Nantucket Preservation Trust (NPT) is kicking off Nantucket’s Preservation Month with a new three-day symposium from June 6 to 8 called Nantucket’s Golden Age: Architecture – Interiors – Historic Landscapes.
The symposium will take place at various island venues and feature nationally recognized architectural critic and educator, Paul Goldberger, as the keynote speaker. His talk at 5 pm on Tuesday, June 6, in the Unitarian Meeting House on Orange Street is open to the public free of charge. Tickets to remaining symposium events are $595, available by calling Nantucket Preservation Trust at 508-228-1387 or at nantucketpreservationsymposium.org.
The program, made possible in part by the Community Foundation for Nantucket’s reMain Nantucket Fund, will focus on the island during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a time of extreme wealth due to Nantucket’s whale-oil industry. Today this rich past is reflected in the preserved town, its public buildings, residential interiors, historic sites and streetscapes that together provide an ideal classroom to rediscover this golden age. The symposium will be an educational tool, help to achieve national recognition for the island’s unique resources, and further the NPT’s mission to preserve Nantucket’s historic architectural heritage for present and future generations.
“I do not think there is a town center anywhere in America more beautiful than Nantucket and more powerful as a statement of the idea of community, the idea of buildings working together to make a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts…” commented Architect Critic Paul Goldberger. Participants will get behind-the-scenes tours of private homes, gardens and public spaces in the Main Street neighborhood and in ‘Sconset. Lectures by national and local architectural historians, preservationists, and museum curators will include: Paul Goldberger, a leading figure in architecture criticism and contributing editor at Vanity Fair; Peter Kenny, co-president of Classical American Homes Preservation Trust; Catherine Zipf, architectural historian at MIT and Roger Williams University; and Therese O’Malley, expert in American landscape history from the National Gallery of Art. Local speakers include Marty Hylton and Linda Stevenson, co-directors of the University of Florida Preservation Institute: Nantucket, Betsy Tyler, author and local historian, and the NHA’s Director of Properties Catherine Taylor and Curator Mike Harrison.
Home Page Photo courtesy of the Nantucket Preservation Trust.