Historic Landscapes Aren't Museum Pieces

Historic Landscapes Aren't Museum Pieces

Historic landscapes carry a heavy burden. They're expected to preserve cultural memory, support public use, protect natural systems, and absorb the realities of maintenance — all while conveying meaning to people who are visiting for the first (and likely only) time. That's a lot to ask of a landscape. And a lot to ask of the landscape architects entrusted with their preservation.

Often, when people think of preservation, they think of freezing a place in time. But a landscape isn't an artifact in a museum vitrine. It's a living system and an active public space. It needs more than protection. It needs stewardship, interpretation, and care. Sometimes it also needs design intervention — not to erase its history, but to protect it, make it legible, and keep it accessible.

But before you can do any of that, you have to determine what kind of preservation you're actually doing.

The Four Approaches to Landscape Preservation

The National Park Service identifies four approaches to preserving historic landscapes.

Preservation maintains the existing form, materials, features, and character of a landscape as it has evolved. It's the most conservative approach, appropriate when a landscape's distinctive features remain largely intact.

Rehabilitation protects those defining features but allows additions and alterations where the historic fabric has been damaged or little integrity remains. It can be dramatic. As an example, the NPS points to Philly’s Franklin Court, where ghosted steel frames stand in for buildings that no longer exist.

Restoration returns a landscape to its appearance during a specific period, removing later additions and reconstructing missing features if evidence is available, like historic drawings, paintings, and written descriptions.

Reconstruction is even more extreme, re-creating a vanished landscape from documentation. It's the most interpretive and evidence-dependent treatment of all.

Once you determine the most appropriate approach, you have to then determine what actually contributes to the landscape's historic fabric. Here again, the NPS helps, naming two kinds of elements: organizational elements—edges, clusters, land use, etc—and character-defining features like structures, materials, vegetation, and topography. Preservation is the work of understanding how these elements relate, so you can preserve the site's meaning — its story.

The Landscape Is the Story

Buildings tend to get the preservation spotlight. They're well-documented and relatively easy to interpret, with materials that can be sourced and dated.

Landscapes are harder. They shift with weather, use, ecology, and, too often, neglect. Their meaning lives less in built form than in natural growth, movement, views, pathways, and the relationships between those things. That makes historical landscapes incredibly rich, but also incredibly complex. Battlefields are an obvious local example.

We were on the team that prepared the master plan for Washington Crossing Historic Park. There, the landscape isn’t background to history, it is history. It—weather, topography, and ecology—are central to the story of Washington leading troops across the Delaware on Christmas night in 1776, beginning the 10 Crucial Days that changed the tide of the revolution. The story isn't just told at the site of the crossing, it unfolds across nearly 500 acres and 57 cultural resources—McConkey's Ferry Inn, the Thompson-Neely farmstead that served as a wartime hospital, the Soldiers' Graves, Bowman's Hill Tower—stitched together by the Delaware and its canal towpath.

Good Preservation Makes Places Usable

Washington Cross Master Plan

Our goal with the Washington Crossing master plan wasn't to restore the site to the way it looked on a winter night 250 years ago. That history is critical, of course, but the landscape’s relevance depends on ensuring the site continues to convey its history to the people who visit today—accessibly, understandably, sustainably.

“People” being the keyword here. The plan was built on public engagement, with more than 700 stakeholders: park users, officials, local businesses, neighbors, historic organizations, ordinary citizens. This input helped us respond to a real operational problem. After the 2009 budget cuts, staff had dropped significantly, and a plan written for the Bicentennial no longer matched how people used the park.

The Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission needed a sustainable future, so the 15-year master plan had to address land management, building use, interpretive mission, partnerships, and long-term care. Less romantic that a midnight crossing, but essential to keeping that story alive. That’s what landscape preservation is about.

Not Just Preserving the Past—Designing for the Present

It helps the place do the work, be it commemorative, educational, ecological, civic, recreational — or as often happens, all those things at once.

Historic landscapes don't only belong to the past. They belong to us, today—and we're responsible for protecting them for tomorrow, against everything from budget cuts to environmental disasters. A historic landscape doesn't survive because someone draws a boundary around it. There are no vitrines here. It survives because the systems around it keep functioning—financially, ecologically, interpretively, physically—so the landscape continues to commemorate, educate, and sustain a natural ecosystem. The work is careful and usually subtle. But it changes how a place can be understood.

And, at its best, it changes how we can be understood.