What if all buildings — and their stories — had the right to remain?

This review is part of a special collaboration between Planetizen and Booked on Planning, a biweekly podcast where AICP planner Stephanie Rouse and Jennifer Hiatt chat with authors of the latest books shaping urban planning today. Listen to the episode with today’s author in the player below. 

May is Historic Preservation Month and a great time to highlight Amy Hetletvedt’s new book “Preserving with Purpose: Reimagining Buildings for Community Benefit.” While more flashy, strict historic restoration projects often get the headlines, the author instead provides readers with a look at other types of preservation activities: from using buildings as art to how to save buildings in rural, declining areas. While preservationists will find this book interesting, it appeals to a much wider audience, breaking away from technical details of preservation to highlight dozens of stories of building reuse to support local communities. 

Many of the author's ideas stem from her ten years living in Detroit at the height of the hollowing out of the city and mass demolitions. She highlights an example of a home in Detroit being deconstructed and shipped overseas to be used as an art exhibit, leaving a hole in the fabric of the block that only caused harm to the neighborhood in an attempt at art elsewhere. Another, less harmful, artistic approach to using the vacant buildings scattered across Detroit was the Heidelberg Project that called attention to the government's harmful actions in demolishing homes at such a scale.

A key theme of the book is the sustainable benefits that building reuse provides. The preservation field has slowly started promoting this concept through campaigns like “the greenest building is the one that already exists,” a phrase coined by author and architect Carl Elefante. But Hetletvedt’s approach furthers sustainability efforts beyond focusing on the buildings that meet national preservation standards to instead “reusing so-called nonspecial buildings [that] can have greater sustainability impact than reusing the so-called special ones.”

Several stories chronicled in the book surround the idea of incremental and iterative processes because “at the scale of a building, an incremental process can help with financing, and allow greater opportunity for individuation and innovation.” This included a group in Pittsburgh purchasing and restoring the exteriors of a group of rowhomes and selling them to buyers that could slowly work to upgrade the interiors as time and money allowed, making the homes more affordable. Hetletvedt takes readers overseas for examples of creative temporary bracing of hollowed out churches to allow time for a full project to come to fruition without risking a full building collapse.

Back in the U.S. Hetletvedt highlights many stories of buildings that survive or fall to ruin and how “the very existence of the ruin, the remains, becomes part of the story, and the adjacent restored building becomes a vantage point, physically and philosophically, for the ruin.” This was the case for the buildings that were tied to the murder of Emmett Till in 1955. This same story is found in every plantation site across the U.S. where the history of the enslaved people has been lost, while the white slave owners' buildings survive. One attempt to take back this history is underway at Menokin in Warsaw, Virginia with a Remembrance Structure built on the site while the main house is being restored with a focus on highlighting the craftsmanship of the enslaved individuals who built it.

There is so much more to find in the illustrated pages of "Preserving with Purpose” that offer alternatives to preservation, and allowing buildings to tell important stories.