About

Randall F. Mason is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Historic Preservation at the Stuart Weitzman School of Design, where he also holds appointments in the Departments of City & Regional Planning and Landscape Architecture. His teaching and research focus on preservation history and theory, historic preservation planning, urban conservation, social justice, and cultural landscape studies. Mason has been at the University of Pennsylvania since 2004, serving as the Department Chair from 2009 to 2017 and as the Executive Director of PennPraxis from 2014 to 2017. He leads the Urban Heritage Project at PennPraxis, which undertakes planning, preservation, and cultural landscape projects for the National Park Service and other clients, with numerous reports available. From 2020 to 2023, he co-created and led the Center for the Preservation of Civil Rights Sites, conducting research, teaching, and fieldwork related to Black heritage places marking civil rights histories. Mason has authored several books, including 'The Once and Future New York: Historic Preservation and the Modern City' and 'Giving Preservation a History: Histories of Historic Preservation in the United States,' and is working on additional projects related to cultural landscape ideas and contemporary theories in historic preservation. His professional background includes work at the Getty Conservation Institute, academic positions at the University of Maryland and RISD, consulting practice, and co-founding Minerva Partners, a nonprofit research group. Mason has received awards such as the NEA Rome Prize and an Honorary Doctorate from Gothenburg University, and has contributed significantly to the fields of heritage conservation, urban planning, and social justice.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Computer Science
• History
• Visual arts
• Art
• Engineering
• Civil engineering
• Aesthetics
• Law
• World Wide Web

Selected publications

• Review: <i>Historic Preservation Theory: An Anthology, Readings from the 18th to the 21st Century</i>

  Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians · 2024-03-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Book Review| March 01 2024 Review: Historic Preservation Theory: An Anthology, Readings from the 18th to the 21st Century Jorge Otero-Pailos, ed. Historic Preservation Theory: An Anthology, Readings from the 18th to the 21st Century Sharon, Conn.: Design Books, 2022, 608 pp. $70 (paper), ISBN 9780578547145 Randall Mason Randall Mason University of Pennsylvania Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (2024) 83 (1): 121–122. https://doi.org/10.1525/jsah.2024.83.1.121 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Randall Mason; Review: Historic Preservation Theory: An Anthology, Readings from the 18th to the 21st Century. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 1 March 2024; 83 (1): 121–122. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jsah.2024.83.1.121 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of the Society of Architectural Historians Search Jorge Otero-Pailos's collection is an important contribution to historic preservation's intellectual infrastructure. Many well-known texts are included; others are presented in valuable English translation (e.g., works by Camillo Boito and Gustavo Giovannoni, who are both important to my own teaching). Other pieces are novel and revelatory (Countee Cullen's 1925 poem; Francis Lieber's 1863 wartime policy), and some well-known works are reset in the context of preservation's intellectual history (from Walter Benjamin and Martin Heidegger to Kevin Lynch and Jane Jacobs). In comparison to previous preservation theory anthologies and analyses, Historic Preservation Theory is a leap ahead in number, variety, and geographical-disciplinary-perspectival diversity. The collection rightly and assertively goes beyond the literature on preservation per se, linking developments in preservation thinking to other narratives of architectural culture, cultural policy, and intellectual history. The anthology is unquestionably valuable, diverse yet directed in its choices, and well crafted. However, the question that persisted... You do not currently have access to this content.

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• Values and sustaining heritage

  Routledge eBooks · 2022 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • History

  Sustaining heritage means sustaining values. In keeping with progressive theories of heritage – centering on function and use, as well as form and materiality – professionals need dynamic means of informing and managing decisions, engaging beyond the professions and, more broadly, making heritage and its conservation relevant to contemporary society. Concepts and practices of values-centered conservation (VCC), as they continue to evolve, can provide such a dynamic framework. The underlying theory of VCC holds that accounting for a greater range of values will produce more meaningful, useful, sustainable outcomes. The main concern of this chapter is exploring how the VCC framework is used (with less emphasis on describing ‘what it is’). After establishing some conceptual ground surrounding VCC, I assert the continuing utility of values-centered frameworks in conservation practice, policy, intellectual and political work on heritage in contemporary society.

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• The Decorated Tenement: How Immigrant Builders and Architects Transformed the Slum in the Gilded Age

  Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians · 2022-03-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Book Review| March 01 2022 The Decorated Tenement: How Immigrant Builders and Architects Transformed the Slum in the Gilded Age Zachary J. Violette The Decorated Tenement: How Immigrant Builders and Architects Transformed the Slum in the Gilded Age Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019, 288 pp., 22 color and 129 b/w illus. $39.95 (paper), ISBN 9781517904135 Randall Mason Randall Mason University of Pennsylvania Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (2022) 81 (1): 108–109. https://doi.org/10.1525/jsah.2022.81.1.108 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Randall Mason; The Decorated Tenement: How Immigrant Builders and Architects Transformed the Slum in the Gilded Age. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 1 March 2022; 81 (1): 108–109. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jsah.2022.81.1.108 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of the Society of Architectural Historians Search In Zachary J. Violette’s The Decorated Tenement, one hears strong echoes of today’s affordable housing debates, and particularly their cultural undertones. Aside from needing (or, dare we say, having a right to) shelter, what do the poor deserve in terms of design, decoration, and agency to make their own places? What spaces can “others,” including immigrants, make to express their cultures and satisfy their needs against the desires of dominant narratives (the market, morality, taste, and so on)? These are not new questions. And in this fine work of material culture history, foregrounding the façades of the Gilded Age’s “decorated tenements,” Violette expertly tells a story focused on cultural issues. The book is a superb example of architectural history and a good rejoinder to the economically overdetermined, politically polarized discourse of our day. Violette defines a decorated tenement as “a building built in a ‘slum’ neighborhood for working-class, usually... You do not currently have access to this content.

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• Preserving Justice in Place

  Change Over Time · 2022

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Law

  Preserving Justice in Place Brent Leggs (bio) and Randall Mason (bio) KEYWORDS Islam, Muslim, Arab states, regionalism, Eurocentrism Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Montpelier, Orange County, Virginia. West (main) elevation pictured before its restoration in 2003. Historic American Building Survey. [End Page 260] The US civil rights movement resonates strongly with the 1972 World Heritage Convention's notion of universally valued heritage. Like liberation movements in many countries and all regions of the world, the civil rights movement—whether one thinks of the canonical civil rights icons of mid-twentieth century or the long civil rights movement—centers on the fundamental rights afforded to members of society.1 These civil rights are relational, about participating fully in a society and contributing to one's own culture: voting, land ownership, protection from violence, access to education, legal due process. In safeguarding these rights, civil rights movements and leaders tried to save the United States from itself, make good on the promises of the founding documents for all Americans, and reckon with the unjust and uncivil realities of US history as experienced by many Black and Brown people. In light of contemporary political struggles and societal conflicts, the heritage of civil rights has become more consequential. As with all aspects of Black heritage, decades and centuries of erasure, destruction, and decay shape the possibilities for preservation of civil rights sites. Heritage places serve as symbols of still-unresolved civil rights issues, marking the sacrifices of political leaders but also (increasingly) celebrating the hard-fought prosperity and joy of Black attorneys, scholars, entrepreneurs, artists, and community leaders. The types of heritage places at issue range from the conventional historic houses and sites of conflict to more unconventional heritage experiences enabled by digital humanities or generational wealth building through property ownership. The urgency connected to preserving civil rights heritage, and its fraught nature in the ongoing culture wars, is exemplified by vitriolic debates over The 1619 Project and the runaway success and influence of the Equal Justice Initiative's memorial, museum, and other heritage activities in Montgomery, Alabama.2 Civil rights heritage pushes preservationists, as professionals and leaders of our own cultural movement, to pursue preservation and conservation as a public good in its own right—sustaining public memory—and also to assert that access to one's heritage (one's culture) is indeed a civil right in itself. The work of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund exemplifies what is at stake in advocating for civil rights heritage as places and stories of national and international significance. The Action Fund is a signature program of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which has long held a central place in the US historic preservation field, advocating for preservation as a means of saving communities as well as protecting [End Page 261] landmarks. The most recent challenges facing historic preservation in this country relate directly to civil rights and the efforts of African Americans to realize the rights owed to them. This is principally a challenge of facing up to telling the full story of US civil rights but also a matter of marshaling the financial, political resources to change the conversation about whose heritage matters in public discourse and the public realm. This generates the mission of Action Fund partner at Penn—the Center for the Preservation of Civil Rights Sites—and, we submit, is fundamentally the same goal pursued by those creators and advocates of the World Heritage framework. We would like to present several examples from recent work on preservation of civil sites here in the United States to highlight both the progress and the remaining challenges. The campus of the University of Virginia is a World Heritage Site, the vision of the founding father Thomas Jefferson. We all remember the tragic events that happened in Charlottesville in 2017, when white nationalists wearing khaki pants and polo shirts, holding tiki torches, rallied around a monument on an historic landscape imbued with Black humaneness and resilience. These Americans advocated for creating a new form of Jim Crow in the United States. We (most Americans) thought that this was a violation of our cultural values that did not reflect...

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• Introduction

  The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography · 2021

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Computer Science
  • Sociology

  Introduction Elizabeth Milroy (bio) and Randall F. Mason (bio) The essays in this issue, large and small, are all over the map—purposefully. Our intention in editing this volume of PMHB is to provoke fellow researchers and readers to look anew at and think deeply about the built environments all around us. Acts of building shape our everyday lives (collectively and individually) by creating location and a sense of place. The histories of these structures and places guide the creation of new environments, both inspiring and tempering contemporary building practice. By "built environment," we mean to invoke a broad set of places, professional fields, and ways of making, designing, thinking, and describing. We are not much concerned with covering the geography of Pennsylvania; rather, we emphasize a range of built environment histories, issues, subjects, and approaches. Individually, these pieces interrogate the uses, designs, and meanings of legacy environments. We also see each essay—and the group as a whole—as an invitation to find connections between environment-making in one place and period and the impulses still afield today in practices of design, preservation, and public history. We cast a wide net when drafting the call for papers for this issue to encourage authors to think creatively about how their work might resonate with the theme. The breadth of responses enabled us to bring together a lively variety of research articles and smaller "Hidden Gems," ranging from the commentaries of eighteenth-century Quaker diarists on the legacy of William Penn's agrarian capitalist landscapes to the history of public bath facilities in Philadelphia to the vexatious driving habits of Fiske and Marie Kimball. Readers have an opportunity to stroll through Germantown founder Francis Pastorius's garden, then delve into the meaning of Frank Furness's work for the great Philadelphia Modernist Louis Kahn. Each essay is a richly researched, carefully made, and deeply meaningful window onto the histories of thinking about and making the built environments that are Pennsylvania's legacy. Acknowledging the variety of subjects and approaches, we also sense some important linking themes. [End Page 188] First, rather than focusing on one structure or site, all of the authors take a contextual approach by interrogating the social and political milieux alongside the design conditions governing placemaking. A second theme involves the history of efforts to create as well as to critique peaceful and therapeutic places of refuge and improvement. A third concerns the tension between "official" and "vernacular" styles or ideologies. Relatedly, a fourth theme traces how the efforts of individual citizens—diarists, designers, administrators, and philanthropists—have informed the conception, construction, and use of public and private structures and spaces and how these efforts can both comply with and resist broader structures of sociopolitical and economic power. William Penn famously referred to the colony of Pennsylvania as "a holy experiment," envisioning the creation of an agrarian capitalist paradise built by the enterprising yeoman class. Jay Miller proposes that by projecting an idealized "official" vision of the colony in his promotional pamphlets, Penn fostered "a false set of expectations for what life in the new colony would be like, contributing to the acrimony that soon emerged between the proprietor and his putative subjects." It remained for Quaker authors of journals published in the 1770s, though they subscribed to Penn's reformist idealism, to confront the reality of the exploitative "vernacular" landscape created by settler colonialism. They produced a record of that landscape "attuned to precisely what Penn overlooked"—the actual shape of the agrarian capitalist economy created by colonists and the lives of the people it marginalized. In order to restore the imagined Arcadian past Penn had projected in his promotional works, these Quaker reformers recognized that direct action would be needed to alleviate the suffering of indentured servants and tenant farmers, enslaved Africans, and displaced Indigenous peoples. By the end of the nineteenth century, like their counterparts in other American cities, elite White Philadelphians led efforts to promote sanitary reform within the slum districts of Philadelphia. In her essay, Sarah Lerner describes how the Public Baths Association (PBA) used the construction of public bathhouses in targeted neighborhoods during the first quarter of the twentieth century both to...

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• Rethinking the Roots of the Historic Preservation Movement

  2019-10-21 · 2 citations

  book-chapterSenior author

  This part introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters. The part argues that urban planner and even real estate developer were often just other names for preservationist, especially in the early twentieth century. If preservationists could recognize the social reform roots of their movement, they would be more apt to see their project not as simply saving individual structures but as shaping healthier urban and rural environments. Preservation could become an anchor of approaches to regulating the urban environment against sprawl and other destructive developments. The burgeoning literature on the social construction of the past has helped to reinvigorate urban and social history by showing the centrality of battles over the past in contemporary social and political debates.

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• Historic Preservation, Public Memory, and the Making of Modern New York City 1

  2019-10-21 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter debunks some commonly held myths about New York City’s role in the development of historic preservation in the US—namely, that the demolition of Penn Station in 1963 was the birth of historic preservation in New York and the US and that historic preservation is necessarily pitted against change as an antidevelopment movement. Instead, a brief history of New York’s nascent preservation movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is outlined, including the creation of the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society within the context of a broad moment of urban reform. Broad types of preservation ideology are outlined—curatorial and urbanistic approaches—and illustrated with detailed case studies of some notable preservation efforts in the early twentieth century, principally St. John’s Chapel and City Hall Park.

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• Marked, Unmarked, Remembered: A Geography of American Memory

  Journal of American History · 2019-01-16 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Histories of trauma and efforts to reconstruct their geography have become an important topic across a range of fields (from history and anthropology to design and preservation). Marked, Unmarked, Remembered extends this work of documenting commemorative landscapes. Produced by the fraternal team of Andrew Lichtenstein and Alex Lichtenstein, with several historians providing short essays, the form is a substantial part of the book's point: combining photography, captions, and short essays, it is less a work of research than a work of interpretation (“a photography book supplemented with text, not a book of scholarship illustrated with photographs” [pp. 6–7]). Marked, Unmarked, Remembered follows the path blazed by other important works: on commemorating landscapes of violence (Kenneth Foote, Shadowed Ground, 1997; Erika Doss, Memorial Mania, 2010); marrying text and image to convey the experience of landscape (John Berger and Jean Mohr, A Fortunate Man, 1967); and Joel Sternfeld's masterpiece achieving both (On This Site, 1996). Such books also bring to mind the long tradition of National Geographic and other photojournalism-driven magazines.

  PublisherDOI

• Values in Heritage Management: Emerging Approaches and Research Directions

  Getty Publications eBooks · 2019-01-01 · 2 citations

  book

  Over the last fifty years, conservation professionals have confronted increasingly complex political, economic, and cultural dynamics. This volume, with contributions by leading international practitioners and scholars, reviews how values-based methods have come to influence conservation, takes stock of emerging approaches to values in heritage practice and policy, identifies common challenges and related spheres of knowledge, and proposes specific areas in which the development of new approaches and future research may help advance the field.

  Publisher

• Review: Things Fall Apart exhibition and walking tour, Chemical Heritage Foundation, Philadelphia, PA

  The Public Historian · 2018-02-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Book Review| February 01 2018 Review: Things Fall Apart exhibition and walking tour, Chemical Heritage Foundation, Philadelphia, PA Things Fall Apart exhibition and walking tour. Chemical Heritage Foundation, Philadelphia, PA. Elisabeth Berry Drago, Curator. June 17, 2017–April 7, 2018. https://www.chemheritage.org/things-fall-apart; https://www.detour.com/philadelphia/things-fall-apart-the-walking-tour. Randall Mason Randall Mason University of Pennsylvania Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar The Public Historian (2018) 40 (1): 136–140. https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2018.40.1.136 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Randall Mason; Review: Things Fall Apart exhibition and walking tour, Chemical Heritage Foundation, Philadelphia, PA. The Public Historian 1 February 2018; 40 (1): 136–140. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2018.40.1.136 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentThe Public Historian Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2018 by The Regents of the University of California and the National Council on Public History2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

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Frequent coauthors

• Max Page

  4 shared

• Richard Leach

  Michigan State University

  2 shared

• Peter B. Jones

  University of Oxford

  1 shared

• A Padwell

  Maudsley Hospital

  1 shared

• Ghada Ismail

  Mansoura University

  1 shared

• Abbeygail Jones

  South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust

  1 shared

• James Gardner

  1 shared

• J.V. Psaila

  1 shared

Labs

• Center for the Preservation of Civil Rights SitesPI

Awards & honors

• 2012-2013 National Endowment for the Arts Rome Prize