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Present: Eric Breitkreutz, Matthew Bronski, Taya Dixon, Allan Galper, , Tarica Harris, David Hart, John Hoffmann, Susan Hollister, Lyn Hovey, Steve Jerome, Wendall Kalsow, David Kelman, David King, Michael Lynch, Doug Manley, Philip Marshall, Henry Moss, Maia Brindley Nilsson, Brian Roche, Zac Sargent, Susan Schur, Malcolm Smiley, Jay Stanbury, and Sara Wermiel 1. Out and About: Committee members reported on a number of preservation events where they had participated outside of the Boston area. Farthest flung was Matthew Bronski, who had recently presented a paper at a triennial international conference on durability of building materials in Lyon, France. ASTM, the National Research Council of Canada, RILEM and similar organizations abroad came together as sponsors and participants. Matthew's presentation dealt with the cladding durability lessons learned from widespread rapid failures of wood-framed structures clad with EIFS (e.g., Dryvit) in the Southeastern U.S. Surprisingly, the current tendency to build increasingly less durable residences is not limited to America, land of sprawling suburban McMansions, OSB sheathing, and Beavis & Butthead. Forensic colleagues from Finland to Brazil to Kuala Lumpur independently reported on their current national pandemics of shoddy residential construction. Wendall Kalsow attended the Rhode Island statewide preservation conference along with 499 other people. He considered the event a major success with good waterfront tours and sessions on wooden boat restoration. Susan Hollister described the recent day-long event at the Frelynghausen-Morris House in Lenox sponsored by APT Northeast, with five teams in working sessions on conservation problems. Topics included both exterior and interior murals. Kim Konrad and Marilyn Freeman were among the organizers. Former HRC committee members now working in Albany include Kim, Jack Alvarez, Erin Tobin and Stacey Thomas. Lyn Hovey set a moment aside from his international travels to include involvement with chapels at Swan Point Cemetery in Providence. He is organizing a charrette with Elizabeth Bell about a range of Pre-Columbian and Spanish Colonial architectural topics in Antigua, Guatemala. Henry Moss attended the National Park Service-sponsored Preserve and Play conference in Chicago where he spoke about the adaptive reuse of historic gymnasium buildings. Fenway Park and Whalom Park were local projects that were featured in the Park Service line-up. Philip Marshall had just returned from a preservation conference in China, but time was too short to hear about it, and his portfolio of travel observations exploded during the following forty minutes… 2. Philip Marshall - Perspectives on International Preservation: The committee had invited Philip to present his thoughts about global issues and agencies and cross-cultural aspects of historic preservation in the 21st Century. A professor at Roger Williams Universtiy for 15 years, an active member of the training committee of US/ ICOMOS, and with past involvement in the Taos Pueblo and in Tibet, Philip had several ways to think about this subject. ICOMOS is a subdivision of UNESCO, but somehow functions quite autonomously. Dinu Bombaru from Canada is Secretary General of ICOMOS. Philip mentioned the success of the ICOMOS internship program that arranges international exchanges of professionals at the beginning of their careers, with more than 400 people who have swapped countries. He began to unfold his ideas with an overview of US/ICOMOS as a broker between US interests and international resources. In 1972, UNESCO combined cultural and natural heritage resources into a category called "World Heritage Sites." The U.S. is one of more than seventy member nations in this forty year old organization founded by UNESCO to protect "tangible heritage" worldwide. Each member can nominate one site from its country per year. Currently, between 200 and 300 historic sites and urban centers are listed among member states. World Heritage Sites were created as a reaction to the Aswan Dam in the 1960's, to afford some protections to sites of international importance that sorely lack national or local protection. However, in many cases the U.S. designations have gone to sites that, though highly significant, are already well protected. Philip cited attributes of U.S. sites typically nominated for World Heritage Site designation. The easy nominations share some of the following attributes: National Park Service ownership, a natural formation, a museum complex, a site where archaeological significance is paramount. Some examples include the Statue of Liberty, Chaco Canyon, Redwoods National Forest, Yosemite, and Glacier National Park. In 1992, Taos Pueblo was the only U.S. site not sharing any of these characteristics. Philip hopes that Newport, Rhode Island may be nominated in the coming year. Savannah, Georgia put forward its collection of public spaces as a nominee, but ICOMOS said private property also had to be part of the designation. Property rights activists are staunch opponents of World Heritage Site designation of areas that include private property. Currently, the United States has no site containing urban fabric. In order to do so, a stewardship easement would apply to the entire subject district. Philip noted that professional standards, political frameworks, and approaches to local involvement vary enormously and that there is no handy, universal language or attitude towards historic resources. For some time, ICOMOS has been working towards guidelines that can suit the needs of radically divergent cultures within a shared framework and expressed in a single document. Currently, ICOMOS is working on guidelines for interpretive approaches. At this point, Philip turned to his own experience with living communities where historic resources had heightened and transformed meaning because of cultural discontinuities. He showed images of a celebration in Queens (36th Avenue & 36th Street!) organized by second generation Tibetans. The Tibetan community in New York is making interpretive connections between ancient historic sites and their new lives, while in Tibet new monasteries with greater space and improved seismic resistance are being built to look exactly like their historic predecessors. In one of Philip's examples an outgrown monastery (centuries old?) is now subject to adaptive reuse as a center for Tantric Buddhism. Philip suggested that if you intend to work with historic resources abroad, you might improve your understanding by engaging the corresponding immigrant community in the United States. Philip focused on preservation issues that arise from a lack of continuity of values between generations. He suggested that the Tibetan example, for all its complexity and ambiguity, retained great cultural vitality. By contrast in the Katmandu Valley buildings are being preserved while the culture that appreciated them rapidly disappears. Philip noted that many cultures have utterly dissimilar concepts of art and artistic value. For many people in the world today an object either has power or it does not. Philip began to explore other discontinuities, such as in Taiwan, where planners avidly sought to imitate U.S. models of industrialization and planning without understanding our American planning mistakes and thus repeated them. Meanwhile, they have created historic districts with clear design guidelines for their colonial sectors, while Moderne and Art Deco architecture is largely ignored and unappreciated. Issues of cultural identity abound… In indigenous areas where the local craft tradition survives, Philip strongly advocates for international preservation assistance that works within the local craft tradition, with local peoples utilizing their own traditional materials, methods, crafts, practices and workers (while resisting the temptation to intervene as a 'technically advanced' outsider with our own materials, syringes, and approaches of object conservation on a very large scale). Surprisingly, the local craft approach is often a difficult sell to international preservation advocates. Philip argues that we only need 'preservation' as such where there is a lack of continuity (in culture, craft, and materials) from the past to the present. Consequently, Philip warned that active indigenous sites are poor candidates for international designation. Angkor Wat, for example, would be a better prospect than Taos Pueblo.
8: 00 a.m., Thursday, June 9, 2005 The Architects' Building, 52 Broad Street, 5th floor, Boston Featuring a presentation and discussion on "The Technical and Philosophical Challenges of Rehabilitating the Twentieth Century Building Envelope" by Matthew Bronski
Henry Moss, Matthew Bronski, and Sara Wermiel co-leaders and scribes
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