Grethe Pontoppidan is trained as an architect m.a.a. with a post graduate Nordic Masters degree in Architectural Heritage. She runs her own private heritage consultant firm specializing in 20th Century built heritage. Her projects include large inventories, assessment reports and conservations strategies of modern urban areas as well as single monuments. Grethe chairs an advisory board for a Danish heritage NGO, is an appointed censor at Royal Danish Academy architecture school, and she was invited member of the editorial group for the new Danish framework for listing of the welfare states. She has been the driving force behind the listing of significant Danish 20th Century sites and in raising national awareness about such issues as historic concrete and modern one-family-houses as heritage.

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As a Vice President to the ISC20C bureau, Grethe is engaged in coordination of the Education Initiatives together with Susan MacDonald. Additionally, she will be working on the dissemination of the Historic Thematic Framework and on building up a Climate Change discourse within ISC20C. Grethe has been a member of ISC20C since 2017 and since then actively involved in the ICOMOS Heritage Alert for the Viking Ship Hall and the INNOVA CONCRETE working group and responsible for running up the INNOVA CONCRETE international launch event in the hall in 2019.

Grethe graduated from the Royal Academy of Architecture and has been working 20 years as a practicing architect, form 2014 focusing on modern heritage and taking a postgraduate Master in Architectural Heritage (NORDMAK) from the Aarhus School of Architecture in 2018.

Her approach to heritage is based on the understanding of conservation as a democratic, sustainable, and interdisciplinary management of change that combines a broad, often unconventional toolbox ranging from research, assessment of heritage sites, strategic planning based on cultural significance to civil and NGO engagement and dissemination initiatives. She has raised new public debates on modern heritage in Denmark, including about the Viking Ship Hall, historic concrete and its conservation, and standardized single-family housing from the 1960s.