Preservation Futures: Design
This is the third in a series of four articles. Follow the links for Part 1 and Part 2.
Design is fundamental to the connections historic preservation establishes with the public in the physical world. For centuries, design has been a key component in the management of change in the historical built environment; today, it is the primary means by which historical settings are adapted to contemporary needs, interpretations, and value systems. This demonstrably creative activity, often but not always identified as preservation design, is a vast mode of operation with a long history. As a cultural practice, it carries an accumulated set of instincts and codified principles. Many of these were drawn either from working in traditionally defined historical settings of monumental significance, or borrowed from twentieth-century aesthetic theories in architecture and art conservation.
Set against the backdrop of an ever-evolving understanding of both the “historic” and of history itself, it is a timely and pressing matter to question what the proper role of design is in preserving built heritage. And with extraordinary and ever-increasing pressures imposed on historic buildings, landscapes, and regions, are preservation design practices evolving, and fast enough to address today’s challenges?
This academic year, the Department of Historic Preservation at the University of Pennsylvania convened a roundtable series Preservation Futures to interrogate the future of the historic preservation field through the themes of society, history, science, and design. This article draws on the proceedings of the third roundtable where we—David Hollenberg and Nate Rogers, faculty in the department—spoke with three design practitioners working in historic contexts across the realms of architecture, landscape architecture, and planning: Dominique Hawkins, FAIA, an architect, preservation planner, and founding partner of Preservation Design Partnership; Stephen Kieran, FAIA, an architect and founding partner of KieranTimberlake; and Peter Viteretto, FASLA, a landscape architect and principal at Heritage Landscapes.
Figure 1. Communities are challenged when trying to balance the impacts of climate change and retaining their historic resources. In 2021, Preservation Design Partnership developed Flood Mitigation Design Guidance for Historic Residences for the City of St. Augustine, Florida, to assist property owners seeking to sensitively improve their resilience. Courtesy of City of St. Augustine.
The first topic was the recent evolution of preservation design practice. When starting out, Dominique recalled, the focus of most building inventories, determinations of historic significance, and design guidelines was adherence to particular architectural periods and styles. Little overt attention was given to wealth, privilege, and power. Today, by contrast, preservation planning efforts that explore the interrelationship between physical places and the meaning of these places to the communities inhabiting them have become central to the field, which is also striving to address challenges such as climate change and gentrification that pose existential threats to physical and social fabric. Still, as Stephen pointed out, in comparing reactions to his firm’s proposal for a Yale dining hall alteration in the 1990s to their recent design for the renovation of the Folger Shakespeare Library, the oppositional impulse of preservation advocates and reviewing authorities is the same today as it was thirty years ago. What people continue not to see is that “the best way to secure the future of these buildings is to make them as useful as they can possibly be for the present.”
The central design challenge in historic settings remains, as Stephen put it, one of providing a future for an asset that is valued for its past. The panel agreed that any change to historic site and assets, whether stabilization; painstaking, “imperceptible” restoration; or transformational change, is a matter of design. And that the specificities and parameters set by working in a historic context are not obstacles to good design outcomes; exemplary design has a direct relationship with the kinds of formidable constraints and rigorous dialogue that historic settings impose.
Next, the group discussed the need to expand the field to serve the “98%” of buildings which are neither historic icons nor new construction. A common statistic is that new construction comprises 1% of the U.S. total building stock in any given year. “That means 99% of what we're still going to have at the end of the year was already here,” Stephen noted. “But if preservationists are working on the 1% that represents the very highest value in terms of cultural heritage, who is tackling the 98%? . . . To me, there’s a vast terrain for the field to create a framework for the management of the 98%.” Indeed, since 2022 the majority of design projects, as measured by architects’ billing, involve renovation, rehabilitation, or expansion of existing buildings. Work on the 98%, Stephen said, is “becoming the economic engine driving the architecture profession.”
Despite this positive trend, one concern is that the vast majority of design professionals receive no historic preservation training. While there are perhaps fifty degree– or certificate-granting graduate programs in historic preservation in the United States, enrollment is relatively small, and a significant portion of these graduates do not enter the design fields.
Another is lack of standards for best practice. For the 1% of building stock that preservation architects do typically tend to, there are clear and well-understood guidelines, as Dominique put it, to “help us to find and create what the parameters of that project will be.” But for the 98% “it is really the community—if an architect is doing their job right—who defines what’s valuable about the place.” Yet community participation can be at odds with clients’ priorities for schedule and budget. So “architects aren’t always given the bandwidth to do the kind of engagement it takes to provide something meaningful for the people who ultimately will have to engage with that site, day in and day out.”
One change that would help, all agreed, is better policy. By its nature, policy that addresses the 98% would look very different than current preservation standards and guidelines, which typically dictate aesthetic and material outcomes through a closed set of requirements. In Dominique’s view, new policy should define and prioritize process-oriented outcomes, civic engagement, outreach, and how communities’ specific needs are analyzed. This would be policy that “doesn’t regulate window molding profiles” but preserves the urban fabric of neighborhoods and cities, and gives communities greater control over the future of the place where they live. Stephen strongly supported the idea of tax credits for rehabilitation in general, rather than for just the most traditionally “historic” buildings.
Figures 2. The mid-century Kenworthy gym at the Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C., before KieranTimberlake transformed it into a new space for worship. Courtesy of KieranTimberlake.
Figures 3. The new Quaker Meeting House at Sidwell Friends, after transformation by KieranTimberlake in 2011. Photograph by Michael Moran/OTTO, courtesy of KieranTimberlake.
The third and final theme of the conversation was sustainability. During the energy crisis of the 1970s, the preservation community rallied around the purported environmental benefits of saving old buildings, effecting a number of pro-preservation policies at national and state levels. But the field’s track record in the arena of sustainability is mixed. In numerous cases, preservation advocates made outsized claims about the energy efficiency and environmental performance of historic buildings that suited their aims but were difficult to back up with data, while at the same time resisting energy upgrades that compromised historic fabric or were seen to undermine certain aesthetic values.
The recent past shows evidence of positive change in this regard, supported by decision-making that is increasingly evidence-based, carbon accounting software that is both more sophisticated and accessible, and an increasing societal focus on the role of carbon emissions in the threat of climate change and catastrophic weather events. But how are present-day sustainable design values — such as embodied and operational carbon, weather resiliency, or biodiversity — playing a role in projects and practice?
Dominique spoke about a sector of her practice helping historic communities plan for the impacts of climate change. “Historic communities tend to be built adjacent to water, and they tend to be in vulnerable locations. Change is coming, and the reluctance for local communities to accept change is based upon their perceived level of vulnerability.” This work can be challenging because “you're typically dealing with a property owner's most valued possession, their home, as well as their financial ability to stay in a place that they love. The seas are rising, the climate is changing, and there are certain places that will no longer exist or be habitable.”
“The vast majority of design professionals receive no historic preservation training.”
In Kieran Timberlake’s work, carbon accounting has become standard over the last decade, and the firm applies it to existing-building projects as well as new construction. Used early and throughout the design process and in combination with operating energy modeling software, carbon accounting allows designers to make choices with the least environmental cost. Retaining and reusing existing buildings where possible, as opposed to demolishing and building anew, is an imperative for the field — “the biggest move we can make,” according to Stephen, especially if greater use (and utility) can be drawn from the same building fabric.
A persistent obstacle is that even well-resourced institutional clients tend to prioritize initial capital costs over long term economic and environmental sustainability. As Stephen said, “I don't know how much more urgency we can create in the world” over the threat of climate change. But there is an opportunity for the design fields to embrace economic modeling more fully, helping clients make informed decisions that incorporate energy and maintenance costs and carbon emissions. As a remedy, the panel agreed that society would benefit from a greater sense of currency for carbon, so that clients and the public could look at it as a resource to be spent or conserved. There is also an educational opportunity in the design schools to teach students about the first and recurring costs of buildings over their lifetimes. “As an architecture student, I got zero education about the cost of architecture, let alone the cost of keeping it looking new across time,” Stephen pointed out.
Figure 4. The degraded lagoon element in Jackson Park, Chicago, was reshaped through a 2015-16 plan by Heritage Landscapes into a scenic area with a graceful walk. Photograph by Robbie Sliwinski, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, courtesy of Heritage Landscapes.
One promising arena, Peter noted by way of conclusion, is in preservation design for historic landscapes and public spaces. Historic landscapes are different from historic buildings in a number of ways. Landscape designers work directly alongside nature and time, and landscape preservation has to confront the dynamic nature of ecosystems head-on, leading to entirely distinct value systems around material integrity, original design intent, and what constitutes character-defining features. This model of a vibrant and dynamic ecosystem also offers a potential analogue for the preservation of districts and regions, where change is managed in such a way to promote the overall health of the system.
In general, the preservation of historic landscapes is fundamentally sustainable, although greater attention must be paid to systems such as hydrology and biodiversity than in the past. Another design challenge specific to historic landscape preservation is that such public spaces have often been imposed upon by various activities and accretions over time “that don't fit or reflect the inherent design values or the value of the landscape to the community.” Working under the banner of landscape preservation, Peter’s firm, Heritage Landscapes, designs through subtraction, making material improvements through strategic excision in a way that can maximize cultural value with a lighter resource and carbon footprint. A persistent policy challenge for the preservation of landscape is that many struggle to understand the meaning and importance of historic cultural landscapes.
Citation
David Hollenberg and Nathaniel Rogers, “Preservation Futures: Design,” PLATFORM, Mar. 25, 2024.
