Point: Reconstruction Doesn't Work!
R. Brooks Jeffery, Coordinator, Preservation Studies, College of Architecture, Planning, and Landscape Architecture, University of Arizona.

A false sense of history will be created if the San Agustín Mission is reconstructed. The result would convey more about the values of today's "hyper-realistic" culture than it ever could of the nineteenth-century culture the original building represented. Nothing remains of this building. Furthermore, it has lost its contextual relationship to the other built features and open spaces of Mission San Agustín, the flowing Santa Cruz River that supported it, and the Tucson Presidio that protected it.

The Secretary of the Interior's Standards for the Treatment of Historic Properties defines four treatments: Preservation, Rehabilitation, Restoration, and Reconstruction. These treatments were devised in a hierarchy of preference and authenticity. Thus, it is better to preserve than rehabilitate; better to rehabilitate than to restore; better to restore than to reconstruct. As defined by the Secretary of the Interior:

Analysis of these standards provides sufficient evidence of the inappropriateness of reconstruction as a treatment in the case of the convento. First, reconstruction as a treatment was only intended to re-create portions of a property, not the entire property, as in the case of the San Agustín Mission. This implies the existence of some remnant of the property, such as was the case in the reconstruction of the buildings at Williamsburg. Second, lacking the physical evidence, the documentary evidence for the convento - exterior photographs of an unplastered ruin and written descriptions - leave much to conjecture regarding the internal spatial relationships, structural systems, and wall treatments of the original building as it appeared before the advent of photography. Third, if the convento is to be more than just an icon for the larger mission site, then reconstruction must include the entire complex, including its chapel, granary, gardens, and acequias, to convey a legitimate public understanding of the property. And fourth, how does a reconstruction accurately educate the public about that period's building materials, construction technologies, and other physical qualities while clearly being identified as a contemporary re-creation?

Compliance with the Secretary of the Interior's Standards provides historic properties with the legitimacy sought in a project as prominent as Rio Nuevo. The guidelines continue to advise that if sufficient information is not available, it is better to interpret the lost building through other media, than to run the risk of fabricating an expensive historical untruth. In Philadelphia, the structures around Benjamin Franklin's house were heavily restored by the National Park Service based on existing physical and documentary evidence. In the case of Benjamin Franklin's actual house, the National Park Service concluded that there was insufficient information to create a credible reconstruction, and a full-scale, three-dimensional, metal frame of the house was erected - along with outdoor exhibit materials - to repre-sent and interpret the site. I am not advocating for a steel frame outline of the convento. Rather, we should look at creative ways to represent the convento, and its context, that will satisfy the educational as well as experiential goals expressed in the Rio Nuevo proposal without falsifying the authenticity of the original building.

By re-creating an historic artifact, we also devalue the truly authentic historic structures, such as Mission San Xavier, which deserves to remain as the symbol of the Spanish Colonial presence in Tucson. Rebuilding the convento, in the context of the contemporary tourist-oriented development of Rio Nuevo, would serve more as a Disneyland-esque stage prop, just as its ruin did for late nineteenth and early twentieth century curiosity-seekers, as represented in their photographs.

Umberto Eco, in his influential 1961 essay, "Travels in Hyperreality" first coined that term to describe the pseudo-places of his American travels. He described places like Disneyland (and now Las Vegas) as where, "the American imagination demands the real thing and to attain it, must fabricate the absolute fake." Any reconstruction of the convento (and presumably, the presidio wall) would be a fake; a dishonor to the authenticity of extant historic structures and the validity of Rio Nuevo's attempt to interpret Tucson's cultural identity.

COUNTERPOINT: Reconstruction Can Work!
Marty McCune, Historic Preservation Officer, City of Tucson