Five Minutes with Nick Kalogeresis
We sat down with Associate Principal Nick Kalogeresis to learn more about his passion for historic preservation planning.
What ignited your passion for historic preservation planning?
When I was in graduate school, I took a preservation planning class taught by a protégé of Lachlan F. Blair, who was a long-time professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and widely known as the author of the College Hill Study: A Demonstration Study of Historic Area Renewal, a revitalization plan created in 1959 for a neighborhood adjacent to Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Nationally, many consider the College Hill Study as the first preservation plan in the country – a “landmark plan” that offered an alternative to the widespread urban clearance and neighborhood erasure efforts happening in American cities at the time. I was inspired by the class and having studied urban and architectural history as an undergraduate, it motivated me to pursue a career in planning. I wanted to be the next Lachlan Blair and write that next landmark plan.
What experiences have shaped your approach to planning?
I started my career in urban planning and historic preservation in a small downstate town in Illinois as the executive director of a start-up Main Street revitalization organization. It was there that I learned the “in the trenches” work of historic preservation – saving and reusing buildings to catalyze community regeneration. But I learned more than just firsthand preservation work. Most importantly, I gained valuable experience collaborating with people on building consensus and community involvement in grassroots revitalization efforts. From there, I have worked as a consulting planner in both the private and non-profit sectors providing me with opportunities to travel and work in many different places across the country, from small rural communities to large cities. Travel and work have helped me understand best practices in preservation planning as a means of sustaining the quality and vitality of place. Mostly, I have learned not to underestimate communities. Even the most economically challenged ones have found ways to preserve and enhance the places that matter to them.
How does historic preservation contribute to the quality and vitality of place?
Even though preservation planning is a passion of mine, I have worked on arts and culture plans, comprehensive plans, downtowns, and corridors, and almost everything in between. I was encouraged by my preservation planning professor to do other types of planning to gain broader perspectives on the different issues communities often face when making planning decisions. This has helped me become better at providing solutions to the types and degrees of change a community needs for a vibrant future and the roles historic preservation can serve in that future.
Nick Kalogeresis, AICP is an Associate Principal and Urban Planner in MKSK’s Chicago Studio. Over his 30-year career in urban planning and historic preservation, Nick has worked throughout the country on assignments ranging from downtown and comprehensive plans to small and large-scale preservation planning assignments. In 2010, he wrote the historic preservation plan for San Antonio, Texas, and has worked on projects that garnered two Daniel Burnham Awards for Outstanding Comprehensive Plans by the Illinois Chapter of the American Planning Association. Nick has taught preservation planning at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the School of the Art Institute at Chicago.