Strategic Thinking and the Heritage of Every Single Day.
Aaugh HELP they are tearing it down!!! NOW!!
One of the many benefits of my three years in Silicon Valley, buttressed by 30 years of serving on non-profit Boards of Directors (I whittled it down to four recently. Well, five.) is that I have been steeped in strategic thinking and strategic planning. While this may seem like a normal exercise to the MBA crowd, it is something that tends to be lacking in the historic preservation/heritage conservation field. Continue Reading
Categories Are Your Frenemies
When I was a kid, there was a tween game where you sat in a circle and clapped and called out “Categories! Names Of!” and then someone shouted a category and you had to keep on shouting out examples of that category or you lost the game.
The nature of thought requires us to divide things into categories. This is good, because it facilitates learning. We need categories to begin to understand the multivalence of our world. To this extent, categories are our friends. As our understanding progresses, we begin to see the limitations – the false boundaries – of categories. As we grow, categories become our enemies.
Architectural history is a good example. We begin by learning styles and periods. Federal, Italianate, Queen Anne, Richardsonian Romanesque, Beaux-Arts, Craftsman, Art Deco. We study the defining characteristics of each of these styles and pretty soon we are able to survey buildings in the streetscape and categorize them.
The Next American City: A Response
By Vince Michael and Anthea Hartig
We regrettably missed Charles Buki’s Next American City speech at the National Preservation Conference in Austin, but studied it and it is a provocative scorcher, as the self-described “community developer” no doubt intended (see for yourself at www.czb.org and http://www.czb.org/blog/2010/10/comments-at-the-national-trust-for-historic-preservation/). Buki congenially opens with his denouncing of the label preservationist, but goes on to share his valuable critique of our built environment – and of preservation’s seeming lack of care about community and over-privileging of architecture and its rehabilitation. We here writing don’t have the luxury of eschewing the preservationist label, although we are both active in the discursive movement afoot to change that label (see Forum Journal, Spring 2010, focused on “What’s Next for Historic Preservation,” in particular Donovan Rypkema’s headlining article, Michael’s and Muniz/Hartig’s pieces therein and the follow-up Forum On-Line discussion with Rypkema and Vince Michael.
Buki’s overall critique of our social built environment finds it Koyaanisqatsi-esque—an out of balance set of places in which interdependencies and interconnections have been lost. He also argued convincingly that distinctions between city and suburb are artificial and not helpful, especially in the wake of our efforts to rebuild such places through preservation, new urbanism, or even “old” urbanism, about which we couldn’t agree more, but for reasons different than his. Here goes. Continue Reading
Upcoming Lectures
This Thursday night I will be the after-dinner speaker for Quincy’s 20th Annual Preservation Dinner, doing a reprise of a talk on “50 years of Chicago historic districts” I did for the Traditional Building Show at Navy Pier last fall. It will be a great opportunity for me to see the incredible preservation story that is Quincy, a town with a wealth of downtown and residential landmarks.
The following weekend I will be at the National Trust Board meetings in Kansas City, and speaking on “Barry Byrne: His Architecture and the Design for St. Francis Xavier” at St. Francis Xavier Church, 1001 East 52nd Street in Kansas City. The lecture is Saturday May 16 at 7:30 PM preceded by organ music starting at 7:00 PM.
I’m still moving
Well, first they moved my office, then I moved my home, and now they are moving my blog. I have to write this to initiate the process and hopefully 200 old posts will follow.
Thought for Thursday March 27 2008. My beer club sent a half-sized newsletter claiming it was using less paper and is therefore greener. They then sent an email suggesting that future newsletters be pdfs which is even more environmentally friendly.
My response? Is it really more sustainable to rely on computers, which run on non-renewable coal, rather than paper, which is renewable and made from trees?
Do We Dare Squander?
Our alumna Kate Keleman deserves congratulations for her curation of the excellent new exhibit at the Chicago Architecture Foundation, Do We Dare Squander Chicago’s Great Architectural Heritage? That seemingly unwieldy title was hand-written on a protest sign carried by Richard Nickel during the 1961 attempt to save Louis Sullivan’s Garrick Theater. Kate worked under Greg Dreicer at CAF who has made quite a splash in Chicago, and the graphic/physical design of the exhibit is really quite good.
Now, I am biased because I am in the show – one of many individuals quoted and pictured in conjunction with key preservation efforts, ranging from the 1920s effort to save the Palace of Fine Arts (Museum of Science and Industry), to more recent projects such as the Monadnock Building and Hilliard Center. Community efforts in places like the Gap and Old Town, as well as the I & M Canal National Heritage Corridor (that’s how come I’m there) stress the important role of grass roots organizing efforts in preservation – which is the subject of a discussion I will moderate in conjunction with the exhibit on April 17 in the evening. The great Richard Nickel is included, as is Preservation Chicago and the recent effort to landmark Roberts Temple, Emmett Till’s church on the South Side. Continue Reading
Going Gothic?
Several alert historic preservation alumni sent me this clipping a couple of weeks ago. Turns out the house that Grant Wood used in his famous painting “American Gothic” is threatened with demolition, according to Harry Mount, a writer in Eldon. Not only is the little white cottage with the big Gothic window is empty, boarded-up, and being offered by the State Historical Society for $250 a month, but there is little interest. One neighbor wanted to tear it down in the 1960s but balked at the $200 purchase price. Continue Reading