In 2019, the city of Miami demolished the old Miami-Dade County Courthouse. The building was not structurally unsound. It was not beyond repair. It was, by most accounts, a perfectly serviceable mid-century public building with a clear civic presence on the downtown skyline. What it was not was profitable. The site was worth more empty than occupied.
This is how most demolitions work. The building is rarely the problem. The problem is that the building is in the way of something more valuable, or that maintaining it costs money that no one wants to spend, or that the people who once used it have moved on and the people who now own the land have different plans.
The Preservation Argument
Preservation advocates tend to make their case on aesthetic or historical grounds. This building is beautiful. This building is significant. These arguments are not wrong, but they are often insufficient. A city government weighing a demolition permit is not primarily interested in beauty or history. It is interested in tax revenue, development pressure, and the political cost of saying no to a developer.
The buildings that survive are not always the best buildings. They are the buildings that someone found a use for.
The buildings that survive are not always the best buildings. They are the buildings that someone found a use for. The old warehouses of SoHo survived because artists needed cheap space. The cast-iron facades of downtown Miami survived because they were attached to buildings that kept generating rent. The Brutalist civic buildings of the 1960s and 1970s are threatened precisely because they are large, expensive to maintain, and difficult to repurpose.
What Florida Loses
Florida has been particularly aggressive about demolition. The state's rapid growth has created constant pressure to replace older buildings with newer, larger, more profitable ones. The result is a built environment that skews heavily toward the recent. Drive through most Florida cities and you will find very little that predates 1980. What does predate 1980 is often in poor condition, because the economics of preservation in a growth market are brutal.
The Sarasota School buildings are a partial exception. Because they have been written about, because they have been championed by preservation organizations, because they have acquired a kind of cultural cachet, some of them have survived. But survival is not the same as thriving. Many of them are underused, poorly maintained, or threatened by the same development pressures that have consumed everything around them.
What gets demolished, in the end, is what no one fights for. And what no one fights for is usually what no one has learned to see. The work of architectural criticism, at its most basic, is teaching people to see buildings they have stopped noticing.