 Good evening everyone. I'm Elaine Stiles, an assistant professor of Historic Preservation here in the School of Architecture, Art, and Historic Preservation. And it's my pleasure tonight to introduce our speaker at the Roger Williams University Architecture Lecture Series, Randall Mason. Professor Mason is Associate Professor in the Graduate Program in Historic Preservation and in the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design. He's well known to his colleagues in the field of Historic Preservation for his research on the social, economic, and political aspects of preservation practice, an area of critical need in the field. His work in these areas include consideration of urban design, economic development, memorial practice, the history of the historic preservation movement, and interpretation of cultural values. And his books, The Once in Future, New York Historic Preservation and the Modern City, and Giving Preservation a History, Histories of Historic Preservation in the United States, which is edited with Max Page, explore historic preservation as an element in urban design and urban social fabric, and of course are usually required reading for most historic preservation and urban study students. At U Penn Mason's work Bridges Scholarship and Practice, he leads the Center for Research on Preservation and Society, which conducts applied research on the relationships between historic preservation and contemporary social dynamics. And he also serves as a senior fellow at Penn Praxis, the School of Design Center for Applied Research, Outreach, and Practice, which brings institutional design expertise into the community through practical and applied projects led by Penn Design Faculty. Before joining the faculty at Penn, Professor Mason had appointments at the Getty Conservation Institute, the University of Maryland, and with our neighbors to the north at the Rhode Island School of Design. So please join me in welcoming Randall Mason. Thank you very much Elaine for the generous introduction. Always a little embarrassing when you hear what you've done read out like that. And to Hassan and Nathan and to others, I really appreciate the invitation and the chance to not just to talk about work, but to talk about work with people who are engaged in the same work. So I'll try to limit the time that I talk between 45 and 60 minutes. You can come and pull me away if you need to, if it gets goes a little bit too long. But the thing that's most exciting and most valuable to me about these experiences is to hear your questions and your responses to what I'm talking about. So I really do hope that we have a little bit of a chance for dialogue later on. So I guess the sort of central question I wanted to talk about is historic preservation's relationship to contemporary society and to contemporary design. It's complicated and it's fraught and it doesn't necessarily seem to be getting any easier or clearer or better. But it's a really urgent question. I think we all need to ask ourselves whether we're coming to the topic of dealing with the inherited environment, as I try to generally call it, from the perspective of being a preservationist or a designer with a capital D or a local elected official or a professor in school. No matter what your sort of position is regarding these issues, there seem to be greater complexities as the days pass. So the structure I've given to the presentation, first I'll talk a little bit about preservation and then I'll talk a little bit about design. And then I'll talk about some of the actual projects that I've done recently with colleagues and students. And what I hope is that when I talk about preservation, some of the preservationists will turn a little sideways and say like, wait, that's not what I do. And then the same thing will happen with the designers when I talk about design. Because I think that trying to sort of step back and reframe what we mean when we think about preservation, what we think about design, is one of the ways that we can sort of locate ourselves and get a perspective that we can both stand behind sort of ethically and professionally. But also frame a kind of set of responsibilities that mean something to someone else. That don't just mean that I like my work because it's my work, but that we're out there doing social good and public good. So how many of you are preservation related, by the way? You don't need to be a student. How many of you are designers? How many of you are both? Good, good, good, good. I like those people. Okay, so you're the ones I'll call on. So what is preservation? So the way I usually start such a discussion is what preservation is not. And it's not all about Penn Station. And it's not all about charismatic buildings. And it's not all about architects with capital A whose names you all know. And then I've written, Elaine kindly mentioned previous work and the work that I've done in the history of preservation has mostly been aimed at kind of tipping over this cart that it's all about the kind of heroic political advocacy movements that arise in response to the demolition of a great landmark building. And that's part of the story of preservation and it has been for a long time and it will be for a long time. But it's certainly not the whole story. And the whole story, there's not just like a simple replacement. It's not just the fact that we've been interested in other things for a long time or that we are a political movement. A lot of people in preservation think of the preservation as a movement. I think that's really problematic because we're not only political, we're also technical experts and we're also designers. So it's, you know, looking into history has clarified my view in some ways, but it's actually complicated it more. And that's what keeps it interesting. So whether it's New York at the turn of the 20th century or any other American or other city around the world, for that matter, preservation always has a real kind of complex of connections to the moment in which it's done. It's not just about looking backward and curating artifacts. So to get more to what the kind of gist of preservation and importantly what people outside the field think of preservation, I usually use the following two slides and I think at least one of you is a former student of mine, so you probably may have seen these slides. One of the impressions people have is that preservationists are basically taxidermists. We find the prettiest specimens, we kill them, we pin them to the board, we put them behind glass, we put tags on their feet to tell other people what they mean, and then we just make sure that they don't change and definitely don't touch them. And you know, we make a joke of it but that's a really important part of what preservation is about and we've actually named it the curatorial instinct. That's the curatorial tradition in preservation is incredibly important. It's not as unchanging as people from outside the field think it is, but it's very also limiting if you think about all the other things that preservationists aspire to do. It's also just a really beautiful photograph so it always sort of perks people up. It's a photographer named Rosamund Purcell. Second part of the story is that preservation is also inherently and delightfully political. This is a photograph and I'm sorry that the label seems to have fallen off, which I apologize. It's a photograph taken by Stanley Kubrick, who you may know from his other work. Before he made films he was a photographer and this is in the collection of the Museum of the City of New York. The thing about this photograph that I think is relevant to this is that preservation is about fighting for a cause, for a movement, for an idea, for a building. And it's not just about a fight over a building, it's about the process of fighting. It's about the process of being political and being part of the mix in any city or settlement or landscape of who decides what things change and what things stay the same. Now again, as with the curatorial instinct, there is an argument that to be made that preservationists identify a little bit too strongly with this pugilistic impulse that we're always spoiling for a fight. We always want to say no to any proposal. That's true a lot of times, but it doesn't capture by any stretch the range of political positions and strategies and tactics that preservation professionals use all the time. The last side note about this is that since this picture is really big, you guys can probably see this, they're both hitting each other and they're both smiling. So there's some sense in which they really enjoy being part of the kind of sport of politics. I wanted to relate this back to what my day job is in teaching preservation at Penn. We try to sort of follow through on these curatorial and political traditions by deploying them in ways that are very professionally relevant for our graduates. And that means training people in technical areas of preservation, but also in the political areas of preservation and everything in between. All the kinds of academic traditions and epistemologies that one needs to be a conservator, to be a community planner doing preservation work. So the technical stuff includes, you know, actually going out and doing analyses and treatments of inherited buildings. This is a brick kiln in Montana that my colleague Frank Montero worked on for several years. And that's Nathan, that's Laura Lacombe, and that's second from the left, second from the right. And this is a photograph of a summer project we did for a few years in a World Heritage site in Montenegro where the issues were not the technical conservation or the architectural conservation of buildings, which was handled exceedingly well. It was issues like how do we limit the number of tourists? What do we do now that cruise ships drop off 600 Germans at a time and we don't get any financial payback from it? Where do we put a road? Who do we have to involve? And so it's very much more of an urbanistic and a landscape problem. And so we teach around these as well. The School of Design is everything really, it's been a great place for me to work because it's really well-disposed in terms of the range of disciplines in the school. Preservation is one of five departments and it's very porous the way that students can move across departments. Because preservation is not a discipline, it's a field that applies to, it uses the work and insights of lots of disciplines. We have active partnerships with people in all the four other departments. The way that we do it, the typical degree in preservation, the professional degree is the two-year master of science that we've now been delivering for 35 or 40 years. We actually recently started a one-year post-professional degree for people who already are working, already have a design degree of some kind but want to pivot into more preservation-related issues. And we sense that there's a great need to do this or a great desire to do this but to leave your practice for two years of full-time school is just unreasonable. So we're experimenting with this new way of injecting more preservation into other design disciplines as well. Back to the two-year degree, I mentioned a second ago to Hassan and I just want to talk about the different focus areas that our students take on usually mostly in the second year of their program. Because these five focus areas, in our mind, capture the breadth of the kinds of practice that preservationists will be expected to do so they align with professional opportunities. But they also clarify the breadth but also the boundaries of preservation as a field. So it handles everything from technical conservation to capital D design but the complexities of actually managing cultural and historical sites which means running a business or managing an enterprise is a very different set of skills than you get when you're studying technical conservation. And with preservation planning, although we have it in that one little box, that could mean real estate development, that could mean public policy, it could mean stamping permits in a historical commission. So we try to get our hands on the complexity of the field by channeling it in these five ways. And I'll go through the, actually these are probably less relevant now because I've already talked about the charismatic and urbanistic split within the field but to show that we still care about charismatic buildings I always like to make the joke that like the environmental field has struggled with getting over the public's desire to preserve, to conserve only the charismatic megafauna, the pandas or the tigers or the elephants. We have to get over that too but we still have to conserve the charismatic ones. So in for instance you may have to learn how to draw an elephant in plan and in section and this building is near where I grew up at the Jersey Shore so I always like to loose the elephant. How many have been to loose the elephant? Great. I'm sorry this drawing doesn't capture the stairway where you enter into her back leg and walk up. You can. And on the urbanistic side of the spectrum I always focus on the main street program invented in the 1970s by the National Trust for Historic Preservation and still going strong as a real turning point in a way kind of a radical intervention in the preservation field because for the first time preservationists were organizing not around the curatorial care of a building but around the idea of how do we preserve a town? How do we preserve downtown as a place to do business? And preserving the buildings are part of that but by no means the central part of it. So it's a matter of business organization and marketing and running enterprise and planning in all of its senses. So of course the main street program is a preservation idea but a wholly different sort from the way that we think about charismatic buildings. So the kinds of buildings we typically work on now include everything from the typical charismatic buildings, the old Georgian houses of the rich white folks. We now also study their slave plantations in Delaware by chance. My colleague Aaron Wunch I think some of you know has been studying that very carefully as well as more modern versions of charismatic buildings like the Miller House in Columbus Stuff that I do tends to focus more on urbanism and landscapes so neighborhoods in Philadelphia of which there are many in desperate condition and need help of many kinds like Sharswood where preservation is really an affordable housing issue first and foremost. It's about making affordable housing work in a heritage landscape and in particular kinds of historic building forms but it's really about keeping the people who already live there in their houses. And then of course as neighborhoods improve other issues arise and the image at the bottom I did not paint it I just took the photograph of it but gentrification is alive and well as a political and a cultural issue in a lot of Philadelphia neighborhoods and we too have to grapple with that. That's not somebody else's problem and we neither caused it nor can solve it but we are implicated in all aspects of it. And to the last part I'll say about preservation particularly is that one of the next issues that I think a lot of my colleagues are working on or want to be working on have to do with variously called negative history or negative memory or dark history or sites of trauma which include genocide memorials in Rwanda. The building on the left I'll talk more about later. It's a project I've been working on the last several years. And then one of the other issues that people all around the country have been talking about and will for a while the Confederate memorials and the moving or altering of those because of contemporary political advances I'll say. So now a few words about what design is. Always hazardous to do this because I'm not a capital D designer but I'll make a venture anyway. So in preservation parlance usually this is what design is. It's about these old white guys with long beards from other countries and the argument that they vicariously had in the 19th century about scraping and not scraping or scraping too much or too little. So this is again is a really important and abiding issue but it's by no means a really useful definition of design for contemporary preservation. Instead I've turned to thinkers like Herbert Simon who many of you doubtless know who was a social scientist and a management consultant and a lot of things he kind of ignored, I think he fundamentally ignored disciplines and sought deeper understanding about how things work, how systems work, how organizations work, how universities work and he thought a bit about engineering and design. He usually called it engineering but he came up with a definition of design that probably most a lot of you probably use or could recite. I can't recite it so I have to have the slide up here but he sets out an idea that design again with a metaphorically with a small D is something that everyone does because it's about as he puts it, now I'm sorry I have to read and my glasses are not quite strong enough, everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred situations. So time is absolutely crucial in this but there's very sort of general invocation about the kind of boundaries of change. Certainly they deal with the environment in our sense the environment in the broadest sense and he goes on to talk about how fields of management, business, architecture, education, law, medicine all basically are formed on this core idea that design is about transforming existing conditions into preferred conditions. That very very broad definition of design I think is not just a clever insight I think it's a very useful one. I'm not the first one to think that I have no empirical evidence that Jim Fitch read Herbert Simon's work but they were of the same moment so I think there's probably not totally a coincidence that the synoptic approach that Fitch captured in his teaching and his work at Columbia and this textbook was a kind of a challenge that we have yet to really fully take up in the field as you may remember how many of you preservation students have already bought and read this you will or at least go in the library and check it out as teasers there are chapters on economics there are multiple chapters on ecological issues and Fitch wrote a lot about the environment and politics and culture and how we deal with cultural difference. So the kind of proto ideas in this book from the 70s it was really about ideas from the 50s and 60s but really it sets up a challenge and in a way kind of justifies those of us who identify as of the preservation field pursuing a more ambitious framing of our field based on a broader definition of design and also engaged with contemporary issues I'm going to go through those to save a little time the way that I try to think about a kind of a revised or critically rethought practice following the kind of path of people like Simon and Jim Fitch and others is to think about engaged preservation now as opposed to what is a good question and I would say that my sense my notion of engaged preservation is meant to supplement and complement and kind of to critique what you might call technical preservation or political preservation any from either purist kind of position or the kind of experimental preservation that is now arisen which is essentially kind of an art form preservation as something that happens in a gallery to make a rhetorical point. I think all of those are really interesting and useful and valuable in a certain way but fall short ultimately to the goals that I think preservation should pursue as a field which not only take advantage of the things at the top of the box the creativity and spatial intelligence and research that we already do and we've been doing for a while but to also really take up the challenge of deeper knowledge about how systems work and how change works to really put a flag in the ground about this around this notion of public good which is constantly under attack even before our current political moment it was under attack but is really under attack now and it does not lose sight of the fact that the passion and advocacy and political wisdom is useful for whatever purposes but this notion of engaging with contemporary social issues as I won't say it's been absent from preservation but it hasn't been as central as I would hope it would be and so in the projects that I'll talk about in the balance of my time the idea is that those get foregrounded the issues of the right now and the issues that are about conflict and contention take a more central role not to blot out or to replace issues about material conservation and arresting decay they don't blot out issues about regulating buildings so that they don't change too much it really just kind of tries to put those in different relations to one another so let me just try to go through these in a relatively speedy manner and hope for some good questions to follow on at the end so eastern state penitentiary how many of you have been there great did you go for the Halloween scare or did you go for the daytime tour anybody go for the Halloween scare that helps when you can explain it to others later so it's an amazing for in many preservation perspectives an amazing landmark is built in the 1820s to Haviland's design was used as a prison from the 1820s to the 1970s when it was closed and it was the original spoken wheel a hub and spoke rather a prison design that was later copied by some accounts 300 different prisons around the world it was based on this idea of penitence that those who committed crimes should be isolated and made to be alone with their thoughts and to contemplate God's judgment of them etc etc these are our quakers that we love so much in Philadelphia had this really bad idea built a building to enforce it and what it did was drove people insane so they had to change the prison a lot over between the original kind of penitence system and a number of other incarceration strategies that were tried over the years I should also say that it's close to but not in the center of Philadelphia was originally built to be on the outskirts city of course grew around it so this aerial gives you a sense of its size it's about 11 acres within the wall and just a few minutes up the hill from center city so the original plan is on the left and the current plan more or less on the right so you can see the numbers of additions that mostly followed the kind of DNA of Haviland's plan but in some ways very purposefully changed them for instance one story wings were made into two story wings the original exercise yards which were also for individuals to not encounter another person were later converted to lots of different uses so there were some flexibilities taken so in the mid 80's a group of reservation advocates to save the building and realize that they not only didn't just need to save it because the city owned it and was thinking about selling it to make it into things like a shopping mall and a supermarket believe me they're actually drawings of how you put a supermarket in there without demolishing the wall but their biggest mission initially was to get people to visit it because once you get people inside the building to appreciate the power of its idea and the tragedy of what happened to people inside of it that was where the meaning resided so they got hard hat tours okay and they began to take people into it so that was 30 plus years ago I've been on the board of directors for about five years and was an advisor to them before that so I've only come in in the last several years but the people who were the initial advocates are still run the organization and is fantastically successful not just as a preservation organization and not just as an economic enterprise because terror behind the walls produces a lot of income to fund the preservation work it's also become very successful as essentially a social reform institution as a place where people go they don't go to learn about the issues of mass incarceration but when they go they also learn about the issues of mass incarceration and racism which are not only national issues but are particularly acute issues in Philadelphia and even in the surrounds of the actual neighborhood of the prison so the conditions that you find are usually described as a stabilized ruin decay has been mostly arrested new roofs have been put on everything which took something like 15 years to get the roofs repaired there is a bit of sort of artistic influence in the curating of moving artifacts around to make interesting combinations this barber chair was never in a cell but putting it in a cell makes and provokes certain kinds of thoughts there are other kinds of preservation strategies that have been used over the years to again to bring the building and the whole place to life in different ways for different audiences on the left is Al Capone cell and on the right a synagogue both of them restored if not totally reconstructed and totally not in keeping in the terms of preservation philosophy with the rest of the building but very sort of small and bespoke kind of micro experiences within the whole complex because the complex is so bloody big and because there's so many rooms and it's relatively spatially confusing when you're in there they can get away with doing different things in different spaces in a way that many other kinds of architectures wouldn't allow so this is a sort of before and after from a master plan that was done a few years ago preservation strategy before and after we're still actively thinking about how we preserve the building and connect that to different programmatic opportunities opportunities that are both economic and social and also artistic I would say that one of the biggest sort of transformative decisions made about this preservation project was when they decided to invite artists into whatever they wanted to interpret in the space of the prison so whether it's Jesse Crimes on the left interpreting his life as an incarcerated prisoner Cindy Stockton Moore on the right doing an exhibit about victims of murderers who were jailed here there have been dozens of these projects over the years and annually there's a call for artists I think it's actually open right now if any of you also have artistic ideas and so is this constant refreshing of new ideas and provocations that are loosely connected to the whole interpretive program but really effective at getting people thinking in different ways about this not just being an old building that is an artifact left behind that they can go look at it fall apart and then of course there's the tower behind the walls that it remains I won't say controversial but it remains a constant subject of discussion within the leadership of Eastern State Penitentiary Inc to make sure that the relationship between the Halloween scare and the interpretation of the architecture and history and social issues remain distinct enough that people don't confuse one experience for the other so we can have a long, long talk about that and I'm glad to field questions about that at the end but I do want to certify that the essentially the kind of surplus that is created by terror behind the walls goes to preserving the building it doesn't go to you know we don't have board meetings in Aruba we don't you know people don't get big bonuses it's not it's not a profit making venture the most recent change and for those of you who've already been I would say go back now to see a couple of new exhibits that very directly take on this issue of mass incarceration and racism one is called the big graph elegantly named it's a metal structure that sits out in open space and it shows over time the percentage of the population of the US that has incarcerated so you can see the increase decade to decade of how many people how many Americans are in jail on the end of the let's see if this guy works on the end of the most recent column there's also room to grow so subsequent decades they'll put another one out in 2010 on that edge there are all the different countries of the world are arrayed by percentage and on the backside of it and we're at the top by the way US on the backside of it is a breakdown by race as that was done subsequently when it was understood that we got the criticism that well this is a racial issue but we can't not talk about that aspect of it so that has been very carefully inserted into this exhibit and then the visitor feedback that we get is very carefully parsed for how people respond when we change the messages in some of the old exercise yards space was created or rehabilitation project was launched to create a big exhibit called mass incarceration that gives it's a very well designed set of didactics and interactive videos that give you a not just a kind of a social overview but also a lot of first person testimonies about the effect that incarceration has on contemporary Philadelphians really powerful exhibit and highly recommended last thing I wanted to say about eastern state you know like every building it continues to change and not just fall apart one of the things that we've been lacking for the last 30 or 40 years is bathrooms there are no bathrooms there have been portagons brought in for visitors quarter of a million visitors a year no bathrooms so this has been an urgent need for a long time and we're in the course of in the midst of see if I'm putting a new structure in here that will be basically a visitor center and bathrooms in this old electrical facility and it's the first time that there's been a decision to put a new structure of any kind in within the walls so it's been very controversial it's been controversial in a good way there's been very vigorous discussion about classic preservation design issues like how much should it be differentiated from existing fabric how much should it use the language of materials or how background should it be how forceful should it be so we've been having actually got an email this morning about yet another design change that it's a very collaborative groups so every decision is made by committee so we hope that that makes a better result this one is not happening so don't worry about that one second project is North Brother Island which hopefully none of you have been to because it's off limits to the public it's an abandoned island in the east river of New York and it's owned by the New York City government the Department of Parks and Recreation manages it and owns it as a wildlife preserve although for between the 1880's and the 1960's it was used as a hospital island for quarantine and for drug treatment and for a bunch of different things so it had this human history from the 1880's to the 1960's and then it was abandoned nature is taken back over and among other species the black crown night heron nests there and because that's a protected bird the island is managed as a wildlife preserve this is a contemporary photograph North Brother is that's Riker's Island LaGuardia that is a little corner of Central Park and more importantly these are several South Bronx neighborhoods Hunts Point Mott Haven and this is Randall's Island technically North Brother is part of the Bronx and this part of the Bronx as you can really just sort of tell from the air photo is very underserved in terms of green space and environmentally beneficial environments to have a city park basically part of the burrow that's not accessible seems politically untenable and indeed several politicians are really lobbying to make it into a publicly accessible park there are lots of barriers to doing that one is that the birds are endangered and their nesting sites can't be disturbed second is that there's no infrastructure third is that it's got a bunch of falling down old buildings on it that will never really have a reuse and present a real danger to people who might visit so that's the sign that welcomes you on the island by the way I'm not sure why they put it here this is on the side that faces Riker's Island so I guess if you got in the water and you're a really good swimmer you wouldn't pay attention to this anyway when you saw it so I think it's kind of a wasted sign so we did a studio first in 2005 actually on how to balance the nature conservation and historic preservation futures of an island that has the ruins of about 20 buildings and this really interesting and very disturbed ecology we went back and did a studio in 2015 and then got a foundation to fund this study which we've shopped around to New York City Council we have a couple of councilmen who are supporters and we're fundraising now to actually design our recommendations which is to bring limited public access back to the island in a temporary way to at least give partial benefit to South Bronx kids mostly to this sort of amazing environmental asset in their midst this gives a sense of some of the surroundings the land use that brown is industrial pink is residential and the aquamarine is civic this is the first map that we could find of the island which is really wonderful because it confirmed a lot of our instincts about landscape change ecological change for those of you who are geomorphologists it's a classic drumlin it's got this sort of streamlined hill with wetlands on both sides it's just a glacial remainder the first hospital building you see there and over time about 20 or 30 buildings were added this is what it looked like after World War II it's basically a campus looks like it could be any sort of school the land on the 20% of the land on the right side of the island is landfill it was a subway fill from a subway tunnel project elsewhere in New York but this sort of scrubbed clean and lawn filled campus was used after World War II as a town basically the state rented it from the city and housed 5,000 returning veterans who were on the GI bill and going to universities in New York so between 46 and 51 people took the ferry back and forth it ran every 10 minutes and a friend and I published a book on this and we got letters from people like oh I grew up there and I took the ferry back and forth my dad went to NYU so it was this very sort of interesting interlude when it was really intensely used and really connected to the part of the island to the city totally changing the way that it was disconnected before it was always valued as a quarantine place and among other things Typoid Mary was exiled there for decades so to have it totally connected suddenly was kind of a transformational moment but after the 60s the last use of the island was for drug rehab for kids from the Bronx and upper Manhattan that program failed and the city just sort of let it sit. Today this is how you approach the island this is one of the old ferry gantries that one of our architecture students did a great project for how to stabilize this and essentially to make it into a kind of a sign for the island the conditions on the island will be captured in these photos basically abandoned buildings that have lost their integrity have been taken over by the invasive species whether it's maples or ivy or mulberries this is kind of a garage and these are photographs and the photographer Chris Payne took five or six years of amazing photographs in all seasons and the two of us did a book together when I did a history and he did the photographs if you want to see more. The studio that we did and the study included we did a classic preservation study documented what buildings were there we documented landscape conditions I know you can't read this but the pink boxes on the right were the only five of the buildings that we thought with even with great investment could be brought back to some use and there are a couple of them that potentially with a big price tag investment could be reused. Then we did basically we followed kind of national park service cultural landscape methodology to identify character areas and organize our recommendations around those character areas and they basically break down to it as a stabilized ruin and interpreting it because it's not really interpreted other than the many many websites of urban explorers you can you probably may have already looked up on your phone people who are not supposed to go there go there anyway and take photographs and find ghosts and things like that to monitor the ecological resources because as resilience and coastal resilience get to be more important issues this place is already made laboratory to understand the response of especially of different plant associations to changing maritime circumstances it was totally over washed and sandy for instance and that had a big effect on even the invasive species and lastly and most interestingly to bring limited public access basically curated tours and educational experiences keep buildings from falling over on people but also keep some of the buildings up the ruins at least so third project not too far away from your Stamford Connecticut I'll go through this one relatively quickly because it's still going on so it's not finished but it's also not terribly interesting project it's important but not terribly interesting the south end of how many of you know the south end of Stamford or anybody from there so it's this part of Stamford and it was traditionally at first it was a beautiful rural cemetery and the big park at the end it was country estates that looked in the water and became a big manufacturing landscape the Yale Lock Company was there Pitney Bows was there other big manufacturing and small manufacturing operations so it became the kind of industrial part of town but in the postwar years as the industry left two things happened being concentrated place of four populations and immigrant populations and it also partly got redeveloped especially in the boom years of the 90s and 2000s for new high rise condo buildings for people working in the financial industries either based in Stamford or on the very quick train ride into Manhattan so this is the map from the RFP really ugly map from the RFP that the city issued to try to solve the problem of the yellow parts and there and basically all that being high rise new urban design with really bad street design and automobile oriented and to save the blue stuff which is the historic fabric what they don't color blue here actually should be color blue that's the remnant of the historic fabric that we're trying to defend as part of a bigger scheme to allow more room for density for further development because the city needs and wants further density and development but to protect enough of the urban fabric so that it is, it retains its integrity as a district and continues to provide affordable housing benefits so this is a typical scene of the heritage houses which are nothing special especially if you're from New England it's a typical kinds of housing types mostly wouldn't and then this is just the intermediary scale urban new development there's even bigger stuff when you get closer to the train station I should say that I'm the preservation consultant on a team that's led by a landscape architect named Ellen Nices who has a practice in Brooklyn and teaches at Penn also and together we're doing this kind of conservation solution to protect buildings like this that are used, almost none of them used for single family housing the classic kind of main street buildings where there are, there is a business sector that's hanging on there but mostly the affordable housing this is my favorite picture because you can barely count the satellite dishes and therefore the different apartments connected to different parts of the globe that this is basically the last part of Stamford where affordable housing in historic buildings is still viable so this is, it is on the national register preservationists may well ask, well isn't it already protected only on the national register there's no local preservation law, politics have prevented it which is pretty rare for Connecticut, Connecticut is usually pretty strong at the local level for preservation so this is a map from the 1986 national register nomination, the red buildings have been demolished this was the Yale Lock factory and they kept this one long building and basically scraped the rest of it clean and you can see that here, basically here is the area that we're focusing on most, go through that but this is a close up of that same area where you see, this is still existing factory building, the Blicken's Durfer typewriter factory, you can't make this stuff up the charismatic old timey name, the Blicken's Durfer factory and this is actually, which in the 1890s was a school, is now just a bigger school and the crux of the issue for us has been to how to remake those blocks so that they serve that role to connect the two existing bigger parts of the historic district but also create enough amenity that the developers will pay for part of it and it's basically like a user fee arrangement and will also create public space that legitimately mixes these two very different populations that don't mix at all. The developers have made all these attempts at making public space that only serve the new buildings and really aren't public realm in any fundamental way so we're trying to figure out how to get this green street of a string of public spaces and one of the things that we're doing that pushes the envelope with preservationists a bit is to talk about moving buildings because moving frame buildings is actually a lot easier than we typically think it is. Post Sandy, there have been a lot of coastal communities that have moved a lot of buildings and lifted them at least and moved them around so with some of the smaller and more kind of marginal buildings that have already been kind of isolated, we thought that those could be moved into this zone and sort of help to knit into the existing in place fabric so maybe take a look at the newspapers if you want to see how the fight comes out but we're close to be able to give this proposal to the city and see if they take it out. Fourth project is in a very strange part of the world called the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. It's a non-country, it's a part of the island of Cyprus and it happens to have this remarkable town called Fama Gusta where the fortifications that were made between the war and 900 years ago are still totally intact including the moat and the glacis and the gates and the interior of the town is semi-intact lots of new growth around it but it's suspended in this very strange political situation. It's right next to the demarcation line where the UN troops still patrol between Cyprus and the Greek part and the Turkish part so-called 1774 have been at loggerheads but inside the walls there are a number of remarkable church buildings and other landmarks that groups like the World Monuments Fund has been working on for years so through a Turkish colleague and colleague at World Monuments Fund we got involved in this project WMF was already funding wall paintings conservation in one of the churches, not one that I pictured here I'm afraid and it was amazing work in this incredible church building but it struck me when I first heard a presentation about it as conserving the deck chairs in the Titanic because this beautiful church would be totally overrun as soon as there's a political solution to the Cyprus problem and investment rushes into this amazing landscape that not only is this the great walled town, it's also a beautiful coastline, a Mediterranean coastline so whether it's for beach resorts or boutique hotels without controls in place to protect the historic urban fabric and the landmark buildings and the walls and fortifications it would be totally overrun and ruined by the development that someday if there is a political solution we'll get unleashed. So let me just go through quickly a couple of atmospherics, this is the main gate this is part of the Venetian built fortifications that have recently been conserved, they're in better shape now than this picture suggests but there's a lion that Venetians very happily leave behind. This is the moat which is at least informally, I was told not to go there because it's too dangerous, but there's an old guy on his morning walk so people actually do use the landscape around the wall so the authorities from outside Fama Goose to tend to think that there's nothing worthwhile inside the wall, it's just all like poor people and immigrants who live there and there's really no reason to preserve it, all the valuable stuff is gone but a closer look or our closer look at least suggested quite the opposite. This is the most remarkable building in the town which is a cathedral, notice anything strange about this cathedral? Hassan you can't answer. Yes sir. Right it's a mosque, it's not a cathedral so it has a minaret of course so the Ottomans took over Fama Goose to in the late 16th century I think and turned it into a mosque, it's been a mosque longer than it's been a church it's just one of a number of remarkable buildings, this one being the one most visible that have all these different lives over time and continue to serve the community extraordinarily well so it's really a matter of understanding these places as sort of living, breathing, changing buildings and not just sort of curatorial elements. They've made a modern town square around the cathedral slash mosque which again is the center of civic life. Number of other great buildings including this is the church where they did the wall paintings conservation, other very early houses, later 19th century Turkish buildings ruins of all kinds all around town. So we did a series of studies with students to basically to document what was happening in the town, vacancy, condition, building type and so forth in order to make a set of recommendations about what would happen when change of a very dramatic sort comes. The last thing I'll say about it is that maybe I should have had these slides earlier because the real opportunities that the big money developers from, I guess you have to imagine they'll be Russians because they own the rest of Cyprus and they'll very quickly gravitate here. This is the port that is between the wall and the water and is currently controlled by the Turkish military. Turkish military have all the waterfront land and once they leave or are made to leave it opens up all this land so not only the kind of 100% corner so to speak of the town, but just south of the town is this suburb, modern suburb called Verosha that in 1974 was quickly abandoned. Everybody got out because the Turkish military was invading and all these buildings are empty and have been empty since 1974. There are a few of them, there are dozens of them and it's quite a big territory. It's basically the dark east side territory that you see to the right in this photograph. Some of them are used by the Turkish military, but otherwise it's this whole abandoned town. We were not allowed and very greatly discouraged from going into the Verosha when we were there, but apparently some people have, like North Brother Island, people not being allowed in is allure to some people. People have taken photographs of the car dealership where the 1974 cars are still in the showroom and people's breakfast table where they just left and the meal is still on the table. So it's this real-time machine that will be totally transformed by the onslaught. The real preservation story though, and I think the development story is what happens to this thing that's still at the center of the wild town. As we know from the kinds of urban development that's going on in every continent these days, that people realize the amenity value of historic landscapes and historic fabric, especially when it's so charismatic and so beautiful and so intact as it is in Fama Gusta. So we think it's one of those real sort of time bombs that's going to blow up someday and we can do a lot to try to prepare for that. Okay, last project. Several years ago I did a small project with some students to do a study of a memorial in Rwanda with an architect in New York who was doing a plan for conservation and renovation. Although they didn't have any conservation folks on their team so we kind of joined them. That turned into a two or three year project in which we worked, are working with the Rwandan government essentially to do training so that the people who manage their national genocide memorials have conservation expertise or at least exposure and as they manage the ongoing life of these memorials they can factor conservation in. They really haven't in the past except very kind of idiosyncratically. Background for this of course is that some of you probably know at least a little bit about the 1994 genocide but the the starkest and operative fact is that in a hundred days 800,000 people were killed and mostly killed by hand. It was not like poison gas or bombs or even guns. So as it's incredible human tragedy, anyway you slice it no matter what political side you're on. And it was essentially different classes within Rwandan society who victimized, one victimized the other. They're often described as ethnic groups but that's not really the case. There was more of a kind of a social and economic class difference. Anyway the story after 1994 is remarkable in a different way. Have any of you been to Rwanda? It does actually get a fair amount of international tourists these days. Since 1994 the country has been remarkably turned around. It is regarded as the most successful stable, highly developed, or quickly developing country in Africa, certainly in East Africa. I mean this incredibly resilient story of rebuilding Rwandan society including bringing people to justice who were the perpetrators of the genocide and reintegrating them into Rwandan society at the same time that Rwandan society built itself up economically. That was all managed by a guy named Paul Kagame who was the leader of the militia that stopped the genocide in 1994. They were in exile in Uganda, invaded the country and basically stopped the genocide and basically became the political power. So it worked. They transformed the country. The downsides include political repression, not quite free press, reports of torture and worse as part of maintaining that political regime. So it's a very fraught, it's an incredible story in all these dimensions but also still incredibly fraught. Human Rights Watch routinely reports about what an evil regime the Kagame regime is. At the same time there are plenty of other people who hold it up as an example. The Singapore of Africa. More repressive than it needs to be but it works. A kind of political regime. So having been invited to work on this, for better or for worse the strategy that I and my team took was to focus on the people on the ground who have the day-to-day responsibility for keeping these places intact so that not only can they continue to be used by Rwandans today as unabashedly as part of a political campaign to keep the country together and even repress it but to make sure that these places were intact in the future so that as Rwandan society continues to transform and democracy matures in the future that these places would still be available for interpretation for reflection for commemoration because if they disappear then the prospects for a better Rwanda I think disappear with them. So we thought it was very important even at the kind of technical, professional, material level to help our Rwandan colleagues figure out how to keep these places together. And so strangely I found myself very engaged in technical conservation and even stranger engaged in technical conservation that's mostly about textiles which as you'll see in a minute is the most urgent problem with this site. So this is the sign that you see as you're passing on the main road through the town of Neymata. The memorial is just off the road. It was built as a Catholic church as you'll see in a moment. Incidentally it's the main road that you see here behind the sign in a couple of years will be the main road connecting the new airport to the capital. So the amount of traffic on this road will increase exponentially putting more pressure on the town and of course the memorial. There are lots of ways that the Rwandan genocide is already memorialized in literature and in writing in artworks, in archives that the Rwandans and their partners in this case really based trust called the Aegis Trust help them build an archive of survivor testimonies and first person accounts and transcripts of this extraordinary 10-year transitional justice effort that were called gachaka courts essentially means grassroots and it was basically a decentralized justice system where people would come forward in village, literally around the village green and admit their crimes and apologize and be not absolved but to sort of get a reduced sentence or otherwise be reincorporated in the society. So this remarkable sort of coming clean to each other. The transcripts of every one of these once a week meetings in every village for 10 years has been digitized or is being digitized as part of this remarkable archive. So the memorials are part of a bigger effort to literally archive and metaphorically archive evidence of the genocide. And again what happens with that evidence is a political question that is to be perfectly honest that's the next question I have to deal with in this work in Rwanda. I really haven't figured that out yet and that's the next book that I write is going to be about figuring out what this means for the kind of political futures of my work and my work means in sense of these political futures. But I'll talk next more just about the on the ground work that we did at Niamata and then I'll wrap it up. So Laura Lacombe again, Nathan and I both know her. She was a Penn student and studied material conservation and was part of the team that we took repeatedly to Rwanda to do training and as part of the training to do the conservation work and a conservation plan for Niamata. The woman on the right is named Rachel Moratakeke. She's the manager of Niamata, the genocide site. She grew up in the region and her family, she's a survivor of the genocide and her family was dispatched at Niamata. And many of the people who manage the sites and work for the government agency that manages them have personal connections to the sites where they work and often incorporate that into their tours. The tours are the only way that the sites are interpreted. There's no brochures, no signs, no films, it's just the people and the artifacts. So it's this very kind of clarified straightforward experience. My most important collaborator over these three years has been Martin Mujoza whose family was also dispatched at Niamata. Remarkably sent him out of the country just in time in April 1994 so he was spared but as soon as he came back and tried to find his family he became involved in the response, the post-genocide response in the most literal way of separating human remains from artifacts and to begin the process of preparing these sites as memorials. Most of the national memorials are sites of these very intense killing, not all of them are. The structure you see over Martin's right shoulder with the roof on the left here is a mass grave structure. Each one of the national memorials has a concrete vault mass grave structure in which human remains are kept. Off of public view but you can go into the vaults to view them if you like or if you're a survivor and want to go see the remains of your people you can go in and witness them personally. Martin has been since 1994 involved in one way or another in caretaking, keeping care of these sites and he's now the chief of the site managers and conservators for CNLJ which is the government agency that manages the sites. He is trained as a school teacher and in biology and he doesn't have any conservation or design or engineering training. He's been figuring it out as he goes along and has done a remarkable job of one man with a whole country of sites to manage but he's principally who we're working with and the 12 people who work under him are the kind of students in our training program. This is the site itself and sorry it's not a great image but the church building is right there. That's the main road and this is the property. That's the new church because the old church was consecrated when it was turned into a memorial and this is kind of a little enclave of religious uses, schools, convents, rectory and the newly built church so it forms a little kind of quiet square off the sort of cacophony of the main road. A quick aside into architectural conservation and architectural history the building itself is a really remarkable design. It was designed in 1980 and built shortly thereafter by a Swiss architect priest who was a missionary to East Africa. His name was Bernard Jobin. He's still alive. We've interviewed him and this happily we found this in a Swiss architecture journal. The church is made essentially of very simple mason reconstruction with a metal roof passively ventilated and passively lit. Beautifully designed to be part of its environment. Low tech. All local materials and no advanced technology. Nothing more advanced than concrete. The building includes some really interesting references including Romanesque arches on this interior elevation and if I didn't tell you where this was you might say okay this was like a third rate student of Corbusier so the literal Corbusier references of the sort of pinwheel plan where he pulls apart the building in these different spots to introduce his concrete screens for passive ventilation and as you'll see in some of the pictures I show of the interior there's a reference to Ranchamp. There's a space between the top of the wall and the roof structure where there's a thin line of light so it's a very, very rich building even just architecturally. This is the typical wall to give you a sense of the local material. Pretty badly made brick, serviceable but badly made and the mortar is concrete basically. So architecturally the conservation strategy has been and we've just continued this to leave intact any damage that's from the genocide from April 1994 like the bullet hole on the left but to remove and remediate and to arrest the decay that's coming from other vectors including birds nesting on the building and his excrement is you can see on the right. So some of the pathologies of the building we eliminate and others we essentially have to keep intact because they are the most significant part of the architecture. This is one of the screens one of these sort of ventilation screens. There's no barrier air and wind and pests and everything else can go in and out for better and for worse. This is the tower at the back which proclaims its role as a Catholic church. From the interior this is looking up at the ceiling where the bullet holes from 1994 have been preserved. Really cleverly by putting an almost clear fiberglass layer on top of the metal roof. It's a very light metal structure so the light fiberglass has gone really well. We'll need to be replaced soon and that will be a challenge but this is a really wonderful way to keep the damage intact and actually to sort of highlight it. It's a mass grave structure. This is the interior of the church what you see from them. There are two entrances and the main entrance gives you the immediate view across this one large room to the altar. This is the tabernacle at the bottom of that big tower that's open at the top and sort of admits this beautiful light. There's a baptismal font. These are the light aluminum structures that hold up the roof. This is a crypt structure that was made in 1996 after the genocide as a way to display certain artifacts so this is a stairway that goes down. The thing that overwhelmingly impacts you when you walk into the room are the piles of textiles everywhere. In this view they're on top of every one of the pews in the church and they are essentially the stand-ins for the missing people. When people came to the church they were told to go there to be safe to find refuge. Of course that was a trick and it only made them easier to slaughter in greater numbers but they brought with them their clothes and household goods and whatever they needed. So these piles of clothes were separated from human remains in the direct aftermath of the genocide and have remained here for the last 24 years. Sitting there in a passively ventilated building and deteriorating more and more quickly as the years pass. It's bad enough when they're on pew benches and lifted up off the floor a little bit in other parts of the church. This is the day chapel at the back of the sanctuary. These are all just piled on the ground. So we quickly realized that the building was in quite good shape and didn't need any really dramatic interventions. There are some water infiltration issues but those are sort of slow burn and can be dealt with pretty simply. But the textiles were urgent. If nothing was done they would be gone in 10 years. And so we had a textile conservator as part of our team, a woman named Julia Brennan who also has experience among other places in Cambodia working on some of the remains from the killing fields there. So she had a little bit of an analog to how to deal with this. And the long story short is that we designed and prototyped a process for semi-cleaning the textiles. Bringing them up off the floor reducing their humidity and getting rid of the pests to just slow down the decay. You might think well why didn't we just go put them in a museum facility. Well there's a Rwandan law that these artifacts can't be taken off the site. And we also didn't want to enclose the building and condition the building. It would be a disaster for the architectural conservation reasons. It would also be extraordinarily expensive and the electrical supply is not that great. So we had to design a solution like Brennan-Joban that was based on the existing low-tech availability. This gives you a sense of what the different part, different conditions of the textile collection. Some of them are quite recognizable as garments. Other ones are so either embedded with laterite road dust or simply deteriorated. You can see here like this is all just eaten away and just so dirty that you can't really tell what it was originally. So part of the challenge was in sorting out the different parts of the collection because they would be treated somewhat differently. And to again to train the Rwandans on the concepts behind the process but also in the process itself so they could continue doing this work. It's a massive amount of collection just at this one site. And every other site in Rwanda has its textile collection that is just piled up in a corner somewhere. So we took a really long time to make this. We couldn't use a drone either. No drones allowed. The defense ministry says no drones. So no drones. So we invented a way to take basically interior aerial photographs to map the textile collection and to estimate its size. 39 cubic meters. A big 18 wheeler shipping container is 40 cubic meters. So basically an 18 wheeler's worth of textiles. There are also some artifacts, rosaries and wallets and glasses and things like that. Many fewer of those though. This is a quick detour into the crypt where there are some human remains and artifacts on display in a glass case that has never been monitored. So here you can see Martin and Laura installing some really simple Hobo devices to measure relative humidity and temperature just to get a sense of what kind of deterioration could be mitigated. Some of the interior architecture also needs to be dealt with for various reasons. But the textiles again are the overwhelmingly the challenge. This is Julia Brennan doing some of the sorting. This is a blanket. This is Martin and Julia starting the sorting in the day chapel. Our goal last May and June was to completely process this room and to re-display it again as a training program. What we needed to do that, this is a map of the site done by Rwandans. There's no place on the site to do the work. So we had to make a building. I joked to my friends that I'm not an architect and certainly not a trained architect, but this is my first built structure. So I basically had to design it in my notebook and send it to Rwandan contractor to build it out of sheet metal and posts. Designed so that it could be dismantled easily and sent on to the next memorial site once they started work there. So it's essentially a kind of a, you know, sort of a temporary building. But it's on a concrete foundation. And so one of the things that we needed the building to enclose was this contraption that we had an engineer build. It's essentially a tumbler. Put the clothes in, tumble them. A lot of the dirt falls out. Any of artifacts and human remains that happen to be left also fall out into the tray underneath. The clothes that are totally deteriorated get put in a different stream and basically immediately archived. But the ones that are still recognizable get vacuumed. Again, in a non-destructive way, they're put between two sandwiches of screen and vacuumed. And then put in these plastic bins that are right out of a, you know, Home Depot type store with zoalite beads, desiccant beads that soak up the humidity. So the most important thing to do is to get the pests out and to reduce the humidity. So we put the clothes in with the beads in an RH meter and they monitor. The one is monitor. When it gets down to a certain humidity level, then they can swap them out for a next bin full of clothing. The zoalites are sustainable in the sense that once they're used up, you just heat them, drive off the water and then you can use them again. So they're kind of, you know, infinitely usable. They're usually used for keeping seeds dry for agricultural uses. So, last two slides. This is before and that's after. And so the we had to create a kind of an interim display or interim interpretive design. And what we decided to do is we had these metal platforms created that are sort of, they're three like, sort of like bed platforms out of all metal. And we re-displayed cleaned piles of clothes on the platform as well as the bins of clothes that still needed to be monitored. So this gave easy access to the staff that they could record the humidity and know when to swap things out. Plus it cleaned the day chapel and the continuing, you know, supply of dirt and pests also needed to be remediated right away. So the last picture that I would have shown, if we'd done it already, I'm going back next week and I hope that I have another slide to take is that all the clothes on the pews should have been removed. The pews repaired because they're all wood on metal brackets and they're all been eaten by termites. The clothes processed and then put back on the pews and displayed the same way so that if you went back you wouldn't be able to tell that they had been conserved. They might look a little bit cleaner, but they'd basically be re-displayed in the same way. That was extremely important to the Rwandans and to the survivors. That kind of direct witness to the loss of their families is one of the most important things that they do every April when this 100 days of commemoration begins every April 7th. People come and spend sometimes days at this and other memorials remembering their ancestors. They need and want these collections as the direct witness of the genocide. The technical work that we carved out was to make sure that they and future generations are going to have these textiles in this place to go back to. We know it's a very imperfect solution. We know that the decay continues. These are still exposed to most of the same vectors that they have been exposed to, but this is the best that could be done right now in order to get them on a path of thinking about conservation long into the future. With that, I will take you back to Philadelphia and be quiet and listen to your questions. Thanks. I'm sorry for talking for so long, so I find it hard to stop. So in New York, was it Brother Island? Yeah, North Brother. Why? I guess my question is in a situation like that that's so inaccessible. Why even create a preservation effort in that situation? Because the public can't get even if you have these minor kind of trips to there, is that a feasible kind of investment? For those five buildings? Well, we don't know what can happen to the buildings yet. We actually propose that some of them be torn down because the one most dangerous and most deteriorated ones and have the materials reused in some way. So we're not actually specifying which buildings need to be preserved and they certainly won't be reused or rehabilitated in our lifetime. We thought the rationale to rest on two things. Well, three things. One is I mentioned that the South Bronx is dramatically underserved when it comes to green places, natural environments, and as they deal more with environmental injustice issues, like they have the highest asthma rates in the city, etc. They want and need more environmental resources. Since they already own it, and it's right there, they can see it but not get to it. It seems like a political imperative to give them access to it in some way. Now, you could do that virtually. And there's one interpretive sign in a park on the shore that says, okay, that thing you can see, this is what it is. This is what happened there. So you could do it virtually, but we think it'd be more powerful if at least some people got the experience of actually being there, and especially young people. So that's one. Number two, the social histories attached to it that have to do with quarantine and immigration are really important and urgent and we shouldn't just squander an opportunity to interpret those stories for current and future generations. And the third one is kind of an abstract concept, but economists have this notion that part of the value of a cultural good, an old building or an island or whatever it is, is what's called its bequest value, or its option value. And that is that it has a value because you might go to it in the future, or that somebody else in the future might go to it. So it's not your immediate use of it and personally your use of it, but that you value the idea that someday somebody might be able to make use of it, take value from it. And so as a matter of bequest value I think especially in very fast growing and transforming cities like New York, we should look very carefully at every bequest value issue that comes up, because it's we like to say it's a scarce resource and that's right. We're not going to make new North Brother Islands. We'll make other kinds of stuff and we'll preserve those too. But this is once this is lost, it's lost. Going to talk about Rwanda, you were talking about how your solution is for conservation, especially of the personal good you see in the stuff that the families are most interested in, are prioritized most, value the most, that eventually simply because of the of the primatic and biological conditions they're going to decay and disintegrate at some point. It's probably within the lifetime of survivors of the genocide. Are a lot of your discussions with the people that work on the site talking to them about how to manage that process when people come to visit their families remains? Do you mean that people might actually physically touch them? Just in general of like preparing the people who work at the site for the fact that the textiles are going to go? Yeah, so absolutely. That was sort of like day one of the training. Everything falls apart, things fall apart in a famous book. It's not a matter of stopping that all together but managing it. All of our interventions are about managing that decay. There are ways to manage it more aggressively and less aggressively. They've been doing a little bit, but not that much. We're moving the lever, that's how we talked about it with them. We did propose a bunch of ideas to them that made sense to us, but they're not acceptable for various reasons to the Rwandans or to say an algae who is, you know, they're our client. They're actually not paying us. The money is not coming from them, but that's who we're working for. One of the differences between, I talked earlier today to a class at Brown, one of the things that, you know, there's always that moment as a teacher when people start writing things, you realize you must have just made an important point because you wrote something in your notebook. It said it's like, you know, working professionally, we can talk about the philosophy of how we do this or that. But once you have a client that's part of the mix, it doesn't make the philosophy go away or less important, but it adds another really important influence that changes the shape of everything. And so what CNLJ has to do politically, financially and just bureaucratically are part of the constraints we're working with. So one of the things that they, we couldn't do, we couldn't remove things from the site. We still put in our final report that the best solution we thought was to drastically reduce the amount of textiles on display and to take X percent, you fill in the blank, and to archive them offsite in Kigali in a conditioned facility. And that would be, we'd have to change their law to do that. We said you should change your law because that's the best way to guarantee that you can display them and interpret them and commemorate with them as you are and have the possibility of doing that in the future. Because otherwise, you know, in 10 years or now, 50 years, I don't know, how many years did we give them by extending the life of these things. They have more, but they don't have an infinite number. So we've tried to make them aware of that, and really give them actionable recommendations that they can do right now and will work. Thank you. I actually want to ask a few questions. The first one is, I'm trying to connect to three dots, and I can get the first two pretty well, but maybe you can help me with the third. And the second question is actually about your thoughts about Cuba because when you were talking about Cyprus, I think about how Cuba is changing so rapidly, and I kind of want to get there myself before it's gone. Because it wasn't kind of a time capsule for a long time. And I'm just going to give you the observations about that. But my first question is, the first thought is a long time ago I was listening to a story on a PR about a woman. I can't remember if she was a therapist or a clergy person, but her job was to take people and even children to see the bodies of the deceased. And there was this story about a girl who wanted to see her brother shortly after he died, and the family didn't want her to and they thought she couldn't handle it. And she went in and she talked to him and she brought him a flashlight so he wouldn't get hurt in the dark. And it was beautiful and it helped her cope and it helped them cope. And looking at the chapel in Rwanda, I think about all they have is clothing, but it's something. So that's two dots. And the third dot is just historic preservation in general, that it's not the body of your deceased sibling, it's not the clothing of your genocide due to relatives, but history somehow if we can still touch it and connect to it, it helps us process and I guess that's the third dot I think you gave yourself a good answer to your question. I won't say anything about Cuba because I've never been there and I've not studied it so I would be interested to hear others talk about that. But for the last point that you made, the third dot is that the sites where things happen matter. The popular term is the place matters. And we say that so often we forget exactly what we mean by that, but whether it's whoever you term it, that the specificity of a thing happening in a place at a time to people, that we can make those connections and that they're meaningful to us. I think we need to study that ever more deeply to understand how that works for people and to honor it. And I think we all have personal instances where it might not be something that's meaningful to the whole society but it's a place where you did a thing and that location is going to be meaningful to you no matter what's there now. In the classic tour when I was early in my career when I worked as a preservation and planning consultant one of the kind of jokes was that one of the tours you always get when you go to work in a new town is the older person who gives you a tour of the things that are not there. That's where the factor used to be, that's where my school used to be and that's where it used to be. I'm eligible for the national register now. When I start to hear myself do that, it's true. In a way it's kind of funny but it doesn't matter because I know that that was my school and I have a memory attached to that location. That's still legitimate to me. So dealing with that in a more robust way means that we have to get away from some of the material concepts that are still at the center of our field to go back to the beginning of the slide talk and V-lay and Ruskin. Material authenticity is an important concern. It's not the only concern when it comes to making decisions about preservation. So we have to allow and then also theorize how things like the authenticity of experience matters at different scales, individually, families, schools, countries. We have sociological theory back that up but we really haven't reckoned with that as a design issue. So I think that's under the banner of engaged preservation. I think that's one of the things we need to work on. Sorry, she had her head up first. Sorry. I understand you're not just curious. Dark Heritage is a pretty considerable subcategory of preservation made it potential on a couple of topics that you just discussed here. And as a practitioner who works on that, I'm curious with sites like these that have these particular sensitive issues in consideration do you find that Dark Heritage sites tend to kind of work together in order, is there communication that's kind of below the general level of preservation? These little agricultural small tricks and stuff that are being shared about the sites that do have to do textile conservation in non? Not that I know of. I think to the extent it exists, it's going to exist in the professional and disciplinary silos that are already out there. If you wanted to know about textile conservation, I actually don't know where. Is there a journal of textile conservation? This was my first textile venture and so Julia Brennan led that whole part of the project. She has said many times and I've encouraged her greatly to publish this so that people can see what we did and decide whether it's useful or legitimate. So I think at a technical level there's still a use for publishing it and given the digital tools we have, I think you can find it if it was out there. There are some organizations and there's one in particular that works on there's kind of a network of negative heritage sites. It's called International Sites of Conscience. International sites what he said. And so Eastern State Penitentiary is a member of it. There are a bunch of Holocaust sites in Europe, Cambodia, it's global. They mostly focus on conservation issues or really design issues. It's mostly about issues of reconciliation, transitional justice and social rebuilding. They have been involved in preservation with the capital P. It's just not central to them. You're seeing these case studies as situations where you are going into a community and you're really kind of thinking about the needs of that community in a larger environmental sense and stabilizing their environment. We call preservation as well, but for me some of this is really just stabilization as related to the particular needs of a particular community at the moment and then into the future. These environments of course have the value to conserve them as related to these needs going forward. And it just reminded me, I just wanted to ask you if you had ever given any thought to this, John Carlo to Carlo ages ago, I came to speak when I was in graduate student and this time was so compelling because he believed in participation. That's where an architect starts listening very carefully to the voice and getting on the ground with the voice of the community and then you start to think about design and sort of seeing a parallel here, you know, you listen to the voices and then you begin to think about how it conserves and how it goes forward from there. I just wondered if you had any thoughts on John Carlo or any of that. I'll get to that in a second, but I think the thing that's more in the center of my plate and I think everybody else's plate who I work with is some idea about people-centered design, people-centered practice, people-centered preservation. Some people call it like, you know, socially, there are a million names for it, socially engaged practice, et cetera. So I think that that is an idea that has been out there for a while but never fully taken up. Paul Davidoff in the planning, if you ever study planning, you have to read the 1965 article by Paul Davidoff who coined this idea of advocacy planning. The planners weren't just technical experts, they had to take a side and to pursue that and basically work like a lawyer. You have a client, you work for that client's interests. So this has been out there for a while and there are a lot of ways to take it up. Sam Mockby in the rural studio, et cetera. So I think that's a really important part of all of our practices right now. On the Italian side, I started Nathan and I started talking about this but this is work that you should finish. I started studying an Italian architect planner, conservator, historian named Gustavo Giovannoni who was active in the first half of the 20th century. Almost nobody in this country knows him because his work was never translated. He stayed in Italy his whole life, et cetera. Fascinating work because he totally ignored boundaries. He did all this in different countries. He intervened in all these different ways. Given that he worked in the first half of the 20th century, he didn't give a hoot about the people. Experts knew best. That's a post-war phenomenon. So his successors, DiCarlo maybe first among them, in the Italian tradition which is this incredibly strong and clear and admirable tradition of urban conservation. There's a line that connects me and DiCarlo and Pane and the people still working today. I think that would be a great retelling of that story because the Italians are often remembered for being great designers, not great planners or community advocates. So that would be a great project to research. You said the industry and the preservation as it was practiced has certainly changed to improve planning, community and that would seem all the rest of it. So in terms of what you do or in terms of what we should be doing in say educating students, I'm not sure we do enough to think about the economics. We talk about real estate at one point or all these other factors that you're into and we can't do everything. You had mentioned this question about boundaries as presentations. I'm curious just to see what the boundaries are and how do we let the others into our profession. So let us into other professions. That would be a perfect question at my PhD defense because it's totally unanswerable but absolutely it's the best question ever and the most important one to what we do every day. So how would we draw boundaries around preservation? It would be hard pressed to actually draw the line but I think you can imagine some conditions that should always be present. Certain conditions always being present would require someone with preservation expertise to work on it. So built heritage I'd like to think of the inherited environment as opposed to because it also relates to natural environments, things that are not built by humans. So, you know, an understanding of the materiality the evolution and the cultural meaning of those things. That's something that touches on a lot of professions but preservation is the one that centers on those things. So I think that's one thing that's always in the center of it. I think being a historian to be a preservationist I think is really important because other fields use history and they should defer to Gale. But other fields use history but preservationists have to also be historians. And that's why there's, you know, we get believe me we get pushed back on it. Every first semester preservation student has to take the historical methods course and do the deed research and do the census research and do all the primary research to learn how to actually be an historian. Even if you don't do it your whole life you have to appreciate the kind of contribution that that makes. So I think that's another, you know, sort of delimiting factor. Not that there's never an architect who also is a legitimate historian but the exceptions don't prove my role. And so I think that maybe those two are the I don't know the only two but maybe the first two. I think there are a whole range of ways to teach it to go to the easier to answer part of your question. We don't need to have a course for every complication. And there are lots of ways to make clear enough the kind of core of the field if not the boundaries through not just through lecturing about theories and cases but also through method. And then letting people encounter different problems in different places and through the complications of, you know, going to a studio site and interviewing people like the officials, residents, etc. You realize some of the complications and you have to sort them out by not only not just which one I have to pay attention to and which one I can ignore but how those different ones, you know, educate you differently. But you do have to prioritize the end of the world and the end of the day and as with all kind of community participation work we want to know from this community because they have intelligence we don't have but we can't listen to them all the time. Sometimes we do things that they don't want or we recommend things they don't want. So those complications I think can come from, can be appreciated from a firm base. We argue all the time and we've been, I think my faculty for 35 or 40 years has been arguing about what is the core. Believe me, every semester it seems like, you know, we open up that box again and try to tinker with it. I have a good question. As preservation continues to change and adapt to its surroundings where do you see industrial transportation preservation being mixed in with building preservation? I don't think in terms of buildings and bridges and parks and gardens is different. I think the, my assumption is that we all need to be treated fundamentally the same way. Understand the materiality, their history, the processes by which they operate and work and then figure out from that the calculus of what needs to be preserved, what can be preserved and how to design the change going forward. So I would respectfully say that I wouldn't answer a specific bridge question just like I wouldn't answer a specific garden question because I think the kind of approach to heritage conservation being taught today is rightfully not specific to type and increasingly less specific to culture. I mean the kind of internationalization of preservation is another, you have an expert sitting in the front row here. That's a very fraught but I think big opportunity for the preservation. One reason why I bring that up is I've worked with railroads and planes trains and it's often, I've found the case is it's usually forgotten. It's like when I talk to a historian or I'll talk to someone else, their view focuses on the building and the property itself not the let's say passenger car or let's say the aircraft itself but everything around it so that's where I come from. Well yeah there is a bias in preservation toward buildings and interestingly that has not always been the case that basically happened in this country that happened in the early 20th century. If you look at some of the other roots of preservation in the U.S. they are in things like national parks and the movements that resulted in national parks. There's a great I subject my students frequently to this essay from the 1830s by Thomas Cole, the name of which now alludes me but he's basically talking about how nature is the substitute for buildings in American heritage because we don't have castles, we don't have abbeys, we don't have great cathedrals but we have waterfalls and mountains and etc. So as we can all visualize that in his paintings but that contributed a lot to the national park movement, what became the national park movement which is all about cultural landscapes and only incidentally about buildings. Thank you.