Questioning Authenticity

Authenticity is an important category in cultural debates, which has emerged in parallel with the notion of modernity. Authenticity refers to the idea that something is “real” or “true,” that its outer appearance is in correspondence with its inner being, in contrast with things that are “fake” or “false” or “dissimulating.” Although the term thus seems to have a rather unequivocal meaning, its usage evokes quite some paradoxes. This paper focuses on one of these paradoxes: the different notions of authenticity that are at stake within practices of conservation on the one hand and within the modernist discourse of the Modern movement on the other. It shows through a discussion of two different case studies—the Lever House in New York and the hotel La Concha in San Juan, Puerto Rico—that both forms of authenticity are often at odds when it comes to the restoration of modernist buildings