The University of New Mexico

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Contact: Carolyn Gonzales, 277-5920, cgonzal@unm.edu

March 21, 2006

Sustainability Focus of UNM's Inaugural Pearl Lecture

The University of New Mexico School of Architecture and Planning presents the first George Pearl Fellow Lecture on Friday, March 31, at 4:30 p.m., in Northrop Hall, Room 122 on the main campus.

The featured speaker is Chester Liebs, UNM adjunct professor in preservation and regionalism, whose lecture, “Learning from the Cultural Landscape: Lessons From Japan,” focuses on lessons to be learned from Japan's everyday places for use in planning more sustainable American communities.

“Liebs did more than anyone else to help us appreciate our everyday landscape with his classic book, ‘Main Street to Miracle Mile: American Roadside Architecture,'” said Chris Wilson, director of UNM's preservation and regionalism program. “It will be enlightening to see how he reads the Japanese landscape for lesson of sustainability.”

Liebs founded, and for more than 20 years directed, the nationally-renowned preservation program at the University of Vermont. He spent five years as a Fulbright Fellow, then professor, helping to develop heritage conservation programs at Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music.

Liebs said, “When I returned to the U.S. in 2003, I had a dose of reverse culture shock. I saw the movie ‘Lost in Translation,' about Americans adrift in Japan, but it had an opposite effect on me. It made me homesick for Tokyo.”

The America to which Liebs returned had been “supersized.” “It took me more hours and gasoline here to do the simplest tasks. By contrast, in my neighborhood in Japan, I was able to get almost everything I needed by bicycle with exercise as the only by-product.”

Liebs describes Japan 's sustainable infrastructure – parking lots where a hundred “shopping bicycles” fit into the space of a few SUVs – and space age, high-speed trains. He notes that Japanese cultural patterns and traditions have created one of the world's most advanced civil societies. Japan, Liebs argues, can offer insights for New Mexicans engaged in Albuquerque 's downtown redensification and the development of a commuter rail system “with the same futuristic fervor being lavished on New Mexico 's proposed spaceport.”

A recent recipient of the James Marston Fitch Preservation-Education Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Council for Preservation Education, Liebs has also been awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to teach at Tokyo University during the 2006-07 academic year, while writing a book on lessons from Japan's ordinary landscape.

This event is free and open to the public. This will be the first of two Pearl Fellow lectures this spring honoring long-time Albuquerque architect and preservationist, George Clayton Pearl, who died in August 2003.

 


The University of New Mexico is the state's largest university, serving more than 32,000 students. UNM is home to the state's only schools of law, medicine, pharmacy and architecture and operates New Mexico's only academic health center. UNM is noted for comprehensive undergraduate programs and research that benefits the state and the nation.

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