In 2023, the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, the independent federal agency which advises the President and Congress on historic preservation policy and oversees the Section 106 process for federal-agency action, invited public feedback regarding the application and interpretation of the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for the Treatment of Historic Properties. “The Standards” provide guidance that is central to implementation of federal, state, and local historic preservation law.
The application and interpretation of the Secretary’s Standards and associated guidelines significantly affect public and private projects involving historic properties, influence strategies and techniques people choose to deploy, change costs associated with addressing historic property issues, and shape distributional equity. In requesting feedback on the Standards, the ACHP sought to better understand how their implementation may or may not affect projects that address the critical issues of our time, including climate change and the housing crisis.
In this one-on-one discussion, Sara Bronin, Chair Advisory Council on Historic Preservation will sit down with Katie Horak, President of Docomomo US docomomo-us.org, to provide background on the role of the federal government in shaping historic preservation policy, and will discuss the feedback ACHP received about the standards, and offer some thoughts on their impact to Modern sites.
Bronin will discuss material, subjective and policy challenges to protecting Modern sites, and challenge attendees to influence better outcomes, and will offer entry points to engaging with federal, state, and local decision-makers to improve better protection for Modern sites.
Sara C. Bronin was confirmed by unanimous consent by the United States Senate in December 2022 to serve as the 12th chair of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation. A Mexican American, she is the first person of color to serve in this position. Chair Bronin is on leave from her tenured position at Cornell University, where she serves as Professor in the College of Architecture Art & Planning, Professor in the Rubacha Department of Real Estate, an Associate Faculty Member of the Law School, and a member of the Graduate Faculty in the Field of Architecture. Chair Bronin received a J.D. from Yale Law School, an M.Sc. in Economic and Social History from the University of Oxford, where she was a Rhodes Scholar, and received a B.Arch. and B.A. in the Plan II Liberal Arts Honors Program from the University of Texas at Austin.
Katie Horak is a Principal at Architectural Resources Group and manages the firm's Downtown Los Angeles office. Her work at ARG ranges from rehabilitation projects on some of Los Angeles’s most recognizable landmarks to large scale planning projects, including SurveyLA. In addition, Katie is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at USC, where she teaches graduate-level courses in historic resource documentation methods, and she is President of Docomomo US.
