This document summarizes a speech given by David J. Brown about the future of historic preservation. Brown discusses three important characteristics for the future of preservation: embracing change, connecting with people, and regaining a political movement approach. He argues that preservation must adapt to change over time and broaden its focus beyond traditional definitions. Successful preservation makes time a continuum by using the past to enhance the present.

1. Preservation: Change for the Future
The Kelly‐Tukey Lecture in Historic Preservation
At the University of Virginia
By David J. Brown
Executive Vice President and Chief Preservation Officer
National Trust for Historic Preservation
April 6, 2015
It is an honor to be with you today as part of this distinguished lecture series at one of the
nation’s great universities, to consider the look of historic preservation in 20 years and what we
should be doing to get there.
Gazing into the future is a daunting assignment, but one that is necessary – even for those
who are pigeon‐holed in the public mind as focused on the past.
It would be much more enjoyable to regale you with stories about the past. That is
especially tempting here in Virginia, where you have a glorious history in preservation that is
worth celebrating.
But…if we are doing our job, what we do as preservationists is not primarily about the
past. Preservation has to be about people today and in the future.
I have recently come to appreciate a quote from Peter Drucker, the management guru, who
said:
People in any organization are always attached to the obsolete – the things that should
have worked but did not, the things that once were productive and no longer are.
Please keep that thought in mind. But before we look ahead, I want us to consider the story
of preservation today. In doing so, I will take the “on the one hand, then on the other hand”
approach that Harry Truman once famously belittled when he pleaded for “a one‐handed
economist.” But I believe there is validity in both points of view.
One story shows that historic preservation is thriving. America’s cities are magnets for the
young, creative class, and they are voting with their feet to live, work, and play in older and
historic neighborhoods. The National Trust recently looked at data from five major cities in the
U.S. and found that up to 90% of the hip bars and restaurants in those communities were
located in older buildings. In the past thirty‐five years, the Historic Rehabilitation Tax Credits
have been used to preserve nearly 40,000 buildings, brought a private sector investment that is
approaching $110 billion, and generates $1.27 in taxes for every $1 spent by the federal
government. President Barack Obama has used his power under the Antiquities Act to
designate as National Monuments some of the most important – yet underappreciated – sites
that tell the broad story of America. Places such as a Japanese internment camp in Hawaii, the

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Harriet Tubman House, and Pullman – the heart of the American Labor Movement of the late
19th
and early 20th
century. In study after study, local historic districts are shown to provide
strong economic value to communities here in the Commonwealth and across the nation.
But the other story is of preservation under assault. Economists such as Harvard’s Ed Glaser
are out on the book and lecture circuit blaming historic preservation regulations for all sorts of
evil, from housing shortages to the high cost of city living. Architect Rem Koolhaas, whose firm
mounted an exhibition in New York City, made a similar claim – too much historic preservation
regulation was limiting growth and change in too many places. The Historic Rehabilitation Tax
Credits are under threat in a Congress where a tax reform discussion draft prepared by the
former head of the House Ways & Means Committee contained language to repeal the credits.
The Obama administration has cut funding for preservation, eliminated entire programs such as
Save America’s Treasures, and called for the weakening or termination of some of the country’s
most important preservation protections found in federal law. In too many places, it has been
years – if not decades – since there was the support and political will to establish a local historic
district.
We would do well to pull lessons from both stories as we focus on three characteristics that
I believe will be important to the future of preservation. The first – and where I’ll spend the
most time this evening – is that contrary to popular perception, change is constant and
important to our work as preservationists. To ensure a vibrant future, we need to embrace
change in where we work, in the tools we use to do that work, and in ways that move beyond
the traditional definitions and expectations of historic preservation.
Secondly, I want to consider how our future success hinges on our ability to reach and
connect with people. Americans really do care about the loss of places they love.
Unfortunately, because of the way we often approach and frame our work, many people think
of preservation in terms of landmark buildings, grand gardens, and regulatory controls – and
not in terms of how our work gives people meaning for the present and hope for the future.
The final characteristic grows out of my belief that we must regain the sense that
preservation is a political movement. With the “professionalization” of preservation, we have
too often forgotten that we have to convince people to join us in saving places that matter.
Language is a big part of the success of any political movement. The language used to describe
preservation looks backward and is drenched in preservation and conservation doctrine. We
need to look forward. We need to understand the values that those outside our movement
attach to historic places. Then we need to speak to those values.
Let’s begin by focusing on change.
Paul Goldberger, the Pulitzer Prize‐winning critic, says,
“[P]erhaps the most important thing to say about preservation when it is really working as it
should is that it uses the past not to make us nostalgic, but to make us feel that we live in a

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better present, a present that has a broad reach and a great, sweeping arc, and that is not
narrowly defined, but broadly defined by its connections to other eras, and its ability to embrace
them in a larger, cumulative whole. Successful preservation makes time a continuum, not a
series of disjointed, disconnected eras.”
Continuity and change. Embracing both is as important for how we work as it is for the
places where we work. And it is critical to a broadening of our work beyond the traditional
definitions of preservation.
Thankfully, preservation as a movement has proven to be highly adaptable. The National
Trust owns sites that represent our movement’s initial focus on great architecture, museums
and gardens. Yet at Drayton Hall, the Trust took a different approach from the traditional “fully
restored/fully furnished” house museum of the day.
And we’ve expanded preservation’s focus over time, as the understanding of what’s worth
saving and how we do our work has changed. In a 2013 New York Times story, two 27‐year‐old
Buffalo residents were lauded for their preservation skills as micro‐developers, “rehabbing
derelict properties to rent (or sell)…in an attempt to save houses from demolition….” One of
them, Bernice Radle, gave a TED talk, holding up a heart‐shaped poster that read “Preservation
is Sexy” while explaining the “preservation as social activism” manifesto that drives her and her
peers.
Preservation as social activism. In the 21st
century, preservation is definitely not a one‐size‐
fits‐all proposition – not with Main Street revitalization, heritage tourism, social justice, micro‐
development, the use of urban landscapes as public history, a growing back‐to‐the‐city
movement, public gardens, historic site reinvention, tactical urbanism, and the focus on
economic and environmental sustainability all part of our work.
This broadening of our understanding of preservation has led to changes. But given the
assaults on our work we need to be open to more rapid – and perhaps radical – change in
where and how we work. This can begin with an understanding of what’s really important.
Herbert Muschamp, former architecture critic for the New York Times, said,
“A building does not have to be an important work of architecture to become a first‐rate
landmark. Landmarks are not created by architects. They are fashioned by those who
encounter them after they are built. The essential feature of a landmark is not its design, but
the place it holds in a city’s memory.”
Places change as they are imbued with meaning, memory and stories. Looking at landmarks
only through the lens of an architect, architectural historian or landscape architect – without
considering other equally important perspectives about place and community – severely limits
our understanding of what makes our older and historic buildings and their landscapes special

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and contributes to our understanding of time as a continuum. Daniel Solomon, writing in
Bedside Essays for Lovers (of Cities), notes what the sustainable city must sustain…
“…is the culture of the city: the way people cook in New Orleans, the way they dress in
Milan, dance in Havana, speak in London, wise‐crack in New York, look cool in Tokyo.”
Cities change all the time. They are living organisms, and that is what living organisms do.
But while change is inevitable, the form of that change is not inevitable. The trick is to preserve
the soul of the community while permitting necessary and inevitable change to occur.
Those of us who care about the historic environment want that change to be evolutionary
and sustainable – not one of constant upheaval that tears down the old and rips it away. We
want to see change that acts with respect towards our historic environment, while adding, as
Solomon says, “vibrant new chapters to history without eradicating it.”
Just as places change, the tools we use as preservationists must also change.
Our current toolbox has proven both its effectiveness and limitations. Those tools were
often built around practices that may no longer work as effectively as they once did, as Peter
Drucker suggests, and are based upon a federal framework that can be challenging to adapt to
local situations. But that is changing…and many of the new tools look to data to help guide
decisionmaking.
Since the 1961 publication of Jane Jacobs’ seminal text, The Death and Life of Great
American Cities, planners and preservationists have intuitively understood the important role
that older buildings, landscapes, and development patterns play not only in building continuity,
but in supporting community vitality, social diversity and small business development. Through
the research of the National Trust’s Preservation Green Lab, we are now able to empirically
show how right Jacobs was.
Using a trove of newly available data, spatial statistical analysis, layered citywide maps, and
in‐depth neighborhood case studies, our work has found strong statistical connections between
the unique architectural character of older urban blocks and economically vibrant and socially
diverse neighborhoods.
A 2014 National Trust study – entitled Older, Smaller, Better – begins to make this case by
highlighting preservation’s key role in economic vitality and the intensity of human activity. We
found that neighborhoods made up of a diverse mix of older and newer buildings support the
local economy, with a high percentage of new businesses as well as women and minority‐
owned businesses.
We also show that young people love old buildings. Night life is most alive on streets with
a diverse range of building age. On Fridays at 10:00 pm, there is significantly greater cell phone

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activity in neighborhoods with mixed‐vintage buildings than neighborhoods with new buildings
alone.
This work is telling us that we need to step away from the exclusive focus on built assets
as “great architecture,” as if buildings and places matter without the stories of the people who
inhabit them. In the 21st
century, people crave experiences, community, and authenticity, and
they will move to, invest in and take care of places that provide these core needs.
If we shift in this direction, perhaps we can move preservation to the mainstream. 50 years
ago, preservation operated as an outsider movement, working against the grain of normal
policies, plans, and development practice. As a result, many of our tools were created as
exceptions, fixes, and Band‐Aids, designed to give older buildings, landscapes, and
neighborhoods a chance for survival in an otherwise hostile environment. For example, historic
preservation districts are typically implemented as overlays on top of base zoning that was
created for suburban style development. Similarly, historic buildings are given exceptions and
exemptions in building and energy codes that were written for new construction.
Although preservation is, in some places, now accepted as the norm, the problem – and the
opportunity – is taking the values and proven benefits of preservation to scale. If Jane Jacobs is
right and if the story of preservation as thriving is true – in other words, if saving, reusing, and
retrofitting old buildings is a good thing – how can we make this happen more easily and more
often?
We do it by creating tools that move older and historic environments from the exception to
the exemplary. From the exempt to the norm.
Although the number of buildings over fifty years of age constitute more than half of the
structures in many of our communities, five percent is the average extent of historic fabric that
is protected through local designation in many large cities. We need other tools – such as
demolition review and context sensitive zoning – which can recognize the importance of
historic buildings and landscapes. In places such as Salt Lake City, preservationists are working
to build those tools, and here’s how the Salt Lake paper describes it:
The goal of the whole exercise is to preserve historic neighborhoods or just plain nice, older
neighborhoods from demolitions, outsized remodels and McMansions. The new process can
lead to a historic district or landmark site, or it can lead to something less restrictive called a
character conservation district.
Under this system, the neighborhood, in conjunction with the city planning office, can
create their own guidelines. How can we make the saving, reusing, and retrofitting of old
buildings happen more easily and more often? We can do it by making local guidelines local,
and developing them in collaboration with the community. The reliance on National Register
criteria, the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for Preservation, and traditional historic
district zoning as the primary or only appropriate guideposts for preservation calls to mind

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Peter Drucker’s admonition. We need to recognize the varied forms of preservation today and
use tools to support broader rehabilitation and reuse. Moving beyond the traditional
architectural survey, we can now leverage open data and GIS technology to measure and
visualize assets and opportunities in our communities at the block, neighborhood, and city‐wide
scale. Let’s also open up our surveys to volunteers to engage them in our work.
Economic consultant Don Rypkema has said that “if your historic preservation commission
does not have written, illustrated guidelines, available online and understandable not just by
architects but by actual human beings, you’re part of the problem with preservation, not part
of the solution.” Let’s build preservation standards that can be understood and embraced by
the communities where they are used.
The saving, reusing, and retrofitting of old buildings can also happen more easily and more
often by creating tools that look at outcomes, as well as prescriptions. One such tool was
developed by the City of Seattle with the help of our Preservation Green Lab. Seattle passed
the nation’s first outcome‐based energy code, focused on energy‐saving outcomes instead of
prescriptive actions. That code aligns with the inherent energy‐saving qualities of older
buildings.
Randall Mason, chair of the Historic Preservation program at the University of Pennsylvania,
has noted that,
“We get really wrapped up in local preservation laws because those are the strictest and
clearest expressions of the preservation impulse. There are lots of other paths by which
preservation gets done. If you buy a home and you decide to renovate it, inspired by
property values or because you like old stuff, that’s preservation. If the President decides to
declare a national monument…that’s preservation, in addition to all of the typical tropes of
preservation—national parks, historic districts, great monuments, great works of
architecture. …”
As Mason notes, preservation takes many more forms than the ones often associated with our
work.
To support that, we can embrace innovation in our preservation classrooms and our local
preservation organizations, letting a thousand flowers bloom in terms of community guidelines
and tools.
Finally, let’s consider re‐thinking our one‐size‐fits all system of classifying buildings and
recognize that older and historic buildings – whose preservation we want to encourage – come
in a variety of types and levels of importance and let’s establish classifications and guidelines
that recognize this fact. Mason notes that,

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“…those of us who work in preservation need to be more assertive in cultivating forms of
preservation that are not ‘capital‐h,’ ‘capital‐p,’ [Historic Preservation] —not just historic
districts, but the adaptive reuse of buildings….
There are a wide variety of public policies which support that work.
A final thought about change: In the next twenty years, we need to accelerate the
transformation in how we think about the use of historic buildings.
The National Trust is focusing on the relevance of its 27 landmark sites and is embracing
change, including at Woodlawn, located in Alexandria, Virginia, and the first property acquired
by the Trust. Woodlawn, like many house museums, has been under‐funded and under‐utilized
in its 60‐year history as a museum.
In a partnership with a farm‐to‐table nonprofit organization named the Arcadia Center for
Sustainable Food and Agriculture, the National Trust is looking beyond the house museum at a
new use for Woodlawn. We are opening the doors to broader public participation and setting
up a 21st
century use that relates directly to the site’s 19th
century roots as a place for
experimental agriculture in a shared use of the site. One story from the past that especially
resonates with both Arcadia and the National Trust is the story of the Quakers who purchased
Woodlawn in the years leading up to the Civil War and turned what had until then been a slave
plantation into a free labor zone, making it profitable for the first time in its history. In a very
different time and context, Arcadia’s efforts at Woodlawn will be repeating those of the
Quakers—trying to use food in service of social justice.
Sometimes embracing change entails going back to the future.
The change at Woodlawn is built around the idea that people are central to our
conservation of historic environments. Poet Peter Streckfus, when asked to consider why old
places matter, responded, “I’m not sure old places matter. People matter. The question is how
do we honor ourselves when we honor old places?”
We haven’t always thought about people in preservation. I know I’ve seen thousands of
Power Point presentations of buildings, but no people. Once again, those who are pushing our
movement forward are considering how preservation would be different if we focused on
people.
We are seeing this when we open up our work to the places people love, and not just
architectural masterpieces. Urban historian Dolores Hayden writes that,
“Restoring significant shared meanings for many neglected…places first involves claiming
the entire…cultural landscape as an important part of American history, not just its
architectural monuments.”

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When we change our focus to people, we become serious about relevance. In many of the
places we save, and in the way we approach their conservation, we often talk about the “period
of significance.” But at the National Trust we are turning that on its head, and asking, “What if
the period of significance is now?”
At President Lincoln’s Cottage, where Abraham Lincoln conceived the Emancipation
Proclamation, understanding that “the period of significance is now” leads us to use of the site
as the springboard for exhibits, lectures, and projects that address human trafficking in the 21st
century. Slavery, unfortunately, didn’t end in 1865.
If preservation is about people, we will be concerned about how our actions impact people
and the planet where we live. We live in a world that is using up its resources at an alarming
rate. Our Preservation Green Lab is using peer‐reviewed research to demonstrate the role that
older and historic buildings and communities can play in the effort to bring our cities and towns
toward environmental sustainability. As this body of knowledge grows, it will be important for
preservationists to understand the science and join the fight in city councils, planning
departments, state legislatures, and the halls of Congress. This is work that is relevant, people‐
centric, and critical to our future.
Daniel Solomon in his Bedside Essays calls the places that respect their historic
environments and evolve in ways that maintain the continuum of past – to present – to future –
“continuous cities.” They are the people‐centered antidote to sprawl. Solomon writes,
“Sprawl and erasure insulate us from the great pageant of humanity … The city should be
didactic, the great teacher of human possibility. Only cities, only continuous cities, can
perform this role, because they are the places that experience is not selective. In the city of
twenty‐first century dreams, obsessions about physical well‐being and human connection
take on spiritual dimensions and inform architecture and city building. The continuous city is
as healthy for the soul as it is for the body.”
Environmental psychologists are helping us understand that “old places provide people with
a sense of being part of a continuum that is necessary for them to be psychologically and
emotionally healthy.” Can we challenge ourselves in our historic sites, regulatory review, and
sustainability efforts to put the focus on people?
And can we accept the challenge to be about all people?
At far too many places – at historic sites and gardens, in the neighborhoods we choose to
designate, and through our publications – we have told our stories in a way that conveniently
forgot the majority of the people whose lives were part of our layered history. Preservationists
are beginning to work preemptively and collaboratively with all communities. The change of
working against to working with marginalized communities in retaining their community
structures (both social and spatial) is among the central crossroads for the preservation
movement today. We need to ensure that we have the skills and partners to do this work.

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At the National Trust historic site Montpelier – the historic home of James Madison – this
work is also changing the landscape that many have come to associate with the estate. For
many years, the lawn from the rear portico down to the garden could have been at the 18th
hole of the Augusta National Golf Course. It looked beautiful.
But it hid the truth of how the enslaved community was central to life at the home of this
founding father. So five years ago, the Montpelier Foundation erected wooden frames on this
lawn to show the historic relationship of the homes of the enslaved community with the
mansion – and forever changed the perception of visitors to the site. Late last year,
philanthropist David Rubenstein gave Montpelier a $10 million gift that will allow us – among
other things – to recreate these homes, and more fully explain how the slave economy
functioned at the home of the Father of the Constitution. This work has been undertaken with
strong input from historians and archaeologists but – more importantly – it has engaged the
descendants of the enslaved community at Montpelier.
This focus on preservation as a form of social justice can apply to many places people care
about today – not just Woodlawn, President Lincoln’s Cottage, or Montpelier. Max Page,
Distinguished Professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, has written and spoken
eloquently about the capacity of old places with difficult histories to lead to social justice.
Those who experience a revelation at a place like Montpelier will be attuned to it in other
places as well – such is the power of one place, one action to have consequences for people.
Having considered the importance of change and people to our future success, let’s move
to the language we use in this political movement of preservation.
Far too few people understand the changing nature of preservation. I believe this is
because our reactionary language looks backward and is based on conservation doctrine.
We’ve allowed ourselves to be defined by that language.
When the voters of Houston, Texas, narrowly defeated a referendum to save and
rehabilitate the Astrodome, a local newspaper felt perfectly comfortable in saying that the
voters had rejected nostalgia.
Nostalgia? We don’t work in nostalgia. The Astrodome – the 8th
Wonder of the World, a
modernist icon, and a symbol of the brashness, big vision, and can‐do spirit of Texas with a
bright future – isn’t nostalgia. Yet we’ve too often allowed ourselves to be framed by others as
seeking to return to the past because we can’t cope with the reality of life today.
When we think of language, we have to recognize that fundamentally, preservation is a
political movement.

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Writing on the influential planning blog Greater, Greater Washington, David Alpert brought
this point home in a post about an especially difficult fight over the Brutalist‐style Third Church
of Christ Scientist in our nation’s capital.
If there's ever an example of winning the battle and losing the war, (Alpert wrote) this
church fight is it….I admire the strict preservationists' fortitude in standing up for what they
believe, but preservationists need to realize an important fact: preservation is a political
movement.
For all the talk about how preservation retains even buildings that are unpopular (since
tastes change), preservation got started saving buildings that were popular. Masses rose up
unsuccessfully to save the old Penn Station, still New York City's most deeply‐felt loss. Our
historic preservation laws came from the political force of many citizens dismayed at the
changes happening around them.
Since then, the political climate has changed. (Alpert ends by noting) If I were a leader in the
historic preservation movement, I'd be very worried that the movement is heading…toward
irrelevance in pursuit of ideological purity.
Political movements succeed when they find issues where undecided people agree with
their side. They also succeed when they work hard to educate the public about why things –
such as modernist buildings and landscapes – can be important from an architectural,
sustainability, and a (small "c") conservative point of view. We should be more respectful of all
places and not assume that everything is going to be rebuilt every 30 years. But we have to
speak in language that resonates with the values that people care about. And we have to
understand that we may be going up against deeply held beliefs by the public about what they
like – and don’t like – in our communities.
While we may be forward‐looking, the framing others do of our work – and often the
language we use as preservationists – helps make the case for our critics. Right now,
preservation is often defined based on our most traditional and regulatory traits. We are the
“NO Police.” Sometimes the shoe fits. There is a vocal part of our movement that wants to use
preservation to “stop” change and “keep things as they are.”
There are times when we – as preservationists – should say NO. We may be trying to keep
– and sometimes we are the only voice for – something of value. But I believe strongly that the
NO has to be coupled with an explanation of why it matters and why it is valuable to people,
with solutions and with a vision for the present and future.
Conservation and reuse of historic buildings and neighborhoods is at the heart of much of
the renewal of American communities over the past 30 years. But preservation as nostalgia
often gets pigeon‐holed as a niche, a “nice‐to‐do” but not “critical‐to‐do” activity. Thankfully, a
new generation is providing a sense of how to approach preservation holistically.

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They are making the case – in path‐creating, forward‐thinking, active language – for
preservation. My colleague Tom Mayes recently spent six months on sabbatical at the
American Academy in Rome focused on the language we use in describing why old places
matter.
In a series of essays, Tom explores the reasons that old places are good for people. He
begins with what he considers the main reason—“that old places are important for people to
define who they are through memory, continuity, and identity—a ‘sense of orientation.’ These
fundamental reasons inform all of the other reasons that follow: commemoration, beauty, civic
identity, community, and the reasons that are more pragmatic—preservation as a tool for
community revitalization, the stabilization of property values, economic development, and
sustainability.”
As Tom notes in his introductory essay, “The notion that old places matter is not primarily
about the past. It is about why old places matter to people today and for the future.”
Our political movement must compel others to believe that saving historic and older
buildings should be a priority for decision makers today. We must show that livable
communities today – thriving, alive communities – are diverse. Wholesale demolition and new
construction destroys the connectivity and the continuum that make places unique and
desirable.
But if we speak in language of preservation and conservation doctrine – even if we are
speaking of relevant issues such as environmental sustainability and urban “hipness” – we will
still fail to reach the majority of Americans who share our interests and could be supporters.
Some of the most important work in this area today is being undertaken by Dr. Jeremy
Wells, a professor in the historic preservation program at Roger Williams University, where he
specializes in the use of social science research methods to improve the ways in which the
historic environment can be conserved.
In the Spring 2015 issue of the National Trust journal Forum, Dr. Wells makes the case for
historic place conservation based on people’s values. He describes the disconnect between the
way that professionals who work with old or historic buildings, places, and landscapes…
“…make an objective case for conserving historic places and the emotional way in which
most people actually talk about places with cultural value. Each side tends to talk past each
other, which may help to explain why most people support conserving old or historic places
but don’t view themselves as historic preservationists, and therefore fail to support
organizations that advocate for historic place conservation.”
“In other words,” Wells continues, “we aren’t communicating effectively with most
stakeholders in their own language and its familiar meanings. We are operating as if we

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expect most people to adopt our language, perspective and objective descriptions, which is
an improbable outcome.”
To be embraced, preservation needs to be easy and personal. My colleague Tom Mayes has
observed that,
“As preservation has become more professionalized we have developed our own language,
practices, standards and professional organizations. While the professionalization is useful
in many ways, it can also create an insularity that may impede our capacity to see what we
have in common with others outside the field who also care about old places. And we may
not recognize some of our own biases.”
Jeremy Wells has spoken to that disconnect when describing a layperson’s perspective on
the historic environment. People believe that heritage can be found everywhere – not just in
special districts – and that at heart everyone is a heritage expert. Natural and cultural heritage
are intertwined in a continuum. People have a much more multidimensional view of
significance than the preservation expert would often suspect, and people understand that
significance lies in the present, not the past.
When we look at these perspectives, it is easy to see why much of our work on the
professional side of conservation conflicts with the public’s view of heritage. Our doctrine and
practices are based on federal laws and frameworks – such as the National Register of Historic
Places, the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for Historic Preservation, and the Guidelines for
the Treatment of Cultural Landscapes. It is virtually impossible, in that framework, to apply
broader understandings of heritage that would resonate with the public.
Old places matter to people for a variety of reasons, and these reasons often overlap. Yet in
the preservation field, we simplify and codify with our focus primarily on two aspects of the
environment: architecture and history. Both are important, and should be part of the reasons
why we protect old places. But there are many other reasons why the public cares about older
and historic places.
“Making arguments to the public based on conservation doctrine is almost certainly
doomed to failure,” according to Wells. “So how can we make a better case for historic place
conservation? The answer is to make a better effort to understand how the public values,
perceives and behaves in historic environments.”
As we think about how to get to a future for preservation that recognizes the need to
understand public values, let’s ask preservation students to show proficiency in outward facing
community engagement, much as they do in identifying landmark buildings or knowing how to
mix mortar for a 19th
century house.
We need to stop talking to ourselves and, as suggested by Tom Mayes, start listening to –
and working with – everyday people, mayors, brewers, philosophers, housing advocates,

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historians, planners, developers, architects, shop‐owners, politicians, environmentalists,
sustainability experts, environmental psychologists, sociologists, neighborhood advocates,
artists, writers, composers, and community organizers.
One final note about language that goes to the heart of our movement’s challenge: its
name. The words “historic” and “preservation” do not do justice to the fact that our work is an
essential element in the future of America’s cities, towns, and countrysides. “Historic
Preservation” combines two words that look backward and fit the stereotype of resistance to
change. We grapple with this at the National Trust. Most laypeople call us the “National
Historic Trust” and perhaps that should be our name. It is clearly an easy and personal
alternative to the mind‐numbing mouthful we use now. I hope as a movement we can have a
meaningful conversation around change, people, and language that begins with our name.
My vision of preservation’s future is one where we embrace change and employ a variety
of locally‐grown tools that make our historic buildings, landscapes, and development patterns
the norm rather than the exception. Those tools would be developed and employed by, for,
and of the people. And we would have a political movement that embraces our grass‐roots
origins.
Historic places matter to people today and to future generations because of the changes,
stories, memories, and inspiration that are embedded in our landmarks, in our vernacular
buildings, in our older neighborhoods, and in our historic landscapes. If we tell that story in
language that speaks to the values people care about, and if we work side‐by‐side with the
people living in our communities, we can have a future in preservation where we save and
continue to use these places that tell the broad and rich story of America.
Together, we have the opportunity to make our historic buildings, landscapes and
neighborhoods relevant in shaping the future of our ever‐changing communities. If
preservationists embrace change in where and how we work, we may find ourselves in the
same situation as those who follow Mark Twain’s advice about always telling the truth: “It will
amaze your friends and confound your enemies.”
Here’s to an amazing future.
Thank you.