Through Weitzman's Center for Architectural Conservation, preservation faculty and students are working with the National Park Service and the Ancestral Lands Conservation Corps to preserve Wupatki National Monument, where people first gathered in the 1100s. (Photo Ha Leem)
When Penn’s Graduate Program in Historic Preservation was founded in 1981, the field was primarily concerned with architectural practice focused on saving, protecting and restoring buildings deemed to be of historical significance. “What we call heritage has broadened significantly—it’s no longer time-based or associated with high-style, elite, and monumental buildings. It’s now about places, not just buildings, and the communities they serve,” says Frank Matero, Gonick Family Professor and chair of the Department of Historic Preservation and founder and director of the Center for Architectural Conservation (CAC). “It’s no longer a question of ‘Why?’ It’s now about ‘For whom and how?’”
Fast forward 40 years, and the field has significantly widened its purview and understanding of its role as, what Randall Mason, professor of historic preservation and city and regional planning, has described as an archive of, and agent for, change in contemporary society. Today, the field is experiencing what some professionals say is a “call to purpose” and probing how it can become more of a public design practice. As conservation professional and Weitzman Lecturer Kecia Fong puts it, “In the public mindset, it has been about white male history and exceptional buildings and monuments.”
This past June saw an important milestone in the study and practice of historic preservation at Penn, as the program earned departmental status. The Department will continue to offer the Master of Science in Historic Preservation and a Master of Science in Design with a concentration in historic preservation, and will expand electives responding to current issues in the field and allow for deeper cross-sector partnerships linking pedagogy, research and practice.
The transition marks a “coming of age,” says Matero, rather than a new direction. “It really represents a 40 year-old experiment that’s delivered on its original proof of concept. It sends a strong signal in academia and the profession that the study and practice of heritage is an autonomous discipline that has its own history, knowledge, and skillsets that are specific to it alone.”
And it couldn’t come at a more consequential moment. “Given the political and cultural fragmentation of the present, and the looming crises of climate change and migration, historic preservation—as a field, a scholarly pursuit, a habit of stewardship, a mode of design—will be called to task with urgency and in ways we can hardly imagine today,” says Randall Mason, who previously served as the program chair and led PennPraxis, the applied research, engagement, and practice arm of the Weitzman School. He was also the founding director at the Center for the Preservation of Civil Rights Sites, where he is now a senior fellow.
Kecia Fong (right), lecturer in the Department of Historic Preservation and editor at Change Over Time, and Francesca Russello Ammon, associate professor in the Department, lead students on a walking tour of the historic Society Hill neigborhood in Philadelphia. (Photo Lou Caltabiano)
The field has never been more primed for these changes. A recent survey of over 2,000 practitioners exploring changing attitudes in the historic preservation community of practice found widespread consensus on the need for substantial and immediate changes in order for it to be of relevance today. Conducted by Mason and Kaitlyn Levesque for PennPraxis, the survey findings point to a desire for the field to be more outwardly engaged and less inwardly focused and to a number of core challenges, from addressing the lack of racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity in the field, and the need for more forward-thinking and impactful leadership, to elevating intangible heritage, changing public policy and financing of historic preservation work and overcoming a general bias toward white, western, cis- and/or male perspectives.
A new generation of historic preservation students and practitioners has called for self-reflection on issues of equity and whose history matters. At Weitzman, initiatives like the Center for the Preservation of Civil Rights Sites (CPCRS) and the Urban Heritage Project have enabled the School to forge new partnerships and expand its research agendas in a way that foregrounds experiences and stories of historically marginalized groups in the heritage arena and builds the capacity of partner institutions doing this work.
With CPCRS, Penn has developed cross-sector partnerships with the Alabama-based HBCU Tuskegee University, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Humanities in Place Program, and with other stewardship organizations, government agencies, and educational organizations to better build capacity to preserve and sustain black heritage sites and other places shaped by the American civil rights movement.
Through coursework like Heritage and Social Justice, students are putting theory into practice. Now in its third year, the Heritage and Social Justice course is centered on the propositions “that heritage (and its conservation and design) and social justice (and its applications to many professional and practical domains) are both reparative practices and that exploring connections between these two realms is a worthwhile and even urgent pursuit.” Instructors Mason and Brent Leggs apply an intersectional lens to the course, considering how this work relates to environmental justice, public health, representation and social equity across Black peoples’, LGBTQ and disability rights. In Documentation, Research and Recording, co-taught by Associate Professor Francesca Russello Ammon and Lecturer Kecia Fong, students were tasked with doing deep dives on buildings, neighborhoods and sites across West Philadelphia. “We’re conscientious about finding sites that have been part of Black narratives and history and for students to look at those sites that have not yet been researched to add to a collective body of knowledge,” says Fong, who also edits Change Over Time, the preservation department's semiannual journal.
Preservation student Mia Maloney (MSHP'19) was part of the Center for Architectural Conservation team to produce documentation for a conservation and management plan for Taliesin West, commissioned by the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation.
On the sustainability front, preservationists are working to protect historic sites vulnerable to climate change and all the repercussions associated with extreme weather at the same time as they look to older buildings and sites for lessons in resilience and adaptation. Taking account of the significant carbon footprint from the construction of new buildings, Matero insists that preservation is the original sustainability. “If we want to preserve resources, adapting, regenerating, and repurposing existing buildings and sites is one of the most impactful tools at our disposal,” he says.
Matero goes on, “What does it mean to build today amid ecological crisis and social injustice? The question begs consideration of how we can preserve/retain/reimagine the vast reserves of existing high-energy construction such as brick, hollow clay tile, and concrete structures that remain invisible and disposable to most architects yet their embodied energy and potential for reuse have scarcely been considered. It is time for a major shift in the value system of architecture beginning with what already exists.”
St. Paul Missionary Baptist Church in Macon County, Alabama, is among the Black heritage sites that Weitzman's Center for Preservation for Civil Rights Sites (CPCRS) has partnered with Tuskegee University to help protect.
Founded by Matero in 1991 upon his arrival at Penn, the Center for Architectural Conservation (CAC) has helped to expand the role of technical research in architectural conservation practice. Central to the CAC’s work through public and private partnerships has been the need to expose graduate students and young professionals to the exigencies of field- and lab work through internships. “There are lessons to be learned from older buildings concerning their performance as well as tolerances for change as we consider life cycle analyses and retrofits for new uses.” Matero explains. This expansive approach to preservation has resonated with architects and other design professionals well beyond Philadelphia. A recent project through the CAC and the National Park Service has focused on developing risk and vulnerability frameworks for traditional architecture in the face of changing climate. At one project at Wupatki National Monument in Arizona, Matero and the CAC are working with tribal communities, drawing on both Indigenous knowledge and scientific approaches to conservation to create a more integrative and responsive approach to understanding earthen and rubble masonry architecture. In collaboration with The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation and the Taliesin Institute, Penn students have been reconsidering the meaning of Wright’s organic architecture in the context of today’s notions of design sustainability and resilience at Taliesin and Taliesin West.
The program’s expansion to department has also entailed developing new courses, and advanced studio and fieldwork opportunities that are reflective of the 60 percent of students in the program from outside the US. “There is a conscious effort to globalize how we talk about heritage and ways we think about heritage conservation,” says Fong. Last year, she was tasked with developing programming pertaining to current heritage and conservation trends across Asia through a roundtable series exploring themes of heritage and global conflict, public space and identity, urbanism and heritage, and most recently on heritage, precarity and livelihood.
A recent issue of the Department of Historic Preservation's Change Over Time journal, published by Penn Press, focused on LGBTQ heritage.
Preparing students to not only excel in the field but also move their organizations forward requires an expanded and integrated set of skills and knowledge areas beyond the traditional scope of historic preservation. Part of this work is acknowledging the field’s shared purposes with community development and housing, sustainability and environmental protection, economic development, urban design and planning, and creative placemaking and community organizing.
One skillset that will be critical to graduates’ success is in the realm of community engagement—namely, the ability to adeptly navigate the social and political complexity that historic preservation projects today evoke. Ultimately, says Fong, the goal is to provide students with a methodology that can be adapted to the nuances of each project and community they’re serving. “There will be variations in how you implement it depending on where you are,” says Fong. “It’s a matter of understanding the context—temporal, physical, social, cultural, political—and then asking what are the possibilities for a site’s future based on the array of visions people from there have.”
Expand Image
