Preserving historic buildings

Preserving historic buildings
Currently, some cities are facing the situation whether to preserve
the old, historic buildings or to destroy them and replace them with
modern buildings. In my opinion, a wise solution to this dilemma
depends on the circumstances. Firstly, it is obviously that the
historic buildings are valuable and deserve being preserved. The
old buildings are an important aspect of the traditional culture; they
represent the history of a country or a culture. For example, the
Forbidden City, lying in the center of Peking, is one of the
representatives of the long history of China. Every day, visitors
from all over the world go there to have a look on the palaces
where Emperors lived thousands of years ago.
These kind of historic buildings reminder people the history, and is
reasonable to be well preserved. Secondly, some historic buildings
are excellent textbooks on architecture, and need good care. One
cannot imagine how clever the ancient architects were; they
invented so many artful techniques and adopted these on their
works. Every ancient building that lasts till today is a good example
for certain architectural technique. One will be surprised to know
that some of the ancient stone bridges in China have last for
thousands of years. They are strong enough to suffer the ages. What
is more, some of the techniques have been lost and people can no
longer reproduce such bridges. The current architects realize that
even with the modern techniques, people can hardly build as a
lasting stone bridges as those ancient ones. These kind of historic
buildings are supposed to be preserved. However, there are some
exceptions. In some historic town in China, there are a lot of similar
historic buildings. These cities cannot develop themselves any more
because there no more space, unless they destroy some of the
historic buildings. As a case in point, in my hometown, there used to
be a large amount of historic housings, each of which is hundreds of

years old. In this case, the best solution is, as the government has
done, to preserve a few of these buildings as representations, and
destroy the others in order to build new ones. By this means, we not
only preserve the history but also develop ourselves. In sum, people
should preserve the historic buildings. But we should leave enough
space for the development of modern buildings.