Save As: NextGen Heritage Conservation

Alumna Isabel Thornton grew up in the Rust Belt town of Roanoke, Virginia. After graduating from USC, she eventually returned home and took note of the city’s beautiful Victorian homes, many vacant and in a state of disrepair. Linking her experience in affordable housing with her passion for historic places inspired her to establish a nonprofit called Restoration Housing. In this episode of Save A...

Alumna Sara Delgadillo grew up in Pacoima, a blue-collar neighborhood in L.A.’s San Fernando Valley. Sara joined us in Season One to discuss how growing up in Pacoima influenced her life, studies, and career in heritage conservation. She also shared some of the enclave’s rich history, including some of the longtime small businesses that serve as centers of community and cultural continuity. One of...

After the Watts Rebellion of 1965, Black architects Art Silvers and Robert Kennard designed a Late Modern building for the Mafundi Institute, a cultural organization. The Watts Happening Cultural Center opened in 1970 as a place of creative expression, community, and healing. The popular Watts Coffee House has called the building home for decades. Now commonly called the Mafundi Building, this nei...

From 1930s census cards to virtual reality, the Bunker Hill Refrain project just keeps getting cooler. This multi-year effort is using data to reimagine downtown L.A.'s Bunker Hill—a historic, vibrant neighborhood razed in the urban renewal/removal of the 1950s. Dr. Meredith Drake Reitan offers an update on the project, which is digitally rebuilding the neighborhood block by block. Hear the l...

Save As is taking a wee little break this fall.  BUT we will bring you some exciting updates on previous episodes.  We will be back in 2024 better than ever and with new and interesting episodes.  Stay tuned and take this time to catch up on previous episodes from Seasons 1, 2 and 3! Connect with us on Instagram , Facebook , and LinkedIn !

A group of architecture students at the University of Southern California wants to do more than just design buildings. They want to work with communities to “un-design'' spatial injustice and leverage the power of residents in shaping their neighborhoods. In this episode, producer Willa Seidenberg talks with students Reily Gibson and Kianna Armstrong about L.A.'s Sugar Hill, a very...

When Emily Varley arrived in Beaufort, SC for a summer internship, she had no idea she’d make a discovery that would change the course of her studies at USC. Her research for the Reconstruction Era National Historical Park led her to a boarded-up Freedman’s cottage associated with both Daniel Simmons, a Black soldier for the Union in the Civil War, and Edith Stokes, a Black woman who lived there f...

Allensworth is a tiny town with a big history—and its residents are grappling with some very big issues. The only town in California founded and governed by African Americans, the Central Valley farming community was free of oppression and full of opportunity. It also faced more than its share of obstacles. Residents have been fighting to save it for decades, from working to restore the long-negle...

One of the many great things about Los Angeles is its unrivaled legacy of modern residential architecture. Students in Peyton Hall's Materials Conservation class did their case study on the John J. Buck House (1934-35) by R. M. Schindler, one of the legendary architects who defined Southern California modernism. Co-host Cindy Olnick tagged along on a site visit and talked with Peyton, student...

In case you missed it, we're re-releasing this episode from Season 1. The decade-long civil war in Syria has decimated the country’s infrastructure, killed more than 400,000 Syrians, and created the world’s largest displaced population of around 13 million. Heritage sites play a big role in war as targets of destruction and are typically an early focus of rebuilding efforts. With an optimisti...

Small businesses provide much more than goods and services. Over time, they become neighborhood anchors and a key source of culture and community—especially for new Americans. Heritage conservationists are increasingly turning to legacy business programs as economic development strategies to combat rising rents, gentrification, and the erosion of community character, particularly in ethnic and imm...

What happens when a community takes its educational future into its own hands? Funded by local advocates and a generous grant from the Rosenwald Fund, the Allen-White School served the African American community in Whiteville, Tennessee from 1920 until 1974. With thousands of graduates, the school helped shape the lives of multiple generations. Now, despite a 2012 arson attack, the alumni are work...

Warning : This episode features the difficult topic of sexual slavery during World War II. Producer Willa Seidenberg talks with recent graduate Hanyu Chen about her thesis, Our Bodies, Their Battlegrounds: The Conservation of Comfort Stations in China. Before and during World War II, the Japanese Imperial Army forced women and girls into sexual slavery for the military in its occupied territories....

In case you missed it, we're re-releasing an episode from our first season, chosen by our Save As intern, Emily Kwok. It's an Emily's Pick! Have you ever considered sound a character-defining feature? Musician and alum Kasey Viso Conley certainly has. She knows why Nat King Cole, Janis Joplin, Van Halen, and countless other recording artists insisted on using specific studios to get...

In case you missed it, we're re-releasing an episode from last season, chosen by our Save As intern, Emily Kwok. It's an Emily's Pick!   Should the Brady Bunch House be in the National Register of Historic Places? Why not? asks alum Jonathan Kaplan. In his master’s thesis, the TV writer-turned-heritage conservationist makes a case for designating sites specifically for their use in...

How can taking a building apart possibly relate to heritage conservation? Join us in the Upside Down for a chat with architect and alum Guadalupe Flores about his thesis, Deconstruction: A Tool for Sustainable Conservation . When a building can't be saved, reusing the materials makes perfect sense. The concept of deconstruction certainly isn't new. But how do we make the case for it in a...

Chinese American architect Gin D. Wong, FAIA (1922-2017) defined what it means to achieve the American dream. He immigrated from China as a boy and went on to have a 60-year career as a successful architect in Los Angeles. He played a key role in the design of post-World War II L.A., with projects including LAX, CBS Television City, and the iconic Union 76 gas station in Beverly Hills. In this epi...

This episode delves into global heritage conservation, as producer Willa Seidenberg talks with recent grad Haowen Yu about his thesis, Examining Feng Shui as Tangible and Intangible Cultural Heritage . Many Americans consider Feng Shui primarily an approach to arranging space. Yet it’s a far more complex system of knowledge, practice, and tradition that has spanned more than a millennium. Feng Shu...

We said “so long” to summer with a trip to the Santa Monica beach with historian Alison Rose Jefferson, whose work at USC launched a deep dive into African American recreation areas in the Golden State. Her master’s thesis on Lake Elsinore led to her widely acclaimed book, Living the California Dream: African American Leisure Sites in the Jim Crow Era . Alison shares some of the struggles, success...

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When is a light fixture not just a light fixture? When it helps tell the story of a remarkable home designed, and lived in, by one of the twentieth century’s greatest architects. The 1951 Reunion House in L.A.’s Silver Lake neighborhood was designed on spec by Richard Neutra. It housed Neutra and his family as his home/studio down the street was rebuilt after a fire, and it served as the long-time...

Is Leimert Park the most significant neighborhood in Los Angeles? Katie Horak thinks it might be. “I don't think there's any neighborhood in the city that tells so many different important stories about our history as a city, and that really has the integrity to still tell that story,” she says in this episode of Save As. A USC alum, principal at Architectural Resources Group, and adjunc...

Last month, about ninety volunteers spent a weekend excavating the former hospital site at Manzanar, a World War II incarceration camp about 225 miles north of Los Angeles. Some of those volunteers were students in Mary Ringhoff’s Cultural Resource Management class. One of those students was Save As producer Willa Seidenberg, who interviewed people on site about why they travel from near and far t...

As a kid, Laura Dominguez would sit under the kitchen table during tamale season, listening to family stories as the grownups handed her corn husks to play with. Now she’s one of the people setting a new table for heritage conservation, with community as the centerpiece. In this episode, Laura shares the personal roots of her professional path, her doctoral research into the origins of conservatio...

You may know that Greater Los Angeles has the largest Armenian population outside of Armenia. But you might think it’s concentrated in the city of Glendale and Hollywood’s Little Armenia. Recent alum Erik Van Breene found pockets of Armenian Americans throughout the county while researching his thesis, Not So Little Armenia: Conserving Armenian Heritage Sites in Los Angeles . In this episode, Erik...