Step 1: Give an Anecdote:       During the late 1950s through the early 1980s Victorian houses in the San Francisco Bay Area were, unlike today, cheap to rent and often occupied by younger, progressive, counter-culture populations. While the Cockettes communed on Scott Street, Janis Joplin resided in an apartment on Ashbury Street just blocks away from the brightly painted purple house where the Grateful Dead spent the Summer of Love (and where the famous drug bust of 1967 took place), and across the bay in Oakland the Black Panthers established their headquarters in a Queen Anne Victorian. In fact, many of the endearing, now “kitsch” architectural qualities held in the popular imagination of the Bay Area are the result of appropriations of counter-cultural expressions of gay and drug culture during a period of social transformations of the 1950s through 1980s. As noted by Elizabeth Pomada and Michael Larsen in Painted Ladies: San Francisco’s Resplendent Victorians, “Drugs, media, and the counterculture have made this an age of color. A revulsion against the sterile, inhuman, intimidating monoliths spreading like architectural ooze over the downtown landscape helped foster the need for the enduring stability and character of the Victorians.”5 Ironically, today San Francisco’s Victorian houses are cornerstones of the city’s notoriously conservative preservation policies. What were once domestic symbols of social transformation and cultural influence on the national consciousness of human rights have been aesthetically molded into static representations of what was fundamentally a project in heterogeneity and individual expression.   Step 2: Broaden the Scope:San Francisco’s Queen Anne houses are just one example of how “preservation” policies can reduce culture to a stable, aesthetic image. In so doing, preservation can dilute the legacy - and capacity - for social transformation. If one of the intentions of preservation codes is “to preserve knowledge of the past through architecture”, then one could reasonably expect these codes to illuminate, even to promote, social transformation through changes in cultural and social awareness, generational expressions, individuality, and media. This all begs the question: what is being preserved by preservation policies, and for whom? Planning and preservation commissions routinely regulate architectural styles, forms, materials, uses, etc. under the banner of preservation. In nearly every instance, however, questions arise about what metrics are to be used in assessing the value of cultural heritage in architecture and urban spaces? In fact, the general lack of a theory of preservation among architects leaves a critical aspect of the built environment under the domain of bureaucracies intent on the idea that preservation is an act of stable retrospection.Step 3: Pose an Open-Ended Question:While the avant-garde in art, music, and architecture is typically ambivalent to the affinities of broader culture, could turning our attention to the banal peculiarities found in the everyday lead to alternative sources and understandings for both critiquing preservation and provoking alternative models of it that are both retrospective and projective? Noting that preservation codes generally concentrate on the facade, how might we develop a theory of preservation that is both critical & absurd, applicable & abstract, and dynamic & fleeting?Step 4: Narrow the Content:Each student is asked to interrogate, develop, and deploy terms and techniques of “preservation” by working locally from their respective locations, and by paying attention to facades, public spaces, and architectural elements around them that might not otherwise be seen as a source for architectural investigation, Students will co-create an encyclopedia of under-valued spaces, forms, histories, and places followed by design speculations characterized by the un-ordinary, manipulated, or perverted manifestations of things otherwise considered banal or normal as suggestions for alternative methods of preservation.

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