The Routledge Companion to Automobile Heritage, Culture, and Preservation

Barry L. Stiefel, Jennifer Clark, Barry L. Stiefel, Jennifer Clark

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138389434
• eBook ISBN: 9780429753428
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Museum Studies
• Index: Technology & Engineering

The Routledge Companion to Automobile Heritage, Culture, and Preservation explores automotive heritage, its place in society, and the ways we might preserve and conserve it.

Drawing on contributions from academics and practitioners around the world and comprising six sections, this volume carries the heritage discourse forward by exploring the complex and sometimes intricate place of automobiles within society. Taken as a whole, this book helps to shape how we think about automobile heritage and considers how that heritage explores a range of cultural, intellectual, emotional, and material elements well outside of the automobile body itself. Most importantly, perhaps, it questions how we might better acknowledge the importance of automotive heritage now and in the future.

The Routledge Companion to Automobile Heritage, Culture, and Preservation is unique in that it juxtaposes theory with practice, academic approaches with practical experience, and recognizes that issues of preservation and conservation belong in a broad context. As such, this volume should be essential reading for both academics and practitioners with an interest in automobiles, cultural heritage, and preservation.

Part I

Defining automotive heritage from other forms of heritage studies

1

Preservation education and automotive heritage

A holistic approach

Barry L. Stiefel

Preservation education the world over prepares people for careers related to stewardship of the historic built environment. However, within these programs, there is no curriculum pertaining to the preservation of automotive heritage or vehicular material culture as a component of the field. This shortcoming is reflected within the United States by the more than 93,000 places on the National Register of Historic Places (N.R.H.P.), which includes 165 watercraft, 63 railroad vehicles, 4 airplanes, and several objects related to the space program, but not one single automobile, even though cars have made considerable contributions to American culture and human civilization for more than a century. Much information and material culture related to automotive heritage has been lost or is not being maintained appropriately due to the lack of professional preservation education in this area.

In order to rectify this shortcoming, I recommend incorporating vehicular preservation education within academic programs of the built environment. These programs would educate future professionals not only about automotive restoration – the most common treatment – as well as the value of alternative best practices applied to vehicles but, more significantly, about how to study vehicles and conduct the appropriate conservation treatments. The programmatic proposal I am making is not a new form of shop class, but a hybridized curriculum that synthesizes a liberal arts education grounded in the humanities and social sciences with expert knowledge of the natural sciences, engineering, and vocational trades – the precise educational background needed to undertake the comprehensive preservation of automotive heritage. As part of this study, the National Council of Preservation Education’s (N.C.P.E.) evaluation standards (see text in Appendix) for accreditation, among other relevant standards established by other organizations, are cross-analyzed alongside automotive preservation issues not only to demonstrate how this is hypothetically possible but also to serve as a roadmap for the creation of this curriculum, and various terminal degrees at the undergraduate and graduate levels. A comparison is also made of the automotive restoration programs identified by the Restoration, Preservation, and Mentorship (R.P.M.) Foundation, highlighting where there could be overlapping redundancies as well as new frontiers of automotive heritage appreciation.

The purpose of this study is not to educate a new breed of historic preservation specialist exclusively. Rather, by spreading the academic understanding of automobiles to a broader audience – which is presently the domain of mechanics, engineers, and hobbyists – there would be a positive impact on how society values materiality and cultural heritage and its wider dispersion. The automobile would serve as an additional conduit for this alongside buildings, monuments, and other objects that have already been accepted in mainstream preservation practice. As an example, a large number of students who obtain architecture degrees do not go on to get an architectural license and practice, but instead find fulfilling careers in related fields, such as interior and spatial design, landscape architecture, and website design, as well as production design in the film and television industry. All utilize the creative skills of the architecture curriculum. Meanwhile, others who prefer managerial work go into building surveying, property development, construction, and urban planning.¹ All graduates take their education and use it in their respective fields, widely expanding what they have learned to other activities. A more holistic preservation curriculum with rigorous study of automobiles ultimately may have an enormous effect on our society, especially within a liberal arts, humanities, social, and natural sciences instructional framework.

Background to preservation education of the built environment and automobiles

Presently, there is only one published authoritative source on preservation education pedagogy of the built environment that has undergone extensive peer review. This is Preservation Education: Sharing Best Practices and Finding Common Ground, coedited by Jeremy C. Wells and myself in 2014, which came out of a conference of that name in 2012 in Providence, Rhode Island.² What separates Preservation Education from the many other instructional texts, such as Historic Preservation: An Introduction to Its History, Principles, and Practice by Norman Tyler, Ted J. Ligibel, and Ilene R. Tyler, is that Preservation Education is a critical analysis of preservation education for the purposes of improving teaching methods – it is not a handbook for actually conducting preservation interventions directly on “things” or places.³ In addition to Preservation Education, there is also the academic journal Preservation Education & Research by N.C.P.E., which has similarly focused on historic built environment education and related subject matter. At the time of writing, no article has appeared in this journal pertaining to historic vehicles.⁴

Within the automotive restoration education field are numerous titles on how to conduct preservation and restoration work on automobiles, but nothing yet on pedagogical analysis or experimentation that has undergone peer review. Links to several academic journals, including the Journal of Engineering Education, can be found through the American Society of Engineering Education, though little work has been done specifically on automotive engineering education. The focus of this scholarship has been on contemporary and future automotive design, rather than historic automotive preservation or restoration. An example includes a conference paper by Ala Qattawi, Paul Venhovens, and Johnell Brooks on “Rethinking Automotive Engineering Education: Deep Orange as a Collaborative Innovation Framework for Project-Based Learning Incorporating Real-World Case Studies.”⁵

Other scholars have delved into the cognitive and pedagogical benefits of learning with one’s hands. Examples include Matthew B. Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work and the fourth chapter of Preservation Education, “Thinking and Doing: A Twenty-First Century Pedagogy for Preserving the Historic Architectural Artifact,” by Robert W. Ogle.⁶ Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft features a motorcycle on the jacket cover due to the author’s interest in motorcycle repair; however, Crawford also has a background in electrical contracting for buildings. He is thus proficient in working with both stationary structures of the built environment and moveable vehicles, which is an intriguing paradigm when considering where preservation education could go for the future. Both Crawford and Ogle use very similar terminology in their pedagogical approaches as well. The seventh chapter in Shop Class as Soulcraft is coincidentally titled, though with a slight word difference, “Thinking as Doing” (author’s emphasis).⁷ Ogle postulates that it “is the responsibility of the educational community […] of moving toward a more balanced curriculum that supports the intellectual and cognitive learning necessary to achieve the desired ends.”⁸ Likewise, Crawford argues that “if thinking is bound up with action, then the task of getting an adequate grasp on the world, intellectually, depends on our doing stuff in it.”⁹ What I would like to emphasize is that on the theoretical level, whether one is “thinking and doing” with automobiles or architectural monuments is, ironically, immaterial. Both of these things can play an important role within physical preservation trade work. Therefore, what might this look like when applied within the greater preservation field? Considering how significantly automobiles have impacted the built environment over the past century, it is not a far stretch to be inclusive of them within a greater hands-on curriculum. After all, there is a long tradition in many societies of conducting repair work and maintenance of old cars in the family garage or under the canopy of a large tree (i.e., the shade-tree mechanic). At one time, the public education curriculum of driver’s education, in Sportsmanlike Driving Series by Amos Neyahrt, included instruction in automobile maintenance in addition to operation and safe conduct.¹⁰ But what about automobiles within higher levels of education, such as the bachelor’s and master’s degree levels, which are often more academically sophisticated and produce graduates with career ambitions that are frequently not inclusive of the skilled trades?

In 2012, Frederick A. Simeone edited a groundbreaking book, The Stewardship of Historically Important Automobiles.¹¹ Within it, Simeone and a collection of contributing authors with backgrounds in historic automobiles explore what treatment models the stewardship of vehicles should emulate as interest in old automobiles undergoes a significant evolution in sophistication. The treatment of historic automobiles has some commonalities with antique furniture, especially regarding their assessment and marketing in the collector-museum-auction house milieu and materials conservation. However, several of the contributors, including Mark Gessler, Stephen DuPont, and Carmel Roberts, make strong cases for why the already established framework of historic built environment preservation might serve as a better model for the future. Most notably, they point out the benefits of conducting historic built environment–style heritage documentation and preservation planning work for developing best approaches to intervention strategies – crucially, the question of whether to restore or to preserve – the value and meaning of integrity withi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Driven heritage Introduction
• Part I Defining automotive heritage from other forms of heritage studies
• Part II Conservation and preservation of historic vehicles and associated built environments
• Part III The future of the automotive museum
• Part IV The significance of experiencing intangible automotive heritage
• Part V Car design and heritage identity making
• Part VI Sustainable futures for personal mobility
• Afterword
• Index