The built environment is not supported and improved solely by architects and designers. It is a group effort involving many fields—economics, sociology, ecology, development, writing—and the Henry Hope Reed Award is unique in its recognition of this fact. In the words of the prize committee, it is given “to an individual working outside the practice of architecture who has supported the cultivation of the traditional city, its architecture and art through writing, planning or promotion.”
The 2008 recipient of the award exemplifies commitment to the built environment and its connection to this wide variety of disciplines. Roger Kennedy is an advocate, administrator, educator, author and scholar. For him, sustainability has not been a fashion promulgated by celebrity spokespeople or a vice-presidential documentary, but a 50-year cause.
Kennedy’s passion has focused not solely on building traditional communities, but on our broader responsibility to society and the earth. He has served as special assistant to several Presidential cabinet members and been director of the National Park Service and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Through written works and now in conjunction with the Center for the Environment at Harvard University, he has worked for the preservation of natural resources and taken this “stewardship beyond preservation and into education.”
There is a complex connection between the built environment, the natural environment and human society. The solutions required to solve such problems are often many-layered, requiring collaborative effort. The answer is not simply waiting for the next “techno-fix,” but first recognition of “the humbling truth that the earth remains bountiful only if its rules are followed.” Kennedy has supported the preservation of natural and built landmarks such as the Mesa Verde cliff dwellings in Colorado not out of nostalgia, but necessity. He spoke eloquently of this in remarks on the 100th anniversary of the Antiquities Act in 2006. These landmarks are an opportunity both to recognize the glorious successes of human development and to study the reasons for their downfall so that we might learn to recognize the effects of our own actions on the environment and to better care for our own society and resources in our own time. It is not often that so many disciplines are ably undertaken by one person; Roger Kennedy’s tireless commitment to them all toward understanding and improving our environment, both natural and artifact, has been a unique inspiration.
Samantha L. Salden
Photo Credit: Diana Walker
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