Bluestone Takes Preservation Studies to a New Level

BU’s College of Arts & Sciences took a big leap forward with our Preservation Studies program this fall, hiring Professor Daniel Bluestone as director. Born in Boston and raised in Eggleston Square and Newton Centre, Bluestone is among the most highly regarded preservation educators and preservation advocates in the United States. He has spent his teaching career affiliated with two of the top historic preservation programs in the country: ten years teaching at Columbia University and twenty years directing the University of Virginia’s program. Last year, Bluestone’s celebrated book Buildings, Landscape, and Memory: Case Studies in Historic Preservation (Norton, 2011) received the Society of Architectural Historians Antoinette Forrester Downing Award, the most prestigious award given annually to a book in historic preservation.

Founded in 1983 under the auspices of BU’s American and New England Studies Program, Preservation Studies has trained leading preservation professionals who now work in key local, national, and international historic preservation organizations.

Virginia Sapiro, Dean of Arts & Sciences, views Bluestone’s appointment as a key part of a strategic vision of strengthening Preservation Studies and making historic preservation training available to a broad range of new students across the University, including students training in History of Art and Architecture, History, Archaeology, American and New England Studies, and Planning. Pointing to Bluestone’s undergraduate degree from Harvard College and his PhD from the University of Chicago’s Committee on the History of Culture, and his teaching and preservation community projects, Sapiro said, “Professor Bluestone’s record of interdisciplinary teaching and research precisely aligns with the historic home of Preservation Studies within the American and New England Studies Program and our interest in seeing Preservation Studies working with diverse students across BU and a range of communities and preservation institutions in the city and the region.”

Dean Sapiro also anticipates a significant role for Bluestone in BU’s new Initiative on Cities headed up by former Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino and Professor Graham Wilson, chair of the Political Science Department.  Moreover, Sapiro pointed out that Bluestone, who has taught and consulted most recently in both China and Iraq, stands in an excellent position to engage Boston University’s international students and global studies agenda.

Professor Bluestone has long been viewed as a very effective advocate of historic preservation. He has built his teaching around yearlong community history, planning, and design projects. State historic preservation offices and the National Park Service have pointed to examples of Bluestone’s nearly 30 successful nominations to the National Register of Historic Places as exemplary models of historic and documentary craft. Bluestone’s earliest preservation work was done for the National Park Service’s Historic American Engineering Record, including surveys of engineering and industrial sites in Cleveland, Ohio and his study of the remains of the 19^th century sugar mill industry throughout Hawaii.

Bluestone has been directly involved in over 1 billion dollars of historic rehabilitations, mostly centered in Chicago, Illinois. His multiple resource nomination for Chicago Bungalows has the potential for adding 80,000 properties to the National Register. Bluestone’s work has been recognized by numerous awards and grants including from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Driehaus Foundation, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, National Endowment for the Humanities, Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society, and Harvard University’s Dumbarton Oaks.

Professor Bluestone has already met with his first class—CAS AM 546:  Places of Memory: Historic Preservation Theory and Practice. “It is very exciting and a great honor to be at Boston University,” Bluestone says. “I have great regard for my old friend and colleague Richard Candee, who founded Preservation Studies, and for Claire Dempsey who has directed the program for the past ten years.  Two years ago, I was on a team that reviewed the American and New England Studies Program.  It was clear during our team’s visit that there is a very devoted and loyal group of alumni from this program doing impressive and energetic work in historic preservation. Those alumni and other preservationists have helped extend an impressively vibrant culture of historic preservation in Boston and throughout the region. Working with these preservationists and having students in our program in contact with them is one of the really attractive aspects of moving to BU.  We all stand to learn a huge amount from the locality as we do work that builds social capital in communities and strengthen attachments to place for both residents and visitors. This process stands powerfully at the center of historic preservation. Heritage, historic buildings and landscapes, provide the ballast for society and culture as we engage the past, live in the present, and imagine the future.  This is work I really look forward to now pursuing at Boston University.”

In the spring semester, Professor Bluestone will be teaching and coordinating an innovative cross-disciplinary undergraduate course titled: What’s Boston. Taught with faculty from a broad spectrum of schools and departments at BU, the course is designed to introduce students to the complex urban and environmental world of Boston as it explores the methods and perspectives of diverse scholarly and professional disciplines. This class, Professor Bluestone says, is envisioned as “helping to put the ‘Boston’ in Boston University, while providing a gateway to American and New England Studies and other disciplines at BU.”