Can preservation, development mesh?

Eryn Brennan says local history can subsist as new buildings spring up, just not when structures are completely erased. She cites the Downtown Mall, a healthy building mixture of the antique and the innovative.

“That’s what makes it Charlottesville,” said Brennan, president of the Charlottesville-based Preservation Piedmont and a member of the city’s Board of Architectural Review.

The group that Brennan heads is one of many that have orchestrated Charlottesville’s first Preservation Week, which will center on topics such as historic preservation, sustainable development and green design.

“We are taking a broad look at all of the issues,” Brennan said.

The week — which begins today — will feature a series of lectures, tours, exhibits and brown-bag lunches. Speakers include Roger Kennedy, former director of the National Park Service, and Richard Moe, president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

The week is sponsored by the Piedmont Area Preservation Alliance, a consortium of area groups that was founded earlier this year.

Brennan said that preservation is not only historical but involves preserving energy and solidifying the link with sustainability.

“There’s embodied energy in any existing structure,” she said, adding that demolishing structures not only could waste the materials but also could squander all the energy put into them.

“How sustainable is that?” Brennan asked.

Steven Meeks, the president of the Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society, said it is inevitable that some buildings will be torn down over the years, especially in areas particularly subject to development pressures. In tandem with Preservation Week, the historical society will unveil today an exhibit titled “Lost Albemarle,” a joint project with the Albemarle County Historic Preservation Committee that will display buildings lost in the county in the past 30 years.

“I think it’s important for the public to see what we have lost for various reasons and why preservation is important,” Meeks said.

The exhibit will feature 20 buildings, ranging from estates and bridges to churches and homes. Meeks said that while some of the structures vanished because of obsolescence or neglect, “probably the majority of them were taken down to be replaced by something else,” he said.

City resident Bill Emory, who will co-lead a walking tour around Charlottesville’s Woolen Mills neighborhood, said he may struggle to fit everything into his one-hour time slot Sunday.

“There’s so much stuff,” he said.

Woolen Mills has a plethora of historic buildings — Emory said neighborhood residents played an important role in shaping the area after the Civil War by cornering the market for fine wool. But the neighborhood, located east of downtown, can teach residents about development for the future as well, he said, because of how it was built to emphasize walkability.

“There’s just so much to learn in terms of how a people and a place can have everything and do it on two feet. And that was the way it was 100 years ago here,” Emory said.

A complete schedule of event can be found at http://www.tusculum.sbc.edu/preservationweek/default.shtml.