Dana Moody, a University of Tennessee at Chattanooga historic preservation professor, sits down at her slightly chaotic desk in her office. It’s a Wednesday around 10 o'clock when she remembers there's a student with an inquiry on one of her old passions, historic preservation. She jumps onto the zoom call where she is met with an eager student ready to shoot questions at her. Moody explains her previous experiences in historic preservation, traveling the country and seeing how other cities conduct their preservation. She says with an almost sad face, “Chattanooga is not good with historic preservation. Chattanooga is good at economic development and revitalization, but Chattanooga will tear a building down if it's more economically feasible to them.” This brings into perspective how important this should be to us.
Historic preservation is the process of preserving and rehabilitating old buildings. You may think most older buildings don’t even have historical significance, but you think wrong. Moody, with her long and rough cut platinum blonde hair, passionately describes her favorite era of architecture: “Victorian, and what I love about Victorians is they were a very complex society,” she says. “They wanted a specific object for everything they did. And so when you walk into the front of the building, you have a foyer, and there's always some hard chairs. If you were left to sit in the foyer, you weren’t gonna be there long. In those areas are things we don’t think about today." In Moody’s last sentence, she sums it up perfectly. Without historic preservation, we wouldn’t know half of the things that we know now about, like those very complex societies. From those societies we learn a very important story, our story. Whether that be just the history of a place or the culture emitting from it, whenever old buildings get torn down to just create brand new ones, that culture and history is permanently gone.
Surrounded by her teal office walls, Moody waves her hands around to describe how complex she realized preservation really is. “It was more than furniture; it was textiles, glass, silver, pottery, so many things I had no clue about. And you just start learning about all these things you didn’t know, but every bit of it I was passionate about.” All of those things help paint the picture of our past, which again, is why just getting rid of them because they are “unimportant” takes away parts from our whole story that makes it harder for us to understand ourselves and where we come from.
Not only is tearing down buildings that are abundant with our culture and history detrimental to how we function as a society today, but it is maybe even more destructive to the environment. Washington State Department of Archaeology and Historic Preservation published an Executive Summary in 2011 that claims, “In the United States, 43% of carbon emissions and 39% of total energy use is attributed to the construction and operation of buildings… Demolishing and rebuilding takes vast amounts of energy and materials, both of which are increasingly in short supply” ("Sustainability and Historic" 2). Carbon emissions refer to the greenhouse gasses which are mostly carbon dioxide. This is important to know because these greenhouse gasses float up into the atmosphere and create a blanket that absorbs and traps the sun's heat, which leads to climate change ("Causes and Effects"). Historic preservation plays an important role in helping our environment from these harmful gasses. By reusing or rehabilitating old buildings instead of building new ones, we start to think more sustainably.
Moody saw examples of sustainable restoration on a trip to Cuba, where she saw not only their beautiful historic buildings but also how they are using what little resources they have to be more environmentally conscious. Moody flips her hair as she almost jumps out of her seat to exclaim, “They were working on the capital at the time, and they had to replace some of the granite ceilings. They couldn’t get new granite, so what were they gonna do? They [took] the original granite, ground it down into a powder, recast it and put it back up, and it looked the same. They’re just creative, very sustainable. They even have a class where they bring around 200 students to teach them the old school methods of preservation."
In the United States, a lot of newer buildings that are being built are using bigger windows to take advantage of the natural sunlight, which seems like a paradox because “many historic buildings were designed with passive systems before the invention of electric lighting and powered heating and cooling. As a result, these buildings were designed to take advantage of natural daylight, ventilation and solar orientation - the very characteristics that are being used as 'sustainable' design attributes today” ("Sustainability and Historic"). We are trying to be more “energy efficient” by building houses with big windows when there are older homes and buildings that have the exact same thing. “According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency, it takes about 65 years for an energy-efficient new building to save the amount of energy lost in demolishing an existing building. Re-using an existing building also means fewer construction materials in landfills. Reuse is more sustainable than new construction”("Is Preserving").
Let's bring all of this back to Chattanooga. Why don’t we care enough? Why don’t we want to put in the work to protect our fragile history and unique cultures? Why aren’t we willing to get uncomfortable for our environment, for our future? “Not in Chattanooga," Moody admits. "In a city like Franklin, Franklin has huge preservation. Even Knoxville has got a stronger preservation than Chattanooga does. We feel, honestly, if we save or impact one or two buildings at a time, we’re winning in Chattanooga." Moody is working to fix this problem by sharing her experience and teaching the newer generations how to perform this historic preservation and also why it is so important for us and our future.
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