FORUM
Experiences

Relax by the water after a day of pre-conference events or travel at West Palm Beach’s Lake Pavilion. Located at the end of the historic commercial corridor, Clematis Street, attendees will enjoy breathtaking views of the Intracoastal Waterway and network with conference-goers while enjoying light refreshments. Conveniently located to popular local restaurants, the Lake Pavilion is a great starting point for your evening in West Palm Beach. Attendees are also welcome to stroll down the Waterfront Promenade area and take in the music of Clematis by Night, an award-winning weekly concert series that happens every Thursday evening from 6-9 pm adjacent to the Lake Pavilion. Chill out South Florida style at this community event that has been attracting locals and visitors alike for nearly three decades. ‍

Tickets for The Lake Pavilion Event are $30.

We will kick off FORUM 2024: Preservation Under the Palms with a light breakfast and program featuring Erica Avrami, PhD.

How we manage, adapt, and retrofit the built environment is shifting in response to climate and social justice concerns. New knowledge and emerging legislation regarding energy, carbon emissions, adaptation, land use, and equity challenges the preservation enterprise to reflect on its intentions, processes, and outcomes, and to anticipate challenges and opportunities for policy reform. This talk will explore this new policy horizon and examine ways in which preservation action can contribute to more just and resilient futures.

Dr. Avrami’s research and teaching extend the heritage enterprise beyond a practice focused on sites and buildings, exploring preservation as a form of public policy that functions across geographic scales and diverse demographics. She interrogates the intentions, processes, and outcomes of historic preservation in relation to social justice and the climate crisis, and seeks to transition heritage tools and policies toward equity, resilience, and decarbonization.

Erica Avrami is the James Marston Fitch Associate Professor of Historic Preservation at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, an affiliate with the Columbia Climate School’s Center for Sustainable Urban Development, and co-director of the Adapting the Existing Built Environment Earth Network. She also serves as the co-chair of the Advisory Council for Historic Preservation’s Experts Advisory Committee.

This event is included with full registration.

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Friday evening’s event will immerse conference attendees in Palm Beach history and culture during a program and on-site reception at the Flagler Museum. When it was completed in 1902, the New York Herald proclaimed that Whitehall, Henry Flagler's Gilded Age estate in Palm Beach, was "more wonderful than any palace in Europe, grander and more magnificent than any other private dwelling in the world." During the last 122 years, Whitehall has been many things: a private home, a private club, a grand hotel - and for the last 65 years, a museum and National Historic Landmark. Stripped of nearly all its contents a hundred years ago, today Whitehall’s appearance is nearly indistinguishable from when it was completed in 1902. The story of the restoration of Whitehall and the recovery of its contents over the last 25 years is one of incredibly good luck, two dozen capital projects, and a lot of very hard work by a team led by the Museum’s Executive Director, John Blades. Hear directly from Mr. Blades about this work during his lecture titled “From an Abandoned Hotel to a Nationally Recognized Museum and National Historic Landmark.”

Tickets for the "Night at the Flagler" event are $45.

In this presentation, author and art conservator Rosa Lowinger will discuss the ways in which materials conservation and the preservation of historic buildings provides a framework for understanding personal and societal damage and how this can lead to repair on a broader scale. Lowinger's interests have been developed over decades in her award-winning bicoastal conservation practice RLA Conservation, LLC and have included hands on work with extraordinary modern buildings and works in crisis in areas of disasters and political calamity. The presentation will be a literary delve into notions of repair, and how the telling of compelling narratives is a tool that can be used to help buildings survive. Lowinger will discusses the links between historic preservation and healing of intergenerational trauma using examples from her family’s story of double exile from Eastern Europe to Cuba and then the United States. Based on her 2023 memoir Dwell Time: A Memoir of Art, Exile, and Repair, this presentation highlights the specific challenges of conserving twentieth-century materials in tropical and marine climates and the metaphors for and dealing with coastal conservation in the period of climate change. Purchase your copy of Dwell Time through the conference registration website.

Tickets to the Saturday Luncheon are $35.

Join friends and new acquaintances at the conference hotel on Saturday evening to celebrate NAPC’s Commission Excellence Award recipients and FORUM Scholars. Short videos highlighting the good work of commissions around the country will inspire you to take lessons learned at FORUM and apply them in your own community. Stay until the end to find out which city will host FORUM in 2026! A light reception will follow the program.

This event is included with full registration.

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