This presentation explores the enduring presence and living traditions of the Lenape people, emphasizing the deep cultural connections that have withstood centuries of displacement, disruption, and change. Highlighting stories of survival, adaptation, and revitalization, it traces the continuity of Lenape language, ceremonies, values, and community ties from ancestral homelands in the East to present-day Lenape communities across the United States and Canada. Through historical insight, contemporary initiatives, and personal narratives, Lenape: Cultural Continuity and Connection invites audiences to understand the ways in which Lenape culture remains vibrant, resilient, and rooted in connection—to land, to ancestors, and to future generations.

Q&A and light refreshments to follow. 

The preservation movement has done more to determine the shape of American cities than nearly anything else in the last half century. But it is increasingly contributing to a crippling inertia, focusing too narrowly on bricks and mortar, divorcing itself from a broad public that has other priorities and needs–other things it wishes to preserve. Can we save what matters most in the service of progress? 

The architecture critic for The New York Times, Michael Kimmelman is the author, most recently, of “The Intimate City,” founder and editor-at-large of Headway, a philanthropically supported initiative at the Times focused on global challenges and paths toward progress, and he teaches in Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. 

Q&A and light refreshments to follow. 

We have more than enough buildings. Instead of wasting natural resources we cannot replenish and polluting our environment even further with new construction, we should reuse, rethink, and reimagine what we already have. We should do such in a manner that opens up existing structures for all of us and allows us to understand where we have come from, where we are, and where we might be going: buildings should be repurposed so that they are sustainable and open, and reveal the history embedded in their materials, spaces, and structure. This lecture will show how new forms of reuse are continuing and opening up the traditions of preservation, rehabilitation, and adaptive reuse and will show what might be possible without building new structures.

Aaron Betsky is a critic and teacher living in Philadelphia. He is a Visiting Professor at the Michael Graves School of Public Architecture at Kean University and at the University of Pennsylvania. Previously, he was Professor and Director of the School of Architecture and Design at Virginia Tech and, prior to that, President of the School of Architecture at Taliesin. A critic of art, architecture, and design, Mr. Betsky is the author of over twenty books on those subjects. He writes a weekly blog, Beyond Buildings, for architectmagazine.com. His latest books are Assembling Community (2025), The Monster Leviathan (2024), Don’t Build, Rebuild: The Case for Imaginative Reuse (2024), Fifty Lessons from Frank Lloyd Wright (2021), Making It Modern (2019) and Architecture Matters (2019).

Q&A and light refreshments to follow. 

In the 2000s and 2010s, Hyman Myers and Bruce Laverty began to record oral history interviews with senior design professionals who lived or worked in the Greater Philadelphia region. Myers was then nearing retirement from the VITETTA Group and UPenn’s Architecture Department. Laverty was the Gladys Brooks Curator of Architecture at The Athenaeum of Philadelphia. Many of their interview subjects were of international renown and made an indelible mark on the region’s built environment. Others were influential specialists in fields such as lighting and interior design, structural engineering and landscape architecture. Together, the interviews provide remarkable insight on what it has meant to live and work as a building and design professional in twentieth-century Philadelphia. Thanks to a grant from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s Historical & Archival Records Care program that the Athenaeum received in 2025, a team led by Kristina Wilson and Kevin Block has started to process the Keystones oral history collection and prepare for the collection’s development. In this talk, Wilson and Block will describe the archiving process, the relationship between architectural and oral history, and provide a preview of what researchers might learn from the collection in the future.

Kristina Wilson is the Gladys Brooks Curator of Architecture at The Athenaeum of Philadelphia. Kevin Block is historian of the built environment and a historic preservation professional.

Q&A and light refreshments to follow.