{"id":408232,"date":"2019-11-20T10:59:09","date_gmt":"2019-11-20T15:59:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/?p=408232"},"modified":"2020-02-04T12:02:10","modified_gmt":"2020-02-04T17:02:10","slug":"unesco-world-heritage-sites-art-historian-peter-christensen-408232","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/unesco-world-heritage-sites-art-historian-peter-christensen-408232\/","title":{"rendered":"Rochester historian takes a role in preserving world cultural heritage"},"content":{"rendered":"

What do the Great Barrier Reef, the mountain railways of India, and the historic center of Krak\u00f3w, Poland, have in common? They\u2019ve all been deemed World Heritage sites by UNESCO<\/a>, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. More than 1,000 locations around the globe\u2014alphabetically speaking, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe\u2014have been so named since the UNESCO\u2019s 1972 Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage. The designation serves to encourage the sites\u2019 preservation as places \u201cof outstanding value to humanity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now Peter Christensen, an associate professor of art history at the Ä¢¹½´«Ã½<\/a>, has a role in the selection process. He\u2019s a newly minted juror for the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS),<\/a> one of the three non-governmental or intergovernmental organizations that advise UNESCO in its deliberations. Trained as an architect and a scholar, Christensen worked as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art before earning a PhD in the history and theory of architecture at Harvard.<\/p>\n

Here, he discusses his new responsibilities and changing ideas about cultural heritage.<\/p>\n

\n
\"\"
Peter Christensen, an associate professor of art history.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

What do ICOMOS jurors do?<\/strong><\/h3>\n

I just got notice of this responsibility a few weeks ago. I\u2019ve received files to review and write a report on. I can\u2019t describe specifically what I am reviewing, but I can say that the content is fascinating. What one sees in the review process is nominations that come from governments and the ways in which different countries frame and present their own ideas of what cultural heritage means. It is very much a lesson in national self-representation.<\/p>\n

What happens when a place is named a UNESCO World Heritage site?<\/strong><\/h3>\n

UNESCO provides a certain amount of financing to maintain the site\u2014that\u2019s the biggest tangible thing. And it\u2019s an honor. The designation of World Heritage sites is a competitive system, and I think that the intangible value is what\u2019s most important. It\u2019s a way of conferring a kind of international status on sites, and it brings a pressure on nations to be good custodians, especially in the face of crises, such as wars.<\/p>\n

How does your work as a juror connect with your research and teaching?<\/strong><\/h3>\n

I wrote my first book on the Ottoman railway network<\/a>. There are buildings associated with it, but it\u2019s not a single site\u2014it\u2019s a network of sites, and it\u2019s a form of infrastructure. More and more, bridges, roads, tunnels, and other things of that nature are becoming a focus of preservation.<\/p>\n

In my research, I use architectural biometrics, including 3D-scanning with facial-recognition software, to map structures. Increasingly, 3D-scanning is understood as the future of heritage. Photographs are great, but they don\u2019t give you precise data. In October, Shuri Castle\u2014a 500-year-old wooden structure that is a UNESCO World Heritage site in Okinawa, Japan\u2014burned in a fire. A 3D point cloud file of the building would make restoration a lot easier, as it will be for Notre Dame, thanks to documentary scanning that was done before its fire last spring.<\/p>\n

What factors might be considered by when a piece of infrastructure is selected as something to protect?<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Artistry, beauty\u2014those kinds of elusive terms that we try to define as art historians are of course still very important, but I think there\u2019s also the social and political importance. One wonderful UNESCO heritage site is the Ottoman Bridge in the city of Mostar, in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It\u2019s a very artful bridge, but it\u2019s also a bridge that allowed two very different regions of the Ottoman Empire to connect. It was a monument that came under attack in the 1990s, during the Bosnian War. It has both artistic merit and a social and political role.<\/p>\n

Are there other ways that ideas of cultural heritage are changing?<\/strong><\/h3>\n

One of the most interesting ways, for a lot of art historians, is the increasing reckoning with works created in the 20th century. Even 40 years ago, very little work that was done in the 20th century would have been considered important enough to be seen as part of the world\u2019s cultural heritage. But history marches on, and now we realize that structures from as recently as the 1970s and \u201980s are important works and need attention, too. World Heritage status doesn\u2019t exist in an ancient or medieval or Renaissance bubble\u2014this is very much about coming up to the recent past.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Peter Christensen, an associate professor of art and art history at the URochester, has a new role as a juror advising the United Nations in its work designating UNESCO World Heritage sites. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":752,"featured_media":408402,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[456],"tags":[20522,37112,29502,9576,27772,16072],"class_list":["post-408232","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-society-culture","tag-department-of-art-and-art-history","tag-faculty","tag-featured-post-side","tag-humanities","tag-peter-christensen","tag-school-of-arts-and-sciences"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nRochester historian takes a role in preserving world cultural heritage<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Peter Christensen, an associate professor of art and art history, has a new role as a juror advising 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