i CHARLESTON CONTRADICTIONS: A CASE STUDY OF ...

The curricula offered by these programs are telling in regard to what type of skills
preservationists are expected to have. Some of the courses include American architectural
history, preservation law, preservation economics, documentation of historic buildings,
historic preservation technology, and preservation planning studios, among others. These
courses largely mirror the curricula offered in similar disciplines, including architecture,
architectural history, engineering, and law. While many of these related disciplines
require a license or similar credentialing process in order to practice, historic preservation
has no such requirement as of this writing. One of the issues that has been raised is that
while historic preservationists take similar courses to these other disciplines, there is no
system in place (other than holding a degree) to ensure that they are, in fact, ready to
practice. To provide a comparison, according to the National Architectural Accreditation
Board, in 2010 there were 120 accredited schools of architecture in the United States
(NAAB, 2010). This means that the field of historic preservation has diverged so
dramatically from the field of architecture that it now has nearly half of the number of
academic programs. Since the field of historic preservation is closely tied to related
disciplines, especially architecture, the question of exactly why it is a separate discipline
is a legitimate one.
One of the answers to this question can be found in the history of architectural
practice, beginning in the early twentieth century. The first school of architecture in the
United States was founded at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology shortly after the
Civil War (Davis 1999, 123). Before schools of architecture were commonplace in the
United States, architects either were trained as apprentices with practicing architects or
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