history pragmatic historian

Domicology and Historic Preservation

As I sit down to write this post, a number of thoughts related to the historic preservation of structures are flitting through my mind. I’ll try to focus on one of them here and perhaps tackle others in later posts. I read an article the other day on The Conversation that introduced me to a new word: Domicology. Domicology was coined by the Center for Community and Economic Development at Michigan State University. It “is…

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design ideas thought fodder

The 500-Year Building

Historic preservation is an ever-changing field. Twenty-some years ago, people in the field concerned themselves with trying to save as many “old” buildings as they could, “old” meaning primarily Victorian-era, with the goal being to bring these buildings (or, at the very least, their facades) back to how they were originally conceived. In many cases, that meant stripping off any modern skins that had been applied during the 1940s to 1970s, removing insensitive architectural features…

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