In this episode, GSAPP Historic Preservation PhD student Anna Gasha interviews Professor Dell Upton. Upton is a historian of architecture, material culture and cities. He is a Professor Emeritus of Architecture at UC Berkeley. His books and articles treat subjects ranging from pre-Revolutionary American architecture to critiques of New Urbanism and heritage tourism, including Another City: Urban Life and Urban Spaces in the New American Republic and Architecture in the United States, which won the 1998 Vernacular Architecture Forum Abbott Lowell Cummings Award. He has also completed a study of civil-rights and black-history monuments and urban politics in the U.S. South, in What Can and Can’t Be Said: Race, Uplift, and Monument Building in the Contemporary South.
Professor Upton discusses what the recent surge of actions on public monuments reflects about our understandings of heritage, culture, and history. The interview points to how historic preservation might critically reconsider and challenge existing practices in response to this moment, questioning the seeming neutrality and apolitical nature of the field. Upton discusses how more interconnected, dynamic perspectives on architecture, the built environment, and the society at large – departing from the “atomized” and static understanding typical in architectural history and preservation – could be valuable in developing greater sensitivity to non-canonical narratives, sites, and knowledge.
Source by Columbia GSAPP
