Preservation Lecture Series: Gregory Dreicer

Wood, Iron, and History: How Stories Shape the Character, Uses, and Lives of Materials and Structures

What do the evolutionary metaphors and nationalistic passions that rule history reveal about the design of our environments? How do grand narratives determine what we celebrate and who we forget? In this presentation, Gregory Dreicer explores how builders reinvented construction during the 19th century, creating the strategies of mass construction essential to industrialization and nation building … and why most of us don’t know about this transformative moment. Inspired by bridges called “American,” technologists developed the long-span beam, truss, and high-rise frame. Asking a simple question—“What is a wooden bridge?”—and developing an evidence-based response can challenge predominant tales and change the story we tell about our pasts and futures.

After the presentation, Amy Slaton will respond and lead the discussion and Q&A.

Gregory Dreicer engages people in exploring cultural issues with innovative museum experiences and historical scholarship. Dreicer conceived pathbreaking projects including Between Fences, Transformed by Light: The New York Night, Chicago Model City, and Unbelievable at institutions including Museum of the City of New York, Chicago Architecture Center, and Museum of Vancouver. Dreicer, a graduate of Columbia’s preservation program, was a Loeb Fellow at the Harvard GSD and a fellow at the Smithsonian’s Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation and New York Public Library’s Center for Scholars and Writers. His latest publication is American Bridge: Reinventing Building, Making History (MIT).

Amy E. Slaton is Professor Emerita of History at Drexel University and holds a PhD in the History and Sociology of Science from the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of books on the material, political, and aesthetic history of building and on historical ideas of human difference across scientific and technological education and labor. She is the editor of New Materials: Towards a History of Consistency (Lever Press) and author of the forthcoming All Good People: Diversity, Difference and the Invention of Opportunity (MIT).

Image caption: Bridge at Horseshoe Falls, Portage, New York (Silas Seymour, built 1851-1852). Library of Congress.