Preservation Chicago is thrilled to announce Max Chavez as Director of Research and Special Projects. Max recently completed a six-month National Trust for Historic Preservation  Mildred Colodny Diversity internship  at Preservation Chicago. We are excited to continue to work with Max who has enthusiastically jumped into a wide number of challenging and interesting Chicago preservation projects.

Originally from Los Angeles, Max is a recent graduate of New York University in London’s Historical & Sustainable Architecture graduate program. He is committed to the preservation of underrepresented heritages, most specifically those of the LGBTQ+ and Latinx communities. In addition to his interests in social and community issues, Max is also a self-avowed enthusiast of architectural history and is very excited to be in a new city full of beautiful sites to explore.

Max was drawn to preservation as a way to tell more diverse stories about our cities and the people that live in them. His graduate thesis, which won NYU in London’s Gavin Stamp Memorial Award for Outstanding Thesis, focused on managing and reusing sites of what Max termed burdened architecture: contentious sites marked by historical traumas and injustices.

We applaud the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s commitment to supporting the next generation of talented, diverse preservationists by providing them the opportunity for direct, hands-on advocacy experience in the field. Additionally, these bright and enthusiastic emerging preservationists bring valuable additional capacity to local preservation organizations working on the front-lines of preservation efforts. We consider this local/national partnership to be a best practice and are hopeful that this model that can be replicated in the future.