Tom Butt is the 2024 recipient of the Louise du Pont Crowninshield Award, the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s highest recognition of superlative achievement over time in the preservation and interpretation of our cultural, architectural or maritime heritage, including buildings, architecture, districts, archeology, cultural landscapes, and objects of significance in the history and culture of the United States. Learn more about the full slate of 2024 awardees.

I grew up in a college town in the Arkansas Ozarks and graduated from the University of Arkansas with a degree in Architecture in 1968.

As an aspiring architect, I was fascinated by the design and craftsmanship of local antebellum and Victorian homes, but I watched with sadness as these masterpieces were demolished and replaced with parking lots. I knew then that part of my future practice would involve saving historic buildings. I attended a lecture by Frank Lloyd Wright, and my architecture history classes were taught by Wright apprentice and AIA Gold Medal winner Fay Jones, who took us to visit Oak Park and Fallingwater during a spring break.

In the summers, I worked for the National Park Service, an internship that took me to San Francisco, Yellowstone National Park and Little Bighorn Battlefield. In the summer of 1966, the National Park Service sent me to Hawaii to work for the Historic American Buildings Survey where we measured and documented historic buildings, such as the Iolani Palace.

After undergraduate school, I spent two years in the Army, including a year in Vietnam as a combat engineer. I was obsessed with seeing Angkor Wat, only a tempting 250 miles away in Cambodia but inaccessible to anyone in the U.S. military. At the end of my tour, I arranged to be discharged while still in Vietnam and headed for Cambodia. I was subsequently caught up in the coup that dethroned Prince Sihanouk. The airports were closed, and I had to walk out to Thailand, but I saw Angkor Wat and then circled the globe, including the Trans-Siberian Railway, finally returning to San Francisco.

After graduate school at UCLA, I was back in the San Francisco Bay Area, starting my own architecture and engineering firm, which celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2023. Around 1980, we started a historic preservation studio at our firm, Interactive Resources, and over the next 45 years played a role in saving and rehabilitating some of California’s most iconic structures, including Coit Tower in San Francisco, 50 UN Plaza in San Francisco and the Jesse Unruh State Office Building in Sacramento.

A key success for Richmond was ultimately bringing Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Historical Park to my city. I made multiple trips to Washington, D.C. to meet with the director of the National Park Service (NPS), top level NPS staff and a Congressional committee. Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Historical Park was established in 2000.

Richmond also had a beautiful—but abandoned and deteriorating—1874 lighthouse owned by the United States Coast Guard on an island. In a last-ditch effort to save it, I founded a nonprofit, found some grant money, and mobilized hundreds of volunteers to bring the East Brother Light Station back to life. Today, it continues to operate as a successful bed-and-breakfast. It was the first Coast Guard-owned lighthouse to be licensed to a nonprofit, and its success became a model for lighthouses across America.

To save the 1930 Albert Kahn former Ford Assembly Plant in Richmond where tanks were outfitted for WWII, I traveled to Washington D.C. to meet with the director of FEMA and top-level FEMA staff to successfully secure a grant to repair damage from the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.

I founded and continue to serve on the board of Rosie the Riveter Trust, the nonprofit partner of Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Historical Park. In 25 years, Rosie the Riveter Trust raised over $20 million and funded multiple programs and projects, including rehabilitation of multiple historic structures, acquisition of extensive collections of WW II memorabilia and financing the award-winning documentary film, No Time to Waste: The Urgent Mission of Betty Reid Soskin, the oldest National Park Service Ranger, now 103 years old and retired.

One of the most successful projects of Rosie the Riveter Trust was the $8 million rehabilitation of the 1943 Maritime Child Care Center, which provided 24/7 childcare for working women (“Rosie the Riveters”) during WWII. It now serves as part of a charter elementary school.

Because of my position as mayor and board member of Rosie the Riveter Trust, I hosted several National Park Service directors and secretaries of the Interior who traveled to Richmond to visit Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Historical Park.

Adjacent to the Maritime Child Care Center, is the Nystrom School, also built in 1943, to serve the children of the 100,000 shipyard workers who flocked to Richmond. My firm was the architect for rehabilitation of the school and successfully nominated it to the National Register. Both the Maritime Center and Nystrom School are part of Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Historical Park.

Advocating for Historic Preservation

New Orleans is one of my favorite places, and after Katrina hit, I joined a group of volunteer preservation professionals assembled by the National Trust to assess the damage and help find ways to protect and preserve the thousands of buildings in New Orlean’s 26 historic districts. We participated in seminars at the Preservation Resource Center of New Orleans and visited hundreds of homes providing advice to owners.

I continue to work as an architect on historic preservation projects at Interactive Resources, and I serve on the boards of four nonprofits dedicated to historic preservation, three of which I founded, I own three homes listed on the National Register of Historic Places, including the 1883 schoolhouse in the Gold Rush town of Sierra City. Recently, we restored the belfry, gone for 70 years, and reinstalled the original bell.

The most important preservation lesson I have learned over the years is that not everyone shares my interest in preserving the past. In my advocacy roles, I typically have to find other compelling messages to create support for preservation policies and projects and I had to partner with collaborators pursuing disparate goals that did not include historic preservation. With the Richmond shipyards, I pitched historic preservation to skeptical city leaders as a job creation and economic development tool, encouraging them to consider embracing it, not so much to preserve the past, but to create a more prosperous future.