BLOG

Mid-Century Maintenance: It's All in the Details

By Patricia Joseph

Mies van der Rohe's last residential design is a soaring condo tower on Chicago's North Side.

It's a Mies van der Rohe building, a condo in Chicago built in 1963, with plenty of architects, designers and Mies fans living there, including me. Though the neighborhood has other designs by him, this is the great architect's last residential work, and its handsome design, carefully crafted by Mies's team–-at least that's what residents want to believe–-is mostly in good shape due to a responsive maintenance staff and a supportive condo board. Yet signs of wear, tear and the toll of Chicago winters are beginning to show after 48 years.

Big windows and open interior spaces that invite the outdoors in are hallmarks of mid-century modern design. In this case, however, the outdoors has been only too willing to enter, over the years wearing away at the thresholds, flooring, grille covers and aluminum door frames in the public spaces.

One of the current maintenance projects, the replacement of four fresh-air intake grilles flush to the floor just inside the two secondary entrances, has been easy to ignore and is probably overdue. Is it a major restoration issue? No. Not really. However, can replacements be picked up at a local supply house or Home Depot? No way. Only part of the challenge in replacing the grilles is that this is a Mies building with unique details causing unique problems that have no off-the-shelf solutions. The bigger difficulty, really, is that this kind of project falls into a preservation twilight zone, not big enough for a major restoration program with a team of experts and a pile of money to rely on but trickier than a standard maintenance task. Time spent researching and finding a supplier often seems disproportionate to the relative importance of the repair. So it's deferred.

The grille of it all, after replacement.

Buildings from earlier periods went through this preservation twilight zone and came out the other side successfully. Traditional buildings have had more failures, repairs and replacements, so their caretakers have had decades, sometimes centuries, to evaluate and help develop a market of vendors, fabricators, products, processes and services to keep their structures in good shape. The supply chain is established.

But it's most certainly not for this mid-century building by Mies. Where should the building engineer start? Suggestions from his network of local fabricators and colleagues working on other mid-century buildings have been helpful in the past, but they weren't bearing fruit this time. Ads in the back of specialized publications provided some suggestions but nothing to get the results he needed. Google yielded thousands of fabricators, but which one has the ability to copy the existing design and then be willing to make just four grilles? These referrals open doors, but each vendor has to be evaluated individually. Oh, for the convenience of vetted, go-to resources who are also mid- century specialists!

A metal "shoe" around the column provides a quick, relatively inexpensive and temporary fix for corrosion at the base but doesn't respect the column's structure.

As it happened, a casual conversation with an interior designer working on one of the units pointed the building engineer in the direction of a vendor located 800 miles away that was able to fabricate four grilles to specification. Problem solved for this project.

Still, there will be hundreds of similar projects in this building alone. The emphasis on form and structure in mid-century buildings, rather than ornament, means that when details as minor as grille covers need to be replaced or repaired, cover-ups, add-on ornamentation and quick fixes don't work. Even fairly minor maintenance and repair efforts need to be planned and completed with a preservationist's view in mind, one that respects the specific form and construction technique.

However, the reality is that it's easy for more people to appreciate a traditional structure, to understand it as historically important and to care for it as such. Buildings from the '40s, '50s and '60s? Not so much.

Mid-century modern style in Chicago seems to enjoy a not-quite historical status. To illustrate, the city's most comprehensive preservation audit, the Chicago Historic Resources Survey (CHRS) of 1996, doesn't rate as preservation worthy a single building constructed after 1940, notes Jonathan Fine, executive director of Preservation Chicago. Yet when Chicago created its first landmarks commission in 1960, the Inland Steel Building was deemed worth preserving, even though it was only three years old.

Fifty years on, it's time for owners of mid-century modern buildings to partner with restoration professionals, not only in the challenges supporting major preservation projects that make headlines, but in the decidedly unglamorous day-to-day maintenance and repair efforts that preserve the original design intent as well. Until problems like securing acceptable replacement grilles in this Mies building are solved with relative ease, there is work to be done. Homeowners, architects, building engineers and contractors need resources--easy access to the technologies, materials and processes, fabricators and suppliers--that will make the maintenance and preservation of mid-century buildings one integrated work flow.

It's time.

Head of consultancy Prospex Information, Patricia Joseph is an ardent preservationist who's active in both Chicago-based and national preservation groups.

Have something to say about this article? Feel free to comment!

Comments feed