Value of preserving older buildings

On Saturday, April 28, I attended a conference in Geneseo put on by the Association For the Preservation of Geneseo. I rode down with a friend (one of the presenters), Evan Lowenstein of Green Village Consulting. The keynote speaker that day was Pulitzer Prize-winning author Thomas Hylton, and the most profound and memorable thing he said was also very relevant to the Conkey Clifford project:

"The best thing you can do for the environment
is to preserve older buildings."

For more detail, you can see the brochure he published for the State of Pennsylvania: Renovate or Replace? The Case For Restoring and Reusing Older School Buildings.

I'm not sure if it's the price of energy, recognition of global warming, or the skyrocketing price of new building materials, but there seems to be a growing recognition of the simple, sensible value of reusing what we have (and in many cases could never re-create), rather than the crazy waste associated with tearing down to make way for new construction, turning our resources into debris which we then have to cart to the landfill.

Along those lines, last month Richard Moe, President of the National Trust For Historic Preservation, spoke at a preservation awards dinner in Buffalo, and said:

"A city needs to strengthen its heart,
without hauling its soul off to the landfill."

The Landmark Society in Rochester has been developing these themes, as well--more about that in a subsequent post.