William C. S. Remsen, RA, is a founding partner of Preservation Inc., a firm specializing in the assessment, documentation, conservation, and presentation of stone, brick, mud brick, and wood historic buildings and cultural heritage and archaeological sites. He is a registered architect, a professional member of the American Institute of Conservation (AIC), a certified member of AIC’s emergency National Heritage Responders team, and a certified historic preservation building assessor for AIC’s Collection Assessment for Preservation (CAP) program. He has over 35 years’ experience with cultural heritage preservation projects in the U.S., Cyprus, Egypt, Turkey, Malta, Chile (Easter Island), Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, the UK, Yugoslavia, and Iran.
His activities include all aspects of conservation projects, from surveys, documentation, and assessments to hands-on conservation work, master planning, intervention design, preparation of Requests for Proposals, contracts, and other project documents, advising clients on contractor and consultant selection, submission reviews, site supervision, project management, etc. For complex projects, he assembles and manages teams of experts to help carry out the work. He has prepared numerous successful grant applications and served on funding committees to review cultural heritage preservation project applications and to award grants.
He received a double BA in Honors Anthropology (Archaeology) and Design of the Environment from the University of Pennsylvania, a Master of Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and a post-graduate Certificate in Architecture Conservation from the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM) in Rome, Italy. In addition to working as an architect in private practice, his previous positions have included: Supervisor of Architecture Conservation for the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities (SPNEA, now Historic New England) with 44 historic house museums from the 17th, 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries; Director of Architectural Conservation at the archaeological site of Gordion in Turkey for the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology; Technical Director of the $35,000,000 USAID-funded Egyptian Antiquities Project of the American Research Center in Egypt to document and conserve ancient Egyptian monuments and sites from the Pharaonic, Classical, Byzantine, Islamic, and Ottoman periods; and Chief Preservation Architect for the Preservation Society of Newport County (the Newport Mansions) with 9 historic house museums. Other work included: serving as Senior Cultural Heritage Advisor for the $12,000,000 USAID-funded SAVE Program for the conservation of Bronze Age, Iron Age, Classical, Byzantine, Medieval, and Ottoman historic monuments, the adaptive reuse of monuments into museums, the development of historic sites for cultural tourism, and development of a conservation capacity building program in Cyprus; consulting with the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) to conserve historic monuments and sites in Cyprus; including the Buffer Zone in the divided city of Nicosia; consulting with The Asia Foundation and the U.S. Department of State at the National Museum of Afghanistan in Kabul to restore the building, catalogue and archivally rehouse the collections, enhance management and operations, and to help design a new National Museum; and serving as the Associate Director of the Boston Architectural College University Partnership to establish a new curriculum in cultural heritage preservation at the National College of Arts in Rawalpindi, Pakistan.
More recent projects include: major architectural conservation work on an important 11th century Islamic masonry mausoleum in Kyrgyzstan; conservation assessments of historic buildings and archaeological sites in Uzbekistan; leading training programs in conservation at a historic American cemetery and in heritage site preservation and management at an archaeological site in Uzbekistan; conservation assessments for museum collections, museum buildings, and environmental systems in the U.S., including 17th, 18th and 19th century museum buildings of the Plymouth Antiquarian Society, the early 20th century Annmary Brown Memorial Museum at Brown University, and the late 20th century Davis Art Museum at Wellesley College; the preparation of conservation specifications, including custom historic lime mortar, for the reassembly of a historic, brick, industrial building for the State of Florida; and the deinstallation of ancient Egyptian and Roman stone monuments at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and their preparation for storage and future re-installation. He has served on boards, including the Gloucester Historic District Commission and the Peabody Essex Museum. He has taught architecture conservation to graduate preservation students at Boston University and archaeology to undergraduate design students at the Boston Architectural College. He has lectured and published widely about cultural heritage preservation and architecture conservation.