Just back from San Francisco, currently sporting the worst air quality on the planet but also hosting PastForward, the National Preservation Conference.

For me it brought back fond memories of Beijing, 2004.  

It was the final meeting for National Trust President Stephanie Meeks.  I remember flying from Chicago to Washington DC and back the same day to vote her into her position back in 2010.

Her speech at the Plenary session hit five major points that well illustrate the status of heritage conservation in 2018 and its future direction.  You can see her full speech here, but I hope she will allow me to reflect on her five points below.

People First

Heritage conservation is about what people want and need, and not about museums and architectural obscurities.  It is about Main Streets and housing and schools and jobs and how communities are built and thrive.  It about more than tourism and curation – it is about how we feel about belonging to a place, investing ourselves in it.

Stephanie cited Abraham Maslow’s 1943 “Hierarchy of Needs” where PLACE and a sense of belonging were first identified as essential human needs.  Current neuroscience has dramatically underscored this early intuition with the solid research into the brain chemistry of architecture and environment in the work of Colin Ellard (which I blogged about here in 2016.)

Ahhhh…dopamine….

The latest developments go even further that Ellard’s quantification of how – chemically – interesting buildings make us feel good and parking lots make us anxious.  I just read Sarah Williams Goldhagen’s Welcome To Your World, a study of the new concept of embodied cognition – that how we think about and understand our world is crafted by our built environment, largely in an unconscious way.  She makes the case that good design is a basic human need, a key to brain health and a source of emotions.  “Recognizing and identifying patterns produces in us a sensation of pleasure.”

We see ourselves in our surroundings.

It turns out architecture is neither a luxury nor an externality.  It is the way we construct our thoughts and feelings.   The heritage conservation field is only beginning to take advantage of these new frontiers in neuroscience which prove something we suspected for a long time.  Look for a big expansion in the coming years.

Innovation

The changes to heritage conservation in the last two decades are epic.  In terms of diagnostics, we can now learn so much more about archaeology and buildings with minimally invasive techniques impossible in the 20th century.  Ground-penetrating radar.  LIDAR.  We can snake cameras into the tiniest crawlspaces and cavity walls, and we can point cloud anything with a regular camera if need be.

Presidio 2007 – an actual point cloud station but they did show us how to do it with camera.

New tools are also available for rehabilitation.  I learned Thursday that a company actually makes siding that matches 1940s asbestos siding!  We can 3-D print components, or we can find the companies that still make the same sash cord they did 90 years ago.

Yeah baby!! 

The greatest innovations, of course, have been in interpretation of historic places.

Painting with light.  “Restored By Light” at Mission San Jose, 2016

Innovation works at two levels here.  First, we have to reach the next audience through the media they choose to use.  Second, we can restore history without resorting to massive physical intervention, as seen above.

Interpretation at the recently reopened Cooper-Molera historic site, Monterey, CA.

Innovative interpretation is key not only to the massive tourism industry, but also the more basic and democratic project of sharing why we save and repurpose elements of the past.  People love the stories in the simplest of buildings.  They enrich our experiences, which people crave today more than things.

Stephanie referenced the virtual reality interpretations of historic sites, and I would simply add that augmented reality is already a staple of museums and public history today, in 2018.  The next generation of tourists will expect AR at every heritage site.  Full stop.

I blogged about this moment almost two years ago here.  

Scale

Scale.  We complained at Harvard Business School this summer that every case study was about scaling.  But yes, scaling is growth and that is the pattern of political economy and indeed civilization.  So too in preservation we need to scale beyond the regulated landmark by incorporating heritage – in some form – into every aspect of building and planning.  We are doing it here in San Antonio, from our neighborhood workshops that invite ALL communities regardless of designation to the city’s recent efforts to improve infill zoning.

Stephanie specifically referenced the rehabilitation of Cooper-Molera Adobe, the National Trust site in Monterey which I was involved with and saw in all of its free-entry glory last Saturday.  It is like the Gaylord Building now – a restaurant, bakery and event space pay for the lively restored and crisply interpreted historic house.  Nice job!

The challenge of bringing the heritage conservation message to scale is implicit in the initiatives described above – including all older neighborhoods regardless of their architectural integrity or consistency; reaching out to include diverse voices from history; understanding heritage as a part and parcel of EVERY planning and zoning decision.

The challenge for groups like the National Trust or San Antonio Conservation Society is how do you transmit scale into your organization?  Can you grow membership in an era of declining membership?  Can you create micro-members who join for a singular moment and cause?  Can you re-tool surveys to fully incorporate diverse and intangible histories?

Living Heritage

This was not one of the categories in Stephanie’s speech, but it was a frequent topic of educational sessions, since San Francisco is leading the way in dealing with Living Heritage through its thematic context studies, Legacy Business Program, and cultural place initiatives.

Japantown, San Francisco

These initiatives explode the traditional bounds of architecturally-based heritage conservation by focusing on intangible heritage and community values that are embodied in PLACE but not ARCHITECTURE.  Some of these sessions were TrustLive follow-ups to the TrustLive presentation at our September Living Heritage Symposium in San Antonio, featuring my friend Theresa Pasqual.  I blogged about our 2017 symposium here.

Climate Change.

Three and a half years ago I attended the Pocantico Conference on Climate change and heritage.  With so many coastal cities threatened by rising sea levels, climate change remains a central concern in the field of heritage conservation.

Preservation is always triage – which are the most important places to save, and which must be let go due to limited resources or political capital?  Climate change accelerates these hard choices.  I am reminded of Valmeyer, Illinois, the little town that moved – in its entirety – up to the bluffs following the devastating Mississippi River flood of 1993, or the National Historic Landmarks on the east coast that have been moved inland as storms worsen.

Like Lucy the Margate elephant.

Joy.

This was a nice touch on Stephanie’s part.  Spread Joy.  The joy of heritage, a work that supports the brain and enlivens the body through its haptic interaction with a nurturing environment, an environment rich in stories and social interaction.

We know about this in San Antonio, where 12,000 volunteers entertain 85,000 attendees each year in support of preservation.  A Night In Old San Antonio® will be here April 23-26, 2019!

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