Recently, the Historic Preservation Review Board of Washington, DC conferred landmark status on a church that is only 36-years old.  See the Washington Post article.  Voting 7-0 over the objections of the congregation, the board insisted that the building exemplified the architectural style of “Brutalism” and therefore the church body could not redevelop the property to better suit the current needs of its membership.  I don’t know about the architectural style, but this certainly exemplifies the brutalism of historic preservation.  Evidently, this is a case of form triumphing over function–a church as art rather than a house of worship.  For all of you like-minded preservationists out there:  If you find structures like so valuable, why don’t you just pool your money together, buy them and reconstruct them out in the middle of some otherwise useless piece of land in the middle of nowhere and put them on display.  You could buy up acreage and plop down historic buildings from all over America on put them on display for all your fellow preservationists!  Then the rest of us could put the land in our cities in towns to more sensible and functional purposes.