Dear friends,
I am a glass-half-full kind of person, and my instinct is to put on a happy face for this President’s column. But as we round the corner of these three first months of 2025, I am feeling a little ragged due to the emotional toll of natural disasters, political chaos, and uncertainty of what the future holds. Although there are positive things I am trying to focus on, I don’t think it is productive to evade the challenges we are facing – and will continue to face – this year.
As always, I write this from Los Angeles, where we continue to grieve the losses from the Eaton and Palisades fires. Although the news cycles have for the most part moved on, we are still processing the impacts of the disaster as many thousands of Angelenos who lost everything are learning what it means to start over. Amidst the terrible sadness, there are moments of hope and gratitude at the community-led initiatives that provide aid and support to those affected and assistance in the rebuilding efforts. The Los Angeles Conservancy recently launched interactive maps for both the Palisades and Eaton areas, wherein one can look up designated and eligible heritage sites, legacy businesses, and other community assets, to gain an understanding of the level of damage and loss. This documentation is a critical first step in making sure these assets are taken into consideration as rebuilding efforts proceed. At Docomomo US we are grateful for the work of our local partners in Los Angeles.
This year has also brought incredible upheaval for the personnel, policies, programs, and mandates that safeguard our country’s cultural heritage. In a few short weeks, we have witnessed the following (among many others): an executive order that poses a threat to the creativity and innovation that has historically guided the design of our federal architecture; the freezing of grant funds that would support heritage documentation efforts in the US, particularly those celebrating the contributions of underrecognized communities; the blatant censorship of heritage sites significant for LGBTQIA+ rights; threats to remove more than 200 words, including cultural heritage, diversity, women, among others, from federal websites and curricula; the gutting of our federal workforce, including many long-term employees of the National Park Service and General Service Administration who hold incomparable institutional knowledge; and release (and then retraction) of inconsistent information regarding the sale of hundreds of federal buildings, many of which are monuments of the modern movement. By the time you read this, there will no doubt be more to add.
We cannot underestimate the threats these moves pose to so many of the things that we hold dear and fundamental to our work in the heritage field. At Docomomo US, we are carefully monitoring the situation as it continues to unfold, keeping close and constant contact with friends and colleagues in federal agencies who are being affected, and assessing how we can best use our voice to advocate for our values in the coming days.
Closing this column on a positive note, this week we are convening with friends and colleagues in Boston for the Preserving the Recent Past (PRP) 4 conference, taking place in lieu of our National Symposium. Docomomo US collaborated with the Historic Preservation Education Fund (HPEF) and Boston Architectural College, and we look forward to the many opportunities to listen, learn, take in the incredible modernist legacy of Boston, and enjoy the company of old friends and new. Our symposia are always restorative for me; they remind me of the impact of our work in the field and the many, many people making a difference in the preservation and documentation of the modern movement.
Finally, we at Docomomo US are a little sentimental about the Preserving the Recent Past conference. After a half dozen years of modest coordination between the states, a group of initial members agreed to consolidate our efforts to form a United States working party of Docomomo International at the first PRP conference in Chicago thirty years ago. We’re grateful to our friends at HPEF for inviting us to be part of their convening in Boston this year as we contemplate the incredible strides that have been made in the fight to preserve modern resources since 1995, as well as the many challenges that lay ahead.
Warmly,
K.