In Canada, the first courses in heritage conservation were created in the early 1980s. Initially rooted in the disciplines of architecture and architectural history, heritage conservation education (HCE) has broadened its outreach over the past decades to include different expertise such as planning, engineering, and management. Currently, Canadian heritage conservation education comprises courses, programs, streams, and formal and informal training and learning opportunities. Existing courses and programs offer a broad range of knowledge and skillsets including crafts, planning, design, management, and adaptation among others. This article discusses how and why heritage conservation learning and training have changed in Canada. Unlike in the United States, the history of Canadian heritage conservation has yet to be written. Unsurprisingly, there is no overview of the evolution of HCE available to this day. Based on a series of interviews with key players in the Canadian heritage sector, the authors review the milestone moments that helped to shape the current landscape of HCE in the country. The article also reflects upon the future of HCE in Canada in view of the changes in professional practice and beyond. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action, and climate change matters more broadly, have seriously impacted the way heritage is viewed and transformed the role it can play in socioeconomic and environmental policies in Canada, all of which making this reflection timely. Building on their collaborative work within the National Roundtable on Heritage Education—including the drafting of its strategic plan in 2020 and a survey of place-based heritage programs—the authors share their views on the gaps, needs and opportunities for the heritage conservation education sector to fulfill its mission to prepare future generations of heritage professionals.
In the 1930s, the Historic American Buildings Survey institutionalized the field notebook as a tool for informal “data” collection during site visits. District offices deposited notebooks as part of the Library of Congress’s permanent public records. Architects’ field notebooks initiated the recording of the nation’s cultural history which was motivated by the organization’s mission to “study, measure, and draw up the plans, elevations and details of the important antique buildings of the United States” so that “they should not pass into unrecorded oblivion.” At first glance, the HABS drawings appear to present self-evident “data” portraying existing buildings in measured outlines, profiles, surfaces, and construction details. Yet architectural drawing is a creative, iterative, and inventive process, even when applied to the recording of historical buildings. When we look at the trail of drawings left behind from the process of recording the built environment, what exactly are we looking at? This study identifies specific techniques present in the drawing process that indicate the architects’ figuration of the facts and the active transfiguration of eyewitness observations into measured images. How architects made measurements, created points, lines, and grids, calculated the congruences between building parts, and made compositional choices, omissions, fabrications, restorations, and rectifications will be discerned from the drawing phases in the Library of Congress’s permanent collection. Close comparisons of field notebook sketches by different district offices include examinations of a log house in California, a Virginia farm’s slave quarters, Spanish colonial missions in Arizona, and a fishing village in Massachusetts alongside the final drawing records of each site. Looking closely will bring into focus how the resultant images display pensive and interpretive qualities in addition to the intended “data” collected. Through the architect’s figuration of an existing building into images it becomes understood as a form of construction and conceptualized as a historical subject. This close reading of images calls attention to the intelligence inherent in architectural drawing as a unique form of visual record making that undergirds heritage recording. This study also prompts critical reflection on the wider history of heritage documentation and the images that continue to shape our understanding of the built environment.
What does “locally grown” mean in the context of postcolonial heritage traditions? Responding to calls in the field of heritage studies for more diverse, inclusive, and situated or localized approaches to heritage and preservation, this article addresses the rise of a heritage preservation tradition in Qatar as an example of resistance to a mono- lithic universal heritage ethos that is disrupted by what was once a “marginal” player. Through an examination of the history of heritage expertise, from its earliest interactions with foreign experts to the meteoric growth of Qatar’s heritage industry and advocacy for global heritage, I propose a historical approach to identifying, circulating, and authenticating local voices in the study and management of heritage. This discussion demonstrates the signifi- cance of engaging with the Arab Region not exclusively through the lens of heritage destruction but, rather, as a strong example of local negotiations that construct and resist different heritage futures strategically.
Abstract: This photo gallery explores sites of Asian American and Pacific Islander cultural heritage that have recently been the site of new research, public opening, or are under discussion for restoration. In parallel, these images portray the rich scholarly network of Asian and Pacific Islander Americans in Historic Preservation (APIAHiP). The editors of this journal issue have collaborated with Huy Pham, executive director of APIAHiP, to create a gallery of places that the community of activists and scholars have studied, visited, and worked to protect. We hope these images will provide a panoramic view of the array of cultural resources that remain as touchstones in stories of indigeneity, immigration, settlement, community building, and economic development, as well as a view into the community of researchers who listen, document, and amplify the histories associated with these places. While there are hundreds of historically and culturally significant places that merit conservation, only a few are featured here. Many more examples are found in several key resources on the subject of conserving Asian American and Pacific Islander heritage.
Cultural heritage remains a critical yet underrecognized factor in armed conflicts. Deliberate targeting, mobilization, and manipulation of heritage sites can exacerbate conflict dynamics and become early casualties of war. Since the Arab Spring, conflicts across the Arab Region have inflicted extensive damage on built heritage, a situation com-pounded by weak economies, prolonged neglect, mismanagement, and limited institutional capacity in the heri-tage sector. This paper examines how conflict dynamics- encompassing actors, methods, resources, environments, and both material and immaterial impacts- with the addition of the agency of heritage sites during the conflict, shape post-conflict governmental responses and reconstruction efforts toward heritage. Focusing on the compar-ative case studies of Mosul, Iraq, and Benghazi, Libya, we analyze conflict triggers, escalation patterns, resolution pro cesses, emergent power structures, and international involvement that collectively influence post-conflict heri-tage recovery. Despite similarities in timeline, urban warfare, and the fight against ISIS, the divergent approaches to heritage management in both cities underscore the complex interplay between conflict outcomes and cultural memory. Contributing to academic discourse on post-conflict urbanism and heritage recovery in rebuilding cities affected by conflict, this research highlights the importance of understanding conflict dynamics and post-conflict contexts to better protect and recover heritage after war.
Cultural heritage sites in several countries in the Arab Region have been weaponised to erase peoples' histories and to re/construct narratives. Politicians have proposed profit-driven urban regeneration and neoliberal projects that have led to the destruction of peoples' heritage as in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Destruction, often legitimised to 'improve' and 'modernise' cities, has led to the mass displacement of people and the loss of architectural identity. In the context of war, the destruction of cultural heritage has been used as a war tactic to perform power and communicate messages of dominance to local, regional and global audiences.This has been the case in countries such as Palestine, Libya, Iraq and Sudan where cultural heritage has become part of punishing communities and erasing their presence. In both 'peace' and war, and when the lines between them blur, we need to protect cultural heritage to celebrate the diversity of communities, and build a future that is free, just and inclusive to all. But how do we restore hope at the time of mass destruction?
Amman has been central to the experience of refugees in the Arab region from late Ottoman times to the present. Employing a method of site biography, this article writes refuge in Amman backward, peeling back the multiple layers of refuge from the newest to the oldest. It starts in the present, in the abandoned houses where Syrian refugees have found refuge in the wake of the Syrian uprising-turned-war. Then it opens onto an older layer, a refugee camp where Palestinian Nakba survivors forged their own refuge. Finally, it uncovers the Ottoman layer beneath the camp, the land grants through which North Caucasian Muslim refugees helped found the city itself. The layered spatial image presented here, which shows different histories coexisting architecturally within a single neighborhood, is an argument for understanding refuge and the city as multitemporal. At stake in putting down in writing ignored temporal sediments is a reclamation of the different hopes and desires that shaped such urban experiences of refuge, inhabitation, and solidarity during times of crisis.
This article analyzes how South Asian American (SAA) histories partake in historic preservation in the United States. It begins with a look at the construction of the SAA identity, followed by an analy sis of its evolution , place in the larger Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) category. The second section focuses on the history of the SAA community. Academic scholarship since the early 2000s has unearthed impor tant, forgotten histories of SAA presence in the United States since the eigh teenth and nineteenth centuries. Instead of repeating that in- formation, the article discusses place- based histories embedded in these larger narratives. The third section looks at the evolution of AAPI repre sen ta tion in historic preservation, noting key milestones and how they include (or omit) SAA histories, along with identification and analy sis of the few SAA properties that have been designated at the national, state , local levels in recent years. The concluding section summarizes how preservation efforts in SAA communities have benefited (and stand to continue to) from their solidarity with and inclusion in AAPI efforts, while noting key gaps and divergences.
In 1990, the first Asian and Vietnamese-oriented mini-mall development in the tri-state area opened in South Philadelphia, becoming a mecca for Vietnamese American commerce and culture in the region. With roughly eighty Vietnamese business now clustered along Washington Avenue, this area of the city has been dubbed by some " Little Saigon." Today, the neighborhood faces encroaching development that threatens its existence as a culturally significant place to Vietnamese Americans. This article focuses on Philadelphia's " Little Saigon" neighborhood and articulates the different ways its built environment serves as an important setting for Vietnamese American heritage, identity, and culture through spatial ethnography, interviews, and preservation recommendations. South Philadelphia's Vietnamese American neighborhood shares similarities with other Vietnamese and post-1965 migrant enclaves across the United States, which often inherit "undesirable" or vacant neighborhoods that are seen as historically insignificant. This study argues for the cultural and historic significance of these neighborhoods-in both new and old construction-and the need to preserve them. Preservation efforts must conserve these neighborhoods as a living landscape, where heritage is tied closely to present and future use, rather than freezing a site's built form in a particular moment in time.
Abstract: The largest massacre in modern Los Angeles history and the largest mass lynching in the United States occurred in downtown Los Angeles in 1871. In 2023, Sze Tsung Nicolás Leong and Judy Chui-Hua Chung were selected to design the memorial to its victims. The violence erupted in Los Angeles’s original and later destroyed Chinese quarter and rapidly surged across downtown streets. The Memorial to the Victims of the 1871 Chinese Massacre will be distributed over several sites—the primary initial site, where the violence began, and surrounding satellite sites, where the violence spread. Sculptural trees, trunks, stumps, and roots, with engraved poetry, make up our design for the memorial, and these elements evoke the complex overlapping experiences of immigration, belonging, rootedness, uprooting, and racial violence. The 1871 Chinese Massacre was part of a larger history of xenophobia in the United States that arose in the mid-1800s and lasted into the mid-1900s. In these decades, hundreds of Asian American communities, primarily Cantonese, were uprooted and destroyed through violence and legislation in an effort to “cleanse” the country of people of Asian descent. We refer to this period of violence and destruction as the Driving Out. Because the principal goal and tactics of the violence were expulsion and erasure, little or nothing remains where the Asian American communities once flourished. To reveal this forgotten history, we present our preliminary concept for a Driving Out memorial with sculptures and poetry that relate formally and thematically to the elements of the 1871 Memorial, suggesting a network of trees, trunks, roots, and words that grow out of a shared history of migration, expulsion, and violence. These related artworks will unite the 1871 Memorial and Massacre with the wider history of the Driving Out, and reveal the mostly unknown geographical and temporal extent of anti-Asian violence that defined a significant part of US history.
Preliminary studies of the most significant architects and designers of Asian descent in the United States have opened the doors to fully explore the neglected contributions of Korean diasporic architects and landscape architects to the built environment. This article calls for scholarly attention to the lives and work of Korean American architects and designers, emphasizing urgent conservation issues relating to built works and architectural archives. By avoiding reductive categorizations of Asian Americanness in favor of foregrounding the broader historical and cultural contexts of the Korean diaspora in North America, this project engages critically with the complex identities and transnational careers of architects of Korean descent. The effects of Japanese colonialism, shifts in US immigration policy, and Cold War geopolitics have shaped the development of Korean diasporic architectural history. We point out how this complex, transnational history raises ethical and practical issues for the conservation of Korean American architectural works and architectural archives.
Following the devastation of the northern Iraqi city of Mosul by the Islamic State, numerous international agencies have launched preservation programs to reconstruct monuments and sites within the city. In this short article we present some findings from the first survey of 1,600 residents of Mosul revealing local attitudes toward that reconstruction. Those results have implications for current and future projects in Iraq. Although Iraqi people support heritage initiatives, we demonstrate that their priorities are for broader rehabilitation efforts that foreground security, humanitarian aid, and peace building. Additionally, rather than archaeological sites and museums, they prefer that local religious sites be restored, because they hold everyday meanings and are used in the community. And while they acknowledge the contributions made by foreign agencies, the residents of Mosul seek greater agency in the future of their own heritage. Taken together, these findings lead us to reflect on the broader themes of repair and rehabilitation and the role material heritage might hopefully play in the aftermath of conflict and trauma.
Abstract: The historic St. Mark AME Church (b. 1920, abandoned 1976) is located at the figurative and literal center of Atlanta's English Avenue neighborhood. As a symbol of ongoing neighborhood transition, the building initially housed Western Heights Baptist Church's white congregation, then a Black one (1938). Once an affluent area, it later suffered the impacts of de jure segregation, redlining, urban renewal, and the opioid epidemic. Now, English Avenue is poised for a new wave of investments, gentrification, and displacement. Site owner and Beloved Community, Inc., founder Pastor Winston Taylor labored since the 1990s to rehabilitate and reestablish safety at the site. Since then, consistent grassroots engagement has grown in-kind work and volunteerism, recognizing preservation as a powerful tool for economic development and revitalization. Taylor partnered with the Atlanta Preservation Center and the Georgia Institute of Technology's School of Architecture to research, document, and craft a pioneering Landmark Site nomination, and in 2023, the Stone Mountain granite shell of St. Mark became the city's first designated ruin, leveraging policy change established in the Land Use Framework Plan (2017) to preserve and strengthen the neighborhood. This case study highlights proactive development for ongoing incremental change and the transformative power of collaboration.
