Whether should a city preserve its ancient, valuable, historic architectures or topple down them and replace them with modern buildings depends upon special cases. With respect to architectures that have invaluable meaning and stand for a certain image of a station, it is recommended that people should preserve them. However, with respect to buildings that are only residential places and do not have historic meanings, people may replace them with modern plaza.

As a threshold matter, if ancient architectures represent special values in the history of a city, or a country as whole, people should make full lengths to protect them from being destroyed. It is especially true of ancient nations. For example, in the city of Beijing, the capital of China, the Imperial Palace is one of the eldest building masses in that district. There are numerous national treasures in Imperial Palace. The wall of the palace is made up of peculiar chemical material which cannot be reproduced today because techniques of producing have been lost forever. Thus, the walls have a good value of researches. Furthermore, the patterns of the palace are typical designs of that period, form which people in contemporary will learn much about customs in that time.

Secondly, some historic buildings should be preserved, though they may seem to be ragged and shabby. Take the ancient arena in Roma. That arena stands for special spirits of the time in the history of Italy. From painstaking researches of archeologists who are studying the arena, we get to know duel is one of the popular activities of that period. People who lived in that period took the person who could win any one in battlefield was the hero of their nation. From these discoveries, we can have a full image of how culture develops from the past to the present. Thus, in such cases, people should preserve ancient architectures as well.

Nevertheless, in other cases, such as useless, residential places, it is better for a city to cast down old buildings and construct modern architectures that can satisfy humans’ needs today. For instance, in Beijing, there was once a large area filled with hutong -- an ancient building masses that date to the 19th century. These buildings are quite the same in patterns. Thus, it isn't necessary to leave all of them untouched; instead, protecting a small portion of them would be enough to preserve historic relics. In effect, the government does tore most of them to construct modern architectures, such as malls, slap-up apartments, and so forth, on original locations, and preserve only a few examples of these hutongs.

In summary, whether a city should preserve its ancient, historic buildings or overthrow them and replace them with modern architectures varies from case to case. In some cases, such as grand houses that have valuable meanings, it is better to leave them intact; however, in some other cases, such as repetitive, residential households, people may replace them with modern architectures.