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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

12. Green Design and the Economy of Sustainability (Episode 12)

Transcript

CLEAVER: What is your background regarding sustainability?

NELSON: Well, I have a Master’s degree in sustainable design. I went to the Martin Center at Cambridge University, and they have a sustainable design degree. And while it is focused on new construction and technology and adding to new construction, I actually focused on sustainability for the built environment and how you can add new technology to an existing building.

CLEAVER: What is your position now?

NELSON: I am the program director for the Historic Building Recovery Grant Program, which is a grant program resulting from Hurricane Katrina. We got funding to focus on historic buildings that were damaged by either Hurricane Katrina or Rita, and we have about 568 grants — historic houses that we are helping to renovate and rehabilitate.

CLEAVER: What is your definition of sustainability?

NELSON: Well, there are many definitions, but I think probably the most concise one would be any effort that creates a result that has a long-term life. Basically, any effort that can be maintained or used or reused. Sustainability is about sustaining something, and that really goes into a long term and not a quick turn around, quickly disposable product.

CLEAVER: What does the term green building mean to you?

NELSON: Well, that one is another one that is used quite a bit. A structure that requires little energy to achieve its function, but also a structure that is designed for its climate, for its location and for its use. So you don’t really want to build a glass tower in a dessert. So wherever your climate is, the location of the property, you want to design something for that area.

CLEAVER: What is embodied energy?

NELSON: Well, embodied energy is any energy that goes into making a product, which includes human labor, fossil fuels, transportation-getting it there to where ever it ends up being. So embodied energy is all the energy in a product until it gets to its end use.

CLEAVER: What features of historic buildings are environmentally friendly?

NELSON: Well one, the society has already paid for the cost of building your houses so the embodied energy is already paid for. So every product has a cost and we have already paid for that. An historic building is inherently sustainable: the products are so good that they are made out of. You can’t get them anymore that they last a long time and they have a long-term life. New material is made to be obsolete in a few years, so modern construction is not made to last, but historic properties are.

Historic buildings were built before we really had mechanical systems to give us a false environment inside, and so the buildings were designed to have passive cooling and passive heating. So most historic structures have designed in them a way for the occupant to interact with their building and to actually use the passive strategies to keep them cool or warm without using energy.

So if you were to use those features before you ever got to the mechanical system of the HVAC system then you can have a lower energy bill just from the fact of interacting with your house. We have gotten out of the habit of interacting with our buildings, and so we have very large glass windows that we leave open in the summer that take a lot of heat, and we just don’t know how to work with our buildings. And you could actually lower your power bill quite a bit if you would just interact with these.

If you take just in the South where it is hot and tropical, some of our best-known and little under-used strategies are, a lot of our buildings are built up on piers. That is for two reasons. One, because we have a very high water table and it keeps the moisture away from our building, but it also allows cool air to go underneath the structure and have a cooling effect in the summer.

Because if you look at a building and think about if you don’t turn your AC on, how are you going to keep yourself cool. The other thing that we have, is we have very tall ceilings because heat rises, it allows people to walk in a cooler area because the heat is up around the ceiling. If you don’t put a drop ceiling in and you actually use that, then you have a very effective way to keep the temperature in your house a lot cooler.

Plaster has the same effect. It is a great insulator, it absorbs and releases moisture as it comes through and it has a very cooling effect inside. The other two things that are really predominant in the South that people do not use very much now is our shutters. A lot of people think of those as a storm prevention, but actually if you use them in the summer, they not only stop the solar rays from coming into your house and heating it up and causing a large energy bill, but it keeps your house cooler because it creates an air barrier between the shutter and your glass so heat does not actually come into your building as much as it does.

The other one is our transoms because you have what is called degree days, which is a way that scientists measure how many days you use a mechanical system. Up north the degree days are heavier when it is cold–they have more cold degree-days–and in the south most of our degree days have to do with cooling our buildings off.

So for example, in a climate if you have an average of two-hundred degree-days a year where you would need to use a mechanical system to make yourself comfortable in your house. If you were to interact with your building and use your shutters when it’s hot on the south side of the building to keep it cool, if you were to come home and open your transoms above your door and allow a breeze to go through and take the heat out of your house, you could go from an average from two hundred degree-days a year to one hundred twenty five degree-days a year. So it just is really interacting with your building.

CLEAVER: How do you incorporate these ideas into your position now?

NELSON: Well because we have so many grants and we have exposure to so many people that most of our grantees have never been involved with historic preservation, so it is a really unique opportunity to educate them.

And probably the biggest education we try to give them because we interact with them over a two-year period, so you don’t try to give them all this information at once and kind of overload them, you are allowed to really work with them through a time frame that allows you to kind of give them a little bit of information and kind of build on it.

And the biggest thing that we try to do is to educate them that what you see on the TV is not your only option. And that if you have a certain amount of money, that if you start with what is already in your building and work with that, if you are trying to lower your energy bill, if you would work with what’s in your building first than your construction or rehabilitation dollar could go further because you’re not trying…if you only have $5,000 and you do it and you use that money to replace your windows with new windows because you feel that that’s what is going to give you the best bang for the dollar, but you have good windows then you could spend maybe half of that on shutters to protect your windows and then have that additional money to go somewhere else.

So the big thing that we try to do is educate the public that what they see on TV is not their only option, and that what is in most of our historic buildings, what is already in place, is something that if you learn to use it-which costs nothing to do, to interact with your building-that you can use your renovation dollars for something else. And that is probably one of the biggest things that we try to do. That is to one, teach them the value of what they have because most people don’t realize what a valuable asset you have, and then how to best interact with it and use what you currently have instead of try to replace it.

CLEAVER: If less new construction is the result of these ideas, then what is the effect on the economy?

NELSON: Well, I think that we are so used to or so in the mode of doing what we’ve always done, which is new construction, which is a large business and I understand that, but I really do think that if you were to lower new construction and go into rehabilitation of the built environment that it really does balance it out. And the reason is because you can take people that work in new construction and if you have less new construction, then those trades people can go into the rehabilitation renovation field.

I also feel that on a city-wide or development company that if you are not focused on construction than you can focus on other things, which is sustainable resources other than oil or coal. For a city, instead of having your city council do new infrastructure for new subdivision development, if you are not having to put your resources into that, you could put your resources into fixing your current infrastructure.

So I think that it all balances out, I just think that you have to look at it in a different direction. I think that less construction and more renovation of your built environment creates the same amount of jobs if not more and can create the same type of profit that companies are looking for. You just have to direct your business in a different way.

New construction, a portion of the people that work in that don’t have to be skilled, you just have to be strong and willing to work hard to where preservation is a skilled labor. It is something that you can take with you. It is like going to school, you actually get educated on it. I just think that it is a poor argument to say that new construction is the only way to go, it’s just the way that we are used to going. It’s fast, it’s a quick turnaround and I think that there are too many houses currently that are unoccupied that you could use.

I think sustainability is not just for architecture, I think it is kind of a way of thinking about things. We have the ability to change the direction that we are going. I think that we are in a consumer-based society, and I understand why we are in a consumer-based society, but instead of trying to sell five things for a dollar each, why don’t you try to sell a well-made thing for 5 dollars for one of them.

I think it is just a new direction of thinking, and I don’t think it is new. I think it is just changing the direction that society thinks. I think that being a disposable society has got to stop sooner or later, hopefully it will be sooner. And sustainability, I think, is an umbrella in which all that fits under. It is more of a recycle, reuse, not need as much, don’t throw away as much. So, but sustainability is attached to architecture because it is one of the largest energy uses that we have in society, other than automobiles, but it can really trickle down to everything. It is just a way of thinking.

Jessica Cleaver speaks with Tracy Nelson, director of the Historic Building Recovery Grant Program, about sustainability and historic preservation.

13. 3D Digital Rock Art Documentation and Preservation (Episode 13)

Transcript

Guin: Carla, Thanks so much for being on the podcast. Why don’t you just start by telling us about your organization, Cultural Heritage Imaging.

Schroer: Cultural Heritage Imaging is a non-profit organization that’s based in San Francisco, and we drive both the development and the adoption of practical digital imaging solutions for people that are passionate about saving humanity’s legacy. And so we do that by working with museums and archeologists and sites to help them develop imaging technology. And we also collaborate with technical organizations to help develop technology and methodology.

Guin: What are some of the other organizations you work with?

Schroer: So we collaborate with a lot of people in all of our projects, and for this particular project, we just had a tremendous group of collaborators. We worked with the National Museum of the American Indian, which is part of the Smithsonian, the Presidio Archeology Program and a couple of archeologists from U.C. Berkeley — Meg Conkey and Ruth Tringham. And on the technology side, we had support from one of the senior researchers at Hewlett Packard Labs, computer graphic researchers at Princeton University, and also the University of California Santa Cruz. So that was our primary group of folks and then the number-one group I want to bring out, who co-taught the workshop with us, were photogrammetry experts at the Bureau of Land Management National Operations Center in Denver. And that is Tom Nobel and Neffra Matthews, who have been doing photogrammetry for a very long time. It was great to have their expertise on the project as well.

Guin: Let’s step back for a minute and discuss how you came up with the idea for the workshop.

Schroer: We’ve been working for some time with a number of technologies, but one of the key technologies is called Reflectance Transformation Imaging or RTI. And RTI is a really great technique for bringing out very fine surface details of an object. Reflectance Transformation Imaging allows you to create a very detailed model of the surface of an object, and you do that by taking a sequence of digital photographs with a light in different positions around the object. And then that’s processed on the computer to a new type of image that generates the surface information based on how the light reflects off of the object. And so once you have it in the computer, you can dynamically relight the object from any angle as well as apply some mathematical enhancements to bring out very fine surface details that could be difficult or even impossible to see with the naked eye.

We have used it successfully in a couple of different rock art sites, and we have presented some of our work at the American Rock Art Research Association Conference. There was a lot of interest among the rock art community in this technology. So that combination, with us putting together some training programs a little more focused in the museum community, really just brought this idea together. But we also included photogrammetry. And photogrammetry is a technique where you take overlapping images, and from those overlapping images, you can generate 3D points in space. And we brought in experts in photogrammetry from the Bureau of Land Management National Operations Center that have been using photogrammetry for really more than a decade on a lot of different projects, including rock art. So it was great to have them involved. Right now we can shoot a Reflectance image and a photogrammetric sequence of a rock art panel and get two different results. One of the future directions we’d like to do is put those two together so that you can have the reflectance image together with the 3D model of the surface. And we have some early research that is very promising in that area.

Guin: Tell us about how the workshop went.

Schroer: First, let me talk a little more broadly about the project. The project really has two components. So the first component was the workshop, and we held that in July. And then the second component, which we are working to complete right now, is to develop materials to be freely available on the web. So more focused on do-it-yourself kinds of materials, to make people aware of the technologies, see how it can be used and to start trying it themselves. So the first component, the workshop, we put out the word through various sources. Meg Conkey is the currently the president for the Society of American Archaeology. She gave out fliers at their last conference, and then various people we had met from different sources and we put out a call and an application process. And we were able to fill the workshop. We had 14 participants plus the instructors for the two full days that it went. It was pretty intense. We were covering an awful lot of material in two days.

The first day we spent a lot of time just showing people examples of results both with photogrammetry and with the reflectance imaging, and going through what it takes to shoot the stuff. So the people from Cultural Heritage Imaging did the reflectance imaging part and the BLM folks did the photogrammetry part. And we walked through what it actually takes to shoot the stuff. And then the second day, the focus was more on actually shooting some objects. So we had set up to work outside and to work with some material and to give people the chance to actually be part of actually shooting the material and then looking at the results. We also spent a little bit of time talking about where this technology is, where we see it going in the future; kind of what’s upcoming. And we had a tremendous conversation that was led by Michael Ashley with the participants to really get a lot of feedback about what are our barriers for adopting this technology in the field, how did folks see it being used. It was really great to have the technical people and some of the target audience really share what makes it valuable, what’s getting in the way and actually we are making a podcast of that discussion that’s going to be available as part of the materials that we are going to be producing.

Guin: Tell us about some of those conversations that you had during the workshop, especially about the future of this technology.

Schroer: We had a great mix of folks. The people who came were largely in the rock art field. We had people from all over the U.S. and a couple from the U.K., as well, but we also included some people on the technology side, including a researcher, a professor from U.C. Santa Cruz, who’s been helping develop some of the technology. And so that was really useful to create some conversations around both sides of that. We also had some folks interested in using the technology not specifically for rock art, but a little more broadly for other kinds of material. And, in one case, for early American grave stones, which obviously has a lot of shared qualities with rock art. So, in terms of the future work, the technology today is something people can learn to do themselves with off-the-shelf digital cameras. You need a good tripod, you need a few things to get it done, and you need to learn how to shoot an image sequence. And then there is free software that you can get that will allow you to process it and look at the results for the reflectance imaging.

Where we’re going is, we’re trying to raise money, and we have some proposals out to further that the software, to make it more robust, add features that people are asking for, and also to add, well, really, there’s this whole field called computational photography, which is based on taking image sequences and processing them for various kinds of results, and that field in computer graphics research is just taking off. So, there are a number of ways that the reflectance imaging we see going into the future can be married with techniques like photogrammetry or structured light scanning could be used with techniques that are being developed to capture more accurate color because the sensors in a standard digital SLR are not great at color accuracy. And then also a proposal that we have out is to do something that we call “automatic rendering” that allows you to take these imaging sequences with light in different positions and generate technical drawings with very different drawing styles that the user can choose from. This data that’s collected, is the same kind of data that’s collected to do reflectance imaging. So we’re very excited about that because you can take a data set one time, process it two different ways and get two very different kinds of results depending on what questions you’re trying to answer or how you’re trying to present your information to others.

Guin: Are you involved with actually coding software?

Schroer: Our organization is small, and we collaborate. We have technical expertise and project management and a little bit of coding expertise, but by and large, the real software development is happening in university research groups that we partner with. We partnered with the National Research Council in Pisa, which has a team that is very focused on cultural heritage work, and has worked with us extensively on a project funded by the Institute for Museum and Library Services. There’s a team at the University of Minho in Portugal, and we’ve done some work with Warwick Digital labs. The tool I was just talking about, the automatic rendereing, that’s a project that we have proposed in conjuntion with Princeton University, so the primary code development would be happening at Princeton.

Guin: It seems like these things you’re developing could be used in other applications as well. For a larger audience beyond just archeology. Have you explored any of that? You’re in the “tech capitol of the world,” pretty much.

Schroer: Our focus is really about finding solutions that solve problems in the cultural heritage and natural sciences area, so we do have a focus on museums as well as on archeologists and archeological sites. There are potential other directions that people could go with some of these techniques, and where we’ve seen people doing other kinds of work we’ve tried to partner with them. One thing we’ve found is that a lot of the tools that are out there are either very early in the research phase so they’re not quite ready for people to do themselves, like the actual techniques and methodology aren’t well described or you have to be a propeller head to actually figure out how to do it. And so what we try to do is figure out what of those things are really interesting, compelling and solve problems in the field, and how do we get those things developed and get them in people’s hands where they can do it them themselves. Because one of the core principles of our organization is that we are a “teach a person to fish” model. So for technology to get out there and really get used that helps in imaging, people have to be able to do it themselves. If they have to hire a specialist to do it, then only a very tiny fraction of the work that needs to get done will get done. If people can do it themselves and it fits in their regular work flow and it solves problems that they already face everyday, then we think it will get adopted and used. And so that is a real driving force for us for what we choose and what we try to get funded and how we try to develop it and get it in people’s hands.

Guin: How do you seek out those people who are good potential partners?

Schroer: What we did was we focused vary early on on people that were working on how to capture information about the real world from photographs. So that’s a fairly narrow band actually. And our president, who also operates as our chief technology officer, has been going to CIGGRAPH, which is the big computer graphics conference, for many years.

And so really through just starting to make some relationships with people there; he was invited on a panel many years ago that opened some doors that talked to people additionally. So really looking for people in this field that also have an interest to applying it to cultural heritage or natural sciences. And what we found is that folks really want to collaborate.

They really want to find ways that their work can get used in the real world, and the kinds of material that we are working with is really exciting to everybody. So the hard work initially was finding the right people that had the right background, but getting them excited about working with rock art or working with ancient ceramics or coins or whatever it is, that’s been the easy part.

Guin: Alright, well is there anything else you want to add about the project or maybe your future directions for Cultural Heritage Imaging?

Schroer: We are a small organization with a big vision, and how we do that is through collaboration and finding the right collaborators is really key. I have been talking a little bit more on the technology side, but we have really important collaborators on the cultural heritage side as well. So for us, all the projects need to have both sides represented.

You don’t want to just build tools without having the users that you’re targeting them for involved and helping to influence them and so forth. So we are getting close to posting the materials from this project and then we got kind of a related project grant from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation to develop materials specifically for the museum conservation audience that are based on the reflectance imaging.

And so we are partnering with the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco on that one. We are going to be shooting some objects from their collection, and interviewing their conservators about specific conservation issues and how they see these tools helping them solve conservation issues with the materials. So we are continuing to do training and trying to spread the word — that’s one side. And then the other future direction is trying to bring in the funding to try to do the related tools — the adding these features that we have been talking about — marrying this kind of technology with photogrammetry and 3D.

And there is just a whole range of possibilities out there and lots of great people that are willing to work on it if we can get the funding institutions to give us support. And we do have a couple of big proposals that are out there right now.Guin: Carla, thanks so much for being on the podcast.

Schroer: Well, thank you very much for the opportunity.

Jeff Guin speaks with Carla Schroer of Cultural Heritage Imaging. The non-profit organization recently used a PTT Grant to hold a workshop on 3D digital rock art documentation and preservation.

14. Technologies for Drying Archeological Wood from Shipwrecks (Episode 14)

Transcript

Jeff Guin: Eric, welcome to the podcast. How did you get involved with the science of conservation?

Eric Schindelholz: Hi Jeff. Thanks for having me.

First off, I became aware of conservation as an undergraduate archeology student and went on my first excavation in Israel and met a conservator for the first time and realized there is more to archeology than digging up stuff. There is also the preservation aspect. So the science of preservation along with the interest in archeology is kind of what steered me into conservation to begin with.

As an undergrad, I took some chemistry courses and more archeology courses, and then went on to obtain a Master’s in conservation. My first job out of conservation school for my Master’s was on a shipwreck project called the U.S.S. Monitor. Just a little background on the U.S.S. Monitor project: It was, at that time, one of the largest conservation projects dealing with iron shipwrecks in the world. There’s about 250 tons of material from this Civil War shipwreck that had been recovered. Our team was in charge of preserving. So that lent to some major challenges in dealing with the volume of the material that we had, and also the variety of different types of material. We had lots of iron, but we also had lots of waterlogged wood and organic artifacts. So it’s kind of through this project where we started working a lot with material scientists and other scientists outside the field of conservation to start doing some research and design where it could tackle these challenges that aren’t usually brought up in the normal conservation lab. So that’s kind of how I became interested and started in the science of conservation.

So that project led into the research that we’re talking about today, which is the NCPTT grant. Is that correct?

That is correct. During that project, I mentioned that we had a number of these wood artifacts. We had gun tools that they used to maintain and fire the guns with. We also had some personal effects, furniture details and pieces, all of which were fairly degraded and covered with rust. Some of which also had iron pieces attached to them. So these were complicated artifacts and we had a lot of them.

So then our task was to then find sort of the best treatment method that we could use for these artifacts, and we looked at some of the typical types of conservation treatments, but we also looked into this fairly new conservation treatment that had been recently developed, and that was in the 90’s, by St. Andrew’s University called supercritical drying.

OK, well explain what supercritical drying is.

Supercritical drying is basically, well, the method that we used in this study, is basically soaking a waterlogged organic artifact, in our case wood, in a series of organic solvents like acetone and ethanol to replace the water in the wood with the solvent. And then taking that solvent-soaked artifact and placing it in kind of loosely described as a “pressure cooker” and pumping in carbon dioxide, bringing the heat and pressure up in this vessel to create supercritical carbon dioxide.

Supercritical carbon dioxide is a form of matter, or supercritical fluid actually is a form of matter, that is neither a liquid nor gas, but displays kind of the properties of both liquids and gases. And so we are all familiar with our three most common states of matter, which would be solid, liquid and gas. So there are a couple of other types of these phases, one of them being the supercritical. So at this elevated temperature and pressure, you have this fluid that has the solvent properties of a liquid, but the diffusivity of a gas—meaning, when we put the solvent-soaked artifact in our loosely-termed “pressure cooker” and remove that solvent with the carbon dioxide, it does it so very quickly because it is like a gas. But it also does it without liquid surface tension. And liquid surface tension is pretty important when drying any type of artifact.

You can find this phenomenon very simply at your home with the drying of a sponge. The liquid-surface tension is basically the force put on an object the by a drying liquid, which causes stress on it and in the form of a sponge, which has a very weak cell structure (very similar to water-logged wood), that sponge shrinks up.

So back to case-and-point here in our pressure cooker with the supercritical carbon dioxide and by removing all this liquid solvent and replacing it with this gas-like substance that doesn’t have a liquid-surface tension, you’re avoiding that shrinkage from occurring. And after you go through this process, which can take a number of hours to a few days, what happens is you just depressurize the vessel and you are left with this artifact filled with carbon dioxide. And we know at room temperature and at standard pressure that carbon dioxide is a gas. So you are essentially left with just a piece of wood filled with air.

Tell us about the history of this method, or this concept, for drying.

Supercritical fluids in general have been around for more than a hundred years, and they were first observed in the 1800s. And by the mid-1900s, they were being used in a lot of industrial processes. Some processes using aerospace to dry different types of materials and as solvents, and now-a-days they are used quite a bit in industry and commercial applications down to even dry cleaning your clothes. If you ever go to one of these “green” drycleaners, what they are using is basically supercritical carbon dioxide. So as a whole supercritical fluids have been around for quite a while. The folks, as I mentioned earlier from St. Andrew’s University, adapted a kind of a method and developed their own spin on the drying method using organic solvents for waterlogged wood. What we did then was to evaluate their method against common types of treatment methods for waterlogged wood.

What came out of the project? What were your findings?

Well our research was concerned with evaluating the process that those at St. Andrews University developed against polyethylene glycol and freeze-drying process, which is just essentially putting a synthetic wax in the wood and freeze-drying it–much in the way that some taxidermy is done nowadays and that also prevents shrinkage from occurring. And we also evaluated this method against just plain air drying. And what were looking for was the shrinkage of the wood. The goal was to have the least amount of shrinkage possible, and also is any cracking occurred and some of the qualitative kind of aesthetic appearance of the wood as well. What we found were many of the things we suspected or hypothesized. First, that the waterlogged wood that we used and just let sit out on the lab bench and air dry shrunk up like a sponge — no surprise there. But also the current popular method of filling this thing up with synthetic wax or polyethylene glycol by freeze-drying gave very good results and little shrinkage. Some amount of shrinkage occurred from the supercritical process we were using. But really it is fairly negligible compared to some other types of treatment techniques out there and also to just air drying in general. So we had fairly good results.

We had some pieces of wood where the degradation was very high and the supercritical fluid wasn’t able to prevent some of the shrinkage that occurred on that wood and also caused cracking. That was an unexpected result that we had.

We found that the supercritical process presented us with good results, but kind of on par with the current technique of synthetic wax and freeze-drying. There are some advantages to this technique, and this is why we kind of looked at it, and it can still be applied in many cases, and that it doesn’t leave material in the wood. You are left with the natural piece of wood at the end, instead of a piece of wood that was soaked with synthetic wax or other materials. It is also much faster than current techniques. The freeze-drying technique that I had explained can take on the order of a few months to a few years depending on the type of artifact, whereas the process of using supercritical fluid cuts that time down to a few days to a few weeks. So from a cost-wise perspective and time and resources, supercritical fluid could be more advantageous for large projects than the traditional techniques.

Are there other applications for supercritical drying?

There are other applications for supercritical drying, not just with wood, but also with other types of waterlogged artifacts. And that has been explored by St. Andrew’s University and Clemson University, who were some of our co-investigators on the project, are using this type of technique to dry waterlogged corks from their Hunley submarine shipwreck.

So there are different things that can be done with drying, but also supercritical fluids in general can be applied to the field of conservation in many different ways. I had mentioned that commonly now you find these drycleaners that use supercritical carbon dioxide to clean things. This could be applied to museum textiles, probably with fairly good results, and to other fairly fragile materials such as cleaning feathers, which is obviously a problem in conservation. So there are a number of different applications out there. It just takes the time and the money to really look into this.

You mentioned the pressure-cooker concept. Does it require specialized equipment or a dedicated laboratory to execute this type of method for drying?

Supercritical fluids for drying require fairly high pressures, sometimes on the order of scuba tank pressures, so thousands of psi. Ours was below 1,000 psi, but at the same time, you need to have specially constructed vessels that are well engineered and safety checked because as you can imagine, with such high pressures, when something goes wrong you may end up with a lack of a laboratory or artifact or personal effects afterward. So, it does require some specialized equipment, but not necessarily specialized laboratories. I mean, just like a freeze dryer that someone can be specialized on or someone trained on, so can a supercritical fluid chamber.

Where currently can supercritical drying be performed?

There are only a few laboratories in the world that are really looking into cupercritical drying. I had mentioned St. Andrew’s University. They had a supercritical chamber, which they carried out waterlogged wood conservation. I’m not sure what the status is at this moment. Also Clemson University, one of our co-investigators, has a supercritical chamber and are working on developing different techniques using this type of methodology. I know there are a few others … but I’m not sure off the top of my head where they are.

So where do you see this research going in the future?

I think we’ve now established from this research and the research at St. Andrews that this is a fairly viable technique. We carried out our experiments on a very small scale.

Our chamber that we used was on the order of a few liters in capacity. At this point, I think there has been enough research that has been conducted so that one could scale up the process and maybe start treating larger artifacts and look at some of the effects that we have observed such as this cracking phenomena, and trying to figure out some of the mechanisms behind that and figure out some of the optimum treatment methods that are out there.

Eric, thanks for being on the podcast.

Thank you.

Jeff Guin speaks with Eric Schindelholz, a conservator in private practice who specializes in metals and marine archaeological materials. Eric was the principal investigator for a PTT Grant Project that examined methods to dry waterlogged archaeological wood.

15. How the Internet Saved an Historic Tree (Episode 15)

Transcript

Guin: Guy, welcome to the podcast. I wonder if you could just start by telling us how you first found out about this tree.

An Osage Orange Tree (courtesy of Wikipedia) An Osage Orange Tree (courtesy of Wikipedia)

Sternberg: I am on the State’s Big Tree committee with a few other people. One of the other people, who is from Kewanee sent me an email. And he said, well, looks like they are going to cut the old hedge tree down in Kewanee because it is leaning over the highway and think it’s leaning a bit more. And this has been a tree that I’ve taken tour groups to. We do big tree tours around the state. It was one of the last original surviving hedge trees in Illinois and happened to be an osage orange. And these were planted due to the impetus of Professor Jonathan Turner, who was a professor at Illinois College, which was the first and is the oldest college in Illinois.

Guin: Well, this is obviously an important part of the city’s history. What did you do to mobilize efforts to save the tree?

Sternberg: This was Friday night when I got the message. The city offices were closed for the weekend, and they had already made plans to cut this tree down the following Tuesday. So, dropping a billion other things that were already in my lap, I went through my address book for about three hours and handpicked 250 people who I thought might take an interest in this, and sent them out a short email expressing what I had heard and if you feel up to it could contact the city and ask them for a little bit more time so that we could evaluate this thing and see if there are other opportunities available. And of the 250, I think at least 50 of them did contact the city from as far away as Europe and all over the states and so forth.

Guin: How did the city react to all the attention?

Sternberg: I got a call from the mayor, and I talked with him and I talked with the city manager, and explained to them that we had done a lot of things like this in the past. I worked with other people involved in trying to save our monumental historic trees. And they said, OK, we’ve got it set up for Tuesday, what should we do? I suggested, well, I’d seen the tree–I had photographs of it I had taken before, I knew it was leaning over the state highway. I said if you could remove those two lower limbs that are cantilevered way out over the highway, for now, that would take some of the pressure off it. And we could set up a meeting up there as soon as possible with some other people who can evaluate this and determine what methods could be used to preserve it. The city knew it was historic. It pre-dated the city there. It was planted there when the whole city was just one farm. And they were aware of that. The county historical society was aware of it, but they were just concerned for public safety–obviously as they should be.

Guin: So you were at least temporarily able to keep the tree from being cut. Tell us a little bit more about this particular species of tree and how that contributed to what happened next.

Sternberg: Being an osage orange tree, we also knew that there were a lot of options open to us that wouldn’t be open with almost any other species of tree. First of all, it’s just totally decay-immune. You can have osage orange heartwood that has been made into fence posts back in the depression that are just as solid as a rock with no treatment of any kind. It’s very tough wood. It has latent buds that will allow it to re-sprout from anywhere on the tree. If you cut it, it will re-sprout and grow again. And that’s one of the reasons it was selected for hedging back in the 1840s. It’s typically a thorny tree, and professor Turner realized after looking at this that if you plant a bunch of these seedlings in a fence row, let them grow a couple of years and cut them back, they will re-sprout and re-sprout more vigorously and thorny than ever. Then you can trim those thorny re-sprouts into a hedge that will stop livestock. This was a time when the Midwest economy was changing from open range to farming, and they had to have something that would fence in and fence out livestock. And as you get further west in Kansas, Nebraska and so forth, they didn’t have many trees that you could use to make fences out of. You could cut a cottonwood down and build a fence, but by the time you got to the north end of the fence, the south end has already decayed away–it just won’t last outdoors. But these living fences would last.

So we knew that. I’d seen osage orange trees that had been cut back every year since the early 1930s. There was one that was growing under where they’re putting a new rural electric light in 1930-whatever, in the Dust Bowl days, and the farmer didn’t want to cut his tree down, so he just and the electric company cut the top half of it and then every year when it re-sprouted, he would trim the sprouts back into a nice little round gum ball. And this tree has just been going just fine ever since then and still is.

Guin: So at this point you’ve got global support for the preservation of this tree and you’ve got the city’s cooperation, so what were the next steps as far as actually preserving the tree?

Sternberg: Well, they went ahead and did the pruning. They had to have a permit and a crane and everything on site anyway because they were planning on taking the tree down, and had blocked off the state highway in the process. And so instead of taking the whole tree down, they did as I asked and took about two tons of wood off the down-lean side, if you will, to give the tree better balance. The whole tree is still balanced over the street, but not nearly as badly as it was. And then we got together a couple of weeks later with a couple of arborists and city council members and the local newspaper guy and a couple of other people who had an interest in this for one reason or another, and a few other people who said I can’t come to the meeting but here’s what I think and let me know what you come up with and give us some photos and measurements and so forth. And these were expert arborists from all over the country, there was an engineering firm involved and several people who just wanted to help raise money or make awareness of the tree their local cause. We had a radio station in Chicago that was doing interviews with me and with the mayor about the tree. The Home Grown Tomatoes Show on Justin TV in Alabama has put it on their show and they actually set up a Facebook page [since inactive] for the tree and the ways to donate money. The city has worked with the chamber of commerce and the local bank to set up a dedicated bank account for the tree. And no money can be taken out of that account unless it is countersigned by both the city and either the bank or the chamber, and restricted strictly to the Kewanee hedge tree. People are able to send their contributions there and those will be used to stabilize the tree, to provide interpretive signing for the tree. They have to raise and relocate a sidewalk that is over the root system. We need to provide a vertical beam and some dynamic cabling to ensure that the tree will be stable even in a severe wind or ice storms because of its lean. So these are the types of things the money is used to fund for.

Osage orange tree after initial pruning to reduce lean.

Guin: Excellent, what do you see as your role, personally, in this process?

Sternberg: It involves giving the tree a personality, making people aware of why it is important, and giving them a way to contribute either monetarily or with volunteer work. And it can work surprisingly well and it is working in this case. We plan to go back once the city gets permission from the adjacent landowner to place this beam on their property via an easement. The beam will be placed like a big vertical post. And then from the top of that post, across the sidewalk to the main limbs of the tree there will be dynamic cabling put in and installed with big eye-bolts. And professional arborists will be doing that in July. They will take a break out from their International Society of Arboriculture meeting in July, which is in Chicago and make the two-hour drive west to Kewanee and a team of volunteer arborists will be doing the instillation then. So we will sort of be working together on it.

Guin: When you sent that first email, did you have any idea what the reaction would be?

Sternberg: I kind of did because, like I have said, we have been doing this for years with other trees mostly in our home county. We have more than 20 trees that we’ve monumented and some of them we have worked on and cabled and put lighting protection on and so forth. And of course the people in my address book are not just ordinary folks, they are people that I associate with because we have similar interests. And so a lot of these people are doing the same thing I’m doing elsewhere in the world or elsewhere in the country. So I knew that some of them at least would write the city and say, “hey let’s give the tree a reprieve, let’s look at this and let’s see if we can help you find a solution that would keep your people safe but also keep the tree going.” And yeah, I expected it and that’s what we got. And I was nonetheless very gratified to see that so many people came out of the woodworks so fast because we only had two days before the tree was gone. And also I need to commend the city because the mayor, the city council members, and the city manager — all were really sad that that tree supposedly had to go but they didn’t know another solution because they just hadn’t dealt with something like this before. And now that they are doing it and they have some help, they are going out and recruiting help. They’ve recruited someone to donate all the beams that are necessary. They are taking every step they can to work with all of us in saving what is their natural and historical heritage as well.

Guin: You mentioned something earlier about the tree actually having its own Facebook fan page. Is this the first time, that you’re aware of, that social media has played a part in a campaign like this?

Sternberg: Yes it is. I’ve used the internet in the past and have memberships in various green organizations to just get emails to people, but I am not very literate in terms of social media and some of these other people are. And I think the younger you are, the more involved with media, then the better you are at it. So the same person who is doing the Justin.tv stream program on the tree said I’ll set up a Facebook page if you get the city to it operated.

So he set it all up, put a way for people to donate, you know click through PayPal, gave it to the city and the city is running it now. And it’s the same fund, it all goes to the dedicated fund for the tree. And if we don’t spend all of it in this initial go around, we’ll be coming back every few years to do some trimming and inspecting and tweaking on the tree to make sure that it is around basically forever.

Guin: What can other historic landscape professionals learn from your experience?

Sternberg: Well, from this one, you might say it is an anomaly, but I have done this type of thing before, and if you are willing to drop your other work and jump on an emergency like this, it would be better if you could do it before it was an emergency, but then you don’t have the motivation of people.

People aren’t willing to do something until the cat is almost out of the door. And the question is if I waited two days later, the tree would be laying on the ground. So timing is critical first of all. It has to be urgent, but it has to be doable. The other thing is that I think you need to get the right people involved and the right mix of people, who number one are altruistic and have these interests, and number two, have something that they can contribute in terms of knowledge or equipment or whatever.

I think that in any case, and each situation is unique, but if someone has an historic landscape or an historic tree in their community–if possible, get out there in advance and inventory its condition and the situation and its legal status and so on so that you know something about the tree. Take the measurements, do the legwork, take a GPS reading, so if you want to send the tree’s location to someone else remote so they can get on Google Earth or something and get a view of the tree, they can do that. Take those steps in advance and sort of adopt that tree. Work with the landowner and make sure they are aware of how important this tree is and the things that you should or shouldn’t do with an old tree to keep it going. Try to work with local groups, who might be interested in interpretive signing or in doing tours that involved the tree. Doing specials in the newspaper, maybe seasonal specials. And while people are doing that, they are going to start looking at the birds that are in the tree and the shrubs that are in the woods around the tree, they are going to get out instead of sitting in front of their TV watching baseball and hopefully they will get more involved with everything that makes their world tick.

Jeff Guin speaks with Guy Sternberg, a certified arborist and retired landscape architect. Guy spearheaded an Internet-based campaign to save an historic tree in Kewanee, Illinois.

16. 3D Scanning, Rome Reborn and Virtual Ancient Worlds on Google Earth (Episode 16)

Transcript

Guin: I’ve heard the term “Born Digital.” Could you explain what that means for me?

Frischer: Born digital means that the product came into life by means of digital technology, and it didn’t exist before. So we might have a document that we scanned and we ended up with a digital file, well that is not born digital. I like to call that “re-born digital” that started life as an analog document. On the other hand, if we make a computer model of the Colosseum, and we use CAD software to do that, we may be inputing measurements that we’ve taken from the Colosseum, but we are not re-creating digitally a previously existing analog product, like a model. So that is what I would call something that is born digital.

Guin: That brings us into a very high-profile project that you’ve been working with called Rome Reborn. Tell us about how that started and where it is today.

Frischer: I always say that Rome Reborn started in the 15th century–of course my own involvement happened a few years later, starting in the mid-1970s. But seriously, in the mid-15th century, the vision occurred to people in Rome, actually some papal secretaries, especially one named Flavio Biondo to reconstruct ancient Rome. It was largely in ruins but there were enough ruins around to inspire people to study them and to learn from them to reconstruct modern Rome. And so this vision of reconstructing Rome started.

I saw a physical model of ancient Rome made from 1933-1973 when I was a young Ph.D. starting a post-doc in Rome in archeology, and I was blown away by this physical model. It was called the “Physical Model of Ancient Rome.” And I thought, coming from a background in photography and electronic music and other technologies, but also from a background in humanities in archeology that there ought to be some technology to get this wonderful, physical model out of this one obscure museum in Rome and into the hands of the people in the world. And that’s really where Rome Reborn started as far as I’m concerned.

Guin: Tell me more about the technologies themselves.

Frischer: It started out as something very exotic and expensive that mainly was available through the manufacturers of hardware and software who produced the equipment you needed to do 3D, and this started in the 1970s. And through a lowering of the price in the 1990s, and especially in the last 10 years, the technology has become ubiquitous in fields like architectural history, archeology–any field in which you are documenting a 3D object. That’s the kind of economic history. In terms of the more technological history of 3D technology, you could say that 3D technology started really divided into two branches right from the beginning. A branch that had to do with 3D data capture, and that resulted early on in the development of the 3D laser scanner and then other kinds of scanners: structured light, time-of-flight, and so on. And that’s how you can capture an object that fully exists in the real world.

And the other branch is CAD, or computer-aided design, and a subdivision of that is 3D modeling. We have on the CAD side standard software that people use is AutoCAD made by AutoDesk. The 3D modeling side, we have a package such as 3D Studio Max or Maya 3D, also published by AutoDesk, that we use when the object we want to capture can only be captured from our imagination. There’s nothing to scan because it is very damaged or it doesn’t exist anymore. We may only know about it from old photographs, records, memories of people or archeological excavations. So over time, these two different branches, of 3D scanning and hand modeling, have come together. And in our project, we have a really good example of a hybrid way in which the two approaches to 3D have been merged, I think in a very useful way. And what we are doing with Rome Reborn is something, I think, most people now, working with 3D in the cultural heritage sphere are doing more and more of–combining these two different branches as they have developed over the last 20 years.

Guin: What has been the nature of the relationship between these technologies and actually using them in cultural heritage?

Frischer: The cultural heritage application is one of the more recent and latest applications of this technology. I mentioned that it started out being very exotic and expensive. Before it was even used by industry, like oil and gas exploration more commonly, it was used by the military. And it was really thanks to the military that we even have this technology. In the 1970s, the early 3D companies were involved in producing flight simulators to train jet pilots for the military. Then that was civilianized and was used to train civilian aviators. As time has gone on, industry has continued to play a very big role in pushing this technology forward. And today, the largest impetus is coming from the game industry. And we have to really thank all of our children for being such fanatics of gaming because that’s pouring billions of dollars of development into the hardware and software that we need in cultural heritage. The cultural heritage use goes back to the late 1980s. As far as I know, the pioneering application of 3D technology to heritage was a show put on by IBM in London in 1989-90, and it was dedicated to Pompeii. And I found that show very inspirational.

A couple of companies then sprung up around the world to try to commercialize this more generally in cultural heritage. They didn’t do too well in the 1990s because prices were still too high. By the mid to late 1990s, scholars started to be able to afford and started to play with this new technology. It was still fairly expensive. We had a supercomputer at UCLA, an SGI-Onyx that cost a million dollars. I now have much more computing power in my $1,500 Sager gaming computer than we had in that million-dollar SGI that we purchased in about 1996-7. But as the prices have come down and the technology has become more and more powerful, the cultural heritage applications have proliferated, and now there are probably one-to-two thousand architectural historians and archeologists around the world who are really working full time with this technology and starting to turn out a pretty big archive of material for us to use and study.

Guin: You’re actually involved with an initiative now to archive that so that people in the future can actually access that data and use it. Tell me about that.

Frischer: The initiative is called SAVE, which stands for Serving and Archiving Virtual Environments. The initiative has an archival goal, and the name, SAVE, pertains very nicely to that goal of saving the stuff were are creating for the future, for future generations. Ironically, a lot of us in virtual heritage are helping to save and transmit and re-interpret the heritage of the past, but we are not paying enough attention to the fact that what we are doing, in so doing, will be of interest to people in the future. And we’re creating a new kind of heritage that needs to be preserved. But the other part of SAVE, besides archiving, is dissemination. That’s the S: “serving” an archival environment. Another big problem of the current day isn’t that we aren’t worried about saving our work for the future, but that we are not able to get it out to our fellow professionals and to the general public to students and scholars around the world. There is no online peer-reviewed journal where people can read about and use these 3D models. The purpose of the journal, SAVE, will be to publish the models so they can be used in real time by people on the Internet, and related monographs and articles, documentation, bibliography and metadata so that the models can be understood. And we are working on major commercial publishers to actually get SAVE implemented over the next 12 to 18 months.

Guin: What does this mean to the common person? And what’s it gong to mean to them in the future?

Frisher: We know from Aristotle and we know from contemporary cognitive psychologist and psychologists of perception that man or humans are visual animals. We learn through the senses. And of all the senses, as Aristotle said, vision is perhaps the most powerful and to us the most useful. So what will it mean when this enormous heritage legacy of mankind is available to us on the Internet in its original 3D form, easily accessible at little or no cost? I think it will mean, for the common man first of all, an even greater interest in cultural heritage. We already know that the Metropolitan Museum gets more guests every year than all of Major League Baseball. So we know that people love cultural heritage and so we don’t have to worry about building up an audience for cultural heritage, but we do have to worry about making cultural heritage more accessible and understandable. Since we are primarily visual people and these are visual objects, the easiest way for someone to understand a 3D object is to see a 3D object. Not to read about it. Not to see a 2D–especially abstract representation of it like an architectural plan section or elevation. But to actually see the 3D thing in all its glory and even to be able to seemingly walk through it and experience it.

We’re working now, through SAVE, with ways to make that available to the public on the Internet, but we are also, more interestingly, working with companies to make it available on smart phones as an application on say, an iPhone. So as you are walking around Rome, you’ve downloaded the program, you can see on your iPhone–or other app phone–a representation of the city as it looked at some early phase in its development, say in antiquity. And you can get along with that image, some information describing what you’re seeing. I think that this will enhance and enrich tourism and probably make tourism an even greater growth industry in the 21st century than it was in the 20th century, which is saying quite a lot. And it will mean tourists will go more and more off the beaten track because they won’t need guides and preparation, they will be able to get the information delivered just when they need it. So it will be “just on time” information.

Guin: And you have actually already started down that trail … and there is something people can get to now, which is your collaboration with Google Earth.

Frischer: Yes. We have a very good relationship with Google Earth. We published the Rome model in simplified form in Google Earth. They call it “Ancient Rome 3D.” And it is a featured layer in Google Earth that all 500 million-plus subscribers can view for free. Google would ask us to add more historic cities to Google Earth. It doesn’t make sense for them to just have Rome. Once they start on this path, they need to cover the whole planet in a rather consistent way.

If your listeners have a good model of any significant cultural heritage site, please let us know. [Contact information in the audio or the Frischer Consulting website]

Guin: And what projects are you working on right now?

Frischer: Beside the SAVE initiative, we are doing a prototype with a new NSF grant, for which we are very grateful. We are working on a model of Hadrian’s Villa. And the purpose of that project to model this world heritage site, is to experiment with virtual world software. Virtual world software: the most famous is Second Life. We have some problems with Second Life. We don’t like the fact that it’s not open source and we don’t like the fact that there are no loaders for standard 3D file formats.

So we made our model of Hadrian’s Villa using AutoCAD, and when we bring it in to a virtual world, we don’t want to have to completely rebuild it from scratch as we would have to do in Second Life. So we found an open-source equivalent called Open Simulator, and we’re working with IBM, which is one of the prime movers and developers behind Open Simulator, to bring Hadrian’s Villa into a virtual world software environment.

And we’re doing that in order to test of out some ideas of a young scholar in Rome who has recently published a book about the site, about how the six groups of people who used the villa when it was new in the 130s A.D. interacted–from the emperor down to the slaves. And you really need to have bots and avatars–3,000 of them by the way–moving around this 250-acre complex to test out her ideas, refine them and make them better. And she is working with us to do that by the way. And so we’re looking at virtual world technology as a medium for scholarly investigation, expression and communication.

We’re also very interested in scanning and publishing to the Internet with secure remote rendering, very detailed models, very high-resolution models of sculpture. Sculpture is something that has been neglected by virtual archeologists today, probably because a sculpture is typically a very organic form. And in order to model it, you need to create a model with many, many polygons. And this is very hard for the computer to process in real time, so I think scholars have tended to shy away from it. But working with David Koller, my post-doc, who came to us from the computer science department at Stanford, where he worked on the famous Digital Michelangelo project with his professor, Mark Lavoy, in the 1990s.

We’ve been really going great-guns with sculpture, and we think that the scanning of sculpture has a great future and is very important in cultural heritage. What we can do with sculpture, once we have a digital model, is what we used to do with casts. So we think of the digital model of a statue as pretty much being the equivalent to the old cast version of a statue. We can use it to represent different hypotheses of reconstruction—put the arms on and put them in different positions, which we are doing with the Laocoön in the Vatican. We can also restore polychrome. We can restore the color if it’s been lost, which we used to do with casts, of course we don’t want to do that with the original. We can easily do that with the digital model. And of course we can, as with casts, make copies. But we can make digital copies and transmit them on the Internet much much more easily than we can even with casts.

Jeff Guin speaks with Bernard Frischer of Frischer Consulting. They will discuss 3D digital documentation of historic resources and the project, “Rome Reborn.”

17. Preservation of Iron and Steel in Bridges and Metal Structures (Episode 17)

Transcript

Church: The real reason we are talking today Vern is because we have just finished up here in Lansing, Mich. “The Preservation of Iron and Steel in Bridges and Other Metal Structures Workshop,” which you are the organizer and host. How did this come about?

Mesler: I’ve been in the restoration of historic bridges for over 10 years. And what I’ve discovered as I’m restoring the bridges for the Calvin County Historic Bridge Park, is first of all, there is a real lack of appreciation of the original material of an historic bridge. And what I wanted to see was more awareness of the bridges and also how to repair them. There’s been so much or lack of knowledge in the restoration of historic bridges. And the other thing I’ve expanded this to the restoration of historic metals, not just for historic bridges but you’ve got historic bridges, riveted, there’s a whole range of structures that are riveted, and it would be great if we could develop processes and procedures and methods to repair those and not destroy some of that stuff.

So the other thing, and what’s important to me and what I think has been overlooked in this preservation of historic metals or historic bridges, is the craftsman’s participation. To give you an example, I attended a conference for preservation of historic bridges, and we had a moderator that was, first of all, who started out saying, “Anyone who is an engineer, raise your hand.” And they raised their hands. “Everybody that’s an architect, raise your hand.” “All the students raise your hand.” But not a single word about a craftsman. And so I think that the craftsman’s been left out too often. And so my goal is to make engineers and people aware of the fact that craftsman were involved in these bridges.

And the other thing I discovered that the parts of a bridge, there’s a real lack of understanding of how things things were even manufactured. How they were built or the techniques used. And a lot of times, you can only find out that information by looking at the piece. The piece, the material, the original material can tell you the history, can tell you how that part was manufactured. Well, you’ve destroyed it. It is gone. You replace it with new steel. Or you replace it with some other configuration of material as long as it looks old. And a lot of times, “well it looks old,” is the only standard. Well, what I’m after is to try to save as much of the original material as possible and so I was told about NCPTT’s grant and I think David Simmons in Ohio had suggested years ago that I apply for this grant.

So I was able to work with Lansing Community College, and Lansing Community College said that they would support it. And I had outstanding support from Lansing Community College, even from the president and the faculty from Lansing Community College. And when I bring proposals or projects, they never ask, “how much are they going to make,” it is always, “well, what do we gotta do?” And so we were successful and I feel this workshop has been highly successful because of their work and their willingness to put forth the extra to make this thing successful.

And from the comments going around, people are pretty excited about it. They want to continue this, and again, the idea is to develop restoration procedures to restore the original material and to train people. It is not to really train craftsman, but to make engineers and preservationists, those people that make the decision on restoration of bridges or historic structures, those people that have to make those decisions is to give them confidence to recommend to use this process or put it in part of their plans or put it in part of their standards or put it in part of their restoration prints. And the one way I can think to do it, it is to have a lot of Lincoln Electric do work for me. And the reason for it, I can weld it up and I can tell people this is how I do it, but they want to know, “Who is Vern Mesler?”

But if I say Lincoln does it, even if Lincoln is doing the same thing I do, they might say, “Well, Lincoln Electric, the world’s main manufacture of welding equipment has approved it or tested it, well that holds a lot of water.” Well, the same things here. I got some good leads today from universities that are willing to participate in testing material after I repaired it and restored it, and so when an engineer has an option to restore an original piece, they can always say, “Look, here’s evidence. Here’s research that was done that proves you can do this by a major university.” It’s going to be a lot better than just saying, “Well, Vern said it could be done.”

Church: I can say that this was a fantastic workshop. How many people were in attendance?

Mesler: When I first organized this, what I did was organize it so people could sign up for all three days or people could sign up for one day. And the reason for that, the one day the auditorium holds 80 people. And we could only accommodate 40 people in the welding facility. So I decided I wanted to take advantage of the capacity of the first day, I didn’t want to turn anyone away.

And as it turns out, we had 13 people sign up for that first day in addition to the 35 people for the 3 days. And then we had 5 students, we had scholarships set up so that students could sign up. Whoever was awarded these scholarships, it paid their expenses here, the cost of the workshop was covered, and so we had all 5 students, we had students from Ferris University, a student from MSU, a student from the University of Michigan, another from the Detroit area.

I was real happy to see that because the idea is that we want young engineers to recognize, we want to start them off on the right foot. We want them to start off well with the restoration of historic metals. We want to make sure they have that in mind, that this can be done. We don’t want them to get into this mode where they are going to do off-the-shelf procedures. Or off-the-shelf standards where they are willing to look at restoring bridges, historic metals.

Church: Well I think one of the things that made this workshop so successful, not only the facilities and the organization and the variety of instructors, but was really the variety of participants. Now they came from states from all over the union and from Canada, but I met bridge designers, department of transportation people, conservators, engineers, constructional engineers. There was really a wide variety. Was that something that you were looking for to bring in?

Mesler: That’s exactly what I was looking for because nobody has done this. I don’t know anyone who has done this. And the idea was to bring craftsman and engineers and preservationists together. And I didn’t want to set this up specifically to train craftsmen because craftsmen, you can spend most of this process, I can train them in a day’s time on how to do this. But it’s not going to do any good to train them if they are not going to be allowed to do it. And so I need to have the engineers and the transportation department to recognize that this can be done and then to be able to recommend it. Like riveting. So often you will hear, “Well, riveting is the lost art.”

Like it’s been buried in the pyramids in the last 2000 years. Well, it’s not a lost art. And you can still buy rivets and every size rivet that was available 100 years ago and by the ton if you want to. And we had riveting equipment. And today we had Michigan Pneumatic come in with all their equipment. And they have been outstanding working with me over the years. And I have recommended them for when I train people to rivet. And so riveting is not that difficult. It is really an insult to tell any industrial person that’s been in the industry or handled industrial equipment, it’s really an insult to tell them they can’t rivet because it certainly isn’t that difficult.

And one of the things I want some of these people to do is grab the rivet handle and drive some rivets. And we had that I’m really happy to see that grabbed this rivet hammer and understood how it worked. And one lady in the group, one that’s worked in historic preservation around the country, and she said, “I’m dangerous now.” She was so excited about doing this hands-on, grab a rivet hammer, grab tools. She was probably the only mechanical things she’s ever worked were a can opener. And now, she’s dangerous now. She’s ganna go and tell them, “you can do this.” So that’s been exciting.

Church: Yeah, not only the riveting. The application of rivets, the removal of rivets, you guys carried a lot of information to us about how rivets are formed, and learned how the rivets actually work. And it’s something I don’t think many of us have ever thought about how they actually go in, how they are made, how they are processed. Also, all the welding techniques that we’ve covered in the third day of the workshop, that was a huge variety.

Mesler: One of the things, I try to get through these myths. A good example is, there are two camps in the preservation community. There’s the group that has never replaced a rivet with a rivet, that’s going to replace a bolt. If they are going to replace a rivet, it is going to be with high-strength tension control bolts. And then there’s another camp that says, yes you can use rivets. But I think that there are more that want to replace rivets with tension-control bolts, but the impressions I get through the communications I have is that the engineers have the, I almost get the feeling that there’s no cost involved with putting tension-control bolts.

You’ve got an iron worker that has a special wand that comes in and is going to pop these rivets in magically. Well it doesn’t. It costs a lot of time, and there’s procedure you have to follow, special equipment. And so what I’m trying to prove is that you can compete with that. Now I’m not trying to bring rivets back to industrial and new buildings and new vehicles or to compete with welding because it’s not going to happen.

And even if you could prove that it’s cheaper than bolts or weld. And more than likely, it is just not going to happen. So my focus is just to, we’ve got enough historical metal around, even the 1950’s, that’s historic metal. There’s a welding procedure for the restoration of historic buildings in the 40’s and the 30’s. So it’s not just 1890 bridges or 1880 bridges, it’s even 1930’s, 1940’s and so there is still a need for that. Cast iron, that’s another. We need more training, more understanding, more people trained to do that. So that’s another option.

Church: Well, I know as a conservator myself, back to the rivets. I always want to replace with in-kind. I want to replace original material that’s failed with like material. But I heard all the arguments with the DOT people that were here and the M-Dot people talking about how it is really going to take a mindset change to get these bridges restored that are going to be continued on the federal highway systems and state highway systems.

So I think that’s one of the things you really succeeded with with this workshop, is to start the ball rolling to change the mindset. Because there’s preservation because we want to save bridges, but do we want to save them as foot bridges in parks or do we want to save them like on the highways. And I think that is one of the things that came out of this. To get some of the people that can make those decisions thinking about that it is OK to use the original materials, the original techniques to save these bridges in current use.

We look forward to hearing more bridge work from you and more workshops in the future. Thanks for talking to us today.

Mesler: You bet.

Jason Church speaks with Vern Mesler, adjunct professor at Lansing Community College. They will discuss the “Preservation of Iron and Steel and Bridges and Other Metal Structures Workshop,” which was funded by a grant from the National Center.

18. Preservation of Mount Vernon National Historic Landmark (Episode 18)

Transcript

Springer: Mount Vernon has been restored over the years, but this does not just include the mansion. How has the restoration dealt with all the other buildings and the landscape in addition to the mansion?

Pogue: Mount Vernon was one of the first historic preservation programs in the country. The Mt. Vernon Ladies Association acquired it from the Washingtons in 1858, so it has been over 150 years that the project has been ongoing. Early on there wasn’t much in the way of models to guide how they were going to do this.

They were operating under the belief that it should be preserved as Washington knew the property, and that was kind of all there was. There were a lot of people that actually advised early on that the only important thing here was the mansion and the tomb where Washington’s body was kept and that all the other outbuildings, frankly, just weren’t that important and that maybe it would be better to just not deal with them.

And thankfully the ladies early on disregarded that advice and decided that they were going to look at not just the mansion, but all the other buildings and gardens and grounds. And fortunate for us, because we now have the largest collection of surviving 18th century plantation outbuildings anywhere in the country, and so it is due to their foresight that those buildings are still here.

Springer: Like most historic houses, Mount Vernon has original furnishings in a space that was not designed to be a museum. How do you balance the needs of the house verses to those of the collections?

Pogue: That really is one of the major issues facing folks who work in historic house museums, that the house itself is of course the biggest artifact that we have, and you can argue the most important one. Over the years, the ladies have been very assiduous in bringing back original objects to the house because the goal here is to make the place look as much as it did when George Washington lived here. So that means that you’re bringing 200-year-old priceless objects back into an historic building that was, of course, never intended to be a museum. So that’s a real balancing act. And one of the main things is the climate in the building and certainly museum objects — museum curators want them to be in a stable an environment as they possibly can be, and historic houses without insulation and all the other things that modern houses have, it’s really difficult to accomplish that. So we did install an HVAC system, a climate system about 12 or 13 years ago now, and it was a real challenge to get it into the building without doing lots of damage to the structure, and then most importantly the goal behind that is very limited. Instead of trying to achieve the very narrow climatic conditions that a museum curator would like, but which could have problems for the building, we have a system that reduces the range of variation, makes the climate better for the objects, but is something we think is still conducive for the health of the building.

Springer: Dennis, what is the greatest challenge that you face at Mount Vernon in attempting to keep the mansion and grounds restored, but also beautiful for the public?

Pogue: Well it is the public. And on the one hand we’re obviously very fortunate in that last year we had over a million visitors come to Mount Vernon, and I’m sure we’ll have that number again this year. We’re are the most visited historic site in the country. Of course that is wonderful and we love that so many people come and see the place, learn the story and experience all of this, but a million people walking through a 250-year-old building that wasn’t meant for that kind of traffic, obviously is a challenge. So there have been structural things that we have had to do to the mansion to bolster the framing of the buildings. The staircase, for example, we’ve done work on that numerous times over the years because that is where everybody walks. So you have two million feet walking up and down that staircase every year. And then because they are in there, they touch things and if one person touches a wall, that’s not a big deal, but after a million people have touched it, then the paint is going to be gone. And so every year, it is the same places over and over again that we have to come back in and do that kind of basic maintenance. In addition, we are open 365 days a year and heavily visited. So it is not as if we have lots of down time where we can work on the building. When we do projects, we do them when people are actually in the building. So that’s a real challenge as well.

Springer: As time goes by, new technologies develop and provide restoration options that have not been previously available. Are there any examples of new technologies that have recently been developed that have helped save or preserve artifacts at Mount Vernon?

Pogue: You know, I think that the preservation field is just a track record of growing sophistication in techniques, but also perspectives, the kinds of things that we are interested in doing and learning about and telling people is different than what it was 100 years ago. And fortunately, we do have new advancements that are being made all the time. Possibly the best example at Mount Vernon is modern paint study, and, back 30 years ago now, Mount Vernon, the association was one of the first sites to embark on a systematic analysis on all the painted surfaces inside the mansion, the goal was, again, to show the mansion as it was when Washington was here, and so that extends to the paint colors. And some of these rooms had been painted 25 or 30 times between the years that George Washington had been here and the paint colors had changed dramatically following the fashions of the day. So the goal was to find out what was the color of the paint in 1799 and then if we could find that to replicate it as closely as we possibly could. So all the paint colors throughout the mansion now are based on that initial survey that was done in the late ’70’s and early ’80’s, and then more recently in my time here over the last 10 years or so, we have had the opportunity to reinvestigate some of those areas and of course, techniques have continued to evolve and improve, and so we have been able to actually make some changes to the colors that we think are even more accurate than when they were done 30 years ago.

So that is one example, but there are a number. Dendrochronology, tree ring dating, we have actually done Dendrochronology at a number of the buildings at Mount Vernon where we had questions about when they were actually built. And that we have been very fortunate, the evidence has been very good, so we have been able to more tightly date a number of these buildings. Photogrammetry, of course, laser technology, all those things are beginning to weigh in, and they are all particularly helpful in recording things. So now we can actually record the conditions much more accurately now that we have these new techniques. So a variety of ways, and it’s really changed during my career, really made some major strides forward.

Springer: I have noticed that Mount Vernon has a very active archeology program. What is the role of archeology in the restoration of Mount Vernon?

Pogue: Well we do, and in fact, I am a trained archeologist. When I came here 22 years ago, it was to run their archeology program. And then a number of years back, I was put in charge of all the historic buildings and the preservation of the entire site. But archeology has a very important role here, and on the one hand its research, its learning more about the estate. We have studied a number of sites here, black smith shop, dung repository, slave quarter, a whole variety of 18th century buildings that no longer survive, and have found those sites and studied them and based on the archeology primarily, we’ve actually been able to reconstruct several of those buildings. So we have been able to bring them back as part of the landscape, as part of what people see here. And the other side of it is cultural resource management, which is that Mount Vernon is a 424-acre site. The 60-acre core of it is the historic area, but then in the outlying areas we have restaurants and facilities and parking lots to support a million visitors a year, and so we do archeology in advance of any ground-disturbing project anywhere on the estate to make sure that nothing is being disturbed as part of that work. So it’s really two sides: It’s pure research on the one side, aimed at learning more about the plantation to help us interpret it. And then on the other side it is just doing due diligence to ensure that we don’t disturb things that are important because of the archeology.

Springer: Well thank you Dennis for talking with me today. I’ve learned quite a bit.

Pogue: Well thank you Josh, it was a pleasure.

Josh Springer speaks with Dennis Pogue at Mount Vernon about the restoration and grounds at Mount Vernon.

19. The Role of HTPC in the National Park Service (Episode 19)

Transcript

Church: Well Moss, the first question I have for you is what is the Historic Preservation Training Center?

Rudley: The Historic Preservation Training Center is a division of the National Parks Service, part of the learning development portion of the National Parks Service, and we train maintenance workers, preservation specialists, facility managers in the proper way to deal with historic structures from the variety of different stand points. One, being craft training, teaching crafts people, maintenance workers within parks how to do their job properly working on historic structures. Two, is to train park managers on how to properly manage the historic resources within their park, how to issue contracts that have specifications in them that are relevant to historic structures. Finally, the other way is actually doing project management, overseeing construction projects dealing with historic properties within the National Parks Service.

Church: So not only do you the training for people, but you also do the actual work on the sites.

Rudley: Yes and our main avenue for training is through day labor preservation projects. We have permanent crews that bring trainees into their crew and train them via preservation projects that we take on all over the country.

Church: I know that your crew specializes in historic masonry. Does HPTC only do masonry or do they have other divisions?

Rudley: No we have three other divisions besides our masonry division. We have a woodcraft division, and their specialty is historic windows, doors, and architectural wood elements within historic structures. They do take on some other projects such as roof repairs, but all on a limited scale.

Our other division is the carpentry division. Their specialty is timber frame structures, log structures, slate roofs, wood- shingle roofs, kind of more on the heavy carpentry, and where the wood crafting division is more on the finish carpentry angle.

Church: Wow, you guys are like a one stop shop for preservation.

Rudley: Pretty much, yes.

Church: I know you do a lot with the Park Service and you’re in the National Park Service. Could the curator of a historic state structure or a non-profit organization contract HPTC for training or just to do the hands on work?

Rudley: Yes, they could. HPTC is not a base funded operation through Congress, so all of our operations are funded through our projects, and our mandate allows us to take on projects for not only the National Projects but other Federal agencies, non-profits, state, local and all the way down to even city governments. As long it’s a government entity or a non-profit, we can do the work and provide training for them.

Church: Wow. How would they go about doing this, say a non-profit or state organization?

Rudley: They would likely look at our website, find one of our supervisors, exhibit specialists, or our superintendent, contact them with either their request for a training event or their request for a site visit to look at a project. We get a lot of calls from different entities just looking for guidance on a, where to find contractors, what type of specifications, materials, to use so in a way we’re kind of, being able to provide assistance on that end of business.

Church: Okay, good. I didn’t know you provided so many services. So we’re here in Natchitoches today out in Oakland Plantation. What brings your crew here to Natchitoches?

Rudley: We were contacted by Cane River Creole National Historic Park about the possibility of us doing some bousillage and lime wash repairs. They had, apparently, put this out to contract. The contractor that was awarded the bid, once he came to look at the project, the park felt that he was incompetent to do the work.

While he was awarded the bid, afterwards they felt that he would damage their structure so in looking to expand their funds within the time requirements, they contacted us. We made a site visit about a month ago, and then we took on the project.

Church: Now you say you are here doing bousillage. What is that?

Rudley: Bousillage is an earthen construction, which is native here to Louisiana. It is a loamy soil that is mixed with lime, Spanish moss, sometimes hay as a binder and is in-filled between wooden members of the structures here as insulation, and also, in most cases, wall coverings. It was limed-washed over.

Church: Okay, so it’s very similar to waddle and daub in other areas.

Rudley: Exactly. Waddle and daub, knogging, that are in various areas, it’s very similar, even to dobbing on log cabins. It’s a very similar process just kind of the local materials are slightly different.

Church: Okay. Are you going to finish your work here or are you traveling back to do more work later?

Rudley: We are doing the bousillage repairs this week. We need to allow enough time to cure, approximately a month at which time we’re going to return to do the lime-wash portion of this project.

Jason Church speaks with Moss Rudley, an exhibit specialist with the masonry division at the Historic Preservation Training Center. They will discuss the role of HTPC in the National Park Service including work they are doing with the historic building material bousillage.

20. Digital Preservation of Documents at the Library of Congress (Episode 20)

Transcript

Guin: Kit, thanks for being on the podcast.

Arrington: Thank you for inviting me.

Guin: I wanted to start by asking you how long have you been with the Library of Congress, and what got you interested in the field digital preservation?

Arrington: I’ve been at the Library for 15 years now. I came in with what was then the National Digital Library Pilot Project. And I’m working now on what has become standard Library practice -having digital elements of everyday work. My interest in digital preservation developed along with the Library’s digital growth and is a natural part of one of our mission mandates – preservation – which extends to the digital formats under our care.

Guin: You coordinate the digital aspects of preparing the very popular HABS, HAER, and HALS data and documentation for online presentation. These are very popular programs. Tell me a little about what they are and what that process is for actually getting the files online.

Arrington: With the HABS/HAER/HALS, nothing can be described quickly ever there. They are just such rich and wonderful treasures of ours. They are unique holdings for us because they are active programs and the collections are always growing, and they are absolutely one of our most popular collections, and always have been. Now that they are online, it is just wonderful the new audiences we are reaching. They are being used by students, historians, life-long learners — everyone. Our collaborative relationship and the high level of cooperation that we enjoy with the office of the National Park Service that oversees these programs and creates the documentation is very special and unique. As many of your listeners might know, the Historic American Buildings Survey began over 75 years ago. They were a Works Progress Administration effort to put out-of-work architects to work and document historic properties. And the Library and the Department of the Interior were a part of that from the beginning. And it’s continued to this day.

The Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) was created in 1969, and the Historic American Landscapes Survey began in 2000. Between those three collections, there are now over 39,000 surveys, which contain over 500,000 measured drawings, photographs and written history pages. The digital conversion process for these materials began in 1996. And I have been working on them and with them since that time.

When we worked with the National Park Service in 1996 to map their collections management database — they had a database they just used for tracking their own work. And we took that database and mapped the records into a bibliographic format that fit in with the electronic access to our other collections that was being developed for the World Wide Web. The next year in 1997, we began a five-year project to scan the collections that we had on-site, including the new material being added quarterly each year and continues to be added quarterly each year.

For maximizing the efficiency of the digital conversion of a collection this large — because the requirements for scanning a typed page and an original medium format b&w negative are very different — we had separate projects to scan the text history pages, the architectural drawings, and the original negatives. This included the nitrate negatives from the 1930’s. By 2001, we had scanned and processed everything that was at the Library. During that time the HABS/HAER/HALS division of the National Park Service completely revamped their database and have worked to add additional information, such as subject terms, which has enriched the records, as well as transforming their workflow to include digital images of the drawings and histories as part of what they transmit to the Library, which allows for faster access online. We’re moving toward NPS providing all of the digital images, though we are not yet accepting born-digital photographs as part of the archival documentation, though we have begun discussions on it in response to the realities of the decreasing availability of large format film technology. So that’s where we stand to day.

It’s all online and available now.

Guin: How do you share your digital files online so that the largest possible audience can actually use these files?

Arrington: The digital files of the Prints & Photograph Division collections are made available online through our online catalog, which you can find at www.loc.gov/pictures. We have item and group level records and thumbnail images available for almost all of our digitized collections, which includes photographs, posters, architectural drawings, political cartoons, stereographs, glass negatives – many things. For a variety of reasons, different rights issues being the most common, for some items, the larger digital images are not available offsite, though you can access them if you are here at the Library. Because it is in the public domain, all of the images in the HABS/HAER/HALS collections are available on the Web – from a thumbnail image to the highest resolution, uncompressed TIFF image.

We’re also exploring reaching out through other venues, including our collaboration with Flickr where we are now posting some of our collections.

Guin: How do people are actually using this information?

Arrington: In Flickr it is very fun. All the kinds of Flickr groups where you will have “oh we like public signs” or any variety of people who have huge specialized images that they are interested in. They include a lot of the collections that we put up. You’ll see many, many of our images used in Wikipedia when people are illustrating what they are posting as an entry in Wikipedia. They’ll come to the library to find their images to illustrate it.

People post our images on their Websites, they use them in documentaries, publications, school projects, research projects, commercial projects. One of my favorite uses of the HABS/HAER/HALS materials is a web site that offers “Free Drawings and Plans” and under categories such as “Build your own Barn” they’ve downloaded the architectural drawings from surveys of barns and made them available, fully crediting the Library as their source.

Guin: How do you analyze the way your images are being accessed and used? Have those analytics changed your process for digitizing or sharing these files in any way?

Arrington: The examples that we’re aware of are actually are mostly for our own research, things that we’ve come across or users that are contacting us with questions. It is really sort of anecdotal for our own experience.

This is not my area of expertise, but I understand that the Library is exploring more now the use of statistics software for gathering information on how our website is being accessed and utilized. At this point, in P&P we’ve only tracked very rough and general statistics for the number of folks coming to the P&P online catalog and collections, and we’ve seen these numbers grow exponentially through time, not unsurprisingly. We don’t currently explore those numbers at the image level, of course we also currently have over 1.5 million digital images available through our P&P online catalog, which are a fraction of the over 14 million items in our collections.

Guin: The Library of Congress plays an important role, worldwide, in making sure that its digital content will be accessible for future generations. How do you determine archival formats?

Arrington: In the Prints & Photographs Division when we began our conversion projects with an RFP in 1995, we selected the TIFF file format as our archival format. We continue monitoring changes through time, for example we’ve been keeping our eye on JP2 – which some institutions are beginning to adopt as their archival format — currently TIFF remains the most widely used and supported file format for archival images. The Library’s National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program Web site: www.digitalpreservation.gov contains an analysis of file formats for the Library’s use that analyzes their sustainability.

Guin: How is your role changing as more content is born digital?

Arrington: We’re taking the same principles for collection, preservation and access that we’ve always followed and are applying them to the realm of born digital. In the same way that we’ve had to research how best to care for a film negative, we’re doing the same for born digital – though it’s a much more active and constantly changing process. On our own, and taking advantage of the work and efforts of others, such as professional photography associations such as the ASMP, or in the work of the Federal Digitization Guidelines Initiative we’re monitoring the changing file formats through time. At this point we haven’t actually accepted a large number of born digital items into our collections, but only because at this point in time we have not had any significant submissions of modern works. But we’ve had enough to begin to explore and establish workflows for accepting, storing and providing access to them. A group of photo-journalist photographs that we collected following 9/11 was one of our first significant born digital acquisitions. In another area we are studying the developing “Best Practices” for preserving vector file formats, like AutoCAD, in anticipation of the eventual inclusion of those kinds of items in our architectural and engineering collections. It is now the rare architect who draws by hand.

Of course in other parts of the library, we have a website preservation program with different events through time and major elections or the Olympics that are preserving websites. We worked collaboratively with the Internet Archive in the early days for the work they are doing preserving websites. So there are issues that we’re aware of and collecting as an institution and sorting out as we go along and as they change themselves.

Guin: How can the smaller heritage preservation organizations–or conscientious individuals–make sure their data is saved in archival format?

Arrington: At this point in time awareness of the importance of digital preservation has permeated the consciousness of most preservation organizations, and an increasing number of individuals. For cultural organizations in particular, with very little effort it is easy to find a number of excellent “Best Practice” guidelines to follow in your area of expertise for becoming knowledgeable about the issues to consider to best create, collect, and preserve their digital objects – whether they are text, or images, or sound files. In addition to being a resource for private, public and government organizations and institutions, the Library’s NDIIP program is offering a new resource to help individuals be more aware of how to preserve their personal digital items. It is a work in progress, but if the Library hopes to collect, for example, important photos in the future, we need to help folks understand now what they should be doing to save them!

Guin: On a personal level, you have an interest in other aspects of hands-on historic preservation. Tell me about that, and does it affect your view of the documents and files your are introducing to the virtual world?

Arrington: My mother had an anthropology background and worked in museums, then owned a used bookstore, and I fully credit her love and appreciation for what objects can teach us with my own appreciation of being able to live and learn from the past within the present.

For that reason, I will say that I’ve always maintained a healthy skepticism of the longevity of digital objects – photographs being a perfect example. I have boxes of wonderful family photos that are intact and have just moved through time with our family despite years of not being touched or accessed. And they are treasures.

The digital equivalent of family histories being created today will require a much greater attention through time to be accessible to future generations. But because of my joy in accessing these “old things” today, I want to be sure that will be true for future generations who want to access the digital files of today.

I’m also always questioning the preservation issues – Are our file specifications good enough to move through time? How are we backing these up? How are we tracking them? Using another photo example, just as color photo prints have fragile preservation issues, the color management of a digital file to maintain accurate color representation through time (or amongst various hardware and software) is tricky.

Really, these are the same old issues that we’ve always addressed in caring for our collections. And following the same preservation and access principles that have always guided us, we will make the best choices that we can with digital items to hold and care for them too.

Guin: Kit, thanks so much for being on the podcast.

Arrington: Thank you very much Jeff.

Jeff Guin speaks with Kit Arrington, digital library specialist at the Library of Congress. They will discuss how the Library of Congress digitizes and shares documents online for long-term public access.

21. The Impact of Climate Change on Cultural Landscapes (Episode 21)

Transcript

Smith: Welcome to the podcast, Robert. Could you begin by telling us how you would define a cultural landscape?

Melnick: Sure Debbie. It’s great to be here.

I think the first thing to think about is that you’ve got to think about not just cultural landscapes, but historically significant cultural landscapes. If you think about many old buildings that are not truly historically significant is the same issue with cultural landscapes. So for me, a cultural landscape is really, any landscape that’s been modified by people.

That doesn’t mean that it’s a significant cultural landscape. And that’s really where, I think some of the confusion comes in, and where it is important to differentiate between just a “landscape,” a “cultural landscape” and a “significant cultural landscape.”

That’s why we go through the national register process, documents like Bulletin 30 for the National Register. So that we are sure that we are really looking at what’s important about that landscape, not just that it exists. From a geographer’s point of view, you might say that every landscape is a cultural landscape.

Smith: That’s a very good distinction. That really helps in understanding, especially for someone who maybe isn’t familiar with what a cultural landscape is. And how would you describe the difference between preserving a cultural landscape, and how is that different than an historic building?

Melnick: Well, I think all resources are dynamic, and buildings are clearing dynamic. But landscapes are dynamic at a rate and at a pace that is dramatically different than buildings. You can actually, in your lifetime under normal conditions, you can see that landscape change. Whereas for an historic building if it is well taken care of, you really can’t.

The other differentiation is that a landscape, by definition, will change. An important issue here is that you in fact want a landscape to change. And that goes very much against, what I like to call, very traditional, and now rather old-fashioned, preservation dogma, which basically describes a goal of preservation as arresting all change. So for a landscape, you want it to change. You just want to manage that change and have it change within certain boundaries and within certain limits.

Smith: And so, in terms of climate change on cultural landscapes, what do you see as some of the potential impacts?

Melnick: Well I think there are many, many impacts that we are already seeing and certainly that I think unless some major changes happen in our global systems they will happen more. So just here are a couple of them. One is rising sea levels, which will undoubtedly effect coastline landscapes. Another is the change in rainfall, whether more or less, that will affect plant communities. Another is the change in temperature that can also affect plant communities. So just things like that, that you would associate with change to the natural systems that we’re understanding, are being impacted by climate change. The same kind of changes will take place for cultural landscapes.

Smith: How might this affect the zones that plants grow in today?

Melnick: Well, I think it’s already affecting them. Certainly here in the west coast we are finding that certain grape varieties are growing further to the north than they were 50 years ago, and they are not able to grow as far south as they were. So, very slowly, very, very incrementally those plant zones are moving.

Now the other piece of this, which I have to mention here, is that even though it’s a global problem, we do understand that climate change affects different landscapes in different ways. So it’s a global problem that impacts landscapes at a very local level. So you may in fact have some values here in Oregon, some landscapes, which are minimally or perhaps not at all effected by climate change. Maybe perhaps eventually they will be many, many years from now, whereas other landscapes are being affected right now by that. So even though we think of it as a global problem, it impacts landscapes at a very local level.

Smith: Well, could you give us an example of perhaps a recognized cultural landscape or a landscape feature that could potentially be impacted by climate change?

Melnick: Well sure. Just take the Kentucky bluegrass for example, which is a great example. That landscape, really over centuries, has thrived in a climate and an environment that is slowly changing over time. So it’s very possible, and again I don’t know this yet but I can envision it, it’s very possible that that ecological system will change so much that the basic quality of it, which is the blue grass and all the associated ecological components of that, will no longer thrive in that larger climate. And therefore it will have an impact not only on the turf itself and literally the bluegrass itself, but you’ll have an impact on walls, on stone walls, on wooden fences, it will have an impact on the architecture that’s there over time.

Another example I could give you is Hanalei Valley on the north shore in Hawaii, which is a very prime taro growing area. And although Hawaii, we believe, is being less effected by climate change than other areas. Eventually, unless major changes happen, it will be. And then the kind of wet-land environment that taro thrives in, may in fact start to dry up. Or it may in fact get wetter. Climate change isn’t always climate warming. Sometimes it can be increased precipitation or it can be decreased precipitation.

Smith: What do you see is some possible actions in response to these potential impacts.

Melnick: Well, I think the first thing we have to do is support a broader, global understanding that climate change is really happening. And as you know, there are a lot of people out there who say, “No, it’s not happening.” I am not a scientist, as you know, but I believe that in fact a climate change is happening. Many scientists believe it too. So the first thing to do is to increase the level of education.

The second thing to do is to increase attention to that on the part of governments nationally to try and turn the course on those actions that are increasing climate change. So those are kind of global, and they apply to both natural and cultural systems. In terms of cultural landscapes, I think in our lifetime we are going to have to think about redefining what we mean by character-defining features. We may have to say, you know that feature that was character defining, really no longer exists and therefore we have to think about it differently. We may also have to think about what we mean by appropriate treatment. So now if an alleé of oak trees dies on a very significant landscape, the preferred treatment is to replace the oak trees, but if the oak trees are dying because the climate has changed so much that they can no longer thrive, it’s sort of silly to replant the same oak trees. So you may have to think about what we mean by “character defining.” Is it the larger characteristic of the landscape or is it the actual physical feature.

And finally, for a third example, I think that we may have to practice what I’ve been calling landscape triage. We may in fact have to say, if it comes to this, that there are certain landscapes we really cannot save because it is beyond our ability, but we want to record them, we want to make sure we know what they are and we want to keep good records of them so we understand their importance in the culture history of our country and of the world.

Smith: Thanks Robert for talking with me today.

Melnick: Thank you very much Debbie. It’s been my pleasure.

Debbie Smith speaks with Robert Melnick, professor of landscape architecture at the University of Oregon and author of “Climate Change and Landscape Preservation: A Twenty-first-century Conundrum,” which appeared in a 2010 volume of the APT Bulletin. Today they will discuss topics addressed in the article.

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.

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