Which one of 20 annual projects for the UO's Pacific Northwest Preservation Field School has made the school's founder most proud?

“That's a Sophie's Choice question,” says Don Peting, an associate professor emeritus of architecture and founding director of the field school. “It's like your children—you can't isolate and favor any one.”

It’s also impossible to isolate the legacy that Peting alone has had on preservation nationwide. In addition to his work with the Pacific Northwest Preservation Field School—which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year—Peting has served as an architecture professor at UO, had a private practice while teaching, was awarded the prestigious Rome Prize, serves on the State Advisory Committee for Historic Preservation and continues work as a consultant on preservation projects.

His accomplishments are why Peting is being honored in 2014 with the 6th Annual George McMath Historic Preservation Award. The award is presented each year to a person whose contributions have raised awareness and advocacy for historic preservation in Oregon.

Congratulate Don Peting on his award.

Tickets for the award ceremony, May 14 in Portland, are available online through April 30.

The Pacific Northwest Preservation Field School is just part of the legacy mentioned when Peting’s name comes up in the preservation community. A scholar of historic structures and building technology, Peting has studied and consulted on sites as nearby as UO’s Deady Hall and as far away as stone buildings in Oira, Italy. His influence can also be seen in the achievements of graduates of Oregon’s Historic Preservation Program, who have gained listings for - and helped preserve - hundreds of sites on the National Register, some as National Historic Landmarks, the highest level of preservation possible.

Other Peting graduates are craftsmen and maintenance staff employed by state and national parks, performing the hands-on work needed to physically restore or reconstruct buildings and structures that otherwise would succumb to demolition by neglect. Others serve in jobs as historical landscape architects, architectural preservation planners, Section 106 coordinators, preservation architects, and more. Still others have gone on to become professors themselves, extending Peting’s reach to new generations of preservation professionals.

“More than any educator in Oregon’s history, Don Peting has embedded in his students a caring for and appreciation of Oregon’s historic resources—whether buildings, landscapes, or archeological sites,” says Robert Melnick, former dean of A&AA, professor emeritus of landscape architecture at UO and former senior program officer at the Getty Foundation.

“Beginning in 1963, when he first joined the faculty in the UO Department of Architecture, Don understood the value of historic preservation in contemporary society,” Melnick says. “As a registered architect, and winner of the Rome Prize, Don set forth to teach his students both the philosophical and technical skills necessary to be advocates and practitioners of historic preservation.”

Peting’s teaching career initially focused on structures and design studio, back in the era when beginning structures courses in the Department of Architecture extended over three terms rather than the one term students now undergo. If that wasn’t enough, he also taught a landscape architecture class.

“I taught eight classes a year,” he says, something no A&AA professor does anymore. Structures “was with the same students for a year—static strength of materials, then steel and wood, all through the one year. I (also) taught studio all three terms.”

After teaching for three years, Peting took a leave of absence, during which he worked full time for an architecture firm in Seattle. “I wanted to get my license and I needed some more training in an architect's office because I had come right from graduate school to here. I was amazed (the UO) even hired me” without experience in a firm, he says.

Back at UO as a licensed architect, he taught for several more years before forming an architectural practice with Bill Gilland, former A&AA dean, which was involved with the restoration of Heceta Lightkeepers' House, north of Florence, Oregon. Gilland and Peting Architects operated from 1979-1990.

On a second sabbatical, Peting continued research from his first sabbatical that eventually led to his receiving the Rome Prize in 1977-78 for his groundbreaking research on water mills. His expertise in water mills served students well when, in 2004, Field School took place at Thompson’s Mills in Shedd, Oregon. After student efforts helped stabilize and restore the structure, it became a State Heritage Site.

Peting and fellow professor Mike Shellenbarger spearheaded talks that eventually led to establishing the UO's Graduate Program in Historic Preservation.

“That conversation started in 1979,” Peting says. “The person who really gave the impetus on this was Marian Donnelly; she came back from a conference and said ‘They've got this historic preservation program at Columbia University and we need to start one here.’

“We didn't see it as an experiment,” Peting says of Oregon’s Historic Preservation Program. “We saw it as a need.”

The UO Historic Preservation Program also had no permanent full-time faculty members for many years. Even today, twenty years after its inception, it has just one full-time faculty member, current Director and Professor Kingston Heath, who wasn’t hired until 2004. The program relies on adjuncts, most of whom are program graduates.

As for the Field School, discussions for that first took place in 1994, at a conference organized by a preservation group hoping to grow the HP program. Entitled “Historic Preservation: Theory and Practice," the gathering in Portland drew about 70 people from around the country. “When it was over, we realized that we talked a lot about principles but we didn't share anything about practice,” Peting recalls. “So we decided we needed to teach some aspects of that. And, we decided to do that in a hands-on field school.”

The McMath Award ceremony will take place from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Wednesday, May 14, at the UO Portland's White Stag Block, 70 N.W. Couch St. Tickets to the award luncheon are $50; proceeds support financial aid for historic preservation students. The reservation deadline for the luncheon is May 3. For more information, contact Crissy Lindsey at 541-346-2982. Tickets may be ordered online.

Read more about Peting's career in the original story on the UO School of Architecture and Allied Arts' website.

- by Marti Gerdes, UO School of Architecture and Allied Arts