Michael R. Allen

Dr. Allen’s research centers on two major areas: the social function of built heritage conservation (historic preservation) and site commemoration, and the production, propagation and contestation of the political meanings embodied by architecture and landscapes. His involvement in the heritage field has built off of nearly two decades of advocacy, professional cultural resources management practice and museum curation. He was the founder and director of the Preservation Research Office, a consultancy that conducted preservation projects for a variety of built forms in 14 US states between 2009 and 2022. From 2022 through 2024, Allen was the inaugural executive director of the National Building Arts Center near St. Louis, Missouri, where he professionalized operations of a nascent museum project and curated its first major exhibition, "Urban Archaeology: Lost Buildings of St. Louis."

Allen’s work investigating histories of architecture and landscapes centers on the built environment’s encoding of political meanings and ideological symbolism, and how that encoding can be produced, altered or contested. His projects have ranged from studying racial segregation as a factor in urban park and residential subdivision design in St. Louis to ironic commentaries on capitalism embedded in postmodern corporate architecture. He continues to work on a long project engaging the development of the physical form of St. Louis through its rise, decline and current subtractive gentrification, in which the ordinary aspects of place (street closures, maintenance of trees in parks) attest to micropolitical forms of racial and social control.

With a special interest in architectural modernism as potentially liberatory movement, Allen has developed a set of current book projects around modernist mass housing and its historic and contemporary meanings. His dissertation research is shaping the book manuscript "Dissonant Modernism: Mass Housing as Architectural Heritage in the US," where he explores both implicit biases in heritage and architectural historic practices as well as the urgent struggles against gentrification and displacement of residents at sites in St. Louis and New York City. The aim of the research is to explore whether dissonant expert and resident value of place can ever be reconciled so that struggles for conserving architectural forms and affordable housing can align. Allen’s related project is "Housing Blocs: Ordinary Modernism Across the Atlantic," developed with Dr. Vladana Putnik Prica of the University of Belgrade. Funded through the Mellon Foundation’s Divided City Initiative at Washington University in St. Louis, "Housing Blocs" brought together scholars from the US and postsocialist Europe to map similarities and differences in the historic development, heritagization, erasure and gentrification of mass housing across divergent political economies. An edited volume is forthcoming.