Reframing Preservation

I. Reframing Preservation

Preservation in the United States has long centered the material—buildings, monuments, and architectural form—often at the expense of the communities that made those spaces meaningful. Codified through the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards and reinforced by the National Register of Historic Places, preservation practices have historically privileged colonial aesthetics, individual ownership, and landmark-based significance.¹ These frameworks uphold what the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund (AACHAF) describes as “the dominant logic of preservation,” in which resources and recognition accrue to sites already legitimized by institutional power.² For Black communities—particularly Gullah Geechee descendants on Daufuskie Island—this has meant that the places most vital to cultural identity often fall outside preservation’s reach: praise houses, family cemeteries, oyster society buildings, and kin-based landholdings held as heirs property.

This project begins from a different premise: that memory itself is a form of infrastructure. Following Christina Sharpe’s concept of wake work, preservation is not simply the act of conserving what remains. It is the labor of attending to what has been excluded, erased, or rendered invisible—what lingers in the afterlives of slavery, displacement, and land theft.³ In this context, preservation becomes a reparative spatial practice. It is not just about buildings—it is about relation, refusal, and return.

Andrea Roberts, through her work on the Texas Freedom Colonies Project, has advanced a framework for reparative planning that centers descendant knowledge, oral tradition, and community authorship.⁴ Her participatory mapping platform challenges conventional planning tools, arguing that Black placemaking cannot be fully seen in zoning maps or deed records, but lives in memory, ritual, and land-based stewardship. Roberts frames this as “planning as remembering.” Daufuskie3D aligns closely with that call. The immersive digital archive developed through the project is not simply a scan—it is an act of remembering with, not about. It visualizes stories and spaces that institutional frameworks have neglected and insists that what is vernacular, spiritual, or undocumented is no less worthy of preservation.

A growing chorus of preservationists, planners, and scholars are advancing similar frameworks. The National Trust’s Sites of Enslavement initiative emphasizes preservation as repair—calling for not just recognition, but restitution.⁵ Their Repair Work framework asserts that preservation must foreground story, relationship, and care, especially in spaces marked by historical violence. The Tuskegee University architecture program, under Professor Kwesi Daniels, puts these values into practice by pairing students with descendant communities to restore structures as acts of cultural continuity—not tourist spectacle.⁶ These models reject extractive preservation narratives that valorize ruins while forgetting the people who built and sustained them.

Daufuskie3D is part of that shift. On Daufuskie Island, the project takes shape through immersive documentation of sites that have been fenced off, allowed to decay, or interpreted without Gullah voices. Many of these are private homes owned by Gullah descendants who have been displaced or moved off-island—structures that have fallen into disrepair due to years of deferred maintenance. Despite their cultural significance, such homes are not prioritized by the Daufuskie Island Historical Foundation for restoration or recognition. Instead, they are often treated by visitors as ruins available for recreation, photography, or worse—vandalism. One example is the Robinson Family Home, whose windows were forcibly removed by trespassers in recent years.⁷ These are not abandoned structures—they are living evidence of a community’s spatial and familial history.

Other sites, like the Oyster Society building, speak to the economic and cultural labor of Daufuskie’s Black residents. Once central to the island’s oyster economy—a labor-intensive industry led by Black women and families—it has been physically refurbished but remains unopened to the public. Despite its potential as a site of memory and education, the building sits unactivated, disconnected from the descendants whose stories it holds. These are the sites Daufuskie3D seeks to render visible: not ruins for tourism, but repositories of care, work, and cultural endurance.

The AACHAF report Preserving African American Spaces outlines a preservation strategy that is both cultural and structural: lift up community-authored histories, expand what counts as “significant,” and deploy digital tools to broaden access and stewardship.⁸ Daufuskie3D enacts that strategy by using immersive documentation to center descendant knowledge and elevate overlooked sites. Through 3D scans, oral annotations, ambient sound, and spatial storytelling, the platform creates new channels for engaging Gullah memory work. It not only supports cultural preservation—it provides the evidence base and narrative depth needed to mobilize broader recognition and resources.

This is especially critical on Daufuskie Island, where many Gullah-owned sites, such as the Robinson Family Home, remain in urgent need of preservation. Ms. Sallie Ann Robinson has launched a grassroots campaign to restore her grandmother’s home, distributing QR-coded donation stickers at the end of her heritage tours. But her reach is currently limited to those physically present. While local news segments and photographs provide some visibility, the scans featured on Daufuskie3D—complete with oral history, historical context, and spatial annotations—humanize the site and crystalize the need. With expanded AR and VR capabilities, the project opens entirely new pathways for engagement—allowing descendants, funders, and the public to connect with these spaces in place-aware, emotionally resonant ways. In this way, Daufuskie3D contributes to the Action Fund’s goals by making descendant-defined preservation accessible, fundable, and experientially powerful.

To reframe preservation, then, is to ask not what is most architecturally intact, but what is most spiritually, historically, and communally held. On Daufuskie, preservation is not about nostalgia or aesthetic recovery. It is about making space for stories that refuse erasure. It is about continuity—not just of form, but of presence. Through this lens, preservation becomes not the fixing of a past in place, but the tending of a future still unfolding.