Future Anterior: Journal of Historic Preservation History, Theory, and Criticism

Although "'Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" has served as a catchy public education tool for American environmental activists in the recent past, adaptation of the built environment to the challenges of climate change has deeper, broader roots. Even recent efforts to reduce new construction, reuse existing building stock, and recycle materials follow decades of considering the environmental stressors and material metabolism of the built environment. As conceptualized and practiced globally in accordance with diverse disciplines, politics, cultures, and resources, "retrofit" registers historical and contemporary responsiveness to unsustainable building conventions and endangered built environments. "Retrofit," however, can carry many meanings: to mitigate weathering, abate decay, reduce waste, limit emissions, extend livability, redress inefficiency, and even to contest colonialism, claw-back indigeneity, and materialize local ingenuity. This issue of Future Anterior offers research on the pluriverse of adaptive practices, conservation theories, and mitigation methods that have transformed the pedagogies and praxis of preservation.

Only a few decades ago, preservation's leading academic, cultural, philanthropic, and governmental sponsors treated environmental design and hazard mitigation as marginal to their mandate to redesign built environments for the future. Today, research of retrofits sprawls across preservation's fields of inquiry and intervention—architecture, planning, and engineering as well as history, archaeology, anthropology, geography, and the material sciences.¹ Such expansiveness yields discontinuity, disconnectedness, and dissonance between critical discourses on building form and performance, land use and utilization, infrastructure integrity, and investment. Nonetheless, scholars, educators, and practitioners have organized and ordained responses to energy and climate crises.² Revised building regulations, design pedagogies, construction specifications plus planning prescriptions, policy recommendations, and legal briefs in multiple spoken and spatial languages reflect investigation and collaboration at multiple scales (i.e., interior spaces, singular structures, building complexes, planned unit developments, neighborhoods, and cities) by a multitude of actors.³ Who, currently and historically, convenes such collective thought and action on energy and climate exigencies? What is the value of knowledge and networks built? [End Page iii] Where and how can or has the value been measured, seen, and demonstrated?

Contributors to this issue, who hail from a half-dozen disciplines and conduct research on three different continents, reflected on these questions, researched relevant cases, and reviewed instructive publications. Each engages with ongoing research that treats retrofitting the built environment as a professional exercise, an industry practice, an investment thesis, a public policy, a social enterprise, a tactic of activists, and/or a subaltern intervention. Together, they explore what it means for jurors of the world's foremost honor for architects to award the 2021 Pritzker Prize to Anne Lacaton and Jean-Phillipe Vassal, French architects committed to making existing structures—single-family dwellings to social housing—livable, longer. The takeaway of these explorations is generative not conclusive: adaptation of venerated and vernacular architecture to current and future environmental conditions renders designers of change vital. What's a preservationist's place in a future of change to buildings, landscapes, and artifacts that make up World Heritage sites, national registers of historic places, cultural heritage trusts, and local historic districts? Explained further below, recent reports and reporting on retrofitting practices and practitioners suggest a viable if not venerable path forward for preservationists' inquiries and interventions in climate change and energy transitions.

The mere fact that centuries-old heritage still stands, serves communities, and showcases culture across the globe suggests somebody—or rather some bodies of governance, finance, or resources management—long ago considered how to retain and reuse them for profit if not posterity. Although diverse individuals and institutions have made material changes to tangible heritage, periodicals and pedagogies concerning the built environment primarily chronicle how designers optimize buildings and landscapes for changing ecology, energy, and economics. In these forums, architects of resilience largely envision and evaluate adaptation and mitigation even though engineers, planners, scientists, and archivists also design systems and structures that preserve the integrity and authenticity of historic structures and infrastructure undergoing reuse and reconfiguration.⁴ Moreover, first-person narratives of retrofit and dialogue on reclamation that appear in architectural media, syllabi, webinars, and reports tend to elevate the built works of well-known predecessors...