There you have it. According to Chicago Tribute writer, Blair Kamin, “Preservation is – just maybe – cool.” Kamin was reviewing the Partners in Preservation program – a collaboration between American Express and the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Other communities like San Francisco and now Chicago have benefited from the $1 million in funds this program has to provide for up to 25 historic resources. Detroit as can best be told is still not in the plans for future phases of the program. Who is responsible for this ommission? How can this situation be changed?
http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/arts/chi-070906landmark-story,1,4280860.story
25 historic sites compete for $1 million in rehab funds
25 historic sites compete for a slice of $1 million in rehab funds. Is that a good thing?
By Blair Kamin Tribune architecture critic
September 6, 2007
Historic preservation is a good cause, but, truth be told, it’s always been a little nerdy — unless, say, Jackie O was leading the fight to save New York’s Grand Central Terminal or Brad Pitt was shooting a Japanese jeans commercial at Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House, as he did last month. New buildings were sexy. Saving old ones was for little old ladies in tennis shoes.But now, it seems, preservation is almost cool — or at least cool enough for a corporation such as American Express to hitch to the same upscale marketing machine that has backed everything from the U.S. Open Tennis Championships to the Best Chef Awards.When the credit card company Thursday kicked off a Chicago-area “American Idol”-inspired contest, an online vote that will let people pick a favorite landmark from a list of contenders vying for $1 million in rehab funds, it took a page from the playbook of “cause-based’ marketing, which seeks to engage consumers with interactive programs rather than simply inundate them with advertising.
The assumption, of course, is that people will care enough about a well-chosen slate of 25 sites and structures, from Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House to the now-crumbling Viking ship that sailed from Norway to Chicago for the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, to go online and vote for them.Yet that seems like a pretty good bet in architecture-mad Chicago, where cabbies are known to offer commentary on their favorite buildings and rigged elections are a civic tradition.”We invite you to vote early and vote often, for historic preservation,” Richard Moe, president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, American Express’ contest partner, said in a statement, undoubtedly aware that he was promoting online ballot-stuffing. (For the record, you are allowed to vote once a day from Thursday through Oct. 10.)The contest is part of American Express’ “Partners in Preservation” program, to which the company has pledged $5 million over five years to help save historic sites across America. Last year, in the program’s rollout, American Express gave a total of $1 million to 13 sites in the San Francisco area.It is easy to see how this marriage of mutual interests got made.The Washington, D.C.-based Trust gets a seven-figure injection of cash for its cause — and loads of free publicity. New York-based American Express gets to associate itself with the nobility and prestige of landmark-quality buildings instead of being tagged as a company that sticks you with a high interest payment if you don’t pay your monthly bill in full.Yet it would be wrong to view the contest as a mere publicity stunt. Donors invariably give money to bask in the glow of public recognition or cleanse stained images. As artificial as this virtual event is, it should draw attention to the cause of saving the past in an intelligent way. Take the list of 25 sites and structures, which the National Trust and American Express winnowed from a list of hundreds of contenders. It doesn’t simply include architectural monuments, such as Robie House, from the history books. It’s full of neighborhood gems, such as the Bohemian National Cemetery, with its renowned collection of funerary monuments, or the Homan Square Power Plant, where a 185-foot-tall, rounded brick chimney would become a lab space in a charter high school scheduled to open next year. This promotes the idea that architecture is democratic, not just for the Gold Coast salon crowd.The list wisely draws attention to the need to save buildings from the recent past as well as the far past. It includes such midcentury modern standouts as Building 42 at the Great Lakes Naval Station in North Chicago. The architect of this handsome, low-slung pavilion, designed in 1942 as a social space for World War II naval recruits, was future Pritzker Architecture Prize winner Gordon Bunshaft.It’s also a good stroke to hold an open house at each of the 25 sites Sept. 15 and 16. The open houses will communicate vividly that architecture is about real, live, three-dimensional structures that create a sense of place in their community, not two-dimensional icons meant only to be viewed on a computer screen.The modesty of the work proposed by the competing sites is appealing too. At the Robie House, money would go to restoring a guest room. At the Quinn Chapel A.M.E. Church in Chicago, funds would fix beams supporting the kitchen floor where food is prepared for kids in day care. This is how preservation typically works. You cobble money together from a variety of sources. You don’t get one big donation from Bill Gates.True, the list isn’t perfect. In the suburban ring around Chicago, Will County was left off entirely, though DuPage, Lake, Kane and McHenry Counties each merited a site or two.Also, only the winner of the online election is guaranteed funding, which will leave it to American Express, the National Trust and a 20-member advisory committee composed of leading Chicago-area cultural figures such as John Bryan, the former Sara Lee Corp. chief, to determine how the remaining funds will be parceled out. So expect some lobbying and arm-twisting before American Express announces the winners in November. But whatever the results, this much is clear: Preservation is — just maybe — cool.For more on the contest, go to: partnersinpreservation.com