A new nominee for chairman of the White House’s Advisory Council on Historic Preservation has been named this week, placing a community activist and architect into a position of influence that had been only a part-time role until 2016.
The Hartford Courant is reporting that Sara Bronin has been nominated by President Biden as the next chair of the 55-year-old council. Bronin is already an advisor to the National Trust for Historic Preservation and has been featured recently in Archinect for her ongoing efforts surrounding housing segregation in Connecticut. If confirmed, she will join Wayne Donaldson and Trump appointee Aimee Jorjani on a list of others to helm the council in the past decade.
A White House press release cited Bronin’s academic background and public service record as the reasons behind her nomination, stating that her work “focuses on how law and policy can foster more equitable, sustainable, well-designed, and connected places.”
Bronin, whose husband Luke is the mayor of Connecticut’s state capital, served as the chair of a group called Preservation Connecticut and had been teaching property, land use, and historic preservation law at the University of Connecticut Law School after completing degrees in architecture and law at the University of Texas and Yale Law School respectively. The former Rhodes Scholar Bronin, who is Mexican-American, also served as a board member of the Latinos in Heritage Conservation organization and had recently accepted a teaching position at Cornell University’s College of Architecture, Art and Planning for the fall.
Bronin and her husband have been honored with the Alice Washburn Award for their preservation of a Civil War-era Hartford brownstone that was deemed "both economical and courageous” by the AIA’s Connecticut chapter in 2014.
“Preservation can heal. It can sustain. It can offer new life, as it is getting new life,” Bronin said in a statement posted to Twitter. “If confirmed, I will be eager to help the Biden administration unlock the power of preservation in many respects.”
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