Andrew Scott Dolkart, 56, an unmistakable presence in the landmarks movement for many years (it’s hard blending into the woodwork with so much nervous energy and a head full of red hair), has been named director of the historic preservation program in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University.

Mr. Dolkart, who is the James Marston Fitch associate professor of historic preservation at the school, succeeds Paul Spencer Byard, who died in July.

Though he lives farther uptown, in the Fort Washington neighborhood, Mr. Dolkart is closely associated with Morningside Heights. Ten years ago, he wrote “Morningside Heights: A History of Its Architecture and Development,” published by Columbia University Press. In the Streetscapes column in The New York Times, Christopher Gray wrote that Mr. Dolkart “combines recondite research with bare-knuckle history, interweaving the nuts and bolts of neighborhood-building with a messy human drama of rivalry, greed, marketing, bigotry — and idealism.”

In his first words as the new director of the Columbia program, Mr. Dolkart made it plain in an e-mail salutation that he did not want preservation to be understood as stagnation.

“I love buildings!” he wrote. “Yes, I love old buildings, but I also love buildings of the recent past, and I love good contemporary architecture as well. I believe that the most dynamic places in America and in the world are those that combine an appreciation of the old with contemporary ideas. It is this juxtaposition that makes cities dynamic.”