Buffalo is hosting another
prestigious conference focused on levering our historic assets. The
Society of Architectural Historians will be having their annual conference
in the city this April from the 10th to the 14th at the
convention center. The event will draw hundreds of visitors to Buffalo from
fields like urban planning, architecture, preservation, and architectural history.
Registration information is available by clicking
here. Online registration ends this Friday, but people will still be able
to register on-site the day the conference starts between 7am and 5pm at the
convention center.
conference will be how Buffalo can utilize historic preservation as a tool for
long-term urban, cultural and economic sustainability. The conference includes
educational sessions and tours of iconic Buffalo buildings like the Kleinhans
Music Hall and the Hotel Lafayette. Several local professionals and UB
professors are involved in the conference and hosting roundtable discussions,
educational sessions, etc.
of Preservation Buffalo Niagara, and Despina Stratigakos, UB associate
professor of architecture, are the conference’s local co-chairs. “After
arriving in Buffalo, I kept telling people elsewhere what an incredible city it
is in terms of the architecture and the planning idea — the creative past and
continuing spirit — and at a certain point, I realized that it really has to be
seen, in a way, to be absorbed,” Stratigakos said. “Buffalo has many
architectural gems, but more than that, there’s a very interesting, radical
history here of innovation. SAH has never been to Buffalo in its 65 years of
holding meetings, and the last time the conference was held in New York State
was in the 1960s, so it’s a big deal that this event is coming to town.”
many education sessions happening at the conference. Conservation,
Restoration, and Architectural History: “An important part of
architectural history entails the study of life within, among, and between the
designed spaces of buildings, but the temporal lives of buildings themselves
pose a peculiar challenge to architectural historians. As a product of
constantly shifting plans and processes, buildings are always caught within a
continuous narrative where they inevitably change form, through growth and
decay; they are remodeled, expanded, gutted, demolished, forgotten, or rebuilt.
The conservator and the architectural historian both search for the origins of
these processes, reconstructing primary forms through fragments, photographs,
plans, and other historical evidence.
possibilities of conservation, in both its historical and practical modes, to
accommodate the movement of time, to preserve its fluidity, stabilize its
heterogeneity, and render accessible its historical morphology rather than
seeking to fix its imaginary origins.”
public events can
be found here and information regarding the tours can be found here. For additional photos from my collection of Buffalo at Night, check out my Flickr page here.