Historic Preservation: An American Perspective on a Professional Discipline

Beginning in the mid-1960s, courses in "historic preservation" entered a number of American universities, later developing into discrete academic programs by the 1970s.¹ These programs, many housed in schools of architecture and planning, emerged in reaction to prevailing design education and practice, gaining support from a public tired of the largely banal and placeless buildings and urban environments that postwar architects and planners had created, often at the expense of vital urban neighborhoods and popular civic monuments such as Pennsylvania Station in New York City. By the early 1970s, the nation's approaching bicentennial only fueled the desire to take stock of the country's entire built legacy, rather than a select white colonial past as celebrated one hundred years earlier. As part of a larger academic movement in interdisciplinary studies and the rise of public interest and activism in environmental issues, policy, and legislation in the 1980s, historic preservation programs multiplied and thrived.

Any discussion of the development of historic preservation as an academic discipline and professional practice must recognize the existing complexities of definition and authority debated in architecture, planning, and landscape architecture, as well as a growing number of challenges from upstart fields including urban design. Dagenhart and Sawicki have described the relationship between architecture and planning as dynamic and diverging, with each discipline defining itself through contrasting paradigms of research-based or practice-based education, the engagement of physical versus social space, and an orientation in policy and process versus representation and production.² The fact that historic preservation entered the academy, and specifically schools of design, in this context, acknowledges the recognition that what was largely perceived as a popular movement, found legitimacy in the academy, where students could be educated, professional values formed, and knowledge and creative work produced and disseminated. Despite this new influence, architecture and planning curricula remained focused on the new, and anything else was suspect. Even an obvious ally such as architectural history experienced shifting "alliances and estrangement" with historic preservation as both fields evolved over time, each exploiting and influencing the other, while design programs and professionals watched from the sidelines.³

What began as a reactionary, cross-disciplinary field of study has continued to evolve, as the phenomenon of heritage has now been claimed by a number of established disciplines outside architecture and planning, and the field has achieved research status through a limited number of PhD programs. While a critical history of historic preservation as discipline and practice has yet to be written, no one can doubt the effect of one on the other since the first graduate class emerged more than fifty years ago.⁴ With issues of public memory; place making; and social, environmental, and cultural equity now demanding greater attention in planning and design programs, historic preservation has found broader acceptance within the academy and in the profession.

James Marston Fitch, founder of the first graduate program in historic preservation at Columbia University in 1964, initially as a two-semester course and later as a distinct master of science program in 1973, broke established disciplinary boundaries by creating a curriculum that was hybrid in theory and method and open to anyone with a relevant background other than design (e.g., history, physical, earth and social sciences).⁵ Already a well-known author on diverse architectural subjects, a critic, and a public intellectual when he introduced preservation courses at Columbia, Fitch viewed historic preservation as an antidote to what ailed contemporary architecture and planning as then taught at the academy. In constructing preservation's history, he frequently cites amateurism in his lectures and writing as a key to its early success and, through his own efforts, a challenge to the dominant academic and professional attitudes toward the historical built environment.⁶ His vision of a new discipline and profession was based on a "synoptic" or cross-disciplinary approach that aimed to correct the myopic focus of specialization and certified expertise that he felt characterized and limited the design and planning professions. The creation of a new discipline and profession free from the bind and power...