John Stubbs

Emeritus Professor of Preservation Studies

From 2011 until 2022 John H. Stubbs was Senior Professor of Practice holding both the Favro and Christovich Professorships in the Tulane School of Architecture. He taught five courses in the Master of Preservation Studies Program and served as Director of the MPS program from 2011 until 2019.

From 1990 until 2011, John Stubbs served as Vice President for Field Projects at the World Monuments Fund in New York where he directed scores of the organization’s projects across the world. His key field projects at WMF included management of the organization’s conservation initiatives at Pompeii, Angkor in Cambodia, the Royal Monastery of Guadalupe in Extremadura Spain, the Tower of Belem in Lisbon, the Liechtenstein Estates of Valtice and Lednice in the Czech Republic, the Temple Synagogue in Krakow, Poland, the Brancusi Endless Column Ensemble in Romania, and St. Ann and the Holy Trinity Church in Brooklyn, NY. He conducted over two dozen international planning symposia and charettes and was instrumental in establishing WMF’s influential Watch List of Endangered Sites program.

In 1978, John Stubbs worked for two years as a Historical Architectural Specialist for the Technical Preservation Services Division of the U.S. Department of the Interior in Washington, D.C. administering federal tax incentives for rehabilitating historic buildings. From 1979-1990 he was Assistant Director of Historic Preservation Projects at Beyer Blinder Belle, Architects & Planners in New York City and worked on the firm’s principal preservation projects including the South Street Seaport, Ellis Island and Grand Central Station.

Beginning in 1989, John Stubbs served for twenty years as an Adjunct Associate Professor of Historic Preservation in Columbia University’s Graduate School in Architecture, Planning & Preservation. He has also taught courses in preservation the schools of architecture at both the University of Pennsylvania and at Louisiana State University.

John Stubbs holds a Bachelor of Science in Construction Technology with a minor in architectural history from LSU. He earned a Master of Science in Historic Preservation from Columbia University in 1974 and attained post-graduate training as a UNESCO Fellow at the International Centre for the Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM) in Rome.

He is a founding board member of the James Marston Fitch Charitable Foundation which he chaired from 2008 until 2012. While at Tulane he served as a Trustee and Chair of the. Preservation Committees of the Archeological Institute of America for five years and the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation for four years.

John H. Stubbs has lectured and published extensively. His first book Time Honored; A Global View of Architectural Conservation; Parameters, Theory and Evolution of an Ethos was published in 2009. It was followed by a sequel in 2011, co-authored by Emily G. Makas, entitled Architectural Conservation in Europe and The Americas; National Experiences and Practice. A third volume Architectural Conservation in Asia; National Experiences and Practice, co-authored by Robert G. Thomson, was published in 2016. Volume IV in the series, Architectural Conservation in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands; National Experiences and Practice, co-authored with William Chapman, Julia Gatley and Ross King, was published in 2023. www.conservebuiltworld.com

A native of Louisiana, John Stubbs’s field experiences in architectural heritage conservation began in the 1970’s working as a surveyor and illustrator on archeological excavations in Italy and Egypt.