Columbia GSAPP is profoundly saddened by the passing of Frank G. Matero ’78 MSHP, a pioneering architectural conservator, influential scholar, and educator whose work helped consolidate conservation as a rigorous, research-driven practice—attentive to how histories are carried, contested, and sustained through material life.

Matero was part of the first cohort trained in architectural conservation at Columbia, earning his MSHP in 1978 under the mentorship of Faculty Norman R. Weiss. He began teaching at GSAPP immediately after graduating, serving as Lecturer and Assistant Professor and as Director of the Center for Preservation Research, helping define the School’s early leadership in architectural conservation education. Weiss reflects: ‘Frank was a friend, a colleague, and a great teacher, for almost half a century. His energy was as boundless as his dedication to his students. It is impossible to accept that he is gone’.

Through the Center for Preservation Research, Matero led and contributed to conservation work at major heritage sites, including the National Park Service’s San Juan National Historic Site in Puerto Rico. These projects exemplified his approach: rigorous material analysis combined with ethical reflection, historical understanding, and deep engagement with place. His teaching insisted that conservation is neither a caretaker posture nor a purely technical operation, but an interpretive act whose decisions reverberate culturally and politically—an orientation he later articulated with particular clarity in his fundamental essay, All Things Useful and Ornamental: A Praxis-based Model for Conservation Education (2007). After his foundational years at GSAPP, Matero joined the University of Pennsylvania in 1990, building an important center for conservation research.

He last returned to GSAPP in 2017 for a lecture on conservation theory, material ethics, and climate vulnerability. As Jorge Otero-Pailos, Director of GSAPP’s Historic Preservation Program, recalls, Matero also recorded a program podcast conversation with him that remains a powerful record of his thinking and voice. In that interview, Matero discusses the cultural implications of material intervention, and the responsibilities of conservators and architects to work collaboratively in shaping more stable and meaningful futures for historic places.

Reflecting today on this continued urgency, Otero-Pailos remarked: ‘Matero was a pioneer of architectural conservation in America, and one of the most important voices calling attention to existing architecture as both deeply resilient and acutely vulnerable, particularly in the context of climate change’.