Cameron Logan: Preservation, Profits and Loss

The Graduate Program in Historic Preservation is very pleased to welcome urban and architectural historian Cameron Logan, Ph.D. In this talk, Dr. Logan will introduce the central argument of his recently published book, Historic Capital. He will then recount two episodes form it, one unfolding in the Capitol Hill neighborhoods, the other in and around Dupont Circle. The episodes highlight the ways in which historic preservation was a dynamic arena for negotiating ideas about history, urban identity and race in the national capital in the 1960s and 1970s. These events were very explicitly local and fought at the scale of house, street and neighborhood. But the situation in which DC inhabitants found themselves was a direct result of urban pressures created by the Federal Government and its expanding domain in the postwar decades.     

Cameron Logan is director of the postgraduate program in heritage conservation in the School of Architecture, Design and Planning at the University of Sydney. His research and scholarship is concerned with histories of place protection and the claims about citizenship that are connected with those histories. A new project extends this work beyond the domain of historic preservation activity, focusing on urban crowds and venues for crowds as expressions of collective belonging. A second, distinct research interest is concerned with the architectural history of schools, hospitals and universities. These histories of institutional building types have explored innovations in architectural planning and servicing at the scale of the campus. They also raise questions about the uses of architecture and urban design as techniques of liberal reform and as proving grounds for urban transformation.

Cameron is the author of Historic Capital: Preservation, Race and Real Estate in Washington, DC (University of Minnesota Press, 2017) and co-author, with Julie Wills and Philip Goad, of Architecture and the Modern Hospital: Nosokomeion to Hygeia (Routledge, 2018). He is currently a Chief Investigator on an Australian Research Council (ARC) funded project on the history of postwar university campuses in Australia. His work has appeared in a variety of scholarly venues, including the Journal of Urban History, The Journal Of Architecture, APT Bulletin and Change Over Time.