Main Content
Date of lecture: February 21, 2024
Abstract
The goals of historic preservation are often at odds with efforts to protect properties from climate change. While preservation encourages maintaining a property’s historic appearance, climate change adaptation often requires change, sometimes radical change, to maintain the safety of a building and its occupants.
As the impacts of flooding and intense storms are increasing in prevalence, property owners and communities are trying to balance their desire to increase resiliency in their communities, while maintaining their historic character and sense of place. Property owners seek options to improve resilience in response to parcel vulnerability. At a community level, municipalities are developing policies, programs, and requirements to address vulnerability on a larger scale, often without considering the impacts on historic resources. To specifically address the impacts of severe storms on the state’s historic resources, Florida’s Division of Historical Resources, the SHPO, sought to prepare three guidance documents to address the impacts of severe storms.
Going beyond a regulatory review, the guidance relied heavily on information gained through site visits in in-person interviews with eighteen small to mid-sized communities across the state. The site visits provided a first-hand opportunity to document prior storm damage, recovery efforts, and vulnerability as well as the implementation of community-wide and property specific resiliency measures. The information gained during the site visits was compiled to serve as a reference for similar communities. The resulting guidance documents provide a wholistic approach for three separate audiences: property owners, municipalities, and state agencies. They described flood and wind mitigation vulnerability and resiliency measures for historic buildings and archaeological sites, and include an analysis of severe storms on tourism, a key state industry.
The presentation will review the challenges of addressing flood and wind vulnerability across a wide geographic area. It will include a breakdown of the roles, responsibilities, and regulatory requirements of the owner, federal, state, and local governments when addressing mitigation of historic properties.
BIO
Dominique M. Hawkins,
FAIA, NCARB, LEED AP
Managing Principal, Preservation Design Partnership
In 1995, Dominique established PDP as a planning and design practice focusing exclusively on offering high-quality professional services for clients with nationally significant historic sites and buildings. Her work is at the forefront of addressing change at historic buildings and settings whether through design, the regulatory process, or the impacts of climate change and flooding at historic properties. From small projects to multi-million-dollar undertakings, Dominique’s work has maintained the highest standards of planning, design, and preservation, resulting in long-lasting relationships, some of which span over a decade of continuous involvement and service. Her work has been recognized with several awards.