Welcome to Columbia University's GSAPP Department of Historic Preservation

Columbia's Preservation Program - America's first - continues to deepen and extend its traditional focus on the public interest in Historic Preservation. The core of its curriculum continues to be the training of professionals in the understanding of historic architecture, artifacts and landscapes, their ability to read and argue for the important lessons historic buildings uniquely offer as public objects. Its two interdisciplinary First Year Studios - Understanding Historic Architecture and Planning for Historic Preservation - put in place the basic tools, first, for the appreciation of the meaning to be preserved in historic buildings, including the contributions of design, history and materials to the creation and communication of that meaning, and, second, for the process of the preservation of historic meaning, viewed always as a creative process for the management of change. Around this core are a strong array of required introductions to the history, theory and practice of preservation, including an exploration of all the techniques and disciplines of conservation in the Program's laboratory, the original preservation lab.

Columbia has broadened the range of choices in its second year with its Conservation Workshop offering hands-on experience with materials of old buildings in the field and in the lab; its Planning Workshop exploring preservation issues on a regional scale; and its innovative Design Workshop, conducted jointly with the Advanced Architectural Design Studio of the Architecture Program, creating and criticizing designs for additions to world-class monuments like the University of Mexico and the Capital Complex of Chandigarh. Courses like a new Introduction to International Practice and the Program's long established Colloquium bring together students' final course and thesis work and consolidate the Program's foundation for professional life.

The two major current thrusts of the work of the Program have been the clarification of the purposes of historic preservation generally - sorting out historic preservation from the other political agendas that have been attached to it in the last twenty-five years - and the reintegration of preservation with the original source of most of its riches, namely, the innovative architecture of all eras including our own. Its resources now include new full-time faculty appointments, including the new James Marston Fitch Professorship in Historic Preservation established for the support of the Program by its late founder, James Marston Fitch, his family and friends.

Two new public forums, the James Marston Fitch Colloquium in the Spring and the Preservation Design Forum in the Fall are extending the Program's immediate public impact. Benefiting from an increasing integration with all the resources of the School, this work has begun to offer ways of strengthening - and safe-guarding - preservation as a professional discipline and a creative force in public life and of widening its appeal in changing times. In undertaking this work, the Columbia Program strives to continue to offer Historic Preservation the leadership that has been its stock-in-trade since the invention of the profession at Columbia more than 40 years ago.

Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation Columbia University 1172 Amsterdam Avenue New York, New York 10027