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The Preservation Technology Podcast

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Preservation Technology Podcast

Welcome to the Preservation Technology podcast, the show that brings you the people and projects that are bringing innovation to preservation.

Episodes

22. Folk Art Conservation and the Rock Garden in Chandigarh, India (Episode 22)

Transcript

Church: I have a couple of questions for you, Tony. I know you have quite the reputation out in the profession of the conservation of folk art. And the thing I wanted to ask you today while I got you captive is how did you get into folk art? What started your interest in conservation, but particularly the conservation of folk art?

Rajer: Well, I was born and raised in rural Wisconsin, and our neighbor was a folk artist. That is, he was a self-taught visionary artist who build concrete sculpture in his yard and carved wooden sculpture for the interior of their logged cabin, which was next to our house. He also happened to attend the same church as I did, and he was also in rosary club with my parents. So, I knew Mr. Talen as a child and was exposed to people making things and making art. My family, who also came from that kind of background, were my grandfather was a furniture maker.

Church: Now Mr. Talen, other than his own folk art there for himself, did he ever sell of has his work ever gotten out?

Rajer: He never sold his work. He only made it for the community. He’d make it for church members, and you could go to him and specifically asking for a work of art that he made and he would accommodate people and make pieces for the congregation. But apart from that, not really.

Now as an young adult, I was exposed to more examples of folk are with my travels along the United States. And in college, by chance, I took a course on popular American culture, and then I was exposed to this broader vision of what visionary art is, art environments like what Mr. Talen lived in, as well as people decorating the interiors of their homes.

Church: As a conservation professional, as a conservator, what made you decide that’s what you wanted to work on?

Rajer: One of my specialties is dealing with folk art and helping to preserve folk art, and you know Jason, I made that decision to have a focal point with folk art because I had met so many folk artists also in my own travels and in my own interest in popular American culture. And I knew that this was not only unique to the United States, it’s found in other countries also, but what was unique was this relationship of meeting the artist in their home environment and the sense of humility so many of them exhibit because the vast majority of them are self-taught artists, but have this compulsion or this desire to embellish their environment.

Church: Recently you’ve been doing a lot of work with the Nek Chand Foundation in India. Could you tell us a little bit about that?

Rajer: Nek Chand is a self-taught artist. He was a road inspector, and he began building a part in Chandigarh, India, that’s at the foothills of the Himalayas. Back in the 1950s it was unfortunately on government land, the government eventually discovered it, and the government bureaucrat decided to let it be open as a public park. And since then, the garden has grown to 25 acres, we’ve got over 3,000 pieces of sculpture, and I help to coordinate Americans who wish to spend one month residences living in the rock garden and making art with Mr. Nek Chand in his art garden. And our foundation is based in London, and I am the US representative for that foundation. And I have recently just returned from India where we have placed six foreigners from three different countries for a period of two months making mosaic art all out of recycled materials.

Church: So if you wanted to find more about this artist and residence program, where would you get information about that?

Rajer: NekChand.org, and Nek Chand is spelled: N-E-K C-H-A-N-D, dot org. And you will see our website as well as our various programs for promoting the completion of the rock garden, the preservation of the rock garden and the dissemination of the rock garden in Chandigarh, India.

Church: So Mr. Chand is still actively an artist himself?

Rajer: Yes. He’s at the garden everyday.

Church: I know he started in the 50s, what is his age now?

Rajer: He is 85, and he is active. He goes to the garden everyday. He supervises the work. He no longer makes the sculptures, but he has people trained under him who not only make the sculptures but maintain the garden and are involved in preservation and operation of the water fountains, the waterfalls, etc.

Church: Now you didn’t mention the completion of the garden. Is there a vision for the end of the work?

Rajer: There is a vision for the end, Jason, and it has to do with Mr. Nek Chand’s desire to not only finish the last of the building, there are only a few more left to be finished, but his general overall plan. He doesn’t work with specific details, but he has conveyed his vision to his immediate staff, and they have an idea of what he wants to see accomplished not only in his lifetime, but after he’s gone. And basically, the Nek Chand foundation supports the idea that after Mr. Nek Chand is gone from the garden, that it would go into a preservation mode of maintaining the garden, that is the sculptures etc, and also holding onto this vision that he had.

Church: Now you mentioned before that he is originally a road inspector, so we know that he is not an originally trained artist. What gave him that vision? What made him start building this environment?

Rajer: We know that as a child, in the period, in the British period of India, that he made sculptures out of sand along the river banks in that part of the Punjab that he lived. And he began by collecting oddly shaped rocks that he felt had a spirit and setting them up on little Earthen terraces that he encountered. And later, as a road inspector it was his job to supervise the crew to collect river rocks, to smash them and to turn them into gravel. And he found that some of the rocks had a particular quality to them, an ascetic quality, so he refused to smash them into gravel, and he began setting them up on these terraces and that eventually turned into and evolved into the Rock Garden where we have over 3,000 visitors a day. And by the way, because the Rock Garden is a self-contained park under the Chandigarh administration, the admission is 10 cents per person. It’s an income generator, and with that money that comes into the garden, we actually have enough money to maintain the garden and to bring it to fruition.

Church: Now one thing that you and I have talked about before. I know you as a conservator go there as a professional, you have the artist in residence, Mr. Chand is working there, but you also hire locals to do both the construction and the preservation.

Rajer: Exactly. And they are hired, we have a permanent staff of approximately 10 cleaners that maintain the garden, pick up the leaves of the garden, etc. And then on a craftural (8:04) basis, we have another 10 workers that make the sculptures and who help in the development of the garden.

Church: The people that do the cleaning and the construction, they are trained there on site by Mr. Chand?

Rajer: Right. They are trained onsite by Mr. Chand and his overseers, and will help us with the pick up of the recyclable materials along the city of Chandigarh. That is the broken plates from hotels, restaurants, etc.; rags, which are recycled into soft sculptures made into the garden, and the other various projects that he’s got going. For example, there is a small nursery there for growing plants, etc. None of it is for sale, but it can be loaned out for exhibition.

Church: Now this is the first time I have heard about the soft sculptures. Are they out in the environment along with the concrete sculptures?

Rajer: No. The soft sculptures, that is the rag sculptures, they are kept indoors either under a canopy or actually in a structure because otherwise they would rot.

Church: Well, very good. What do we think the overall time frame for completion is?

Rajer: We are probably looking at within the next five years. The new art museum is well underway, and that will be finished within the next 12 months. Then it will have to be decorated. And then the next phase of phase three, that is the terrace of the horse and the terrace of the camels, that’s nearly finished. So, this huge 25-acre park, which has a boundary wall around it, will be set and open to the public–all of it–and the fortunate thing for the foreigners, like myself, Mr. Nek Chand has built guest quarters within the garden where we can stay as part of our work-project making the mosaics with his laborers.

Church: So you can find out more information on the website that you mentioned early on NekChand.org, and photographs of the completion as it comes around and photographs of the project. Once that wraps up, what do you think you will be working on next.

Rajer: Well, I will continue to work with Nek Chand foundation, and as I said early, we will go into a preservation mode. So we will work on the documents needed for the preservation to keep up this vision and this dream that was Mr. Nek Chand’s in recycling way back in the 50s before there was even a word for it.

Church: So he is really an innovator of recycling and sustainability.

Rajer: Oh most definitely Jason.

Church: Very good. Well thank you for talking with us today Mr. Rajer, and we look forward to keep up with you and hear how the foundation is going and how the rock garden is going.

Rajer: Please come and visit us in Chandigarh, India. Thank you.

Jason Church speaks with Tony Rajer. He is an Art Conservator with the Nek Chand Foundation and a conservation professor at the University of Wisconsin. Today they will discuss Rajer’s interest in folk art and his work with the Rock Garden in Chandigarh, India.

23. NCPTT Interns Talk About Their Summer Research (Episode 23)

Transcript

Muto: Hello, my name is Anna Muto, and I’m a recent graduate from the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va. This summer I’m an intern for the materials research program at the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. My particular research focuses on rust converters.

So, what happens is a rust converter is a product often based in tannic acid or phosphoric acid. And it reacts with the iron-oxide in rust, and together they make a whole new layer that is extremely protective and helps to prevent future corrosion on any objects. This project is particularly applicable in conservation, as there are so many different historic items and cultural items that we need to protect from rust and from corrosive damage.

During this project, I’m hoping to get a little bit more of an understanding of what it’s like to really work in a conservation lab. So far I’ve really enjoyed the chances that I’m getting to work with different instruments, with different chemical concepts and apply all of these to one simple problem in the bigger world of conservation. I’m also hoping to be able to contribute something in the long run to the work that NCPTT is doing for their particular projects, but also that apply to so many other projects in different firms and across the country.

So to accomplish these goals of my research project, we’re doing a couple different things. The three main parts are: We have these wonderful samples of rusty metal, and what we’re first doing is we’re documenting the metal through each of these different steps. So we do a lot of photography, we’re also doing some chemical documentation with laser profiling so we can get a nice map of the surface as well as using a Fourier Transform Infrared Spectrometer, which is a fancy way of saying we “zap” it get a reading and from the reading it should tell us what the primary chemicals are.

So we use these to document what is happening in the object, but then we also do a couple other tests. Tests for color, gloss, that again help us establish a base line for what is going on after we treat the objects. Once we put this rust converter on top and have the rust react with the tannic acid or the phosphoric acid. And so once we’ve done that, then we stick it in an instrument called a QUV weatherometer, which is a fancy way of saying something that artificially weathers an object. So instead of putting the metal outside for seven months, instead we’re going to put it in the QUV where its exposed alternately to UV light and then to a dark condensation cycle simulating what happens outside.

So we’re hoping that with our samples in the QUV, we’ll be able to chart how well these converters work over a long period of time. So we want to know, first of all, which one initially causes the most change to the rust, but then we also want to know which one is going to hold up the best over this whole period of time. So we’re hoping that the testing in the QUV will help us chart that. And we have, the samples going in for a total of 8,000 hours, which sounds like a lot.

But what’s going to happen actually is at different points we’re going to pull them out and run these documentation studies again. Simple things like, making a measurement of the color and the gloss, but then also using the FTIR and the laser profiling system, and we’re hoping using these methods to be able to actually chart the rate of failure or the rate of success for each of the five different converters that we’re studying.

This actually is a follow up of a study done by the Canadian Conservation Institute, way back in 1988, and at this point all of the converters that they studied aren’t commercially available. So you cant go to your local hardware store and pick up any of these. So we’re trying to update it. We have some more advanced analytical techniques that we can use, but then we also have rust converters that you can go and pick up at Lowe’s or at Home Hardware or where ever. So we’re trying to do a different variety, but also things that will be available not just for me in a lab but for someone who may have a local museum or own a historic home or just have a rusty chair that they want to fix up.

Oshida: Hi, my name is Caitlin Oshida, I’m from Fairfax, Va., and I graduated this past May from the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Va. This summer I’m going to be working with Dr. Mary Striegel and Debbie Smith on a project to determine the effects of herbicide on stone and masonry. So far we have conducted a survey that was sent out to all National Park Service facility managers and Integrated Pest Management facility managers and to collect data on what type of herbicide they use, how often they use it, the concentration they use, and some of the historic features that they have in their park or there site area that comes in contact with herbicide.

The survey just closed, and we got a number of results back, 98, which is very nice. So now I’m in the process of designing experimental design that will take the data that we have collected and make an experiment, so we can actually see if herbicide has any physical and chemical effects on different building material.

So far we know that we’re gonna use “Round-up“, about over 50 percent of the park services that we got responses from use Round-up. The second herbicide we’re going to use is Garlon 4. And we’re not sure if we’re going to use the third, but we would like to try to and see what different chemicals and their active ingredient is and what it can do to the building materials. The building materials we’ve decided to use are brick, concrete and limestone. We might do granite if we have time, but otherwise we’re just going to use those three.

My job this year is just to design the experiment and do preliminary research, this involves like small testing to see if we’ll actually get results. Hopefully, within the next year the experiment will be conducted by someone else, but unfortunately I will not be here for that. But I look forward to seeing if my design works and see what the results are. The information that we’ll collect from this experiment will help not only historic sites, but day-to-day people in your community to protect their homes or their buildings or their features from herbicide and to know what the chemical effect is. We know what the chemical effect of herbicide is on plants and ecological effects of that, but we’re unsure of the building materials. So this will help determine, if like, if they’re spraying herbicide near their house and their foundation. Whether the foundation is in danger of being destroyed or damaged, degraded in anyway.

So my next step in this is going to be to do preliminary testing, like I said before, and that involves submerging completely small samples, core samples of brick, limestone and concrete in Round-up completely to just make sure that we’re actually gonna get results and see some discoloration. This is going to be totally different from the actual experiment where it’s going to be more realistic. Its going to be a controlled spray every few hours as determined by my design plan.

Martin: Hi, I’m Kim Martin and I just graduated from Clemson University in South Carolina, and I just got here in Natchitoches. I’m working on the paint remover study. We gathered historic and modern bricks, and then we cored the bricks to make them into round samples so that they fit into all of our machines. The bricks were weighed and put under the colorimeter so that they got a number assigned to the exact color that they are. That way it’s more scientific when you go back and test again, you can tell the difference in the number.

A colorimeter is this machine that you sit on top of the brick, and it measures saturation and a bunch of other factors. And then it’s a computerized thing, and then it assigns you a number. So after all this initial information was gathered on the samples, some of the samples were painted others were left unpainted as controls. The samples have a couple of different layer categories so that you can tell if there’s more layers. This particular type of remover might work better for you if there’s less, maybe you can go with a less stringent one.

So right now the samples are in the QUV, it’s an artificial weathering machine. It puts them under ultraviolet light, it exposes them to condensation and heat and that process is just really so that we can weather the paint, so that you can see if a particular type of remover works better on weathered paint rather than new paint. New paint is often easier to remove than weathered paint, and then the goal I think of the study is just to see how different types of removers work on historic or modern brick. Because historic brick tends to be more porous. It’s softer. It’s not heated to the same type of level as a modern brick because of the technology at the time. So these different chemicals may leach in deeper, they might change the surface color or any of these things so we’re just trying to figure out what’s most appropriate.

Hopefully a person would walk away knowing what type of remover to use on their building, obviously you’ll have to asses whether you have historic or modern brick. But if you came in with that information you would know, this may be the most appropriate thing for you to use.

Nelson: Hi, I’m Stephanie Nelson and I’m the historic landscapes intern. My projects are based on maintaining historic landscapes. I completed my undergraduate degree at Washington University in St. Louis, where I studied Environmental Studies and Spanish. I finished my degree of Master of Landscape Architecture at Louisiana State University this past spring and found my love for historic landscapes there.

This summer I will be working to find training items that people can use to learn how to maintain their historic landscapes, whether it be maintenance workers or individual home owners. Natchitoches is blessed with a whole bunch of old houses and old yards and older plants have different care requirements than newer ones. So hopefully through the video that I’ll be creating and other resources that we’ll be making available, home owners in Natchitoches will have better ideas and better be able to care for and prolong the life of their plants.

So far this summer, I’ve been working with the National Park Service offices to work to develop a maintenance training curriculum that can be taken by maintenance workers at historic sites so they can learn how to better take care of their landscapes. I’ve also been looking for different documents or videos, websites, publications that speak of how to care for historic landscapes. So those are kind of few and far between, so this work is really important so that people can preserve and prolong the life of their older plants instead of having to replace new ones. Especially historic trees, if you get rid of a live oak, it really changes a place. So there is a lot that can be done to keep a tree healthy, so that it can live longer so we will be presenting some of that information.

I’ll be presenting a training video for landscape maintenance workers at Preservation in Your Community. We are working with maintenance staff at Cane River Creole National Heritage Area to address some of their concerns. When new maintenance workers come on who may be more familiar with working in modern landscapes, there are some challenges that are presented when switching to working on a historic property. Like you need to be more sensitive of where you’re mowing to make sure that you don’t knock into historic buildings or damage trees because the older materials are a little weaker and it’s easier to do damage. So it’ll present information to new workers in those landscapes to educate them about why maintaining a cultural resource, like Oakland Plantation, requires different scales than like maintaining a corporate campus. So our hope is to have people become a little bit more sensitive and more knowledgeable about why things are done differently, and why they should take a little bit more time, like with mowing lawns, to protect whats there and help us keep great resources, like Oakland Plantation, looking as they are and having that historic feel and character to them.

At NCPTT, I’m learning a lot about historic landscapes and cultural landscapes, I didn’t have any formal training in it, so its a great opportunity for me to learn more about this branch of resource protection within the National Park Service and outside of it as well. So I hope to bring my background in studies in Louisiana to NCPTT to help more with local resources also. The South has a lot of unique plants and characteristics that aren’t found in the rest of the country, and so I hope to be able to bring some of that knowledge into NCPTT’s research and materials, and then also within the whole National Park Service.

NCPTT summer interns discuss their summer research.

24. Green Restorations and the Sustainability Movement in Preservation (Episode 24)

Transcript

Guin: Aaron, welcome to the podcast.

Lubeck: Thanks for having me. I Appreciate it.

Guin: Now you write on your website that our buildings define us. What do you mean by that?

Lubeck: I was reading a book recently by Paul Goldberger, the New York Times architectural critic, called “Why Architecture Matters,” and it’s a great book. He has buried in the book a fantastic quote that says, “Architecture is the ultimate symbol of a culture even more so than its flag.”

We’re really bombarded with the primary symbol of American culture as our flag but when we think about it our architecture is obviously much deeper and is a better articulation of who we are and where we came from and where we’re going, for that matter. You can look at it in historical perspective that old houses, which tended to be much more individualistic, built by individuals for individuals, where people making the decisions on design were closer to the actual house- and usually the owner- than they are today, where there are a lot of split incentives and principal agent problems that kind of take that identity away from the architect.

And so for better or for worse our buildings define us. I think that the attraction to old homes is that most of them were built during a time of American ascendancy and American idealism, and course now if we think our buildings define us we have a lot of track homes that are large and centrally planned, where the design decisions are out of the hands of the end user that are not very customized, and they define us in a negative sense as well.

Guin: How did you first become involved in sustainability and the green preservation movement?

Lubeck: A long evolution. I grew up in a family in St. Louis of early adopters of recycling. I remember driving pretty far to find the one place to recycle in the 70’s. Oddly I grew up in probably half a dozen or so what we think of as historic houses, just old houses. I knew I loved them and could identify with them though I never really knew why. And I’m not sure I actually heard of historic preservation until I was about 28 years old, and it was a movement that finally articulated the value of these old homes and somewhat why I had identified with them growing up.

But it was also frustrating to see like obviously so many people had lived in these old homes and relate to them and love them, for someone like me to not have heard about it until I was 28 was almost concerning that there’s almost a PR failure of the movement to spread and articulate those values. That historic preservation is not a household name, it’s never on the front pages. I found it has real negative repercussions for the preservation movement to meet its ultimate goals.

Guin: Well and when it is in the news it’s a conflict or a protest more than a group trying to be proactive.

Lubeck: That is absolutely right and that is historically a reactionary movement, and that has been I think a challenge at least locally here in Durham, N.C., where I live, is that traditionally the troops get rallied whenever there is a building to save but then there’s a movement to try to switch the efforts of preservation to be proactive, to label neighborhoods historic so people can use the huge incentives of historic tax credits to spread cultural tourism and heritage and so forth as a much more positive and far reaching mechanism and vessel for historic preservation to accomplish its goals, but that’s been a difficult change because at least 4 or 5 decades this movement has been reactionary.

Guin: Absolutely, well let’s talk about sustainability, and that is a huge buzz term right now. And it seems like every field of endeavor, historic preservation and otherwise, is adopting sustainable principles. How does this apply to historic preservation?

Lubeck: You do see sustainability and green everywhere. In some ways we’re seeing green fatigue. Because everybody just everywhere you go you’re kind of blind sighted by “greenness.” There is confusion where most people when thinking about your house associate sustainability with energy efficiency and energy efficiency alone; and if you look at the core root of the word sustainability its really tied more to longevity, and energy efficiency is just one of the inputs into that. Longevity and historic preservation are some what synonymous with each other, and you look at the four tenants of green building and its energy efficiency, indoor air quality, longevity and your environmental footprint.

Just working on an old house, whether you make it really efficient or not, has huge benefits to the sustainable equation. Old buildings, they don’t require new material loads so they’re more energy efficient. Old buildings were meant to operate without mechanical systems, so particularly if you have a wider comfort zone of temperature they’re more energy efficient to run.

Actually our mid century homes were less energy efficient than our old homes, that’s a common misconception. Indoor air quality is usually better in old homes than new because we don’t have the synthetics and the glues and the formaldehyde products that you see in the new homes.

Longevity, it speaks for itself when you’re working on a home that’s 100 years old, its already passed the test of longevity, and of course footprint when you’re working on homes that already have existing infrastructure, that already have their walls framed, that already have plaster and all of this embodied energy and intellectual capital and financial capital that went into them, to continue to reuse that really is the ultimate recycling. Ultimately my clientele, which is overwhelmingly academic, I work real close to Duke University here and folks were buying up old houses in Durham and were really interested in the sustainability movement.

Conversations start with, “Aaron, I’ve got an old house, I want to restore it in a green way, what do I do?” And there’s so much information to take in, both on the green building side there’s a wealth of information, and then you factor in all the complexities of historic preservation and all the opportunities of both movements does get a bit overwhelming and that’s where we saw the need for this book. There’s just not that much out there. We actually had one client Google the term “green restoration” and come up with virtually no hits, so I realized there is a void in the market place that the book could fill.

But they’re all sorts of questions that people ask when they’re working on an old house: How do you keep the character while upgrading to meet the needs of the next century? What systems are appropriate for an old home? What should I do with my windows. How do I keep the architectural integrity of the streetscape, should I unwrap the vinyl siding and restore the architecture? How do I insulate an old house? What are the debates you need to address when doing so?

Guin: We have the book in our library here at NCPTT. It’s a good primer and a very practical holistic approach to introducing everyday people, who are dealing with these historic preservation issues, to all the facets that go into maintaining a historic structure and updating it as well.

Lubeck: And that really is the intent is that contractors can read it, homeowners can read it, it can be read cover, or really a reference if you’re just remodeling your kitchen in an old house you can just read that chapter and so forth. So I’m sure It’ll serve a lot of different needs, but it is meant to kind of paint with a broad brush.

Guin: You make comparisons to the environmental movement and to the preservation movement. And there it’s both situations where people are very passionate about their beliefs, yet the environmental movement has been so much more successful in communicating what it’s trying to accomplish and in mobilizing its audience, and working together, collaborating, especially on the web. Why do you think they are successful?

Lubeck: Yeah it’s a great question, and there’s one of the best articulations of that answer is Stewart Brand wrote a book called “How Buildings Learn,” and he has a great chapter on preservation there and the history of the preservation movement. And he had noted that environmentalism really rose up to be on front pages, and that preservation suffered almost from a lack of charismatic leadership.

There was no big event, no big calling or no head of the movement that people could identify with. This ultimately made preservation sort of the little brother or little sister of environmentalism; it’s never gotten the same traction that it has. To me, I also think that the business benefit has not been pressed. Besides Donovan Rypkema, I have not really seen it articulated very well or forcefully or thoroughly. The green benefits of preservation, I think when I started thinking about this book even two or three years ago, they were still not pressed very much and now of course the preservation month, the theme was ‘Old is the New Green’.

Carl Elefante’s work of calling “the greenest building is the one that’s already built.” “Historic preservation is the ultimate recycling” actually has some more historical roots and the Preservation Magazine from the National Trust comes out with a green issue now every year. But all of these things happened in the last two or three years. And one of the other things I think that has not helped preservation get a larger foothold in America is that, to me, conservatives are notably lacking from the movement.

There’s a cultural preservation link and the protection of an architecture that represents American ideals of individualism, strength, ingenuity and pride should be very attractive to conservatives. But to me when I attend preservation events I find them notably lacking and that has, I think, slowed the movement as well.

Guin: I’ve been involved in the social web within heritage preservation for a few years, that it really wasn’t until last year that we had a breakthrough in that field. But it wasn’t the large preservation organizations that were leading the way on that. It was everyday folks and bloggers and the people who were having issues with their homes.

Lubeck: Yes, this has been a movement that is notoriously “IT phobic” and that has not helped either. I think that there’s a big switch to youth input into historic preservation that were really recognizing right now. The last five years I think, you go to the state preservation conferences, that there’s this whole group of folks in their 20s and 30s that are redefining the preservation movement, and I think that’s going to be a great thing. But we’re seeing blogs, fantastic blogs, pop up everywhere that are really digging into detail and amazing research and on local entities and using the Internet as a medium to articulate preservation in ways that were never possible before.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg, and I think that will bring a lot more people to the movement as well. And I think the movement is wider than we think. There are more people out there that just love old houses than identify with historic preservation. I was one of those growing up. I think that there are a lot of folks out there. I even talked to someone last week that said, “I don’t know about historic preservation, but I just love old houses.” And I think there are a lot of people out there like that that just need to hear more information or just be talked to about some of the benefits of the policy of historic preservation and some of the businesses that are out there to rehab houses and protect our architectural history.

Guin: One of the things I really like to talk about is the context of a cultural resource. Including historic structures. I think historic buildings are great—nice to look at. But it’s the story that really attracts folks and makes us care about why this building should still exist.

Lubeck: I think we’re on the tip of an iceberg as well with seeing technology and mobile platforms being used. Someone’s going to recognize that buildings are the static medium through time. So people come and go, fads come and go, styles come and go, but for the most part buildings stay and they’re there for hundreds of years. And so we can use that to root these stories, to tie together how buildings came to be or how communities came to be; how the owner of a tobacco company lived in that house to move to there and that house burned down and they moved to there and had five kids that went on to start this company; or this person helped him start a business or do a development out on the edge of town–and we can start to piece together the story through our buildings. It’s the best medium to do that.

Guin: Well, lets go into some other first steps that the average homeowner can take to maintain their homes in a sustainable and a green way.

Lubeck: Every project’s different. One person may be painting a room while another may be doing a million dollar gut job so it really varies, but the one piece of advice that I’d give to folks who are starting out is to work with professionals or seek out professionals. Even if you don’t end up in a contractual engagement with an architect or a restoration contractor, picking their brain as much as you can or seeing their websites or just meeting people at green building tours and historic preservation tours, will help. Talk to the experts you’ll learn so much.

Guin: How can people get connected to what you’re doing, Aaron?

Lubeck: Definitely reading the book is a great start or going to the website as well, and I’ve got a Twitter account, so you could join my feed for up-to-the-minute thoughts as they come out as well.

Guin: Aaron, thanks for being on the podcast.

Lubeck: Thanks a lot Jeff, I appreciate it.

Outro: That was Jeff Guin with author Aaron Lubeck. If you would like to learn more about Lubeck’s book, Green Restorations, visit our podcast shownotes at the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training website. That’s ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time, goodbye everybody.

Jeff Guin speaks with Aaron Lubeck, author of the book, Green Restorations. Today, they will discuss his book and how it connects the sustainability movement with historic preservation.

25. Barry Stiefel on the Sustainability of Historic Preservation (Episode 25)

Transcript

Kim Martin: Thank you Barry for joining me on the podcast.

Barry Stiefel: Well, you’re welcome. Thank you for having me.

Kim Martin: So, I understand that you teach a class on preservation and the environment. As you know preservationists have often been arguing that sustainability and preservation go hand-in-hand. How do you approach this in your class?

Barry Stiefel: First, I start off with the basics, you might say, and that is going over some of the major points that preservationists argue as being very environmentally sound, and also trying to clarify where there is sort of gray or fuzziness in this respect and sort of going with the students. You know how quite often you have to go by a case-by-case basis. That there really are no absolutes, and then sort of go on from there from what we consider bricks-and-mortar sustainable practices with preservation into things that might be considered more peripheral, but when looking at management and sort of planning for the long future, are other aspects to consider related to not just preservation but heritage and tangible aspects and the environment and sustainability.

Kim Martin: I noticed from your syllabus that you take a sort of reciprocal approach in one section with not only how preservation affects the environment but how the environment affects our buildings. Can you talk to me a little about that?

Barry Stiefel: We started looking at how coastal areas, which we have many historic cities on, are threatened or potentially threatened with rising sea levels. It’s also dealing with atmospheric conditions such as from acid rain or smog that causes or accelerates weathering on historic building materials and historic structures; looking at extremes in climate, because when we talk about climate change, we’re talking about, it’s not just the world getting hotter but it, it’s also dealing with colder extremes at the opposite end. So you know how this can also accelerate weatherization. So that’s the one aspect. Then looking back the other way, it’s sort of thinking of historic preservation, not just the sort of adaptive reuse of historic buildings structures and districts, but also looking at historic building practices and how that can reduce our ecological footprint and in a certain sense can mitigate the effects of global climate change.

Kim Martin: I noticed also that planning had a large part in your syllabus as well. How does a planner incorporate preservation, the environment, and all these aspects?

Barry Stiefel: I’d say that it’s not trying to incorporate all of them; it’s doing them all at the same time. Traditionally, we tend to break things up into categories, you know, this is just transportation planning, this is preservation planning, etc., and we really need to get back to the idea that everything is interrelated to each other and that these are components that we need to consider in all planning, particularly if you want to have a sustainable plan, a sustainable land use, and then all these approaches need to be considered because they all affect one another.

Kim Martin: Is there any really great examples that you can think of at this time?

Barry Stiefel: There are some interesting things going on right now in Boulder, Colo. They’ve also been dealing with an issue of, sort of those who are maybe being too extreme to one side or the other, being either, you know, environmentally speaking or “preservationally” speaking. And the thing is, to consider is that what is going to ultimately be successful is somewhere in the middle.

You know if one is too much of an advocate for preservation, you know, there are things that are important related to the environment or some other aspect of public welfare that maybe ignored and vice versa. I know they’ve been dealing with issues related to promoting LEED certified building and construction within their city, as well as dealing with the historic districts that they have and what they can do to bring those up to higher performance in terms of energy and resource use and so, I know that, at least that’s something that I’ve heard about that they have been grappling with.

One thing to keep in mind is that there is no sort of final end result where, you know, there you made it, that you’re done. It’s a continuous process. You know, you can always do better, you can always improve yourself. So, think of it more as the journey than the ultimate destination.

Kim Martin: Can you tell us what the greatest benefit of preservation is to sustainability?

Barry Stiefel: I would say that this is the greatest use of preservation, not just for sustainability but, sort of preservation at large and that is to improve quality of life. You know, if we lose sight of that then what are we doing it for.

Kim Martin: Why do you think there has been such a separation or perceived separation between people who want to preserve buildings and people who are in the sustainability camp or green building?

Barry Stiefel: I think it ultimately comes to how these two fields have developed particularly in the twentieth century, the middle of the twentieth century. Certainly in western thought we like to sort categorize things: this is preservation, this is environmental conservation, this is X, this is Y, this is Z. And we are, as a society, starting to learn that we can’t always do that.

And I think, you know, where people sort of have the “aha” moment, you know, it’s always been there. It’s just when is that the individual themselves actually recognize it. That’s sort of the issue that has to be dealt with. And ultimately it will have to come down to education and, you know a trickling down into also the college curriculum and hopefully, down into secondary and primary education opportunities.

Kim Martin: I haven’t heard a whole lot about this being taught in preservation schools. How did you come up with your curriculum?

Barry Stiefel: Well, you are correct. You know it’s just starting to change; something that we at least talk about in the joint College of Charleston/Clemson program, you know, these things were at least being talked about on the table initially, and our program wasn’t the only one where this is taking place. As for myself, I really have to sort of look at my experience, my college and university career. My undergraduate degree is a Bachelors of Science in Environmental Policy.

I was aware of preservation to a certain degree based on an architectural history class I took in high school, and then I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do at first for graduate school, and I ended up basically doing a Masters in Urban Planning but focusing in environmental planning. And based on an experience I had in a travel course in that program to Pittsburgh, seeing what they were doing with revitalization in some of the older neighborhoods, got turned onto the idea that adaptive reuse and historic preservation was a form of recycling. And I actually came into it from an environmental perspective and in a certain sense, by the time I was in my doctoral studies, I had sort of come full circle form where I started off when I was in high school.

Kim Martin: What are some things that you think we, as preservationists or just lovers of old buildings, can do to sort of help make ourselves more accessible environmentally or make our case better?

Barry Stiefel: Think holistically. You know, of course, you know, reach out to people — to those who aren’t quite aware of it. Often it’s just awareness. What is the perspective that the traditional environmentalist advocate is coming from? And of course, you know, learn their side and invite them to learn your side, because ultimately, when it comes down to it, we have the same sort of goals and objectives for the long term future.

Kim Martin: And how would you suggest that we make this relevant to just the general public?

Barry Stiefel: The key thing has to be education. You know there is definitely a great, sort of a green bandwagon going on and preservationists, I think, should definitely jump on that. But you know; whenever an opportunity affords to have sort of a preservation bandwagon, you know, definitely extend an invitation to those interested in the environment and sustainability.

Kim Martin: Thank you for joining me on the podcast.

Barry Stiefel: You’re welcome and thank you for having me.

Kim Martin speaks with Barry Stiefel, Professor in the Humanities and Social Sciences at the College of Charleston and Clemson University. They discuss sustainability in preservation.

26. NCPTT, Southern Miss and Hybrid Plastics Collaborate to Study Stone Strengtheners (Episode 26)

Transcript

Church: Derek, tell us a little bit more about your background as a polymer chemist.

Patton: I got my Ph.D. from the University of Houston and I spent two years in Gaithersburg, Maryland, as a post doc in the polymer’s division and that’s where I really learned to apply my background as a Polymer Synthetic Chemist and apply those skills in a way that you can look at the interaction of surfaces with polymers and vice-versa and so I developed a fundamental interest of studying the interaction of the interface of polymers and their underlying substrates. So most of what my group does is polymer synthesis at interfaces. We’re interested in developing synthetic methods to fundamentally change the way the surface interacts with its environment. Whether that’s in a protective coating or to change the way the chemistry reacts. This is the largest part of my background and the focus of my research.

Church: I hear you are a principal investigator of a newly awarded science foundation grant. What makes this NSF grant different than others?

Patton: Yeah absolutely. So we were recently awarded a grant under the Chemistry and Materials Research between science and art. For short they call it the SCIART program. So, with the SCIART award, the National Science Foundation really sought to enhance collaborative opportunities between conservation scientist and chemist or material scientist to address grand challenges in the field of science of conservation of cultural heritage. So that’s the unique feature of this particular grant. It’s one of the first instances where we’re taking a skill set of a physical or a material scientist and combining that with the skill of a conservationist.

Church: You said that this grant was a collaborative effort. Who are the partners on this grant and why were they chosen?

Patton: My co-principal investigators are Mary Striegel, at the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training in Natchitoches, La., and Joe Lichtenhan at Hybrid Plastics and they’re located in Hattiesburg Mississippi. At the fundamental level we want to look at the interaction of new polymers with stone surfaces. So we’re interested in developing polymers that are modified by POSS, which are inorganic silica cages. And we’re interested in incorporating those silica cages into polymeric material that interact and enhance the interaction with stone surfaces as consolidants or as stone strengtheners.

Church: What part will each of these partners play in the research and final outcome of this grant?

Patton: NCPTT, as the only national preservation research and technology centers in the National Park Service, Mary and her staff will bring years of experience in conservation and preservation of cultural heritage items, specifically of stone and masonry on which is the focus of this NSF project. Being at the forefront of the preservation field, they have opportunities of interfacing with experts from industry government and academia. They will be instrumental in helping to identify and address grand challenges in preservation of America’s cultural heritage. Their role essentially, is to help facilitate the transfer of the technology development as a result of this grant to the end user and on the more experimental side they will be involved in analyzing the long-term effects of the stone treatments weathering, stability, of the treatments on the stone surfaces.

Hybrid on the other hand is more on the materials supply side. Hybrid is one of the world leaders in the commercial production of POSS materials. Hybrid has over the years demonstrated very innovative uses of POSS containing materials for a broad range of technologies. For example one related to the conservation of stone. They’ve used POSS materials to modify dental restoration so that you mimic the surfaces of the tooth by incorporating the silica into the formulation. So that’s one of the properties that we can use in terms of modifying stone surfaces or consolidation stone surfaces and taking advantage of the inherent properties of the POSS material in many ways mimics the properties of a stone surface being an inorganic material so many times you can match the refractive index and the modules properties by incorporating the various amounts of POSS into these polymer formulations.

Their role in the project is to synthesize and supply those POSS materials with specific functional groups that can be incorporated into a polymeric material. It also enhances the interaction with the stone surface and supply them to us in multi-gram quantities that really give us a large enough scale that we can actually do realistic size conservation efforts of stone surfaces.

From the university side, one of our fundamental goals is to produce students that are capable of entering the work place with a specific skill set and so one specific thing that this grant does because it is collaboration between academia and a conservation government laboratory and an industrial company like Hybrid Plastics. It gives us an opportunity to train students with a new skills set so that they come out thinking in a different way about using material science and how to apply that specific skill set with problems that are observed in the conservation of cultural heritage.

That’s one of our fundamental goals as a professor to train those students so that they’re capable of going out into a newly developing field where they’re having to address different problems. So if we can take the skill set that we as material scientists or as chemists know and apply those to the challenges conservationists face I think that we produce something that lasts far reaching into the future as a product from the academia side.

Church: Now, once the testing is established and you have an end result. What sort of cultural materials do you think you might be looking at treating with these POSS consolidants?

Patton: I guess we can take some examples from Natchitoches. During a recent visit to Natchitoches at NCPTT we actually went out into the field and learned how some of the traditional methods, traditional products that are on the market today, are being used to treat stone surfaces that are used to make gravestone markers. The U.S. is full of buildings of historical significance so treating those stone surfaces that were used to build those historic buildings is another example.

And then stone and sculpture would be another example, where new products with specific properties of consolidating the stone surfaces while one of the ultimate goals is to do no harm to the surface–those are areas where new products are needed and where we might in a collaborative effort develop those types of materials.

Church: I’ve toured your labs there at the University of Southern Mississippi and met some of your research group. How many of your students are working on this grant project and what types of facilities and what types of things are going to be used from your labs?

Patton: It’s funded through the NSF, National Science Foundation. Through that support we’re able to support two full-time graduate students and two part-time undergraduate students to work on the project. So those four students will be actively involved in the development of both the fundamental interactions of the polymers with stone surfaces all the way through going to Hybrid Plastics to develop the actual POSS materials and then on to NCPTT to do the testing on stone surfaces and actually doing field tests with some of the new materials once we get to that point.

At the university in my lab we’re actually going to focus more on the interaction with the materials of stone surface so we’re looking at things like microscopy and spectroscopy, things that are surface sensitive so that in a very detailed fashion we can probe the interface between the polymeric material and the stone surface so that we can do things like raising angle transform IR for instance to probe that interface and see how it’s actually interacting with the stone surface other things are quartz crystal microbalance.

We can measure the absorption of POSS materials in a very sensitive manner and learn how these materials interact with stone mimic surfaces like calcium carbonate for instance or silicone oxide. So those are two examples of things we’ll be doing in my lab, along with developing the chemistry that will incorporate POSS into polymeric materials.

Church: Well Derek, thank you for coming out today and we look forward to talking to you again.

Jason Church speaks with Derek Patton, Assistant Professor in the School of Polymers and High Performance Materials at The University of Southern Mississippi. NCPTT is partnering with USM and Hybrid Plastics on a National Science Foundation grant to advance the science of stone preservation.

27. Conversations on Sustainability at the 2010 APT Conference (Episode 27)

Transcript

Jill Gotthelf: I’m the Principal at Walter Sedovic Architects, and I am co-chair of the APT Technical Committee on Sustainable Preservation, and I am a preservation architect.

Jeff Guin: Tell me a little bit more about that committee and why it chose to hold this particular session.

Jill Gotthelf: The Technical Committee on Sustainable Preservation began out of a Halifax Symposium, where we realized that there was a growing concern about sustainability and from a holistic perspective, not just energy and embodiment, but also community and social equity and how our heritage buildings played into this movement, and what we should and should not do, as well as the issues of climate change and the impact they are having on our buildings. It was really a very widespread look at our heritage buildings and issues of sustainability and environmentalism, and from that over the years, the committee has looked at addressing issues from rating systems to climate change, education, preservation programs in the schools, and they are addressing issues of sustainability. Now we also have moved into focus of policy and there was a symposium in Montreal that addressed theoretical issues, and over the last two years since that, we realized that we, at APT, have a specific expertise in technology and in the technical end of these issues, and looking at all the organizations that have been working on sustainability, there are other organizations who really are public policy organizations and addressing many of those concerns, and that we really needed to focus on some of the technical issues so we could offer our expertise to the entire field, addressing sustainability and with the coming out of all these new codes, especially the upcoming international green construction code, we realized that many of the concerns dealt with energy and our envelopes.

We, deep down in our hearts, know that historic buildings are not the energy hogs that they are made out to be, and the advantages of thermal lag, and that buildings built before WWII had to address environmental issues, because we could not design the environment out of our buildings and that they really did what most of these codes and LEED, and all of the rating systems were asking for already, and it is just that they have been maligned or they have been altered, the systems have been taken out, people do not understand how they work. So, one of the things we wanted to address is envelope modeling and monitoring and performance of our existing buildings to get real data that show how our buildings work. Modeling of new buildings, we are finding buildings are modeled and then they do not perform the way they are modeled to be. We, with historic buildings, have the advantage that we have real buildings that we can go out and actually do real models based on the performance testing. So, the decision was that now was the time for a two-day workshop to discuss what tests are available for historic buildings, what information can we get and show, and then how can that information be transferred into a model so that we can generate data that we can take to explain how our historic buildings work, what systems are in place, what happens once those originally designed systems are restored, how does the building perform by itself and now, what intervention really is necessary, and you will find that the designs of the systems vary greatly, when you really understand actual performance and then design an intervention rather than a model.

Jeff Guin: And you actually used a real world setting, a historic building, for part of the workshop.

Jill Gotthelf: Yes, we used the Central Presbyterian Church here in Denver. That was an ideal building because it is a historic masonry church with a 1960’s – 70’s cavity wall addition, and we were able to both model the cavity wall addition and the historic portion of the church and look at the differences in how the two performed and the different decisions that you would need to make based on the two different building construction types. There was a series of pre-testing that was done about a month ago so that we had a baseline testing, as well as, doing the hands-on testing at the workshop, so that we had a report of the testing to discuss at the workshop, as well as, to physically do the hands-on testing. This was a building where the original passive system had been closed up, and we looked at how the building was performing now with that and then discussed from our knowledge of how the system originally worked–this whole chimney fact and reopening of the passive ventilation system, what would be gained by restoring the original system and whether that is a better solution or newer intervention.

Jeff Guin: Okay. Well, what were your findings?

Jill Gotthelf: Well, interestingly enough, our findings were actually giving us real data for what we already knew about how thermal lag works, and based on modeling of looking at historic buildings and then modeling how the heat transferred through the building, we have actually started to look at putting insulation on as being a disadvantage, not just from what we already knew about creating dew points of moisture, but that it also did not allow that additional heat to transfer into the space.

It did not allow us to gain the advantage from the thermal lag that we had naturally, and so, it gave us a better understanding of what we already knew, how these buildings performed in a way that we then could bring it to our building stewards, and rather than just trusting us, they could actually see data.

Jeff Guin: Well stepping back a second, you mentioned that this was at least in part, a hands-on experience. Talk about that, what were the participants allowed to use the different types of equipment, etc.

Jill Gotthelf: In the church, we actually had a blower door set-up for the participants to work through, and they watched the set-up of the blower door, an explanation of the fans, how we pressurize or depressurize the building through turning the fans on, having the system work, and then walked through with smoke so that we were able to identify locations where there were drafts, as well then, there was equipment for doing thermal performance…

Jeff Guin: Was that the little handheld device? …

Jill Gotthelf: …That was it being passed around and everyone was able to see, yes. Being that this is in October, the results on that would not be as dramatic unless you were hitting part of the building that happened to have the heat on and steam, whereas, on a really cold day in the winter, you would see a greater differential, or a really hot day in the middle of the summer, you would see a greater thermal differential when we went and tested…all the walls, but I gave a relative understanding of the one surface to another surface and that has been a discussion throughout this workshop that all of our testing devices have reached a certain point of accuracy. You know, they will continually grow to become more accurate, and there is a certain amount of user failure and a certain amount of changes in levels of accuracy depending on the sophistication of the equipment in use, but everyone of them are good tools for relative performance and understanding, because if you are using the same tool in one place and in another place, your relative performance is still the same even if it’s actual physical number that it is meeting out is not.

Jeff Guin: Tell me about some of the other folks that were involved in helping instruct the workshop.

Jill Gotthelf: We have a range of instructors that include, our leader in the hands-on testing is with a company here in Denver that is lightly treading, and they go in and do energy audits and evaluation, and testing. They themselves are not trained architects and engineers in developing the new systems to make changes. They are very well versed in collecting the data and in analyzing the performance of the building and developing an instruction on key areas where efficiencies can be added.

We added to that several engineers, ranging from structural engineers, mechanical engineers, and engineers that are also working in the energy modeling field, who then have been able to show us how that information that we gathered can be put into models and analyzed, can make informed decisions in our evaluation of cost benefits and life cycle cost analysis, and then can also discuss the pros and cons of making those decisions, understanding holistically how the building systems work, making certain changes are going to have impacts on other decisions that you make. So we really had a nice range.

Jeff Guin: You recorded the workshop on video and you are going to do something with that as well …

Jill Gotthelf: Yes. This workshop is for CEU credits from the American Institute of Architects and the NEECES, which is the engineering and the Ontario architects, so it offered a full range of CEU credits. The entire workshop was videotaped from a grant from NCPTT, which we will take the two days and condense it into a one-hour learning module that we would like to then make available to outside of APT as a learning module that can basically be an on-the-road learning module.

Interview with John Anderson

John Anderson: Hi, my name is John Anderson. I am currently an instructional engineer at Robert Silman Associates in New York City. My background is focused on sustainable building, so I have done a Master’s Degree at UC Berkeley, where I focused on sustainable concrete technologies and then before that, I was a Fulbright Fellow in Berlin at the Technical University there, where I looked at the interlap between architecture sustainability engineering and how that forms sustainable design. So that is really where I am coming from.

Jeff Guin: Today you were speaking at the APT Conference in Denver about putting sustainability into preservation. Tell me a little bit about that.

John Anderson: Exactly. So the general idea with the preservation community currently is that preservation is sustainable. End of story. But what we are really trying to do is move sustainability into preservation so that preservationists can move from being a passive participant in this building design movement to really being leaders, and then by being leaders, we can illustrate that historic buildings, historic neighborhoods, have a lot to teach new buildings and have a lot to teach policy makers. So when policy members, administrations, think about they want to do green building, they will look to preservation for guidance.

Jeff Guin: One of the things that you have been involved with is the Pocantico Summit on Sustainability. Tell me about that experience and what came out of it.

John Anderson: Yes. The Picantico Proclamation was started by a group of 28 experts from different fields, from architects to engineers to business people, to environmentalists, anyone who is affected by green building and who has an interest in this. We really sat down and thought about how does preservation interlap and play a role with sustainability and then we also thought about where are some conflicts there and how can we address those conflicts.

Jeff Guin: Let’s talk about those. One of the things that you mentioned in your talk earlier was imperatives coming out of that. Tell me about those imperatives.

John Anderson: Exactly. So, the background in the argument that we are really forming to make this case, program design for sustainability, are the climate change imperative, the economic imperative, and to explain the climate change is pretty straight forward. The economic imperative is really changing to a green economy. So, moving away from resource dependent, non-renewable fuels and building practices, to renewable practices to a practice of conservation. The last one is equity. As we see the world transform in the last ten years and moving forward, we are seeing that more people have a higher standard of living and that’s requiring resources, so we need to think about, especially in the U.S., how can we get more from less.

Jeff Guin: And you also mentioned principles coming out of the initiative. Can you talk about the principles?

John Anderson: Yes. So actually the principles are really lessons that can be learned from preservation and applied to green building, so these examples foster a culture of reuse. We currently have a culture of new, of consumption. So, we can transfer to an idea of reusing something, valuing something, and seeing the bigger picture in something. One of the other big interesting things is to update the sustainability aspects of preservation. So, like we were saying before, that preservation really does not shy away from sustainability but really grabs onto it and takes the lead and leads the movement.

Jeff Guin: Following the Pocantico and the proclamation, there was a follow-up meeting as well called the National Challenge. Tell me a little bit about that experience.

John Anderson: Yes. So, the Pocantico laid out the essential principles and guidelines and the imperatives for integrating and assisting preservation. We took it another step and really refined it, and we said okay, we have all these sustainability concerns, economic, environmental, and social. Let’s focus on the most pressing right now and that is climate change. So it is not everything but we are just focusing on one task, and then the question really is, is how can preservation align with climate mitigation strategy. It is very definitive and very clear what the goal is and then what we are looking for is how can that come about, how can we realize this objective?

Jeff Guin: Have you made any progress in figuring that out?

John Anderson: Well, it is obviously a big challenge, but I think what we have been doing in…we are essentially an advisory board to other organizations and other organizations participate with us, what has come out of this is there has been legislation written that has been proposed to the House, in matters like this where the needs with the DOE, Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency, so really taking our message to policymakers and saying, “Hey, look, preservation is a way to reduce climate change and we need to address this.”

Jeff Guin: Are you learning any lessons from the environmental movement and implementing policy?

John Anderson: Existing buildings emit 40 percent of the CO2 emissions in the U.S. Historic buildings, you know, buildings that are listed on the Landmark Registry are very small, it is one percent of New York City. So, if you have one percent, you cannot make a big change. But if the preservation movement went beyond museum type buildings, one-of-a-kind and historic buildings to really be the spoke person for all existing buildings, then we have really taken a big branch. We have said, we are the people that care for buildings, we know how to maintain buildings, we know how to increase longevity of buildings, and then we have a big area to contribute and then people come to us to say, can you help us with this problem.

Jeff Guin: Absolutely. You talked about the actions items and the steps that we go through to actually start influencing policy, tell me about those.

John Anderson: The big one that we have been thinking about and is a personal interest of mine is research, because I think a lot people that are enacting green initiatives, green goals, so anyone from the presidential administration to localities, such as New York City’s Michael Bloomberg, these people are interested in achieving these environmental goals. And I think what they do not have now that they could use, are tools to help them see that existing buildings are a key in that solution. I do not think people are excluding existing buildings right now, people just are not, they do not have the data available to show that these are the areas one should really be focusing on.

Jeff Guin: When you are talking about the actions items and research, you mentioned the Secretary of Interior standards, as well as, being a place to start to look at those again and figure out how to use what is existing, but also maybe change that a little bit…any ideas there?

John Anderson: So we only have two, two challenges. One is an external communication. The preservation community communicating with other people in green building and the second one is internal. How does the preservation community deal with challenges such as window replacement, operational energy improvement? These are really dealt with traditionally through the National Park Service standards and guidelines. And what we really see a need for is guidance from such an over arching body to really provide guidance on that so if a homeowner that is interested in preservation and interested in sustainability, can have someplace to go to and really get some knowledge from that perspective.

Jeff Guin: So, one of the things that I think I am hearing you say, is that communication is a big part of it and changing perceptions as you said, internally and externally and on a broader scale. How are some of the ways that we could do that?

John Anderson: Yes, these are great points, and I think a lot of it is just talking to people. So, I think it is moving beyond just preservationists talking to themselves. I gave a talk recently to the U.S. Green Building Council and there we were essentially saying that, you know, reusing a building is recycling a building, and one of my friends went to the talk and she is open to these ideas and she is green friendly and she said, “I had never thought about that.” And now essentially she is on board with us. So I think it is just presenting the idea to people in an objective, clear manner with data and research that shows that we are not just pushing a different agenda, but it is really the case at hand. I think that helps bring people on board.

Jeff Guin: What you are saying is that if we can explain exactly what is happening to these folks and meet them where they are, then we have a much better chance at having their support in influencing these policies.

John Anderson: Yes, and we can see this through examples. When you are thinking about urban planning, you think about the real goal now of the new urbanist movement is to build a livable, sustainable communities where you have grocery shops, mom and pop shops, you have restaurants, you can walk everywhere. Where are these ideas coming from? These ideas are coming from historic districts. Historic districts are doing them now, but the problem is that historic districts are not selling themselves or branding themselves in that manner, so it is really an idea of perspectives and really seeing where these new ideas are coming from and often we see they are coming from the past. So, the past is looking forward.

Jeff Guin: One of the things that I heard you mention is actually harnessing the power of the Web, in that we have the ability now to communicate to everyone in the world potentially with an internet connection and influence those folks too. What are some of the ways that you recommend?

John Anderson: Yes, I think that is great. I think that is really a useful dialog–communication. I think what we can do, we can get a lot of information out to people, you know, we can put something out about replacement windows, you know. We can have dialog and informed discussions online and then a lot of resources. You know, if somebody needs resources to make their case–if somebody is saying, “well, I think this old building has some value, and I want to go to talk to somebody that is in charge about this–how do I do that? How do I have the information to share this with other people without having to do a doctoral dissertation on embodied energy?

Jeff Guin: And just as important to that, besides just putting the information out, is to be able to interact about it and have a conversation about it rather than just saying these are the rules…follow them or else.

John Anderson: That is a good point. Preservation is really about the community and preserving the community and the community is made up of different people doing different actions and then that is what really creates the community around them, and I think that is what historic preservation tries to promote.

Jeff Guin: Absolutely. Just to follow up with the initiatives that you have been involved with in talking about Pocantico and the Nashville Challenge–there was a group that actually came out of this effort as well that you are a part of. Tell me about that.

John Anderson: Yes. So we, from national, we drafted an agenda, an action item agenda, and this became the sustained building preservation policy task force or SpitFire for short. This is essentially an advisory council to other organizations working on issues of sustainability and preservation. So, we provide guidance on implementing sustainability into preservation and also as a forum for feedback and holding organizations accountable. When we are saying we want to do these things, we really are there to help people achieve the goals and really move forward in the process.

Jeff Guin: What are some of the organizations that you have worked with to try to advise.

John Anderson: Yes. The National Trust for Historic Preservation from the start, Friends of NCPTT has been in form the start and also APT is involved, AIA is involved and we have the American Council for Historic Preservation, national SHPO’s, so everyone that is involved in preservation is getting this picture and this is really a place to come for assistance and guidance.

Jeff Guin: So if someone wants to find out more about SpitFire or the sustainability initiative, how can they get in touch?

John Anderson: Either on the NCPTT website or on the National Trust website.

Jeff Guin: John, thank you so much.

John Anderson: Thank you very much for the time.

At the 2010 Association for Preservation Technology Conference in Denver, Jeff Guin speak with Jill Gotthelf, coordinator of an NCPTT-sponsored workshop at the conference, followed by an interview with John Anderson about implementing sustainability in preservation.

28. The Philosophy of In-use Musical Instrument Conservation (Episode 28)

Transcript

Muto: Hello John, thank you for joining me today.

Watson: It’s my pleasure.

Muto: Why don’t you tell me a little about your background. How did you move from a music degree into instruments conservation?

Watson: Well, I got interested in harpsichords when I was in undergraduate school. And actually, by the time I graduated I was starting to make instruments and did so professionally. But my “apprenticeship”—quote –unquote—was actually from the historic instruments themselves. I was treating them as primary documents. They were showing me in all the surface evidence how they were made. So from the beginning, I really started to think of artifacts from the past as being mentors more than just old things needing repaired and used. So that, I think, has affected my whole career since then. I did, as an instrument maker, do some restoration. Unfortunately, conservators rarely really specialize in things like musical instruments and they need a kind of treatment that usually requires the expertise of instrument makers. And so it was really as an instrument maker that I was first approached by museums from time to time to do restoration work, including in 1985, Colonial Williamsburg. I restored an 1806 grand piano for them. A couple of years later a position opened up and I’ve been here ever since.

Muto: In addition to having the knowledge of the instrument, are there other specific advantages that your music background offers in your current work as both conservator and curator?

Watson: Although I’m responsible for a bit more than musical instruments—I also have responsibility for clocks and scientific instruments and so forth—the vast majority of my work is with musical instruments and therefore the constituency is musical instrument players and enthusiasts of various kinds. And I’m able to work with the musicians having some understanding of their world and their language and their perspective.

Muto: As you mentioned, you’ve work for Colonial Williamsburg for over twenty years. What are some artifacts that you especially enjoyed working with?

Watson: Well, during the first seven years of my time here, I was actually just half time at the museum and the other half time I was still an instrument maker. That allowed a really ideal kind of circumstance where an instrument that had never been restored but which we really wanted to hear—it was a situation where I could actually make a reproduction of it. And that’s an interesting act of conservation as far as I’m concerned, where the traditional alternative would be to restore the instrument to playing condition. And in the case of three instruments during that time period, we were able to leave the original instrument, with all of its original parts that normally would have to be replaced during a restoration. We were able to leave them in place and use that evidence to make a very accurate reproduction. So three of the instruments in our collection have reproductions that are also in our collection and getting daily use. And that’s particularly satisfying—not only speaking as an instrument maker, or former instrument maker, but also as a conservator. It’s a way of having your cake and eating it too: being able to do a virtual restoration through making a reproduction. And also never causing any kind of loss or wear and tear on original material.

Muto: That’s a very interesting approach. So John, we know each other because in 2009, I conducted a project researching tannic acid treatment for corroded iron in your instrument conservation lab. You mentioned sometimes conserving instruments and needing to replace or treat parts of them. How did the tannic acid research tie into your work as an instruments conservator?

Watson: Well that’s a good example. And I have to thank you once again for the work you did for us. One practical use for it, for me, has been: in a keyboard instrument you have tuning pins holding iron wire. The tuning pin, of course, is embedded in one end in wood. And the normal way of having to treat this would be to take the tuning pin out of the wood and unwrap the wire and do whatever the treatment is going to be and put it all back together. The problem with that is that there’s really preservation-worthy evidence, even in the way the wire’s coiled around the tuning pin. And by being able to leave it all together, even still in the wood, and treat it with something that is not damaging to the wood and doesn’t require a more intrusive cleaning of the tuning pin and string, we’re able to leave it all in situ and protect that workmanship. That’s a very practical use of tannic acid for us.

Muto: Take me briefly through the steps you follow when you’re conserving a historic instrument that comes into your lab.

Watson: Well, one of the first things we have to do is to make a determination whether it is an instrument that can or should be put in playing condition, or should it be left as made exhibitable, or as a third option, actually stabilized in its current condition which may not even be exhibitable but is worthy of the study collection. So those are really three very different levels of intervention. The next thing we look at is what in the instrument is at risk during restorative conservation. For example, I have in the lab right now a spinet, a member of the harpsichord family, from the early eighteenth century and it has a lot of original parts that if we restored the instrument, they would have to be replaced. They simply are not durable enough. They don’t represent their original state enough for the instrument to sound right. They would have to be replaced. But the instrument is much too important historically to be replacing parts like that. So that’s an example of an instrument that’s going to be stabilized in its current state and not restored.

Muto: You bring up the interesting kind of push-pull of conservation, especially for something like a musical instrument. And actually, your recent book Artifacts in Use addresses some interesting challenges in conservation using pipe organs as the case study. Tell me a little bit more about the special considerations that you take in conserving an artifact that may not be displayed in a museum, but instead may be in use after conservation.

Watson: The biggest problem in working with instruments of that kind is that the skill set needed for conservation and the skill set needed for making a pipe organ work are really very different. In fact, they’re almost mutually exclusive. Simply because for me to be a good conservator, that’s pretty much a full time, life-long endeavor to learn those skills. And a pipe organ maker—the same thing. For a person to have conservation skills and pipe organ making skills both is almost impossible.

And so the best option is, of course, a collaboration where these two very different specialists actually work together and combine their insights and their abilities. That’s the best hope for objects like pipe organs. The problem is these two groups are so very different in their worldview. And so the nature of those values, those different sets of values, have to be analyzed and the common ground explored. And that really was the point, and the goal, that I had in writing the book Artifacts in Use.

Muto: That sounds like a very valuable pursuit and the kind of dialogue that needs to be happening for these artifacts. What are examples of some other artifacts, other than the organ case study, that might find fuller meaning in continued use?

Watson: There are objects that many people, at least, believe should be used—even for their own sake, for the purposes of preservation. I think of, certainly, other types of musical instruments, stringed instruments especially. Also clocks and transportation vehicles—old cars, that sort of thing—are very often restored by people who feel that that is true preservation to put them back into use. But to some, even those should be preserved as historical documents and not subject to restorative alterations. And that’s our attitude here at Colonial Williamsburg, even about clocks. It’s not that old clocks should never be used, but it has a lot to do with what we see our role to be in society. Our responsibility is to preserve this historical evidence for the future.

Muto: That brings me to my next question. Are there risks in both restoring a historic instrument or a historic object, and are there risks in then using it?

Watson: The wear and tear is the main thing—not only in the using of the artifact, but in the maintenance of it and the restoration itself. Restoration itself causes us to lay hands on an object sometimes in a relatively intrusive way. And if you think of the surfaces as being a document, with not words, but physical evidence that can be read like words telling the history of its making and its early use, restoration itself erodes that evidence and so does use. But there are some artifacts, though—they have to be used. Otherwise, they’re totally not understandable. And one obvious one that I don’t think anyone would argue with is architecture. And even really paintings and some of the fine arts. Another interesting example is even to think of something like historic gardens. All of these things are part of the material legacy and they all demand a really kind of different approach to their preservation.

Muto: Going back a little bit to your particular area of expertise, instrument conservation, I know you mentioned that the surfaces of an instrument can contain valuable data—from tool marks left during manufacture to the subtle history left on the aged surfaces. You mentioned how restoration can somehow negatively affect that. Can the information actually be preserved through restoration? And if so, how?

Watson: Well that’s a really good question. I have become aware of restoration as being a kind of paradox. If you were to graph an artifact’s condition over time, its condition as the maker would judge it. Well over time, the thing deteriorates and it stops working as well and it doesn’t look like it was originally intended to look.

That’s a reduction of quality in its condition. So if you are graphing this, the restoration puts it back into a former state and the line that is mapping its condition would go up. The paradox is that if you think of the object as a primary document and you graph the condition as a primary document full of historical evidence, you get to that point of restoration and while the condition in the eyes of the original maker may go up, the line representing the preservation of historical evidence actually goes down. That’s the paradox of restoration. So your question is: is that necessarily true in restoration? Are there approaches to restoration that reduce the amount of loss of historical evidence?

And the answer is absolutely yes. There’s a great difference between conventional restoration that’s not particularly aware of or interested in evidence and in their pursuit of newness, conventional restorers tend to really wipe away that historical record. Restorative conservation, on the other hand, is an approach to restoration that’s really very careful to preserve worthy signs of age. It steps over the evidence and it respects the object as a historical document, not just a thing that looks a particular way or functions a particular way.

Muto: That’s very good to hear that that approach is being cultivated. What is your biggest challenge in preserving the historic materials in the instruments while also maintaining the utility of those that you choose to restore to playing condition?

Watson: Well I feel there are ways to merge the goals of conservation with the needs of users. In my case study, in the case of pipe organs, those would be organists and people who enjoy organ concerts and so forth. These two groups of people—conservators and museum professionals who are so interested in preserving things unchanged over time, and those that want to roll up their sleeves and engage and use the thing—are not necessarily incompatible.

There’s a common ground. The greatest challenge for these complex objects, like organs and other keyboard musical instruments just to use that example, has more to do with the difficulty of interdisciplinary collaboration between professionals who are so different in their outlook. But it is possible and it’s worth pursuing. That’s really what my book is about: helping professional conservators see the point of artifacts that are used, on the one hand.

And on the other hand, the organ restorers who have done it for hundreds of years and are not conservation professionals—to help them see the point of conservation values, be aware of the historical evidence and its importance and its preservation-worthiness and to see ways of stepping over that evidence, getting the restoration job done with the least loss of historical evidence. That’s really what restorative conservation is all about.

Muto: I thank you so much for joining me today.

Watson: It’s been my pleasure, Anna. Very good to talk to you again, and good luck to you and the folks at NCPTT.

Anna Muto speaks with John Watson, Instruments Conservator and Associate Curator at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. Today they will discuss the special considerations of conservation when artifacts remain in use.

29. How We Are (and Are Not) Adaptively Reusing Whole Cities (Episode 29)

Transcript

Jeff Guin: One of the things you talked about in your presentation was that the sustainable future actually looks a lot like what we have today…

Aaron Lubeck: That came out of a conversation I had about a month ago. I was up in D.C. talking to Carl Elefante and he had put forth that idea that I thought was really interesting and against conventional wisdom where we think, we all visualize this future that’s so physically different. Think of the Jetsons as an analogy. But if you just look at the demographics of America, we’re not going to grow as fast as we did last century. You know, my grandfather saw our population quadruple. So, of course we’ve had great building opportunity and great architecture opportunity for new construction. But in our lifetime, we might only grow by 100 million or 150 million and that means less building, that means more remodeling, that means that the future physically is going to look a lot like it does today–a lot more so than we think. So, New York and all the small towns, and Texas A & M, the campus, are going to look in 50 years very similar, and that’s a really good opportunity for folks interested and promoters of adaptive reuse because we’ll be restoring existing buildings.

JG: And one of the statements you made was that if you are going to adapt, that you have to reuse. What does that mean?

AL: Just the nature of real estate is that you have to have a use for it before you get financing to bring a project to fruition. So, it’s impossible to adapt something and not reuse it. Gary Kuerber in Durham and I were joking about it because he’s one of North Carolina’s leading preservationists, but now he is heading a development company that does a lot of reuse and adaptations. He said jokingly that he was still trying to figure out a way where he could just do cool things with buildings independent of leases and clients and so forth. It’s every preservationist’s dream but that’s just not possible. So, the term is a pleonism. Use the example, it sort of like “totally pregnant” or “cold ice,”–it’s redundant. So, adaptive architecture or adaptive development might be more accurate or at least less wasteful.

JG: And you used some major cities as case studies of different approaches that were successful, or not. Explain that.

AL: What I tried to do was sort of book in the argument of adaptive reuse with Detroit and Houston respectively. Detroit is a great example of, if you are not able to adapt on a city scale the purpose and mission of your city, then you risk economic decline, and in Detroit this has been severe. And when you have that, you’re going to severely limit, if not eliminate, your ability to adapt and reuse architecture. So the effect of that is stress titles, stress projects, stress owners, who leave buildings to decay and go back to the earth, and we see that all over Detroit. The town is literally half the population it was in 1950, and that means half the buildings are either gone or vacant. That’s a huge challenge for that city. Houston on the other side is a great example, a really interesting example, that just continues to sort of grow because the next patch of green land is cheaper than dealing with or rehabilitating the existing assets. So, its choosing to adapt economically and move from industry to industry and grow flexibly as markets demand, but in doing so, its real estate is always focused on newness. So, there really has been in my estimation, limited adaptive reuse in the Houston area. So, these are the two sort of extremes, and I think other cities across America are seeing flexible policy, flexible markets, that allow for people to go in and rehabilitate old buildings, so those are the ones we need to look to for examples.

JG: One of the terms that you mentioned after talking about your case studies was the concept of the “triple bottom line.” Explain what that concept is and how it relates to historic preservation.

AL: The triple bottom line is a philosophy that’s been growing in stature for the past 25 years or so. It’s really buzzing in business schools right now, and it essentially says that beyond the financial bottom line, which is the literal bottom line on an income statement or balance sheet, businesses need to also look at the environmental impacts of what they do, positive or negative as a company, and they also need to look at the social impacts of what they do as a company. There are some fair critiques of that concept but it’s interesting from a preservation standpoint. I’ve argued that you can make the case that preservation fits very well into all three parts of the bottom line. It’s most naturally a cultural benefit. Obviously, saving our buildings as a back drop and physical representation of who we are and where we came from is of cultural and social benefit. Certainly there is an environmental benefit of using existing assets and not taking up new green field and so on and so forth. And then there is an economic argument just from the tie in with both the environmental and social sides, but that it is just cheaper and it’s better and costs less long term, to reuse our existing assets and stay within the dense urban areas. Houston again, I put forth, as an example of an urban area that’s undeniably had economic success but it’s pretty easy to critique the other two. Not a lot people are putting forth Houston as the cultural center of the United States, although they’re making steps towards improving that and certainly the, you know, nobody is using Houston for environmental policy for sure, and part of this ties into the architecture. I think if Houston would start using some of its existing assets, they would improve in all aspects of the triple bottom line.

JG: Okay. You actually mentioned a third city as an example of your golden mean, and that’s your home town of Durham, North Carolina.

AL: Sure. Well I love Durham and I’ll admit, perhaps it sounds self-serving but you know, it’s not a perfect town, but I think it’s a great example of a town that has adapted very well towards market demands. This is a town that didn’t exist 110, 120 years ago, so it’s very young. Absolutely boomed because of tobacco. By 1910, the majority of the tobacco world came out of Durham, and all of the architecture that is now so amazing in Durham is rooted in that tobacco history. So, we have these great old tobacco mills from American Tobacco and the Chesterfield Building and so forth that came out of this era that are now being adapted. No tobacco today is made in Durham. The last cigarettes were rolled in about 1993, and that’s the sort of transformation that would kill most towns in America, but part of it is good policy and part of it is that we are blessed. We are sandwiched between Duke University and Research Triangle Park. There are a lot of creative class people, there’s a lot of really bright people who want to be there, who want to take advantage of the excellent architecture. Part of it is really good policy for historic preservation. We have substantial tax credits in North Carolina that have been a huge driver of urban renewal, for lack of a better word, urban rebirth let’s say, and that’s really helped Durham come from…even when I was younger, growing up in Chapel Hill, a relatively dangerous place to a place that is really the most desired city of the triangle now.

JG: Okay and what could other cities learn by its example?

AL: I think cities set their goals through policy and that comes from their governance. States do the same and a lot of North Carolina’s success, again, is coming from state level endorsement of historic tax credits. I think that’s the easiest way to encourage good historic use or reuse. The other aspects are a long term sustained effort to educate and grow the preservation community.

I think that there’s a lot of things that people can connect to about preservation as a means to teach history, to teach place, to teach even the harder sciences. I mean you can teach everything from physics to chemistry through our existing houses, and the more people that buy into that, it’s just going to help increase demand for the sorts of houses that need to be sustained to rehabilitate cities. I’m really fascinated with the grass roots part of it because we tend to talk about the cream of the crop projects, these huge commercial projects that are fantastic, gorgeous, multimillion dollar rehabilitations, but most preservation happens through the rehabilitation of a bungalow or a millhouse or a Victorian home. That’s where most of the opportunity is and these are just the layman buildings. These aren’t the ones that you’re going to read about in a textbook ever, but this is the way that everybody can participate.

Anybody who likes their community or architecture or just likes to buy into the concept of stewardship can do so in choosing where they rent or where they buy or where they choose to improve their own community. It’s maybe the easiest way somebody can participate in their current, cross the time spectrum, the past, the future of their community and immediately ingrain themselves in today’s world, is by working in an old house.

JG: Thanks for talking to me.

AL: Thanks.

Jeff Guin speaks with Aaron Lubeck, a speaker at the twelfth annual historic preservation symposium at Texas A&M University. Lubeck will talk about his presentation about “How we are –and are not– adaptively reusing cities in America.” Lubeck is also author of the book “Green Restorations.” Looking at case studies from the past 100 years, we will begin to see that if we cannot adapt, we cannot reuse. In this sense, cities must be ‘elastic’, defined by market and policy. Our goal should be to re-use assets a

30. Texas Dancehall Preservation and the Restoration of Hays Street Bridge (Episode 30)

Transcript

Andy Ferrell: Good afternoon and welcome to the podcast Patrick.

Patrick Sparks: Thanks, Andy. Glad to be here.

Andy Ferrell: I’ve known you for some time, and I know that you are passionate about the engineering aspects of historic preservation. How did you get involved in preservation engineering?

Patrick Sparks: I was an aerospace engineer at the beginning of my career, and so when I was about 25, there was a time when I decided I needed to look a little bit differently at my career, and I thought well, does anybody ever study the problem of what do you do with all the stuff that we build–or have built. So, I got interested in that and then it occurred to me to go back to graduate school and I did. I met David Woodcock at Texas A&M. At the time he was head of the preservation program there, and he welcomed me with open arms as an engineer interested in studying preservation. What I found was that historic preservation was really the only discipline at the time–and really still now–that has a formal set of principles about how you take care of the built environment. So that’s really what appealed to me and going back to graduate school to a program like that was just the perfect thing. After that it took me awhile to build a career in this area, but it’s the most satisfying thing I’ve ever done.

Andy Ferrell: You can’t ask for much more than that, I don’t think. So, in a nutshell Patrick, tell us what is the role of the engineer in preservation projects.

Patrick Sparks: For me it’s really about first, setting the diagnostic protocol. That is, figuring out or helping the team of professionals and contractors, to figure out how to know what’s wrong or right with the building or bridge.

Andy Ferrell: Funny you should mention bridges. I know that you’ve just been involved in this exciting Hay Street Bridge rehabilitation project. Can you give us some background? What have you been doing in that? What’s special about this bridge?

Patrick Sparks: Well, it’s a really a cool bridge. It’s called the Hay Street Bridge or viaduct, and it’s in San Antonio, Texas and it consists of two 1881 wrought iron truss spans that were relocated to San Antonio in 1910 to construct this really long viaduct over the railroad tracks. It was built at a time when there were more and more trains and of course there was more and more vehicular and pedestrian traffic, and so there was a conflict at the grade crossings. So the city compelled the railroad to build them a viaduct. The railroad chose to reuse these two old spans and then build the approaches, about 1000 linear feet of approaches, out of reinforced concrete. It’s really a pretty substantial structure and it connects a historic neighborhood with downtown San Antonio, across this very active railroad track.

Andy Ferrell: So how did you get involved in this project?

Patrick Sparks: Well about eight years ago, in 2002 or earlier, we were asked by the city of San Antonio to give them some background information on truss rehabilitation so we did that, because they were looking for grant money at the time, process of applying for the grant money, and so we took them and showed them another project of similar aged truss that we had rehabilitated and just talked over some of the options. Then later, when the request for qualifications came out, we submitted our qualifications and competed against other firms and were selected to be the consultants for rehabilitation design. That was in 2002 and we just now finished the project. So, it was a pretty long project although the construction, rehabilitation construction, only took about ten months.

Andy Ferrell: Now Patrick, in the beginning of this, did they ever consider continuing to use the bridge or reusing the bridge for vehicular traffic or was it always from the beginning of the rehabilitation, envisioned as a pedestrian bridge?

Patrick Sparks: Andy, early on, I think that there were some thoughts about that because the bridge actually wasn’t in vehicular service until 1980 approximately. So, there really wasn’t any reason from our point of view, that it couldn’t remain in vehicular service but by the time we got involved, the State Department of Transportation and the owner of the bridge, City of San Antonio, had agreed that it would be only a pedestrian and bicycle bridge. They did explore the options of relocating the historic truss spans and several other options during the feasibility study phase, but I honestly think that it certainly could have been a vehicular bridge again. I think generally if we just go back a little bit and talk about bridge rehabilitation in general, we want the bridges to remain in vehicular service if they can. In this case, we thought that they could, but it was a decision that we didn’t have full charge of, but it does make a very good bicycle and pedestrian bridge.

Andy Ferrell: We’ve talked a little bit about this before, and there are lots of historic bridges across the nation that find themselves sort of in the same circumstance. What lessons did you learn in this project that you would share with those folks involved in efforts to save their historic bridges?

Patrick Sparks: Be patient and keep trying. You know these trusses, well one of the trusses, there’s two, one of them is a Whipple, the larger of the two is a Whipple truss, which is a particular kind of truss that was fairly common in railroad and highway bridges in the late nineteenth century, but it is no longer common at all and there’s just a handful of them left in Texas and really not that many nationwide. In particular, this Whipple truss is made both of wrought iron for the main members and then cast iron for the joint blocks that connects those members.

It’s really rare, even in the United States as a whole, there’s just very few of those bridges left. So that truss has a very high level of significance. Now, I bring that up because an engineer, a fellow named Doug Stedman, who is very well known in Texas and is retired now, is the one that identified those trusses as being historically significant and really rallied the community and just the local citizenry and the engineering community to get behind this project as something that was very important. Doug’s perspective on it was these were engineering landmarks, and he was successful in getting them designated as such through the American Society of Engineers. So they are not only eligible for the National Register, they are also listed as civil engineering landmarks.

More importantly, it’s grass roots, people have got to want to keep their old bridges and that’s really the essence of keeping them and saving them even in the face of opposition from powerful entities like the state DOT’s or the Federal Highway Administration, or the municipalities, or the railroads; whoever is pretty determined to replace things. We see that in buildings also. It’s the same struggle preservation-minded people face but bridges get pretty much replaced or used to be replaced without anybody noticing it, and we’ve lost about half of our historic bridges in the United States over the last twenty years.

So, the heritage of historic bridges is at risk. It’s important for people to, somebody identify the resource, the historic bridge, and say, okay, this is important. Then if people can get behind it, then to stay with it, hang on, and follow the available process like the Section 106 or another one called 4F which applies to bridges, and for citizen involvement to get people heard about what’s important about the bridge. It’s not easy to save a bridge, in fact, I’d say it’s harder than saving a building because the use alternatives are pretty narrow. There are a few examples of doing something other than using a bridge as a bridge, but mostly they kind of like to be bridges.

Andy Ferrell: Sure.

Patrick Sparks: And that’s what I tell people. You know bridges want to carry people and cars and animals over some obstacle, whether it’s a waterway or road or railroad. That’s what a bridge wants to do and that’s what we really would like to keep them doing. So having to work with such a beautiful bridge and one that was made of wrought iron and cast iron, which is very durable, and you get to see the historic workmanship and the engineering genius that went into these things.

It’s really amazing to go back to how this one was saved, Doug Stedman, engineer retired, well known, identified the bridge and he said, “Well look, we need to save this,” so he worked tirelessly for over two years to save the bridge and raise monies, and he and a group of people in San Antonio, including the Conservation Society, raised about a quarter of a million dollars to help offset the cost of the project, the matching portion, and they were able to go and get a grant, to win a grant from the DOT.

Andy Ferrell: Patrick, I was just going to ask you, who were the other partners involved in this project?

Patrick Sparks: Well, there are quite a few, so at the grassroots level, Mr. Stedman and the entity of engineers in San Antonio and the San Antonio Conservation Society helped in raising money. The city is the owner of the bridge; the City of San Antonio owns the bridge. The Texas Department of Transportation is the funding agency. They provided the transportation enhancement grant, and they also provided some oversight to the project in terms of design review and construction inspection. Then as consultants, was my firm, Sparks Engineering was the prime consultant and structural engineer of the project. We also had landscape architect, Bender Wells Clark out of San Antonio, and Garcia and Wright, civil engineers, and Joshua Engineering Group, electrical engineering consultants. Then the bicycle community was really behind it and, this is very important, the neighbors were very involved. This is a very distressed historic neighborhood that has been badly impacted by things like warehouses, and the neighborhood is a historic neighborhood but it’s gone downhill. But, there are changes coming, and this bridge is part of that, so people are now moving back into the area and they’re fixing up the houses and there is some improvement. The bridge is part of that improvement to the area, and I think the bridge was very important as a symbol of the community and that the community really is still vital and the bridge is seen as a landmark in this neighborhood. I think that the community support was overwhelming and that really drove the project and drove a lot of the things that we did in terms of the choices we made. For example, the approaches which are made of concrete were not only deteriorated, they were built in 1910, and they were severely deteriorated and really could not be saved, but moreover, they were really right in front of the neighborhood houses. The approaches are just your big wide 30 foot concrete bridge approaches just descended right into these neighbors’ front yards basically. And so it was really an awful place created when the bridge was built in 1910 and consideration was not generally given to or being sensitive about what the neighborhood would be like after you built something. So really there were a lot of problems when the thing was done originally, and we had the opportunity to fix that. We made the approaches much narrower. Instead of 30 feet wide, we made them 15 feet wide, which is what we needed for pedestrians and bicycles. What that allowed us to do, because the approach spans are elevated; this allowed more light to come in, more space, more light and you don’t feel that the bridge is oppressive anymore, and it gave the neighbors a lot of room in front of their houses. Now that space in front of their houses is landscaped and it’s beautiful and people really respond to how narrow the bridge is. But we followed the basic profile and layout of the original bridge, and we found some ways to echo the theme, kind of the architectural theme of the 1910 concrete bridge in terms of its clean lines and rhythm and the little cantilevered brackets that stuck out in 1910, we replicated some of that or we interpreted some of that per our design so that we have a really nice rhythm in those approach structures, which that rhythm leads you right up to these historic iron trusses which are the centerpiece of the project.

Andy Ferrell: Excellent. Well that sounds like a really great project Patrick, but I want to sort of do the lighter side of preservation now, because I know that historic bridges are not the only thing that you care about preservation wise. I want you to tell me a little bit about the Texas Dancehall Preservation, Inc.

Patrick Sparks: The dancehalls are my favorite thing and to anyone who’s listening, you really have to come to Texas if you want to understand what Texas is and who Texans are — you can go to the Alamo and the Stockyards and stuff like that but if you really want to know, you go to a dancehall. It happens that Texas has more traditional dancehalls than any place on earth. We think that there are probably, maybe 500 left out of a historic thousand or so that have existed in the past and the dancehalls I’m talking about are traditional community halls that were built by German, Czech, Polish, and other immigrants that came in the in nineteenth century and brought with them a heritage of social dancing. That nineteenth century heritage is still alive in many parts of our state. So a few years ago myself and a couple of other people realized that what we had was a really unique resource in these halls that still existed, though many of them are not used or only used rarely, but to a large extent the social and cultural vitality is still there. When you go to one, it is like going back a hundred years and there are young couples and little kids and grandma and granddad, the whole family is there dancing. So several of us got together and we said this is very important to save, so we set up a 501-C3 non-profit corporation called Texas Dancehall Preservation, Inc. with a mission of trying to save all of the traditional dancehalls in Texas. It’s a good time and we would like everybody to come down and go dancing.

Andy Ferrell: Excellent. I’m ready to come myself. In fact, my next trip to Texas, I’m going to get in touch with you ahead of time. Well Patrick, it’s been a lot of fun talking to you today. Thank you very much.

Patrick Sparks: Thanks a lot Andy. It’s great talking to you.

Andy Ferrell speaks with Patrick Sparks, an engineer with Sparks Engineering Incorporated and also the President of Texas Dancehall Preservation Incorporated. Today they will discuss the restoration of the historic Hay Street Bridge in San Antonio, Texas, and the work of this unique preservation organization.

31. Cultural Heritage Recovery in Haiti (Episode 31)

Transcript

Jason Church: As we all know, on Jan. 12, 2010 there was a catastrophic earthquake in Haiti that devastated the country and Karen, you’ve just come back from doing some work in Haiti. What exactly were you doing there?

Karen Pavelka: I was helping to setup the lab at the Cultural Recovery Center in Port-au-Prince. I went down with two other conservators, a painting’s conservator, David Goist and an objects conservator, Bev Perkins, and the center was just getting started at that point. We were bringing materials in and organizing. There was a delegation of potential donors coming through and one of the reasons they had us there was to talk to the potential donors and tell them about the importance of the project and explain what conservation could and couldn’t do down there , and to try to build support. So, mine was pretty much, a planning and organizational visit. I got to do a little bit of treatment but not so much. Mostly, I got to lead tours, participated in workshops, help stand in as a teacher in workshops, it’s a very unstructured environment.

Jason Church: Who were you training in these workshops?

Karen Pavelka: Everything in Haiti is chaotic as you might imagine, and you don’t exactly know what you’re going to be doing day to day, so one day I showed up at the Center and some people from the West Indies happened to show up and said that they were going to be teaching a workshop to librarians and archivists the next day showing basic preservation techniques. So, I got to talk to them about basic conservations techniques and what one can and can’t do in a small space. It was two conservators from the West Indies who were working with people from Haiti, teaching people from Haiti.

Jason Church: The Conservation Resource Center that they have established now that you helped establish there in Port-au-Prince, what is that like? How large is it, who is it going to service, who’s funding it, that sort of thing?

Karen Pavelka: It’s not what you’re used to when you think of a conservation lab. It’s in a building that used to be a suite of offices. The building had been inhabited by the U.N. and the reason the site was chosen was because the building is very structurally sound. It didn’t fall over in the earthquake and it doesn’t look like it’s likely to fall over if there is another earthquake. It also happens to have a large fence around it; I guess about and 8 or 10 foot fence and a post where you can have armed guards. So, it was chosen for security and probably proximity to other environments, but it wasn’t chosen as an ideal lab space. We set up tables and shelves where we could get them and there are three labs there, they’re calling them labs, each one of them has a large room or a couple of large rooms and then there will be a smaller room down the hall that has a sink, and they all have bathrooms next to them. There is no real area for wet treatment. You carry all the water in and out of the working space. There are big jugs of distilled water, but you know, it’s pretty much an office space. It’s very beautiful, it’s quite a beautiful country, and the space itself is lovely but more of an office suite than a lab.

Jason Church: Who do they plan to be doing the actual work there?

Karen Pavelka: The project is organized by the Smithsonian. They are the ones who are spearheading the project, and they’re working with a number of other institutions, AIC being a very prominent member. So far, most of the conservators who have gone down have been organized through AIC, the American Institute for Conservation. AIC has served as a sort of clearinghouse to accept applications from conservators and coordinate travel and send them down. Stephanie Hornbeck is an American Objects Conservator, and she’s the chief conservator on the project. She is organizing all the conservation efforts. She is going out and selecting the objects for treatment and talking to the people in the collections, make alliances with people in collections. The very first thing people had to do was to convince people that it was safe to send their objects to the Center. Everything in Haiti as you might imagine, is pretty chaotic right now. So people weren’t exactly willing to say, “Oh good, I’m going to give you my most valuable object” because there’s a certain amount of distrust. Stephanie and the other staff at the Cultural Recovery Center have been making friends with the community doing outreach and letting people know that they can send their objects here, setting up tours, showing them some work that’s been done.

Jason Church: Well, how are the objects chosen that are being treated?

Karen Pavelka: They will work on things that people bring them. They are not choosing the objects, they’re telling people and the arts community that they can bring objects to the Center and the Center will treat them. They have a huge backlog of paintings. Right now the paintings are, I think they’re still mostly from private galleries but the thought is that they’ll be working with museums as well. They’re being pretty democratic about the work that they take in. They’ll take in work from pretty much everyone.

Jason Church: As it pertains to cultural materials and resources, what are the conditions in Haiti right now?

K. P.: Horrible, absolutely horrible. There’s rubble everywhere. I saw one dump truck the entire time I was in Haiti. The streets haven’t been cleared, the electricity is sporadic, all of the hotels are running on generators. There is no central power or very little. The houses of the more well to do people, the hotels that we were staying in, for anyone who can afford it, are running generators to keep power and even they go out periodically, so you know the power is going to go off periodically while you’re there. As I said the streets are just filled with rubble, they’re still clearing collapsed buildings by hand. You see people digging through piles of rubble and pulling out the bricks and the rebar that they might be able to fashion into some sort of dwelling. All those pictures of houses that you see, the blue tents that people are living in, those seem to be the upper middle class ones. A lot of what you see on the street is much worse than that, and I was there before the rains really began in earnest. There was some rain but not tons of rain. The conditions are unbelievable.

Jason Church: When you were there in July and saw the conditions you saw, that was really before the hurricane seasonal rains that they are having, so I’m sure that works of art on paper and of course canvases and mold issues must be extravagant right now. I can’t imagine what they must be seeing at the Cultural Center as they bring in these works of art. Are they having a backlog of objects and if so, how are they, I know with electricity issues, are they having to freeze objects to withstand the mold and that sort of thing?

Karen Pavelka: Freezing probably isn’t so much of a possibility right now because of the electricity. After the earthquake, they did a lot of work to salvage as many things as they could and just get them in a dry situation, you know, to pull them out of the rubble and just put them somewhere where they would be safe. I’m sure that there will be a lot more mold when their rains come because I have no idea what condition some of the buildings are going to be in where the artifacts are housed, so I can’t say anything about whether or not they have leaky roofs or anything like that. I’d be surprised if they don’t but who knows. The Center does have a backlog of materials that they work on. They had a backlog when I was there, and I’m pretty sure it’s only increased since I got back. They’re storing them in the Center and that was one of the reasons that they picked the space that they did. It had enough room not only to work on objects, but to store things that people would work on later on.

Jason Church: How were you contacted originally to get involved?

Karen Pavelka: I’m a member of AIC-CERT, a team of conservators that was trained to respond to disasters and the first call for conservators to work in Haiti went out to AIC-CERT members. I looked at it and thought no, not going to apply, not going to go, not me, because people said it was going to be very rough conditions, living in tents with spotty electricity. I don’t camp. I think of camping as living hell and you know I’m spoiled. I’m an incredibly spoiled middle class person. I like electricity, so I looked at it as I’m not going to go, not a snowball’s chance in hell, and then no other paper conservators signed up to do it. So what are you going to do? So, I ended up having to think, “Oh what the hell, I can do this.”

Jason Church: Tell us a little bit more about the AIC-CERT team.

Karen Pavelka: AIC-CERT is a group of sixty-one trained people who have all gone through a similar set of training in the incident command system and then in protocols that are used for responding to and assessing disaster situations. Sixty-one of course, is not enough people. Fortunately, AIC just got another grant to train another cohort of CERT responders, so that’ll be coming up soon. If you’re interested, keep an eye out, we can use more people, especially from the areas of the country like the gulf coast and Alaska. As you might imagine, so far most of the people are on the east coast. So AIC-CERT is a group of people who are trained to respond to disasters, and I was in the initial cohort of that training.

Jason Church: Aside from the work that they’re doing in Haiti, if there are other disasters, how would people, or say institutions and local governments contact AIC-CERT?

Karen Pavelka: There’s a link to AIC-CERT on the AIC Homepage and actually the work in Haiti is somewhat outside of what we thought of as the original mission for AIC-CERT. The original thought was that the teams would respond to disasters in the United States and would only respond if we are invited into a situation. So, we don’t go unless were invited. People can look at the AIC Homepage and there is a link to AIC-CERT there. There is a 24-hour hotline where you can ask for assistance or you can just ask for advice. If you find something that is underwater, you can just call up someone on the hotline and say can you give me some advice here and we’re always happy to do that. So far, AIC-CERT has responded to the floods in the Midwest and to Galveston after Hurricane Ike. AIC-CERT was formed as a response to all of the damage that was caused by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. We found that we weren’t really as well prepared as we needed to be, but we also found that AIC was the natural clearinghouse to get conservators into a situation.

Jason Church: Is there anything else you’d like to tell us about your time in Haiti, any of the treatments you did, or any stories you want to share about your time there?

Karen Pavelka: I’m just really impressed with all of the work that people at the Center are doing there. They are working through amazing odds, absolutely amazing odds and they are doing it with grace, with dignity, and they’re doing good solid work. Stephanie Hornbeck is absolutely amazing. She coordinates the work, she works well with the staff, she’s setting up training and all of the staff at the center there. They are just amazing people. So I was just very proud and honored to be able to work with them. I was a tiny, tiny cog in the beginning of what I think will be a very impressive project in the end, and I was happy to be a tiny cog there.

Jason Church: Very good. Well Karen, thank you for talking to us today, and we appreciate the information you’ve been able to share with us, and we look forward to talking with you again in the future.

Karen Pavelka: Well you’re welcome and I’m very happy to talk to you and thank you for having me.

Jason Church speaks with Karen Pavelka, a lecturer in the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin. Karen will talk about her experiences helping to setup a conservation lab at the Cultural Recovery Center in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

32. Claire Turcotte on Campus Heritage Landscapes (Episode 32)

Transcript

The Journal of the Society of College and University Planning recently produced a volume of essays highlighting campus heritage and preservation planning. The special themed edition Planning to ensure the preservation of campus heritage details the many complexities of balancing student trends, new technologies , living landscapes, adaptive re-use and nostalgia on America’s college and university campuses. Aimed at the stewardship of these campuses, this volume is the result of collaboration between SCUP and the Getty Foundation’s Campus Heritage Program.

Addy Smith-Reiman: Hello, and welcome to the podcast Claire. It’s great to speak with you today.

Claire L. Turcotte: It’s wonderful to see you.

Addy Smith-Reiman: I’d love to start out with a history of the project and the role of the Getty Foundation.

Claire L. Turcotte: Well, the Getty Foundation initiated a Campus Heritage Initiative in 2002. It ended in 2007 and in the process, they, the Getty Foundation, gave away about thirteen and a half million dollars to eighty-six schools nationwide to develop preservation plans for their institutions.

This included historic buildings, campus sites, and cultural landscapes. So, it was a very comprehensive scope of work. What happened was, the Getty Foundation realized wisely, that there was a tremendous amount of information in these final reports that came back to the Foundation. At the same time, we began discussing this project with the Getty Foundation and applied for seed money in 2007 to organize a project here to analyze these reports and pull out the important information and then do something with it. We had not quite figured out exactly what.

So, we did receive a grant in 2007 to allow us to really organize and outline major tasks with this project. So for example, we interviewed people nationwide who are involved in preservation planning and our campuses across the country and asked them what they would like to have, whether it was a maintenance kind of manual or what. We kept hearing a searchable database, so that is what we have developed.

Addy Smith-Reiman: There is an impressive scope of work of the eighty-six institutions receiving grant funds, and I’m really intrigued by this forethought to develop the framework to disseminate the case studies to a broader audience of planners, managers, and preservationists who would continue the sharing of lessons learned and best practices. Can you explain how the collaboration materialized and how the database materialized.

Claire L. Turcotte: Well the first effort was to obtain these final reports. The Getty Foundation forwarded them to me and some of them I obtained directly from the schools. Oftentimes, this was a difficult task because the person in charge had moved or something. I remember getting an email one winter day saying, “Aloha Claire. I’m the person you’re looking for. I have the report, “and it was from the University of Hawaii at Manoa. So I did obtain about eighty of the eighty-five reports. One school closed so the field was eighty-five and those reports are all on our website. Further, we developed a template, a one page summary, outlining the planning process that was used, the outcomes and so forth. That is useful for anyone doing research. Perhaps Addy, you’ve discovered this yourself. It was a tremendous amount of work but very rewarding as it is being used.

Addy Smith-Reiman: Now I’m wondering, can this template be used by other universities and colleges if they start addressing their preservation needs?

Claire L. Turcotte: Well yes, and as a matter of fact, the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia, a professor there sent me a message saying she stumbled on this website, and her preservation planning senior level class was developing, as part of their class work, developing preservation plans in concert with the school itself, who were developing their own plans. They found, they identified twenty or so useful models for their school by virtue of either geographic location or size, and they could use the information in these reports as useful models. So it was key to their successful planning effort.

Addy Smith-Reiman: So there are really two components to the grant that you received from the Getty Foundation; one was the creation of the database which is accessible and online, and the other is this culmination of the essays that materialized in your Journal.

Claire L. Turcotte: Exactly, but let me go into a little more detail about the website. It also is a network. We now have two hundred and seventy-one members. Anyone can join. It’s free and it also has a whole listing of resources and links to organizations such as yours for example, the National Park Service, AIA, and others. So it has a tremendous amount of resourceful material on the website. The Journal itself is a collection of some wonderful images. It’s all in color and on the inside, it does cover many aspects of preservation planning, the economic angles. There are several articles about the mid-century buildings that now are historic and many are in need of improvement and so on. So again, this is another major resource and the third thing that we are doing as another resource is we are developing a symposium. It’s kind of a culmination of all of our work as the grant winds down at the end of this year. The Journal was kind of a nice prelude to the symposium.

Addy Smith-Reiman: Now this database will be accessible on the website in perpetuity. What are the plans in the future? Can people continue to add to this database or is it really just the project itself, the information is out there and it’s available for everyone to use.

Claire L. Turcotte: It’s available, it’s out there. We are planning to house it permanently. We have not quite decided, maybe internally, but it will be accessible to anyone over time.

Addy Smith-Reiman: Now let’s talk a little bit more about the Journal. As you said earlier, there are articles ranging from the economics to cultural landscape preservation. All seem to embody the greater goal of the project on the whole, which is, how best to integrate change while maintaining campus character. Why don’t you talk a little about some of the articles that really address that on the whole that can be a great resource for anyone out there in preservation planning on heritage campuses or any campus.

Claire L. Turcotte: There are a great variety of wonderful articles here. One by David Newman from the University of Virginia that outlines a ranking system for example; how to prioritize, redevelopment, reuse, of some of the historic buildings and additionally the landscapes, which are sometimes a little more elusive because they are so dynamic. The University of Oregon developed a similar ranking system. Theirs was a matrix. The other important thing that we discovered in these reports and this is acknowledged in the Journal, is the idea of stewardship and in particular I think, the University of Kansas and the Cranbrook in Michigan, both of those reports address individual sites, individual gardens. The University of Kansas talks about view sheds and distances and avenues of site and the need to preserve these as the landscape changes. I have never been there but it sounds like a beautiful campus. It’s built on a ridge so the views are important. Individual gardens are important at Cranbrook. So each campus is significantly different from one another and the issues are quite different at many of these campuses. The importance of this grant initiative cannot be under estimated. There are benefits to the students as well, and the neighboring communities as they often were involved in the process. Mills College for example, comes to mind. They actually had classes for their students. The students were involved in inventorying their buildings. SCAD, the Savannah College of Art and Design included ninety something students in doing their inventory. So it was very beneficial to many groups and yes, the importance of the use of the US Department of Interior Standards and other guidelines by the reporting institutions and therefore; there was a common language that was useful. You know, integrated cultural landscape and so forth; this type of vocabulary. The required analysis and documentation to develop through preservation plans allows these plans to gain importance as standalone planning tools.

Addy Smith-Reiman: Now the symposium has many of the authors of the articles in the journal.

Claire L. Turcotte: Yes, that is true. David Newman is part of this from the University of Virginia. Frank Martin who is a landscape writer and historian, and Joan Weinstein from the Getty Foundation are attending. So yes, we will have Robert Melnick from the University of Oregon and others. So we are thrilled with the response that we are getting. It promises to be another excellent resource.

Addy Smith-Reiman: Well this is a huge resource for anyone involved in preservation planning at our nations’ colleges and universities. Thank you so much for sharing this with us today.

Claire L. Turcotte: You’re welcome. It was enjoyable.

Addy Smith-Reiman speaks with Dr. Claire L. Turcotte, Managing Editor for Planning for Higher Education, The Journal of the Society of College and University Planning, and Project Administrator and Researcher, Getty Foundation, Campus Heritage Initiative.

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