KATHLEEN CONTI, HHM & ASSOCIATES
Proposal Type
Roundtable
Seeking
- Seeking Additional Presenters
- Seeking Specific Expertise
Related Topics
- Consulting
- Environmental Sustainability
- Preservation
Abstract
In bringing together practitioners, academics, and community members, this roundtable will grapple with the challenges and successes of adaptive reuse, especially focusing on historic sites embodying under-told stories. This session will discuss the role of adaptive reuse within historic preservation, the unique opportunities it presents for public history, and its economic and environmental benefits. Participants will share examples and different approaches to adaptive reuse, highlighting how to ensure the story of a place and the intricate layering of the communities connected to it are preserved before, during, and after a building’s physical transformation.
Description
The greenest building is the one already built, and the best way to preserve a building is to use it. Adaptive reuse seeks preserve the history of our built environment, recycle existing infrastructure to better fit a community’s changing needs, and reduce the environmental cost of construction. Typically, this is done by retaining exterior features while reimagining and altering interior spaces to fit modern uses and tastes, such as converting abandoned grain silos into condos or a decommissioned power plant into an art gallery. Within the US, many successful adaptive reuse projects rely on federal, state, and local historic tax credits for buildings listed on the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP).
Yet the NRHP does not fully reflect the rich and complex history of the US. In 2004, Ned Kauffman wrote that of the 77,000+ listings in the NRHP, only 1,300 explicitly related to African Americans, 90 to Hispanics, and 67 to Asian Americans. In 2014, then Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell announced the LGBTQ Heritage Initiative which encouraged historians, practitioners, and the public to tell the stories of LGBTQ associated properties and list them on the NRHP. Activists have continued to push to diversify historic preservation and listed properties on the NRHP, but there is much more work to be done.
This roundtable proposal seeks to bring together practitioners, academics, and community members to discuss the challenges and successes of adaptive reuse, especially focusing on historic sites embodying under-told stories. In the first 30 minutes, participants will share examples of adaptive reuse, highlighting the trials and triumphs within historic rehabilitation. Participants will discuss how the difficulties of ensuring the story of a place and the intricate layering of the communities connected to it are preserved during and after a building’s physical transformation. For the remaining 60 minutes, this roundtable will discuss the themes uniting the case studies; the economic and environmental benefits, grapple with past, current, and future challenges; and propose solutions. Through this format, discussants and attendees will both learn through the sharing of case studies as well as develop toolkits to advocate for and better navigate adaptive reuse to ensure the preservation of a place’s history and building.
In submitting this online topic proposal, I hope to identify additional speakers as well as receive general feedback and input.
If you have a direct offer of assistance, sensitive criticism, or wish to pass along someone’s contact information confidentially, please get in contact directly: Kathleen Conti, HHM & Associates, [email protected]
All feedback and offers of assistance should be submitted by July 6, 2020. If you have general ideas or feedback to share, please feel free to use the comments feature below.
Great topic! I like the idea of a roundtable, but I also wonder if a working group format would be worth considering? I always find the working group format to be really rewarding, since there is room/time for more people to explore case studies in-depth. Just something to consider.
Also–in keeping with your theme about adaptive reuse, you could also consider not only how buildings can tell the stories of marginalized groups, but also how they can be used by those same groups in the present, in ways that help sustain threatened communities or cultures (indigenous groups, or communities faced with loss brought on by climate change, etc). I’m sorry that I don’t have suggestions of people doing that kind of work, but if you find them, I’d love to learn about their projects!