After a two-year pandemic pause, Iowa State University students plan to resume travel abroad this yearto help preserve historic U.S. Department of State properties.
The partnership with the State Department has been re-established andstudents plan to travel to Rome this spring to study the campus of the U.S. embassy there, which includes ancient Roman ruins.
Ted Grevstad-Nordbrock, an assistant professor in Iowa State'scommunity and regional planning department, said, "The act of preserving these buildings is really an act of cultural diplomacy."
Whether in a friendly nation or one adversarial to the U.S.,Grevstad-Nordbrock said the act of preserving properties that have often been gifts from host countries to the U.S. is a sign of investment into communities and protection of the host nation's cultural heritage.
Grevstad-Nordbrock is not the only university faculty member involved with the project partnership that began with an alumnus' outreach in 2015, but he founded and informally leads it.
That Iowa State architecture alumnus,Tobin Tracey, is the director of the State Department's Office of Cultural Heritage.
TheOffice of Cultural Heritage was established in 2015, under the department's Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations. The office's website also includes a map that shows there are State Department properties "worthy of preservation as symbols of cultural diplomacy abroad" on every continent except Antarctica— including embassies, homes, villas, apartments and gardens.
The status of one U.S. embassy:US to evacuate Ukraine embassy in Kyiv amid Russian invasion fears
Some properties are alsoon the honorary Secretary of State’s Register of Culturally Significant Property, a list for "properties recognized for their exceptional importance todiplomacy andcultural heritage."
Iowa State students have done preservation projects at properties on both lists in six countries since 2016, according to a university news release. That list includes the United Kingdom, Ireland, the Czech Republic, Sweden, Morocco and Portugal.
"The research the students do goes into our archives and helps us to build the story of a property," Tracey said.
'These are not museums. These are functioning diplomatic buildings.' What makes a place historic?
Tracey said a lot of U.S. diplomatic properties, especially in Europe, were acquired after World War II between the 1940s and early 1960s— before the National Historic Preservation Act was made law in 1966.
He explained that if a property isn't already listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site or identified as nationally or locally historic in a host country— an automatic stamp of being considered historic— then his office evaluates properties using the guidelines put forth by the National Historic Preservation Act for the National Register of Historic Places.
A property has to check off at least one of several criteria,Tracey said — including a building being at least 50 years old, being associated with significant historical events or people, or embodying the art and architecture of a time.
Without the National Historic Preservation Act having yet been in place when some properties were acquired, "most people weren’t focused on the history or significance of a property prior to that, and there weren’t a lot of records kept on a property," Tracey said.
"From a preservation standpoint it just means we have to dig deeper and do more research looking at both archives in the host nation as well as archives here in the United States including our own at the Department of State," he added.
That's where Iowa State students can make contributions to documenting a property's history— through digital scanning andtaking photographs, but also hearing the stories of Americans and citizens of host countries who have worked at U.S. embassies.
"These are not museums. These are functioning diplomatic buildings," Grevstad-Nordbrock said.
In London in 2016— as the U.S. was preparing to move its embassy to another building in another neighborhood after about 70 years of service—Grevstad-Nordbrock said students documented oral histories of Americanand British staff at the embassy to better understand diplomatic work and how life in the building had changed over decades, a record he's not aware of as existing otherwise.
He said that project might be his favoriteof the three trips he's been on with students so far. He comes from a military family, and while his father was stationed in Scotland, he would go down to London with him on business to the same embassy.
Grevstad-Nordbrock said he tries to get his students to think of buildings as more than just a structure, but part of larger community contexts including gentrification and how governments try to reconcile the needs of tourists and locals.
The former American embassy in London had ties to a historic neighborhood known as "Little America," and students created proposals to use wayfinding signs and interpretative plaques to document the neighborhood's history, he said.
Each trip abroad includes 10 to 15 students,Grevstad-Nordbrock said. That most of their destinations have so far been in Europe has been "a pragmatic reason more than anything," he said— English-speaking countries or embassies that are easy sells for students and generate interest.
Study abroad participation this springat Iowa State is about 80% of what it was in spring 2020, according to another news releasefrom the university. However, travel to Australia, New Zealand and Asia— except South Korea— remains closed, the news release added.
"Our expectation is that as time goes on, we’ll visit other parts of the world," including elsewhere in Africa and in Australia and Oceania— the only trouble with Australia being that it's particularly expensive, Grevstad-Nordbrock said.
He said the State Department does not fund the partnership, and trips are treated as faculty-led study abroad travel by the university; students pay for travel fees.
He said university and outside grants are available to help offset costs, and there's ways to travel cheaper with airfare deals and students staying together in hostels.
Virtual tours of some historic U.S. diplomatic propertiesare available atoboculturalheritage.state.gov/explore-our-properties/. Tracey said students' work is also posted on the office's website.
A sight closer to home:Otters Otis and Ollie make a home in Iowa State University's Lake LaVerne
Phillip Sitter covers education for the Ames Tribune, including Iowa State University and PreK-12 schools in Ames and elsewhere in Story County. Phillip can be reached via email at psitter@gannett.com. He is on Twitter @pslifeisabeauty.
