Lawrence Kreisman – 2024 Preservation Champion Award
Historic Seattle’s Annual Preservation Celebration is coming up on September 19, 2024. We’ll celebrate the projects and people that help amplify our mission. Today, we feature Larry Kreisman, the 2024 Preservation Champion Award recipient.
Congratulations Larry Kreisman!
Lawrence (Larry) Kreisman is a true Preservation Champion. For decades, he has played an integral role in protecting, celebrating, and elevating historic architecture locally, regionally, and nationally. Without Larry’s dedication and effort, the city would be a much different place. Larry was Historic Seattle’s Program Director for twenty years (1997-2017), where he developed an impressive education program for the organization during a period of significant challenge and change in Seattle. He brought significant narrative skills from his educational background in English literature, Fine Arts, and Urban Design.
He was here for the “birthing” of historic preservation in Seattle in the 1970s and has remained at its heart since that time. From the moment he enrolled in the University of Washington’s Master of Architecture program (graduating in 1980), Larry has made a lasting and meaningful impact on preserving the built environment. His graduate work included neighborhood inventory and architectural evaluation at a time when the City of Seattle was developing an ethic and a vocabulary for historic preservation.
He followed that track in a notable career including exhibit design, tour leadership, publishing, lecturing, and journalism. He wrote, co-wrote, and edited eleven books, including The Arts and Crafts Movement in the Pacific Northwest, Made to Last: Historic Preservation in Seattle and King County, and Tradition and Change on Seattle’s First Hill: Propriety, Profanity, Pills, and Preservation.
He served as the Seattle Architecture Foundation’s Viewpoints Tour Program Director from 1990 to 2003. He researched and co-curated “Blueprints,” the centennial exhibit for the American Institute of Architects Seattle and Washington chapters in 1994 at the Museum of History and Industry (MOHAI).
While regularly contributing featured articles on architecture and design to the Pacific NW Magazine in the Seattle Times, he also served an extended term as historian for the Seattle Landmarks Preservation Board. In 1997, he received the Washington State Historic Preservation Officer’s Award for Outstanding Career Achievement in Historic Preservation. In 2006, Larry became an honorary member of the American Institute of Architects, Seattle Chapter.
Retired, but scarcely retiring, he has continued his work of advocacy and public education, most recently as a Rainier Club Honorary Fellow.
If you have been to even one of Larry’s programs, you are familiar with the passion he brings in connecting people to places that matter. His work has touched countless people, and Historic Seattle is grateful to Larry for all that he has given to the preservation cause throughout an extraordinary career.
Image courtesy of Historic Seattle