When Rye resident Jorge Otero-Pailos drives down the Boston Post Road, it’s not lost on him that he’s traveling our country’s first major highway. He thinks about the shared history of the spaces like the Jay Heritage Center, the Square House, and the Knapp House, which were once inhabited by our founding fathers and mothers.
For Otero-Pailos, an artist and architectural preservationist, looking into this “built environment” is key to understanding who we are and where we’ve come from. One of the ways to learn about ourselves, said Otero-Pailos, “is by going to the places that the community agrees to share. And many of the things they hold in com- mon are historic places.”
Otero-Pailos has made it his life’s work to understand cultures and communities through the historic spaces that reflect and connect them. It’s a pursuit he explores through art, education, scholarship, and architectural preservation practices.
He co-founded Otero-Pailos Studio with his partner and wife, Laurence Lafforgue, to produce and exhibit art that expands the range of objects that are valued as cultural heritage.
He is director and professor of Historic Preservation at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation and also directs the Columbia Preservation Technology Lab. His art has been commissioned by and exhibited at major heritage sites, museums, foundations, and biennials, and he is the recipient of a 2021-22 American Academy in Rome Residency in the visual arts.
More recently, he has received ArtsWestchester’s Award for his pioneering preservation practices and his body of work. “Mr. Otero-Pailos is an internationally recognized and sought-out artist and scholar who has made lasting contributions to Westchester’s cultural community,” said Kathleen Reckling, ArtsWestchester COO. Otero-Pailos and other Westchester artists and arts organizations were to be hon- ored on April 10 at Brae Burn Country Club in Purchase.
For Otero-Pailos, preserving the past goes hand-in-hand with taking a deliberate look at what a society wants the future to hold. “If you go to Egypt, they’re going to tell you, we cannot imagine Egypt without the pyramids for the foreseeable future,” he said. “We want our children’s children to have those pyramids there.”
While Rye may not be home to architectural marvels like the pyramids, Otero-Pailos points out that the town’s identity is shaped by its own noteworthy history. “In a very small space, we have some of the most important historic places in Westchester — the Jay Heritage Center, The Knapp and Square houses, the Post Road, the waterfront,” he said. It is this wealth of historic resources that defines the character of the town and the place.
This history, along with its many other attributes, convinced Otero-Pailos to put down roots in Rye. He, his wife Laurence Lafforgue, and their children moved from Manhattan’s Upper West Side to a rental home in Rye in 2017. The plan was to live here for a year to see if it was a good fit. It didn’t take long to realize it was. Says Otero- Pailos, “We were just blown away by the amazing community and the friends we made right away.”
In addition to Rye’s academic, arts, and sports offerings, Otero-Pailos was struck by the community’s deep sense of altruism. “Most people in Rye have commitments outside of themselves,” he said. “They are committed to the greater good in one way or another.”
It’s a commitment that he says has a direct effect on the historical character of the town. “All of that we have because people that came before us made a conscious choice to preserve those places so that future generations could benefit.”
Otero-Pailos lives his passion for preservation daily. His family lives in a 1930s Tudor home in Rye that he and his wife renovated. A crucial part of their plan was to preserve what was historically significant about it.
As a trustee of the Jay Heritage Center, he is part of the stewardship of Rye’s 23-acre Jay Estate, the former home of founding father, John Jay. Through a summer fellowship program that he helped establish, Columbia University preservation students lend their energy and expertise to conservation projects and the restoration and adaptation of some of the buildings.
“My interest is in helping to preserve existing things that are really important to our shared humanity,” he said. And he looks to do so in unconventional ways, with his work as an artist fueling that process.
“It is a process of discovery,” he said. “It’s a method for discovering things that you didn’t really anticipate you were going to find, and being alert to the fact that something just came up.”
His 2021 experimental preservation art project, “Watershed Moment,” is a site-specific installation in the historic pool building of Lyndhurst Mansion in Tarrytown. It combines water sounds and 67-foot glowing latex casts of the interior brick walls into an ethereal meditative space.
Most recently, his public arts exhibition, “Analogue Sites,” was unveiled on April 2 along Park Avenue in New York City. It features three monumental steel sculptures made from fencing that once surrounded the former U.S. Embassy in Oslo, Norway.
This intersection of art and preservation was born from Otero-Pailos’ involvement in restoring the landmark Eero Saarinen-designed embassy after it was sold by the U.S. State Department. For security purposes, a number of U.S. embassies are being relo- cated to the outskirts of cities.
“I was fortunate to be part of the team that won a competition to preserve that embassy and to transform it into the headquarters of a real estate development company,” Otero-Pailos said. Also headquartered in the building is the Norwegian branch of Amnesty International.
The restoration included the removal of a steel security fence that had been installed after the Sept. 11 attacks. The fence was destined to be thrown away, but the artist and preservationist had a different plan.
With the help of a tractor, he shaped and modified portions of the fence at the former embassy site. They were then transported to an Oslo warehouse where he welded and transformed them into three massive sculptures that stand almost 10 feet tall.
Otero-Pailos fashioned the fence’s once straight lines into swirling, flowing shapes. “Each sculpture tells a story of transformation as the individual lines within them turn toward each other, creating a dynamic, open and airy collective form,” he said.
It’s a form that holds personal meaning for the Madrid-born artist. “The individual paths of countless immigrants like me began at a U.S. Embassy and our lives were intertwined and transformed as we became part of the open-ended, collective American story.”
Now on view in Manhattan until Oct. 3, each sculpture has been placed outside New York landmarks: the modernist Seagram Building and Lever House and the historic Park Avenue Armory. In offering the sculptures for public view, Otero-Pailos’ desire is to bring to the fore the role of modern American architecture in cultural diplomacy and the importance of preserving the roughly 20 U.S. embassies that are in the process of being decommissioned.
“We have an incredible treasure, a network of U.S. embassies that were built during the Cold War that are unlike anything else out there, and very few people know about them,” he said. The embassies, he noted, were open to the public and thou- sands of citizens had access to their libraries, art galleries, and theaters. “These were places where America put its best foot forward and welcomed the world in an engagement, in a cross-cultural dialogue.”
His dream is for those embassies to continue playing that vital role through private-public partnerships and hold events like traveling museum exhibits and performances, Fulbright and Peace Corp programs, and international programs for universities.
The artist and architectural preservationist said it sometimes comes as a surprise to people to hear that preserving the past is a way to look into the future. Historical buildings, along with the land and water that surround us, bring to the fore our relationships with one another. They show us where we came from, guide us to learn from that shared history, and illuminate ways to bring those lessons into the future.
For Otero-Pailos, the care and stewardship of our historical places ensures that can happen.
