Our most democratic form of built heritage, historic street pavement has been largely ignored by the preservation movement. Before the 1920s, cities experimented with an amazing variety of paving materials that were essential to modernizing urban life.
Robin B. Williams chairs the Architectural History Department at the Savannah College of Art and Design, where he specializes in the history of modern architecture and cities in Europe and North America. He earned his Ph.D. in Art History at the University of Pennsylvania with a dissertation on the urban transformation of 19th-century Rome. Since joining SCAD in 1993, Williams has focused his research on Savannah, directing the online Virtual Historic Savannah Project 1997-2006 and lead authoring a new guidebook, Buildings of Savannah. His current research analyzes the evolution of street and sidewalk pavement in cities across the USA.
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