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Channel / Source:
TEDx Talks
Published: 2016-07-05
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lxZ4bZ8Pk8
no I'm not a native Savannah %HESITATION the first time I visited the city was and two thousand and my friends and I were planning a trip down to the city I was in Richmond and medical school and we need to disk escape the cadavers and the formaldehyde and the gross anatomy lab for awhile so we planned a trip down and I remember being so taken by
Savannah's beauty the beauty of its live opps its architecture centuries of history and I vividly remember that trip because of the intensity of my reaction to the place I was literally tingling as I went from square to square and scientists call that reaction free zone it's a French word for aesthetic chills and you probably all know the sensation it's when you encounter something so beautiful so
inspiring that you're caught in a moment of breathlessness and it shakes you to your core and the hair on your neck stands up and that's exactly what Savannah to me the first time I visited and I was literally and trance and I had to go back to Richmond and back to medical school with a really tough decision to make so do I continue on my current
path toward a secure career in medicine or do I seek out more of those aesthetic chills and they were so intoxicating at that time so you probably know my decision I dropped out of medical school must my parents sugar and I packed my bags and move to Savannah I rolled and scads historic preservation program and have been working in preservation ever since and I left Savannah
for a little bit I moved up to Washington DC and I move to Pittsburgh %HESITATION but the city Jimmy back down about six years ago and you know old buildings the built environment around me it it gives me chills and the paying attention to the built environment around me is is really important to me it provides me tremendous inspiration and it's through the beauty all buildings
can display what they're designed in their craftsmanship stories that they can tell us and then those secrets that they can hide to and their ability to withstand the test of time and carry us across generations and that's why I became a preservationist and why devote myself to making sure our built heritage is carried forward into the future now I'm not saying that all buildings have to
give everybody chills for some of you it's maybe it's food I mean it gives me chills to %HESITATION poetry painting music %HESITATION but I do want you to gain a higher appreciation for the importance of architecture and for you to pay a bit more attention to the built environment around you sensitive buildings always being in the background and a backdrop of your experiences pull buildings out
into the foreground into the forefront sit there a conscious consideration of your everyday life and why do I want to do this because architecture really does matter to all of us architecture critic Paul Goldberger writes that architecture is all around us and what is all around us has to have an effect on us and that's so true architecture can bring us joy a and comfort and
satisfaction and most important architecture provides this continuity with the past and it connects us together and Goldberger goes on to write that architecture is the physical expression of common ground it's one of those few experiences that we have as a community and I love this that we all partaken together this sharing of place and that's why stewardship of architecture preservation it needs to be a collective
process one in which we all have a voice to make sure that the right experiences are passed on in each of you in each of us needs to stand up and advocate for the places that we care about now I want you to go back in the past in your mind with me and think about a building a place that has particular significance to you so
maybe it's the house you grew up in were you proposed your significant other you favor bar to go to on weekends okay so once you have that place in your mind ask yourself a simple question why does that place have significance and the answer is going to be really obvious it's because of the memories that you have with that plays that you've built up the Associated
memories good and bad that you've accumulated over time and those memories intimately connected to that place and they've helped define who you are today so why is this association between place and memory important well because the primary quantifier for anything having building having value buildings or otherwise is this idea of memory no I'm not talking about a monetary value this value is intangible it's impossible to
quantify but it's very real and it's built on memories and buildings are the physical manifestation the physical embodiment of memories and it's why we fight to save them and why we mourn their loss when the ones that we care about our demolished because our memories are wiped away now this idea of attaching value to memory it's universal it transcends all boundaries socio economic religious racial generational
cultures worldwide the preserve the significant reminders of their past because they have value and this happens at the local level when individuals come together to advocate to save a single building or an entire neighborhood it happens at the national level when we nominate landmarks to registers like our national register of historic places and it happens on a global scale when the international community comes together to
nominate resources to what's called the world heritage list and these are places like the great wall of China the Taj Mahal Thomas Jefferson's Monticello and as world heritage these places have something called outstanding universal value and there's that idea of universality and value again the outstanding universal value is value which is so exceptional it's of common importance to all of us to all humanity so this
idea of assigning value to our heritage it's universal it has no borders and through the preservation of significant places were able to carry our memories across time and are significant stories they're given physical places to reside in these places that we save and that allows an ongoing dialogue to continue from generation the generation now in order for preservation to be truly successful to make sure that
your stories continue to be told you need to make sure that you advocate for saving the places that embody your memories the places that you value and maybe you're saying well that's why you went to school here the professional preservationists you save those buildings well that's all fine and good but I may not know necessarily what's important to you and to your community I have all
the background and how to deal with all the zoning regulations and the preservation guidelines in the ordinances but without an understanding of what's important to you I may not make the right decisions about what to preserve and without an understanding of your local memories important histories can easily be forgotten and over a lot so that's the real challenge so how do we get the local community
to get involved and participate in the preservation process because preservation from its foundations has always gotten its strength from the grassroots from local voices like yours and I think the best way to do that is just be creative and how you connect people to their collective memory and when I was living in Pittsburgh I was on the board of an organization called the young preservationist association
and we work to promote youth voices and the preservation movement and a project that we did that I found particularly inspiring was a collaboration with local high school students and community called homestead which is a struggling rust belt city just outside of downtown Pittsburgh on the Monongahela River and we worked with high school students to compile research take photographs interview older residents of the community and
just really get a sense of the history of the place and that allowed the students to compile their own history of homestead and it really strengthened their sense of community and they begin to think about ways to revitalize the commercial quarter and bring the city back to life and we took all of their stories all of their work and put it together and published a book
and that made the students published authors before they graduated high school and through their process of discovery and this translation of history into something tangible like a book the students were empowered and they became these great voices for the community for the communities revitalization and that really inspired others to get involved and I'm sure all of you as you've been driving around Savannah over the past
year you've been seeing this artwork pop up on vacant buildings and storefronts all over the city they're these portraits and inspirational quotes of artists and authors and musicians and it's a mural initiative called walls of hope and it's bringing attention to previously ignored places connect on new way to connect people to the built environment through public art and it's such a simple idea public art painted
on plywood put onto a vacant building but it's a really ingenious way to spark our curiosity and to get us to change our perspectives about what's important and the built environment and really get us to explore what's around us not every community is different and each of you in the audience is unique and no single creative strategy is going to connect all of you it could
be public art it could be a book by high school students maybe some of you write editorials to the newspaper or you go to your neighborhood association meetings are design review board meetings the strategy necessarily isn't what I'm most concerned about I was concerned that you take stock of the buildings around you and that you bring them into the foreground of your everyday experiences pay attention
to the ones that mean something to you and document their stories and then make sure you share those stories because once you share those stories and you tap into other people's emotions into their memories then you can build value for those places and once those buildings you care about have value saving them just makes sense thank you
