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University of Hawai'i |
(808) 956-8856 Telephone |
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Month July 10, 1997 |
| Contact: Donnë Florence, PIO,
808-956-7522 Sarita MacLeod, Director, Study Abroad, 808-956-4738 |
Headed For Phnom Penh, University Of Hawai'i Historic Preservation Field School Changes Course
The University of Hawai'i's 1997 summer field school in historic preservation is taking place now in Bangkok, Thailand, not in Phnom Penh, as Director William Chapman and his students expected when they left Honolulu last week. Chapman and eight graduate students registered for this summer's field school were in Bangkok for several days' worth of meetings and visits to historically significant Thai structures when political violence in Cambodia caused the shutdown of Phnom Penh's airport on Friday. The field school participants had been scheduled to travel on to Phnom Penh today to study vernacular architecture in Cambodia's capital city and to assist local experts with their efforts to preserve culturally significant sites in Phnom Penh. As hostilities escalated and Phnom Penh remained inaccessible, Chapman began looking for alternative preservation studies in Thailand and working with Sarita MacLeod, director of the UH Manoa Study Abroad Center, to ensure that the students would have the learning opportunity they had already traveled so far to get. Chapman was assisted in his efforts to revise the field school course work "on the fly" by his own network of preservationist colleagues throughout Southeast Asia. Many of them were in Honolulu in March for a conference on preserving, conserving and managing Southeast Asian heritage sites. That conference was co-sponsored by the UH Historic Preservation Program, the UH Center for Southeast Asian Studies and the East-West Center. The UH Historic Preservation Program, in the Department of American Studies, conducts field schools each summer for aspiring preservationists. Field school participants receive training in documentation and recording techniques, including architectural description, drafting, measured drawings and photography, as well as preservation issues, strategies and techniques, historic building materials and conservation survey methods. Last year's field studies took place in Kaimuki (a Honolulu neighborhood) and Phnom Penh. Kalaupapa National Historic Park, the Moloka'i compound where 19th-century vicitims of Hansen's Disease were isolated and cared for by the celebrated Catholic priest, Father Damien, was the site of this summer's first field school. Chapman and this summer's second field school will remain in Bangkok through July 20. |
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