Study Architecture 
ProPEL 
Author(s): Deborah Ryan & Frank Vagnone
Although other types of cultural sites are experiencing growth, Historic House Museums(HHMs) are seeing declining visitation and financial instability. All too often, HHMsare places where a well-intended docent gestures into barren rooms while sharing aseemingly fact-based, exclusive narrative about the great deeds of the great, white manwho once lived in the home. Frozen in a pre-determined period of historic interpretation,many HHMs fall have fallen harshly out of sync with the larger community asdemographics change around them.The well-meaning Board and staff leadership of HHMs, with expertise primarily inmuseum studies, history and collections management, is ill equipped to deal witheither the contemporary understanding of context, or the civic engagement expertiseof urban designers and architects. This paper attempts to bridge disciplinaryboundaries, and offers a comprehensive strategy for reorienting HHMs from a curatedmuseum setting to a new paradigm of real-life habitation.Funded by a $100,000 grant from the New York Community Trust, The Historic HouseTrust of New York City is testing habitation-oriented concepts at the Latimer HouseMuseum in Flushing. The former home of African-American inventor and electricalpioneer Lewis Howard Latimer, the house is located in a predominately Chinese/Koreancommunity. A shared narrative of ASPIRATION will be employed to bridge thepast and the present, positioning the house as a center of social history, explorativeexperience and common identity.Lewis Latimer’s life story was one of achievement. The child of escaped slaves, hewas a civil war veteran and self taught draftsman. He rose through the ranks of anattorney’s office from a delivery boy to a patent consultant, largely fulfilling the sortof hopes and dreams like those of the many immigrants who arrive in Flushing eachday, although few know of their aspirations.A civic engagement campaign is now underway to gather, display and share the personalASPIRATIONS and OBSTACLES from Latimer’s neighbors through civic engagementurban interventions (CEUIs). Precedents for the CEIUs included ParticipatoryCity: 100 Urban Trends from the BMW Guggenheim Lab, the Street Plans Collaborative’sTactical Urbanism 2: Short Term Action, Long Term Change and specificallyCandy Chang’s Before I Die and Career Path community walls, where participantsindividually share their life choices within a larger artistic frame.Architecture students from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte developedproposals for person-powered CEUIs that will be be moved throughout the neighborhoodsthat surround the Latimer House. Modeled after Michael Graves and RalphAppelbaum’s New Jersey Hall of Fame Mobile Museum albeit at a more modest scale,or reminiscent of the Wunderkammer inspired Museum, NYC’s one room exhibitionin a former freight elevator, the intent of the CEIUs is to provide an opportunity forconversation. This paper will illustrate the CEUIs in action, a summary of the informationgained through them, and a description of how that content influenced the reimaginingof the Latimer House experience within its larger urban context.
Volume Editors
Alice Kimm & Jaepil Choi
ISBN
978-0-935502-91-6
