Oct 15, 2024
by
Gary Miles for the Philadephia Inquirer
“He felt strongly that society owes it to our ancestors to treat heritage respectfully,” his family said in a tribute.
Aaron Wunsch, 53, of Philadelphia, award-winning architectural historian and preservationist, and associate professor in the graduate program of the Department of Historic Preservation at the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design, died Friday, Sept. 20, of gastric cancer, at his home in Germantown.
An expert on landscape architecture and the documentation of historic architecture, Professor Wunsch made detailed on-site inspections and took deep dives into public and private archives of all kinds to establish the nature and value of old structures. His family called it a “fierce, tireless, and nimble advocacy for historic sites,” and he teamed with other preservationists to document the histories of hundreds of places and sometimes battle developers and others who sought their destruction.
He worked with energy and urgency, he told The Inquirer in 1998, because “the great American industries of the 20th century are fast disappearing. Buildings are being knocked down all the time.”
He focused much of his attention on abandoned industrial buildings, old cemeteries, Quaker meeting houses, unique rowhouses in South Philadelphia, and churches all over the city. He was quoted in The Inquirer and other publications about his scrutiny of the Church of the Atonement and Woodlands cemetery in West Philadelphia, the 19th Street Baptist Church in Point Breeze, and dozens of other places in Southeastern Pennsylvania and Virginia.
Aaron Vickers Wunsch was born Dec. 22, 1970, in Cambridge, Mass. He earned a bachelor’s degree in history at Haverford College in 1992, master’s degree in architectural history and certificate in historic preservation at the University of Virginia in 1996, and doctorate in architectural history at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2009
Read the full obituary including photographs, and links to his work here.
Aaron Wunsch joined SAH in 1997. He presented a paper at the SAH 76th Annual Conference in Montreal, and served on the Downing Book Award Committee in 2015.
