Art and Architecture: Bending the Future of Preservation| Max Page, Marla Miller, Robert Hammond, Thompson Mayes, Richard Rabinowitz, Liz Ševcenko, Michael Sorkin | Architectural Explorations in Books Series Event

FREE — Auditorium doors open at 5PM.

How can we make the historic preservation movement a central tool for building a more just world? 

Historic preservation often gets criticized for being aesthetically elitist, concerned with celebratory history, and a tool of gentrifiers.  But recent efforts within the preservation movement show that storyline to be changing – if it was ever true. Preservationists, including some of the outstanding figures on this panel, are propelling preservation in new directions toward equitable economic development without gentrification, toward uncovering and telling the stories of some of our most difficult places, sites of atrocity and discrimination, and toward making preservation a central force in making environmentally sustainable cities.

This roundtable discussion, moderated by Max Page and Marla Miller, takes place almost exactly 50 years after the landmark National Historic Preservation Act was signed by President Johnson in October of 1966. That Act created much of the system of saving old places we know today – the National Register of Historic Places, local and state historic commissions, regulations for rehabilitation.  The panelists discuss ways to build a progressive historic preservation movement implementing innovative ideas for the next 50 years of historic preservation.

Outstanding public figures in the fields of architecture, community development, museum exhibition design, and public history, each of the panelists contributed an essay to a new book, Bending the Future:  50 Ideas for the Next 50 Years of Historic Preservation, edited by Max Page and Marla Miller (University of Massachusetts Press, 2016). Max Page is also the author of another new book, Why Preservation Matters (Yale University Press, 2016).

The year 2016 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the National Historic Preservation Act, the cornerstone of historic preservation policy and practice in the United States. The act established the National Register of Historic Places, a national system of state preservation offices and local commissions, set up federal partnerships between states and tribes, and led to the formation of the standards for preservation and rehabilitation of historic structures. 

The commentators include leading preservation professionals, historians, writers, activists, journalists, architects, and urbanists. The essays offer a distinct vision for the future and address related questions, including, Who is a preservationist? What should be preserved? Why? How? What stories do we tell in preservation? How does preservation contribute to the financial, environmental, social, and cultural well-being of communities? And this fundamental challenge: if the “arc of the moral universe . . . bends towards justice,” how can preservation be a tool for achieving a more just society and world?

Copies of the books Bending the Future:  50 Ideas for the Next 50 Years of Historic Preservation (University of Massachusetts Press, 2016) and Why Preservation Matters (Yale University Press, 2016) are available for purchase and signing at the end of the event.

Max Page is a professor of architecture and history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and directs the UMass Historic Preservation Program. He is the author or editor of eight books, including The Creative Destruction of Manhattan; The City’s End: Two Centuries of Fantasies, Fears, and Premonitions of New York’s Destruction; Giving Preservation a History: Histories of Historic Preservation in the United States (with Randall Mason); Reconsidering Jane Jacobs (with Timothy Mennell); and The UMass Campus Guide (also with Marla Miller). Why Preservation Matters will be published by Yale University Press in 2016. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a Rome Prize recipient.

Marla Miller directs the Public History Program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she also edits the UMass Press series "Public History in Historical Perspective." In addition to several books and articles on women and work in early America -- including Betsy Ross and the Making of America (Holt, 2010), named among the Washington Post's "best books of 2010 -- she is a co-author of the prizewinning report Imperiled Promise: The State of History in the National Park Service (Organization of American Historians, 2011).  Marla Miller is also the Vice-President/President Elect of the National Council on Public History.

Robert Hammond is the cofounder and executive director of Friends of the High Line, a nonprofit he started with Joshua David in 1999. Since the High Line opened in 2009, it has become one of the city’s most popular destinations, welcoming over six million visitors in 2014. His accolades include a Rome Prize by the American Academy in Rome (2010); an honorary doctorate from the New School (2012); and, jointly with David, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Jane Jacobs Medal (2010) and the Vincent Scully Prize (2013). He is a coproducer of A Matter of Death and Life, a film about cities through the lens of Jane Jacobs.

Thompson (Tom) Mayes is Deputy General Counsel at the National Trust for Historic Preservation.  A recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Rome Prize in Historic Preservation from the American Academy in Rome, Tom recently published a series of essays about why old places matter to people.  He has written and spoken widely about historic house museums, preservation, and preservation law. 

As president of American History Workshop, Richard Rabinowitz has led creative teams in over 500 history museum planning and exhibition projects around the United States. His book, Curating America: The Past as Storyscape, is forthcoming from the University of North Carolina Press.

Liz Ševcenko is Director of the Humanities Action Lab, a consortium of 20 universities across the US, led from The New School in New York City, whose students and stakeholders collaborate on projects remembering the histories of contested contemporary issues.  She was founding director of the Guantánamo Public Memory Project and the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, a network of historic sites that foster public dialogue on pressing human rights issues.  Before launching the Coalition, she was Vice President for Programs at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, where she developed exhibits and educational activities that connect the stories of the neighborhood’s immigrants past and present.  Ms. Sevcenko has a B.A. from Yale University and an M.A. in history from New York University. 

Architect, author, theoretician and critic Michael Sorkin studied architecture at Harvard and MIT. For a decade he wrote about architecture in the well-known New York weekly The Village Voice. At the same time he taught at several universities, including Yale, Harvard, Columbia and Cornell. His many writings focus primarily on the social aspects and political implications of architectural and urban planning projects. 

In its eighth year Architectural Explorations in Books, initiated and organized by Arezoo Moseni, is a series of engaging programs delving into the critical role that architecture publications play in the understanding of contemporary urban developments and structures. The events feature book presentations and discussions by acclaimed architects, critics, curators, designers, photographers and writers.

The event is free and advanced registration is recommended. 

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