Core Faculty and Staff          Affiliated Faculty          Students

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Center for Historic Architecture and Design

The Center for Historic Architecture and Design (CHAD) at the University of Delaware was created as an interdisciplinary research and public service center in 1984 to draw on national and internationally prominent programs and faculty at the University of Delaware related to historic preservation and to make historic preservation an important part of the University's land grant mission. The Departments of History, Art History, Geography, and Mechanical Engineering cosponsored the Center's formation. 

Located in the College of Human Services, Education, and Public Policy, CHAD is a research and public service center that addresses issues related to historic preservation through an interdisciplinary program of research, public service, and education focusing on historic architecture and landscapes; design issues of the built environment and material culture; documentation of historic properties; computer applications to documentation; research on cultural and historic materials; historic preservation planning and policy at national, state, and local levels; and advocacy for historic resources.

CHAD's philosophy rests on four concepts:

Serving underrepresented historic resources and groups and advocating for them. This translates into an emphasis on vernacular architecture particularly in rural, small town, and urban contexts and resources associated with minority groups and cultures, and an emphasis on what preservationists call "the recent past" (buildings, landscapes, and material culture of the twentieth century);

Building a documentary record of endangered and lost historical and cultural resources in a period of rapidly changing land use in the Delaware Valley. Following the model of the Threatened Building Program of London, this effort became the Mid-Atlantic Historic Buildings and Survey;

Making preservation of cultural and historical resrouces part of a larger intellectural framework of the humanities, material culture, urban affairs, and preservation planning at the University of Delaware; and

Drawing on the Delaware Valley and larger mid-Atlantic region as a laboratory for teaching, research, and public service, as well as international settings such as India and China, preservation issues are explored in a variety of cultural, ethnic, and settlement contexts. In short, the Center's work focuses on understanding the evolution and significance of the built environment and related material culture from a scholarly perspective and designing effective public policies for the conservation of significant historical resources.

Some of the areas in which CHAD excels include:

• Documentation, survey and evaluation
• Historic preservation planning and research
• Laboratory analysis and ethnographic study of traditional materials and technologies

Core Faculty and Staff

David L. Ames, Ph.D.
Director and Professor of Urban Affairs and Public Policy, Geography, and Material Culture Studies

Rebecca Sheppard, M.A.
Associate Director, Assistant Professor of Urban Affairs and Public Policy and Director, Mid-Atlantic Historic Buildings and Landscape Survey

Chandra L. Reedy, Ph.D.
Professor of Urban Affairs and Public Policy and Art History
Director, Laboratory for Analysis of Cultural Materials

Paul Sestak, B.ARCH. 
Senior Research Fellow and Associate Professor of Hotel, Institutional, and Restaurant Management and of Urban Affairs and Public Policy

Kara Green, M.A.
Collections Manager, CHAD Collection

Karen J. Spry, A.S., B.S.
Officer Supervisor

Affiliated Faculty

Students