At ICCROM, Frank Matero Reflects on 35 Years in the Heritage Conservation Field

Frank Matero began teaching courses on the material conservation of the built environment at the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM) in the late 1980s. Over the next decade, a partnership between ICCROM and Penn produced a renowned summer course that allowed Historic Preservation students to travel annually to Rome to study European preservation with ICCROM faculty.

For Matero, Gonick Family Professor and Chair of Historic Preservation at Weitzman, the partnership underscores the international nature of the conservation field; across language, culture, and diverging concepts of heritage, conservators across the world ask universal questions. Last fall, Matero traveled to Rome to reconnect the institutions, and build new partnerships to tackle existential challenges like climate change.

While in Italy, Matero sat down with Rohit Jigyasu, Programme Manager, Sustainable Urban and Built Heritage Conservation, Disaster and Climate Risk Management and Post-Crisis Recovery, to discuss how the field has changed over 35 years, and his advice for emerging professionals.

Read on for excerpts from the conversation, and hear the entire interview on ICCROM’s website.

Rohit Jigyasu: Welcome to ICCROM, Frank! You have had a very distinguished career in heritage preservation practice, research and teaching. Could you share with us how the field has evolved over the years?

Frank Matero: Certainly, the definition of heritage has changed. The scope of heritage grew immensely. What started out largely architectural, suddenly embraced all forms of heritage, and also all periods. Suddenly age was no longer an issue.

The other big component of that was the recognition and embrace of the intangible. Historically, the field’s origins were so fixated on the object that very often, although it was implied, it often wasn’t directly expressed in terms of the multitude of values tying physical heritage to people, and  social values.

RJ: What do you think are the current challenges that are confronting heritage field as a profession? And how do you think we can address those challenges?

FM: On everybody’s mind right now is the issue of climate change. It is particularly significant for conservation because the conservation field has always prided itself on learning from the situation, assessing the situation, collecting information to make an informed decision. So climate change is absolutely the elephant in the room when it comes to what is challenging our past and current developed methods. Climate change is an anticipatory science, which means we have to be prepared for what we don’t know. Which is terrifying to a conservator.

The internal problems are lack of trust in our own field, in our own discipline, in our own profession. This morning I was in the ICCROM library looking at Technical Studies in Conservation, which goes back to the ‘30s. And it was just remarkable how honest and interested the early authors were in the exploration of the technical in the service of humanistic questions. I daresay almost none of those articles would have gotten published today. But they were a very clear demonstration of the origins of our questions, which were based on: How? When? Where? But they were all leading to why?

I think we need to not be so quick to give up the kinds of knowledge we, as humans and professionals, acquire from the interaction with the object, the building, the place, the site. Those are very powerful relationships that we establish both emotionally and rationally through our mental and sensory activities. I think conservators have a very special acumen in that way, that’s why they’re drawn to the field. And I think we need to reinvest and believe in that relationship with things, with places.

RJ: What in your view are the essential things to think about for heritage preservation education for the coming generation? Especially, if you can, also highlight on the pedagogical aspects, but also on the areas that need special attention in terms of teaching.

FM: I would say, trust your instincts. People are attracted to this field usually through a very deep and long reflection on their relationship to places. So I would say, first and foremost, trust that.

The second thing: it’s the questions that are important, not the answers. The ability to formulate critical questions, through critical thinking, is really an important part of education, and it’s actually an important part of being a professional.

Thirdly, which goes back to trusting your instincts, be courageous and take responsibility for the decisions that you ultimately make. You know, conservation is a slow discipline. It’s best when it’s done through long periods of reflection. You can never go too slow, in my estimation—that’s an academic speaking. It’s having the humility to recognize that you’re part of the arc of history, that what you do often follows a decision that someone else made earlier, and it will certainly not be the last time someone makes a decision as an advocate for the building or place.

All conservation is a critical act. There’s no getting away from it. You have to act in the moment, that moment is the now, and that now will have to serve the future for as long as it can. But know that it won’t be forever.

RJ: What is your message to budding heritage professionals?

FM: Act with humility. We are a small piece in the history of a place, and it’s our job to connect the present to the past. The field is, for all intents and purposes, cross-disciplinary, because what we do is done altogether by no other singular discipline, yet we draw from them all. That is a very difficult position to be in, in an era of specialization. So, on one hand, we have to be humanistically as broad as possible, and on the other, scientifically, as specific as possible. And that’s a very difficult road to walk.