A view of Many Glacier Hotel from across Swiftcurrent Lake.

photo by: Audrey Hall

January 2, 2019

Preservation Magazine's Favorite Photos from 2018

Looking Back

The turning of a new year is a time for reflecting on the past while planning for the future, and for me it's become the season when I Iook back on all of the amazing places the National Trust has shared with our supporters through the pages of Preservation magazine. Historic preservation is something that can be described without images, but that only tells half the story. While the importance of a place to our shared history is easy to convey with words, the beauty and vitality of historic landscapes and architecture is best left to photography. Below, I've selected some of my favorite images that were published by Preservation in 2018.

The nature of historic buildings is that we never get to see most of them on the inside. Walk down any city street or drive down any country lane and you are bound to pass by places of beautiful simplicity or architectural mastery. My five favorite exteriors of 2018 include two modernist houses, two adaptive re-use hotel properties, and an early 20th-century one-room school house.

Historic places also come in the form of vast landscapes, campuses of related structures, neighborhoods, and even entire cities where physical structures become part of their larger environments. Appreciating these places requires distance or elevation or both. Hills and mountains, lakes and rivers combined with the built heritage underscore the importance of protecting not only historic buildings but also viewsheds.

And finally, historic places can be as intimate as a single room or handcrafted architectural detail. When older buildings are rehabbed and transformed for contemporary use, it is often the evidence of hand crafted details and historic materials that makes each place unique. Handmade brick, carved stone, heavy timber, and plaster ornamentation bear the fingerprints of people who designed, built, and lived or worked in historic buildings whether they be simple farm structures or elaborate theaters.

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Dennis Hockman

Dennis Hockman is editor in chief of Preservation magazine. He’s lived in historic apartments and houses all over the United States and knows that all old buildings have stories to tell if you care to find them.

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