A Life in Ruins: An Interview with Frank Matero

Frank Matero, the late Gonick Family Professor in the Department of Historic Preservation, was a prolific scholar and beloved educator and mentor in the field of historic preservation. Prior to his passing, he sat down for an interview with his colleague Lynn Meskell, the Richard D. Green University and Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor. He reflected on his over 35 years of work in architectural conservation, the evolution of the field, and its future. This excerpt was drawn from "A Life in Ruins: An Interview with Frank Matero," published in Conservation and Management of Archaeological Sites and is published with the permission of Informa UK Limited, trading Taylor & Francis Group.

Lynn Meskell: This might be a good bridge to discuss your framing of archaeological conservation as an intellectual discipline, not just a profession, and your pivotal role in that development.

Frank Matero: In recent years, the concept of archaeology, indeed the word itself, has enjoyed a popularity of applied usage in philosophy, psychology, epistemology, and architecture, to name a few. The decision to employ it here to describe a methodology for thinking about and investigating physical built form above ground, and specifically existing structures, is intentional in relation to my purpose of exposing the deep and complex ‘readings’ that can come from a fabric-based examination of extant buildings and their landscapes.

Ask anyone to define archaeology, and inevitably, what will be described includes the process of excavation, a literal and figurative ‘digging up’ of the past. This is understandable given archaeology’s long association with the excavation of buried cities, tombs, and artefacts. While it is fair to assume that far more of the distant past lies below rather than above our feet, it is also true that much of the past remains extant, though invisible, in the form of above-ground buildings, structures, and landscapes. All material evidence of the past has the potential to inform our understanding of that past, and, more specifically, the individuals and societies that inhabited the many pasts preserved in the things made and built, as well as their contexts.

While I admit that a truly deep interpretation of the physical fabric of any structure demands a full awareness of the context of that building – its designers, builders, owners, users, neighbours, visitors, environment, and so on – it is evident to me after over three decades of teaching and practice that the most accessible of evidence often goes unnoticed, unrecorded, and uninterpreted.

There is, of course, a long history to such methodical considerations, most notably the pioneering work of Rickman, Whewell, Willis, and Viollet-le-Duc, all of whom focused on medieval architecture beginning in the mid-19th century. More recent early 20th-century contributions, beginning with Norman Isham, Henry Chapman Mercer, and Frederick Kelly, on American vernacular architecture and the great restoration programmes of Jamestown and Williamsburg, quickly led to a formalised national program to record extant American colonial buildings through the Historic American Building Survey in the 1930s and since. Parallel with this focus and serving the same call to identify, preserve, and celebrate America’s European history, the field of historical archaeology emerged – first as a bastard stepchild serving national restoration programmes, and later legitimised as a discipline, as all pasts entered academic anthropology’s sphere of study. With the rise of truly cross-disciplinary vernacular and folklore studies in American universities beginning in the 1970s, scholars once again turned their attention to the meaning of everyday built form, this time with almost no associated written records, and largely the formal and spatial language of these buildings to be deciphered.
 

Could you talk a little more about architectural conservation and where the field stands?

Architectural Conservation is a discipline in critical need of revision and a practice desperately in want of respectability, to be viewed as ‘creative’ as the works it seeks to preserve. The former demands an intellectual platform capable of sustaining robust and challenging questions as to its means, methods and goals; the latter must address its longstanding association as legacy ‘care-taker’ and recognition of disciplinary contributions in sustaining, revealing, and redefining existing cultural works through tangible intervention and interpretation or curation. As a teacher and practitioner for 40 years, I continue to ask what conservators do and why they do it, especially as the vast stock of existing buildings and places gain recognition as having some cultural, social, or economic value to contemporary society. Increasing concerns about the social value of heritage, especially competing pressures to justify the retention of existing buildings and places in the context of social equity, environmental justice, and climate change, are all challenging the historical dominance of fabric-based values in traditional preservation theory and practice. But underneath it all, there has always been an interest in the relationship between people, things, and places, and scholars of various disciplines have focused their respective epistemologies to understand those messy relationships. In short, material evidence still matters.

Ask yourself, Why study the materials of past architecture, and particularly those buildings and structures deemed historically or culturally significant, as epiphenomena outside of architectural practice? How do materials influence the design and construction of architecture, including its performance, ageing and deterioration, maintenance, and recycling? What is the difference between material properties and materiality? What is the role of craft, and how is it understood in valuing and preserving past architecture, when its very re-practice may violate certain principles of conservation dedicated to preserving the original? Can conservation’s interest in materials go beyond technical concerns?

Any deep dive into materials, material evidence, and their conservation must address these questions if heritage conservation, and specifically architectural conservation, is to achieve its rightful place beside other recognised creative and scientific endeavours. Materials are a medium for form, but they are so much more. Study the materials of a building and you can access many intended functional obligations: strength, durability, environmental, and spatial requirements. Probe further and you may discern economic and social status, locality (regionalism), identity, gender, and aesthetics. Go further, embracing the new study of energetics, and you will discover an entire network or ecosystem of relationships that have affected and influenced communities, landscapes, economies, and even politics. While form and space have been extensively studied in the context of architectural history, the role of materials has been surprisingly limited, primarily to locating objects in time and space and to determining authorship and authenticity, including the identification of forgeries.

Newer considerations have shifted towards the complex transmission and reception of buildings and objects as social and historical agents. Consider terracotta and cast iron, for example. Their revival in the mid-19th century found currency in the desire for imitation and diversity of form and ornament, economical mass production, and increasing durability. As traditional natural materials succumbed to fire and the sulphurous fallout of polluted urban environments, the very environments created by the industrial processes that led to the emergence of these new materials and the modern age. It is no accident that the same material interests that created these ‘super’ materials were applied to methods of preservation and analysis of the very traditional materials they challenged.

What I am proposing is a greater recognition and pursuit of the contributions that conservation as a discipline and practice has made not only about the thing under study and its associated makers and sponsors, but the act of preservation itself as a complex cultural activity that has forever changed the history and trajectory of that object, building, and place and the many lives touched.
 

You’re someone who reads widely across archaeology, conservation, and heritage literatures. That’s very rare to be so cross-disciplinary. What’s your perspective on the ways in which we present heritage sites?

I think the heritage industry has been particularly abusive to archaeological sites, where, in the name of public appeal, they have been littered with content in the form of waysides and other ‘learning’ opportunities. Site museums, videos, and other forms of media, while well-intentioned, have become substitutes for the very site to which visitors travel, often with some difficulty, to be ‘in the place’. Sites are only worth visiting if they engage the public in encounter and memory and capitalise on a visitor’s senses. The fragmentary remains, even the least monumental, have a power to invoke a great many feelings, not all intellectual in content. All professionals involved in the outcome of the presentation need to pay more attention to the site visit as a phenomenological experience that is partially curated by those who are familiar with the breadth of narratives residing on site and the tools to reveal them. Archaeologists often lack the broad vision of what is possible when using the site itself to tell the stories, while conservators myopically focus on material minutiae, which is often already far too corrupted to provide any real scientific value. It is time to set aside all past assumptions about site preservation and first ask why we should do it. Why present a site to the public, who are more accustomed to experiences delivered by Disney or Universal, which do it better anyway? We need to find ways to use sites to slow people down to inquire, reflect, and respond.
 

That leads me to ask you about your time at ICCROM and what you see happening there now, and what you would like to see in its future?

ICCROM has an international mission and responsibility to address heritage education issues globally. While teaching at ICCROM, I always had the sense that students from all over the world recognized the commonalities in their work, even though the heritage they worked on might have looked very different. Few other contexts can create that sense of shared purpose. There are also numerous challenges. War, conflict, and climate change … there is nowhere that heritage is not currently affected by excessive risk and threat. Heritage advocates need to step up and voice those needs to garner support. No one will do it for us, especially when the risks apply to quality of life across the board.
 

I would like to finish by emphasizing your leadership in the Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania. You have basically built a discipline here. What is the role of the Department of Historic Preservation in a university setting? What should we be training the next generation to do?

Heritage departments have had a difficult time being taken seriously by the older disciplines and professions represented at the university. It wasn’t that long ago that anthropology was considered suspect until Boas began his programme at Columbia University. Conservation might be an old field with over a century of theorising and practice, but it is finally coming into its own as a methodologically distinct set of knowledge and skill sets that define it. Augmented government support in terms of career paths and job requirements on the technical side could go a long way to deliver on what the academic side has already delivered. Professional organisations could exert more influence on what society expects of those who care for its heritage from both sides-archaeology and preservation/conservation.