Preserving with Purpose

In this episode architect and author Amy Hetletvedt discusses her thought-provoking book, "Preserving With Purpose: Re-Imagining Buildings for Community Benefit." This conversation delves into innovative approaches to historical preservation, particularly around the idea of reimagining how communities can benefit from existing structures. A number of the book’s case studies are discussed to illustrate her concepts that offer a new way to ensure building maintenance and reuse that diverges from the standard approach of letting buildings sit and deteriorate until millions of dollars are raised to complete a full scale renovation.

Show Notes:

• Further Reading:
  • Deventer by Matthew Stadler
  • A Field Guide to Sprawl by Delores Hayden
• You can download a free book guide that includes options to discuss the book in one to three meetings as a book club or lunch discussion at www.amyhetletvedt.com 
• To help support the show, pick up a copy of the book through our Bookshop page at https://bookshop.org/shop/bookedonplanning or get a copy through your local bookstore!
• To view the show transcripts, click on the episode at https://bookedonplanning.buzzsprout.com/

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Transcript

Stephanie: [00:01:00] Welcome back, bookworms. I'm Stephanie Rouse

Jennifer: And I'm Jennifer Hyatt.

Stephanie: and we're the hosts of the Booked on Planning podcast. In today's episode, we talk with author Amy Hetletvedt on her book, preserving With Purpose, Re-Imagining Buildings for Community Benefit. This episode is the first of two in the month of May, highlighting National Preservation Month.

A favorite of mine. I mentioned this in the episode, but I found all the case studies in this book to be so helpful that I slipped them into the last few lectures of the semester for the class that I teach at UNL.

Jennifer: Yeah, and I really loved that Amy made the point that when she was working on this book, which has been a labor of love for a while for her, that the whole idea was that she would be able to take it with her to a client meeting. Put it down and be like, here are four or five different case studies that, you might wanna consider as we think about your, preservation projects.

I thought that was such a great idea. I.

Stephanie: And she breaks the [00:02:00] book into three different kind of categories, or approaches to preservation priorities, poetic and prosaic. And they each have, different. Ways in order to preserve historic buildings. A lot of 'em more non-traditional, like mothballing. There was this conversation, and it's in the book about Mothballing, certificate of Appropriateness, which was a really interesting new idea I thought.

Jennifer: It really made me start thinking about some of our commercial buildings that we have here in Lincoln that could maybe benefit from this technique that you'll just have to wait to hear about at, about three quarters of the way through the episode. So listen all the way guys. I.

All right, so let's get into our conversation with author Amy Hetletvedt on her book, Preserving With Purpose, reimagining Buildings for Community Benefit. 

Stephanie: Amy, thank you for joining us on Booked On Planning to talk about your book, preserving With Purpose, Re-Imagining Buildings for Community Benefit. You described three approaches, priorities, poetic and prosaic. We'll get into some more in-depth [00:03:00] examples in this conversation here in a few minutes, but can you start by describing briefly what these are and how you came to them?

Amy: Yes. Well actually the book didn't originate with the approaches. It began with my questions about preservation. And disinvested buildings and disinvested communities and gathering case studies from around the world. Places I've seen, researched, read about came across through a friend or colleague.

So a lot of the work of threading the book together was really looking at these case studies of ideas that I thought were interesting or approaches that had worked. Sorting through ways of categorizing them. i'm a really visual person, so I had all these Post-its and would arrange them around the room I was working in, in different matrices and early drafts of the book had different categories, but in the end it boiled down to the 3D approaches that you mentioned, priority, poetic, and prosaic.

 once I hit upon these categories, things sort of clicked into place for me. I had been thinking [00:04:00] about the William Morris quote, have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful. So that influenced my thinking on the value of beauty as being equal to practicality.

And it was also later that I realized that the categories somewhat aligned with Vitruvius pillars of architecture. Which have been translated as firmness or structural integrity, commodity or functionality and delight, which is often thought of as beauty. So just to go into the three different approaches, the priority approach is one in which a community rallies to retain a structure that has meaning.

So it's just focused on keeping the building around for an open-ended future. I view this priority approach primarily as an act of resistance, not only to the physical forces like these Newtonian forces that we deal with in the world, the forces of gravity that are trying to, structurally collapse the [00:05:00] building, but also the sociocultural factors as well.

 The practical approach, or what I call the prosaic approach in the book focuses on use value. What can the building offer that meets a need? And we have a lot of examples of this that we can talk about. And finally, the poetic approach uses the building or structure as a way to articulate and amplify stories.

 I also call this a narrative approach where the actions taken on the site or the building. Convey a message or function as a tool of memory keeping. So each of these approaches has benefits to the community and or to our society as a whole.

Stephanie: You mentioned in your lead up to this, how you were reorganizing all these different case studies, and I think that's one of the most valuable things about your book and what I love so much. There were just examples from all over the us, all over the world of your ideas and your concepts, and as I was reading this book, I was teaching a class in intro to preservation.

 Wish I [00:06:00] would've started this book earlier. We're really trying to time this episode with preservation month, which is why we held onto it for this conversation. but it also timed with the very end of our semester. So I was trying to cram in a few of these really great examples into the last few classes of the semester.

'cause I just thought they were so great at showcasing these ideas.

Amy: Thanks, Stephanie. Yeah, I, I really intended it as an illustrated catalog, use by community members, but also as practitioners because it's something that I often wished I had in conversations with clients that we could sort of just flip through a lookbook, if you will, and, and think about and bounce around different ideas.

Jennifer: Yeah, and I love that you utilize post-it notes. no one can see my monitors at this point. But they're kind of covered in post-it notes at all times. And the book was simply beautiful internally, but I actually really thought that the orange that you chose for the cover and I see it, on the shelf behind you, so that made me think of it is such an amazing striking color that like makes you want to pick up [00:07:00] the book just to start with and then immediately you're just met with all these beautiful photos.

It's fantastic.

Amy: Thank you. I'm happy to hear that we, we had a lot of iteration of cover design.

Jennifer: That's fair. so to get started, I feel like your background plays a major role in what ultimately pushed you towards the topic for your book. So can you share a little bit about your background? What made you start asking the question of what is blight? I work in blight and substandard designations all the time, so I'm always fascinated by that and how the work of preservation or not shapes our cities.

Amy: Yeah, I'm an architect, but I did not start out as a preservationist. So my early career focus was. On affordable housing and some of my early practice was in Seattle. So there I worked for a firm who in the 1970s and eighties, and that was before I got there for the record, had used preservation as a means to develop affordable housing for their nonprofit clients.[00:08:00] 

The reason that they were able to do that was because of the economic downturn in Seattle at that time, and the way that they and their clients saw vacancy as an opportunity for societal benefit. So it really was at that firm in Seattle where, first of all, I started learning more about the technical and regulatory aspects of preservation, but second, through being exposed to their work and ethos.

I began to see how preservation could and needed to grow beyond. I think what many perceived to be an elitist endeavor towards more of a democratic means of cultural regeneration. And it was after that, that my husband and I moved to and lived in Detroit for a decade, which was sort of our crash course and life experience on beginning to understand, what is often called blight and learning more about the systemic forces that led to Detroit's.

[00:09:00] Disinvestment. So all of these experiences really led me to write this book, investigating the potential of preservation and about how aligning purpose with preservation cannot only save buildings, but benefit communities.

Jennifer: And also , I'm a theory nerd and preservation theory does live on a pretty wide spectrum. I feel so from, I'm gonna pronounce this wrong, but vt. Led Duke's idea of returning the building to a complete state that had actually potentially never existed in any particular moment, in the past, or Ruskin's idea, which I've always thought was very romantic of just letting and defending the aesthetic of value of the ruins. So how do you think through the idea of historic preservation, where do you land on this massive spectrum?

Amy: Well, I think that at any point in history we. Can look at what we're doing in the built environment, whether it's in cities, in rural environments, suburbs, what we're [00:10:00] doing with our infrastructure, old buildings, new buildings, and we can ask, how does this reflect our priorities and beliefs as a society?

Because there's really no faking it. When it comes to that, like what we build and what we do is what we value. So in the introduction to the book, I refer to our build environment as an ecosystem of use and purpose. So when I looked around me in Detroit and I saw how many beautiful historic buildings were languishing and left behind.

To me, it reflected a gap or it reflected the reality that historic preservation wasn't working. Because historic buildings, there weren't being preserved now more often at that time period, and this was in the early two thousands, the city was the subject of a lot of what's called ruins porn, which you could say was more on the Ruskin side, like focusing on the aesthetic value of the ruins.

But as I discuss in the [00:11:00] book. The perception of beauty in decay depends heavily on one's vantage point. So I started asking what could change and how could we preserve more buildings in the particular context of Detroit? But as I was writing the book and gathering the case studies, I actually realized that the better question was the inverse.

So the better question. To me wasn't how can we preserve more buildings, but what is the role of existing buildings in preserving or serving the community? And can the buildings serve as a resource to the community? And do they have a regenerative role in the community?

Stephanie: Early in the book, you make the case that while demolishing, vacant and neglected buildings can remove health and safety threats of, you know, a falling cornice or criminal activity in the buildings, that the resulting clean slate is a fallacy. What did you mean by this? I.

Amy: I should first clarify that cities [00:12:00] do need to morph and change over time, and that's okay. I think it would be unnatural to freeze a place at one time period in its morphology. but what I'm talking about at that point in the book, Stephanie, is. Broad scale demolition projects that remove proportionately large chunks of neighborhoods.

So when I say that a clean slate is a fallacy in that context, I mean. That, well, two things. First of all, buildings and sites have a memory. So in the book I refer to a sculpture called Urban Extract Number two by the artist Charles McGee, which is in the collection of the Detroit Institute of Art and the urban Extract is.

 part of a wall and the window of a barbershop that the artist frequented for many years. And I see this art piece as an exploration about how demolition and extraction can have a severing effect on memory [00:13:00] and cultural connections. So, just by way of example, if you visit Detroit and ask any Detroiter over the age of 60 about the Hudson's building, which was one of the largest department buildings in the world at the time, the very public implosion of that building in the late 1990s had a huge psychological effect on an entire generation of Detroiters and.

It said to them that this bustling past, as you remember, it is over, and that site remained a hole in the city's fabric for decades. But beyond, I think what we could call these collective memory effects, there are also environmental and health consequences to broad scale demolition efforts. And these are often de-emphasized or undiscussed.

So as far as the ecological consequences, the material waste from demolition does go somewhere, and that's usually to a landfill. But on the health side, one [00:14:00] study linked demolition activity in Detroit to elevated. Blood LED levels in children in Detroit and other studies discuss how vacant land contributes to the breakdown of social capital and influences community wellbeing.

But many of these studies group vacant land and abandoned buildings together, so it's hard to sort of separate out the effects of the vacant land versus the abandoned buildings. But a recent PhD dissertation. Also looked at demolitions in Detroit as part of this broader circulation of power control and capital.

So when I see this sort of knee jerk reaction to demolish, I just think it relates to our tenancy as a society to. Just throw something away and not think that it has consequences. I think about recycling a lot. It was recycling day in my neighborhood today, and I think about how we often really don't curb our plastic use, but we just keep throwing it in the bins and taking it [00:15:00] out for recycling.

And in that point in our mind it goes away. Anyway, as I say in the book, and in our, you know, in our physical built environment, I do think we have this tendency to erase and delete, or try to erase and delete rather than to edit something.

Jennifer: On that. We are very prone to just coming in and demolishing out buildings. And the first thing you hear when you see that is, this is the first step in gentrification. but really, it's actually worse than that. The first step in gentrification is a myth. Can you explain why it's worse than that and how cities can utilize our existing infrastructure without also causing gentrification.

Amy: Yeah, I will begin by acknowledging that gentrification is a really complex and multi-layered topic and about, which in some cases there's not even a lot of concurrence about what we mean by gentrification, what we're talking about, when we're talking about gentrification, because the situations are so varied, and I am [00:16:00] certainly not an expert in the idea of gentrification, but.

As I was writing the book and talking to people about my ideas in the book, gentrification was the question that always came up, and so I realized I can't write this book without addressing it in some way. So I guess to answer your question, I'll focus on two points, which is that first I advocate for retaining the existing resources within disinvested communities rather than demolishing them because.

While keeping them does include the possibility that the neighborhood will later gentrify. I view extensive demolition like we've talked about as narrowing future options for that neighborhood rather than expanding them. And second, I do advocate for communities making inventory of their buildings and of their values, their shared values.

 And so there's a lot of creative ways to do this from. Formal [00:17:00] heritage surveys to more informal ways and sort of citizen driven ways that people can survey their neighborhoods. So if we look at those, surveys and those surveys of both buildings and values, if inclusion and affordability and maintaining existing residents in the community is a value for that community.

 Then I suggest that those values can become a filter for evaluating different approaches to existing buildings in the community. And I think this idea has the potential to be, at least from a policy or a land use standpoint, a proactive approach to aligning or at least better aligning our environment with our values.

Stephanie: We often think of preservation as these two extremes. You either do a full renovation of the building or you let the thing sit empty until you figure out what you're gonna do with it or you demolish it. You offer a third option of temporary uses while the building waits for a [00:18:00] full scale renovation.

Why do you think we haven't really seen more of this?

Amy: Yeah, I agree. Preservation does tend towards these two extremes, and oftentimes if a full renovation isn't possible, the building tends to languish. do think it is. Because of our focus on resources or the lack thereof, people sort of get into the mindset of like, well, we can't possibly raise the $1.5 million or $20 million or whatever it is to fix this building so nothing gets done, particularly in communities that are under-resourced.

So. That's why I began to ask could the building instead be the resource to the community? And in the book, preserving With Purpose, I advocate shifting our focus away from this idea of getting the building from point A to point B. The sort of like physical change of state that the building goes through and focusing towards the building's living role in the [00:19:00] story of the community.

 So temporary uses have a great role to play there because they allow owners and communities to test out uses for the building, whether they are poetic or practical, and prove those uses out and then potentially adjust. A larger and later capital investment. So why don't we see more of it? I do think we're seeing some of it.

 I wrote about that, for example, in a project called Le Grand in Paris in the book, and another example that I'm just learning about is the distillery district in Toronto, which took a very minimal intervention, sort of anti master plan approach. And I realize that both of these examples are in very large, very functional municipalities, but I do think there's a lot of opportunity to continue and develop and expand that idea.

 I do also think there's a reluctance that I observe in the. So-called First World Municipal Systems to enter [00:20:00] into the gray area of temporary use and experimentation. we tend to think that the systems should be able to provide the answer and we get really frustrated when the systems that we set up, to protect and ensure the public safety and welfare seem to sort of.

Work against some of these ideas. So we end up with this paralysis when we see brokenness or examples of where our system's not working. And I was just actually listening to some of your past podcasts, when you had Zara Ibrahim on, talking about the book Messy Cities, and she spoke of the challenge to become messy.

And she said, when the systems of modernism that require high degrees of control don't work as well, so. I think temporary use is a sort of messy, and finally, I guess I'll say that temporary and creative and experimental uses are difficult to do because we operate in a system where [00:21:00] buildings and land are seen as a capital investment and as a means to an end, and are not really viewed in light of their living role in their community.

Stephanie: I think one of the interesting examples was, I believe in Chicago. It was a bank building. I don't know if it necessarily was a temporary use, but it was activating the space and slowly acquiring the capital and in creative ways in order to be able to reuse the building by taking chunks of marble from within the building, engraving them and selling them to raise capital to be able to then reinvest in the building.

And make those renovations. I just thought it was so creative and a lot of the times you just sit there, you'd wait until you can come up with your full capital stack and then you do the renovations. But in this case, the artist had moved into the space, started using it, came up with these creative ways to slowly fundraise and be able to do that work.

Amy: You're talking about the Stony Island Art Bank in Chicago. And yeah, that, that does bring up a couple of good points, which is [00:22:00] that in the community profiles, in the end of the book, I see a pattern where the communities don't start with the big building.

It always starts, you know, 10, 20, 30 years. Earlier with these much smaller interventions that sort of gain momentum, reinforce values, and then it precipitates more and more action. it also invites more rings of community in, to the point where then you can achieve some of these larger, historic restorations.

Jennifer: And keeping in theme with, some more of your case studies. There's a term I've heard about it for like storing clothing, but I'd never heard about it in preserving a, city. So can you tell our audience what is Moth balling a building and can you share the successful story of the preservation SOS group in Springfield, Florida?

'cause it was just such an interesting take on this third way.

Amy: Sure, yeah. As you point out, mothballing is generally a term that we [00:23:00] use with clothing to think about ways that you can protect clothing from decay. You've invited me into this now, Jennifer, because if you really wanna nerd out on that word, I looked it up in the OED, the Oxford English dictionary, and the idea of applying moth Eaton or this sort of As threats to a building was, first used in English in 1638, so, um. The idea of mothballing? Well, I'll, I'll use a separate analogy to sort of explain it, because in the book, I actually use a medical analogy to explain some of the approaches and I, I'll get to mothballing there. But a community inventory is what I call this sort of like first level triage.

 So as I said a few minutes ago, like not all buildings can be saved. Not all buildings are good candidates to be saved. So residents and community groups. Can create an inventory and then rely on their inventory to direct their efforts. Like, are we gonna, direct our efforts towards this building or not?

What I call in the [00:24:00] book priority repairs are sort of this next level triage. They are addressing the wounds that are threatening the life of the building, right? This is where we have to introduce structural bracing or roof coverings so that the interior doesn't get too much water damage or collapse.

So another type of priority repair is this mothballing, and to shift in the medical analogy or to keep it within the medical analogy, mothballing is like putting a building in a medically induced coma. So it's preparing a building for a period of vacancy or disuse. It's an active decommissioning, not just letting the building go, but going in the building, shutting off utilities, draining the water and frost proofing the plumbing, ensuring that it has ventilation, and then boarding and securing it.

I really think that the responses that communities make in times of distress and loss are the choices that shape their future. So in the example that you're bringing up, Jennifer, in [00:25:00] Springfield, which is in a district, it's a district in Jacksonville, Florida, the community members were concerned when abandonment and disinvestment began to prompt demolitions in the community.

And demolition by neglect increases in disinvested areas because sometimes the owners don't have the means to invest in their properties. But also there are other times that owners do have the means, but they choose not to invest in the property because there's sort of a perceived diminished rate of return, right?

Like if my building is only worth $40,000, I'm not gonna put a $10,000 roof on the building. So. This group, preservation, SOS, which stands for Preservation Save our Springfield, advocated for a mothballing ordinance and it eventually became a mothballing Certificate of Appropriateness, which is a term used by preservation commissions, which, would confirm that the owner has stabilized the structure. It [00:26:00] freezes code fines for that owner, which is another reason that buildings end up being demolished because code fines are dismounting, and then it helps the owners work towards an eventual certificate of occupancy, even if that is a very long-term goal.

Another point that I think is really important about the successes of preservation SOS is that it was very much a grassroots effort and it was not spearheaded by specialists. And this is a thread that runs throughout my book, is that successful preservation and regeneration efforts require multiple layers of participants, the residents, the specialists, and oftentimes just interested or like-minded collaborators.

So preserving with purpose encourages these multi-layer collaborations towards the approaches that not only address the buildings, but benefit the communities.

I am really curious. I've never heard the term Mothballing certificate of appropriateness. I've worked in historic [00:27:00] preservation, so I know about Certificate of appropriateness. Is that a very unique approach that this one community has taken or have you seen Mothballing, CVAs elsewhere?

Amy: I have not looked. We need to investigate that for the next podcast.

Jennifer: Yeah. And I really loved that the city embraced this, put it into an ordinance and, wiped the fees. So, one of the things that I work with pretty regularly is a land trust and community land bank work. the properties that we get, I'm grateful to have them. Don't misunderstand, but we are never a, we're rarely able to save the structure that's on the property by the time it gets to us. because it has had to go through five years of back taxes not being paid and then being put up on the tax sale and whatever, and a lot of the people didn't wanna leave their homes. They just couldn't afford to pay the back fines or lose their buildings. They just couldn't afford to pay the back fines.

That part was just so fascinating to me that the community was like, yeah, you know what? We're willing to step in. Quote [00:28:00] unquote, lose this revenue and engage this project to save buildings that a lot of communities would say, why would we even do this?

Amy: Right. And it's a way of sort of lengthening that pause when the owner or the community doesn't know when the building might, be able to be renovated. But it does allow for this sort of meantime and the moth balling. as I said before, puts the building in the medically induced coma, for it to be preserved for that unknown future.

Stephanie: So we've talked about some examples from both US and abroad. Are there any key lessons that we should be learning here in the US from other countries and their approach to preservation efforts?

Amy: Sometimes we need to dislodge ourselves from the problem in order to better understand the problem and see the solutions, and that was certainly my experience with writing this book. it began with all the questions I was asking about preservation during the decade that my husband and I lived and worked in Detroit.

But for me, it wasn't [00:29:00] until I moved away from Detroit, for my husband's work, we moved away. And then at that point in my life, I started to have the mental space, but also the cultural dislocation to begin to think about how the questions I was asking about.

Could be approached in different ways. So that was really the genesis of the book, where my own dislocation, and then the blessing of being able to see different places around the world and learn about how others are responding in other contexts. So

I realize I'm not. Directly answering your question or sort of twisting the question a little bit, but I guess what I offer is not as much what the US can learn from other countries, but ways that people have often successfully addressed very complex problems, which is that we need to get out of our own discipline or our usual context.

We need to dialogue with others, which is what you guys are doing every week, and we need to give our mind. [00:30:00] Enough space to make these cross connections.

Jennifer: So, I know I'm about to ask you to like pick your favorite child here, but of the three approaches that you discussed in the book, the poetic was my favorite approach. Reading those case studies made me really happy. I loved the dollhouse. I loved the, in the end they burned it down like it was just so amazing. So what was your favorite poetic approach?

Amy: Well, I'm already trying to stop myself from laughing that you just said that, because it is like kids asking a parent like who really, who's your favorite, but regarding the poetic approach, which again focuses on the narrative of the building, Or the adaptations to the building and how that tells The narrative has typically not been seen as a preservation approach.

 It's been seen more of as an artistic approach, and it's kind of remained somewhat siloed as something for museums or galleries or exhibitions. We can think about Gordon, Matta Clark in what, the sixties and [00:31:00] seventies and. It has not typically been thought of as a community centered approach, and I think artists like the Asher Gates, who we just talked about in Chicago, are beginning to experiment with these ideas and sort of break down those silos a bit.

So. I'm not gonna say I have a favorite, but one poetic project that was included in the book that I also love is The Dollhouse by Heather Benning, where in this project she removed the entire rear wall of an abandoned prairie farmhouse, and she installed period furnishings inside, and then she lit it up at night and it was really an incredible, luminous feature on the prairie landscape.

 And to be honest, I really struggled with whether or not to include this case study in the book because first of all, it didn't result in a preserved building because it was destroyed by the controlled burn. So I sort of had to reckon with this severing, I think that happens when buildings are [00:32:00] physically lost.

But second, the manner of destruction, How she used burning to destroy the building presented a real dilemma to me because fire and arson in particular have been the means of losing so many historic resources and has been. Historically, a particularly destructive force in Detroit, for example, but in the end, as is obvious by now, I kept it in the book because I saw a lot of sensitivity and beauty in what she did and in how the project conveyed untold stories.

Also because Benning shared with me that it had become sort of a meeting place and a touch tone in the community during the period in which the installation was in place. So I saw a lot of enduring and beneficial qualities there, and I called. That type of projects, interlocutors, which means someone, or in these cases, something that takes part in a dialogue.

[00:33:00] So it is an approach that I think opens up a lot of questions for discussion and really, I view my book as a whole, much less as a manifesto and just more as an invitation to discussion.

Jennifer: Yeah. The reason that that one sat with me, is, Stephanie and I are in Nebraska. You drive across Nebraska, there are little farmhouses that dot the Prairie everywhere. But in my hometown, there was one that was only about two miles off the road, and it was the gathering place of. Local high schoolers to do legal and illegal things. and it got taken down by a tornado, about a decade after I graduated from high school. But it was so important. It's still a part of Hershey's story, and I felt like the Dollhouse kind of created that same situation. So though the building isn't there anymore, the narrative remains the impact of the building remains.

And isn't that still also preservation?

Amy: It is, and that is the conclusion that I eventually came [00:34:00] to as well.

Stephanie: So you end your book with a call to thoughtfully adapt our preservation standards to be more porous. What are some ways that we can do this?

Amy: Well, I will start by saying that I think the historic preservation field is expanding discussions about how places are designated and. What or whom a designation would benefit. I think there's also a movement towards values-based conservation and commemorating difficult stories, and finding ways to protect historic structures while maintaining diversity in communities.

So good things are happening. But regarding the word porous, I was thinking about that word based on a quote by architect Susan Snyder who said, progressive places are not bounded. They are porous, accepting new people, and material change. And I thought, okay, if something is porous, it's acting as a filter.

So we talked about this a little bit earlier, but could we add certain filters like affordability [00:35:00] or artistic expression or resourcefulness when we evaluate proposals for buildings saying, for example, how does this proposed building intervention reinforce or support. Artistic expression in this neighborhood, and then somehow weigh that into the decision making.

I also think that more episodic consultations could be a way to promote some of these in-between solutions and in doing that, communities could benefit from the incremental or temporary solutions that we talked about earlier.

Stephanie: You mentioned how the field's kind of turning towards or recognizing that we need to tell a fuller story and represent other histories. One example in your book that I really love that does, this is Dominican Project in Virginia, and again, I threw that into one of my recent classes because I thought it was just such a great example where , it really touched on a lot of the themes in your book of temporary roofing to protect the structure from continued deterioration.

[00:36:00] Not just going back and filling it in and rebuilding the structure to what it was, but using glass to fill in those gaps and tell a story of the materials and the craftsmanship of the enslaved labor that went into it. And then highlighting the fact that this was a place that had lots of slaves and that really built this.

Plantation. And so I thought these kind of projects get a little bit at adapting our standards.

Amy: I agree. I think that project is a great example of how many of the techniques that we talk about in the book are used over time and. The idea of telling the story from multiple points of view, both from a social perspective, inviting all of that dialogue, but as you said also from a material perspective and their architectural proposal to sort of leave the building itself as a record of the techniques by which they built it. 

Stephanie: And as this is booked on planning, what books would you recommend our listeners check out?

Amy: Well, I had a really hard [00:37:00] time narrowing this down, and since we are all confessed bookworms here, I think you can understand me, but. First, I have a free downloadable book guide to my book, which is available on my website, amy het levitt.com and.

In this book guide, I have options for people to discuss the book in three meetings as maybe you would do in a usual book club format or in just one meeting. because I thought that might work well as a lunchtime workplace gathering for those of you that work in the field of planning and preservation.

 So read it and talk about it. I would love to invite you to do that. As for the other books that I would recommend, one that I've settled on is called Deter by Matthew Stadler. You could still buy an ebook from the publisher for this book or used print copies pretty reasonably, and I absolutely loved this book when I first read it over a decade ago, [00:38:00] and it has really stuck with me.

It is about preservation. And an urban planning project in the city of De Ventor, which is in the Netherlands, and it's written like a novel and it has all of these lovely watercolor illustrations. Because I'm a huge reader of fiction. This idea really appealed to me the idea of exploring, building and preservation and planning processes in a narrative format and getting to know all the characters who play into those processes and getting invested in the plot because we're human beings and we're storytellers.

I'll just read you one of the first paragraphs to sort of draw you in.

This is not a happy day. Mattis wants to preserve the buildings at St. Den. I apologize already for any Dutch people that might be listening, but they are obsolete. The land that they're built on is worth more without them. An architect and planner Mattis was hired to turn St. Raden into real estate to [00:39:00] pay for the state of the art campus The hospital wants to build at the edge of town.

 But he values the older site one building in particular, and doesn't wanna see it destroyed. Why? What's the value of an obsolete building and what does it take to preserve that value? So that's one of the opening paragraphs of that book, which just draws you right in.

 The second one, which I just rediscovered on shelf, is Dolores Hayden's Field Guide to Sprawl. So this book catalogs terms related to sprawl and illustrates them with mostly aerial photographs. It's, I think 20 years old, but it's still really relevant and jarring.

In a good way, sort of in the way that it dislodges our perspective, which as we talked about, can lead us to new ideas and solutions.

Stephanie: It is always good to return to some of the older books. I think we often purchase book, read it, put it on the shelf, move on to the next thing. 'cause there are just so many books. And having done this podcast for so long, I realized just how many [00:40:00] books are out there every year getting released, you know, related in some way to the field of urban, regional community planning.

Amy: It is fun to go back to those old ones and, and open up a page. This was the book that for me, first defined the term snout house.

Stephanie: Yeah.

Well Amy, thank you so much for joining us on Booked On Planning to talk about your book, preserving With Purpose, Re-Imagining Buildings for Community Benefit.

Amy: Thanks for inviting me to be a part of the conversation. 

Jennifer: We hope you enjoyed this conversation with Amy Hevi on her book, preserving With Purpose, reimagining Buildings for Community Benefit. You can get your own copy through the publisher at Island Press now an imprint of Princeton University Press by supporting your local bookstore or the show through our page at bookshop.org/shop/book on planning. Remember to subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts and please rate, review and share the show. Thank you for listening, and we'll talk to you next time on Book on Planning. 

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