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Tisher, Gregory A.

Historic Preservation Program

2008

M.S.

Since the 1980s, an increasing awareness of how human industrial activities, including the construction and operation of buildings, contribute to worldwide environmental degradation has led many in the global architectural profession to reexamine their own practices and instead adopt a series of environmentally sensitive approaches broadly know as sustainable or green design. Many observers have noted that sustainable design strategies used in historic building rehabilitations can be at odds with historic preservation aims, thus putting the supposed allies of sustainability and preservation in conflict rather than collaborative comrades in defense of scare resources, natural and cultural. In many ways, the history of sustainable rehabilitation in the United States from 1989 to 2005 can be defined as one of conflict and collaboration.
This document investigates American sustainable rehabilitation practice during that seventeen-year period in an effort: (1) to examine significant process, design, and preservation aspects of pioneering and representational American institutional sustainable rehabilitation projects; (2) to categorize those projects into "historical" periods based on timeframe and theme; (3) to identify significant themes of change over time, emerging trends, and, as possible, the mechanisms driving this change; and (4) to assess what the discussed projects imply and offer in answering whether good preservation and good sustainable design can be practiced collaboratively. In addressing that latter aim, the empirical evidence assembled this document suggests that an alleged mutually exclusive and intrinsic choice between good historic preservation and good sustainable design is an unnecessary and false choice.