Preservation studio teaches preservation planning practice

The Stuart Weitzman School of Design'sPreservation Studio is a keystone of the Historic Preservation curriculum, taken in the fall of the second year. The key learning objective of the Preservation Studio is sound decision-making practices in the face of contemporary preservation challenges.

This semester, student groups are tackling sites across the region ranging from a single building to 3,000 acres. The three sites each intersect with women's history in unique ways. Julie Donofrio, Ashley Hahn, and Molly Lester, discuss the Studio methodology and their site selections.

The studio is a foundational part of the curriculum in design and architecture schools. Hahn explains what it means in the context of Preservation.

"The core of the Preservation Studio is this values-centered planning method. It's a best practice in the field, and that's something that we want everyone to have come away from Studio having worked with," she says. "In the world of preservation, we have historically been the most comfortable dealing with physical fabric. That is our technical expertise, and it's a traditional strength of the field. But over the last generation plus, it has become more standard practice to realize that we care about a lot more than just the physical fabric. We care about why something matters to people. And that can be in the realm of personal connection, like how we use and live with historic places all the time."

"My site is currently the Delaware Children's Theater, but it was built as the New Century Club of Wilmington in 1892," says Lester. "It was designed by Minerva Parker Nichols, who was the first woman in the country to practice architecture independently, for a Woman's Club that formed in the late 19th century to give women a place to organize around civic issues, self-education, and civic reform."

"I am working with students on the Whitesbog Preserve, which is a historic cranberry and blueberry farm located within the Pine Barrens in southern New Jersey," says Donofrio. "I think it is an interesting site for exploration because it has so many different layers. There are a lot of values associated with the Pine Barrens themselves, the history of labor, the history of child labor, all sorts of social, agricultural trends of the early 20th century. There's also a lot of questions in terms of climate and the ongoing viability of them as a business. It's 3,000 acres, so from a scale perspective, our sites are wildly different."

"I'm working on the Village of Arts and Humanities, which is at North 10th and Germantown Avenue in Philadelphia," says Hahn. "And it's about a four-and-a-half-acre campus of properties that are not all contiguous, dotted across several blocks. Its origins are in the Black Arts Movement, where, as an outgrowth of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, there were performing artists, visual artists, and writers working to reclaim art forms for and by Black people."

Read more at Weitzman News.