A Place for Trades

It’s been an honor this year being a “voice for the trades” in my blog, but having recently attended and presented at the Saving Places conference in Denver, it became quite obvious that a lot of people are talking about the need for “a voice for preservation.”

Even Emily Wadhams, vice president of public policy for the National Trust for Historic Preservation, who was standing in for Richard Moe as the opening keynote, made mention that in light of the drastic cuts to funding for historic preservation in the Obama administration’s proposed federal budget, it’s clear that the message isn’t getting to Capitol Hill.

I think part of the problem is a lack of networking among organizations like the National Trust for Historic Preservation (NTHP), the Association for Preservation Technologies (APT) and the Preservation Trades Networks (PTN), as well as the various statewide organizations like Colorado Preservation Inc. (CPI) and all of the various state historic preservation offices. Even though a conference like CPI’s Saving Places drew more than 900 attendees this year, and the annual conferences of the NTHP, APT and PTN draw a few thousand more annually, effectively at each individual event we are not getting the message out to the general public or the various state governments, let alone Capitol Hill. Instead, for the most part, we’re preaching to the choir.

Carl Elefante, AIA LEED AP, director of sustainable design for Quinn Evans Architects, who has been much quoted for saying “the greenest building is…one that is already built” pointed out in his keynote that part of the problem is also public perception and “green” marketing. Even though sustainably designed and constructed buildings have been with us for time immemorial, our constant desire to improve things has caused far too many of our historic buildings to have their natural lighting and ventilation characteristics short circuited by new and improved mechanical systems that make them dependent on oil-based energy.

And it’s virtually impossible to find anybody who hasn’t been influenced by the replacement windows industry’s marketing blitz to “replace those old drafty windows” with the latest manufactured vinyl miracle. My own experience has shown me that it’s really hard to find anyone not in the preservation field who even knows historic windows can be restored!

The harsh reality is that if we want to find a voice for preservation it will need to be loud to enough to be heard over the deafening sound of the voice of the mass-manufactured marketplace. We hear that voice pretty much every time a television or non-public radio station is on, and if we aren’t hearing it, we’re reading it on the billboards and neon-lit city streets that used to be historic downtowns and now are obscured by the “marketecture” of modern life.

Even if we can manage to see a historic building still standing, we don’t relate to it as a functional and useful thing; rather, we see it as a relic or curiosity, and if we happen to go inside, we most likely won’t find much if anything of its original character. In fact, we may find it is a brand-new building bonded to a historic façade with steel and epoxy and concrete.

I don’t think very many people who work in preservation or a related trade or field would argue that a stronger voice for preservation would be a bad thing, and if it could be heard on Capitol Hill and it did cause funding to be re-established, continued or increased, most of us would be glad and hope some of it made it to us; but how many of us would be able to say it was because we had worked “together” to make it happen?

Instead, too many of us would have to admit that we don’t have the confidence or motivation to get behind an effort to make the voice a reality, either because we don’t believe it will be used correctly or because it might not say what we feel needs to be said or because we’re concerned that in the wrong hands it will do more harm than good.

But the other harsh truth is that too often money is the problem. If used incorrectly, it can do tremendous, irreparable damage, and, invariably, when it becomes available, the carpet baggers will follow. So unless we can manage to successfully network and come to some general agreement about what we would like preservation to be, we should probably be careful about giving it a stronger voice.

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I find it interesting how many people I meet who don’t really know how to react when I tell them I’m a tradesperson. It’s not like they’ve never heard the word, or even that they don’t necessarily know what it means. It’s more like they’ve never really expected to meet one, as if they figured they were all gone–someone they may have read about in history books but not someone they expected to meet walking down the street.

Now if I tell people that a friend of mine is a craftsman, a word you wouldn’t usually use to refer to yourself, they’re more likely to react knowingly and may even know someone else who they consider to be one. But if I were to tell them my friend was an artisan, they probably would have been confused. An artist, however, they would have easily understood.

The apparent absence of trades in education may contribute to this dilemma. When you look through the comprehensive “Guide to Academic Programs” on the National Council for Preservation (NCPE) website, you will find that the resource for young people interested in education in the field of preservation is made up primarily of colleges, universities and institutes that don’t actually imply, by their names, that they teach trades, crafts or the actual skills needed to do the hands-on work of preservation. The short list of institutions that do includes Belmont Technical College, Savannah College of Art and Design and the American College of the Building Arts and the only institution that teaches preservation at a high school level is called the Brooklyn High School of the Arts. Clearly, the concept of including the word “trades” in a school’s name is off limits, in particular at the college level.

In an attempt to get a handle on why we use some words and not others when talking about preservation education, I decided to go online and see what the Encarta dictionary defined them as. “Arts” are defined as “techniques or craft,” and “craft” is defined as “making things by hand.” When you look up “artisan,” it’s defined as a “skilled craftsperson,” and when you dig for the definition of “craftsperson,” you find it’s “somebody making things by hand.” Look up “craftsman,” however, and you find it’s also defined as a “skillful person;” whereas a “tradesman” is defined as a “skilled worker,” and a “trade” is defined as a “skilled occupation.”

Seemingly, this could be considered a bit circular or even inconclusive, but I think it has more to do with the fact there is a hierarchy involved in what these words mean and how they were used when tradespeople were an integral and important part of our culture, versus how they are used today.

The fact that a trade is defined as an occupation means that the skills the tradesperson has developed are meant to provide him or her with a living. Craftspeople or artisans, however, have a degree of skill that may or may not be what they choose to make a living with; hence, a craftsperson or artisan isn’t necessarily a tradesperson, but a tradesperson by definition is a craftsman and artisan.

The fact that the term tradesperson is so unfamiliar to people today is directly connected to the fact that today very few people make their livings by making things by hand. And because we’ve done such a fantastic job of stigmatizing the idea that smart kids make their livings with their minds and not-so-smart kids end up becoming plumbers or block layers, the educational system itself has adopted the word “arts” as a benign way of concealing the fact that schools are teaching their students how to make things by hand.

If we to want save our architectural heritage, we better understand we can’t learn what we need to know from textbooks we order from Amazon.com, although we could buy more “art” there, and, for the most part, we can’t learn it in public schools either. We have to reprogram the public educational system to accept the fact that if we want to save what we have, we have to be taught to use our hands to do it. We need to understand that doing things well requires skills, and those skills are something that should have been handed down through the generations. For the most part, however, they weren’t, and it’s our responsibility to overcome that deficiency.

Craftspeople and artisans may have the skills needed to do the work of preservation, or they may not by definition. But tradespeople by definition are people who work in a skilled trade, and if we are going to make a place in our public educational system, in our economy and in our culture for saving our architectural heritage, we had better be willing to make a place for trades.

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The PTN Board of Directors election was held recently, and several board members have decided to step down, each of whom has been an important part of making our organization what it is today. Scary times when people you have counted on to lead make way for new leaders with new ideas. Important times, too, for any community when its future leadership comes from within.

One of the seemingly less challenging tasks facing the new board is coming up with a theme for the 2010 IPTW to be held in Kentucky’s capital city, Frankfort, on October 21-23. Putting together a few words that quickly and simply tell people what our conference is about actually has become an interesting introspective, particularly because we are part of the world of “preservation” which, as Donovan Rypkema reminded us at the 2009 National Preservation Conference in Nashville, should actually be called “conservation,” something I pointed out in my first blog.

As it turns out, the process of wordsmithing a theme is kind of like walking through a field of land mines. All of the buzz words like “sustainable” or “green” seem to magically morph into scary words for some, dirty words for others and, in many cases, clearly overused and worn-out words that hardly mean anything at all anymore. There’s no question that the quickest way to ruin a perfectly good conversation about saving historic buildings is to start spouting off about “green preservation.” With a lot of folks I know, it’s probably a really good way to clear the room.

So just how do we see our way clearly through this murky haze of misused words, abused terms and far too many word-heavy agendas? Camille Bowman, a dear friend, long-time PTN member and currently the easement technical advisor at the Department of Historic Resources in Virginia, sent an email with her thoughts about the subject. She wrote (in part): “I am convinced that ‘conservation’ is what we all do, professionally, as well as personally as we strive to take care of our bodies, our water, our air, our natural resources, and, thus, our cultural resources. The problem is that we cultural resource folks have never successfully aligned with the natural resource folks,” something I pointed out in my last blog.

She went on to say: “I prefer ‘maintenance’ and teaching about ‘taking care of what we have’ and how it makes sense to learn what we have, what’s good about what we have, how to take care of what’s good about what we have, and gathering folks together that know about taking care of what’s good about what we have…people that know traditional trades, when it comes to historic materials and historic building systems. This includes conservators, tradespeople, yes, and even architects and engineers.” Seems pretty logical, basic and to the point and yet we seem to be driven to complicate it.

The core truth is that we have a choice: Use what we build, or manufacture, until it either breaks, becomes worn or we just don’t want it anymore and then throw it away. Or we can take care of the things we build or manufacture with good maintenance to prolong their useful life as long as possible. As part of that core truth, we have to know what the choice is before we build or manufacture something in the first place. If we’re going to throw it away, why bother building it to last? If we are going to maintain and continue using it as long as possible, then building it to last, be appreciated and even cherished makes sense.

There’s no question that the cultural heritage we have inherited was built to last, in most cases. Whether or not that was a conscious decision on the part of builders or the result of the knowledge they were given during their apprenticeship that was oriented toward honest work and striving to attain high standards of quality is a discussion we can have some time over cocktails. And I hope to God some wacko eco-preservationist doesn’t bring up “green preservation”! But the fact that it can last if we maintain it properly is without question.

If we chose to build those kind of buildings today, then they too will have an opportunity to survive; but if we spend all our time fumbling over which new buzz word is going to be the magic train that takes us into that perfect “sustainable” world, a lot of other folks are going to be busily manufacturing stuff they hope we will throw away so they can sell us another one.

I promise you that if you come meet my friends, including Camille, at the Frankfort IPTW, you will meet a lot of folks who clearly see the value in building well, taking care of what we already have and working honestly. Maybe the theme for the conference should be “Maintaining Honest Work.” Stay tuned to the PTN website to see what we decide.

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October 24th was the International Day of Climate Action, and the conservation community missed a major opportunity to wave our flag. I’m not saying that we are oblivious to the important role keeping historic buildings useful plays in protecting the environment, but I wonder how many of us realize the importance of aligning preservation and environmentalist communities.

We talk about the same things and address many of the same issues and even, in some cases, speak the same language. Carl Elefante, AIA, LEED AP, Quinn Evans | Architects, who will be one of the keynote speakers at the upcoming Colorado Preservation Inc. Saving Places conference entitled “Preservation: the Foundation of Sustainability,” reminds us that “the greenest building is the one already built.” Wouldn’t it make sense to have Bill McKibben, author of books that include Deep Economy – the Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future and organizer of 350.org, an international campaign dedicated to building a movement to unite the world around solutions to the climate crisis, share the role of keynote at such a seemingly important conference?

Many people who have committed their lives to building conservation and the preservation of traditional trades are keenly aware of the influence that construction and preservation have on the environment. My good friend and fellow tradesman Gerard Lynch, who recently spoke at the International Trades Education Symposium in Leadville, CO, has been addressing issues of sustainability from the perspective of a master mason.

In recent conversations and writings he has brought to my attention some staggering facts. In one communication he pointed out that “the manufacture of Ordinary Portland Cement (OPC) is responsible for about 5% of human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide, [and] the largest consumer of OPC is the concrete industry.” In other words, one of the principal building materials used in modern construction is one of the major contributors to climate change.

Richard Moe, president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, has been quoted citing a recent report which says that by 2030 nearly one-third of the country’s buildings would need replacing simply because they were never built or designed to last any longer in the first place. That would create enough debris to fill 2,500 NFL stadiums, it has been calculated, and the energy to re-construct, Moe said, would power the entire state of California for 10 years. How much OPC went into the construction of those buildings?

As preservation professionals and tradespeople, we are all too aware of the challenges presented in maintaining modern structures because of the recent rapid evolution in the manufacture and application of modern building materials. Compared to challenges that are faced by owners of historic structures, who often have trouble seeing the value in hiring contractors who understand and employ traditional trades and materials, it becomes clear that the solution to the latter easily comes through education, while the solution to the former requires technology that arguably is what got us into the recent spiraling increase in CO2 emissions. Shouldn’t we be working to encourage the application of the knowledge we have already accumulated to the construction of more durable buildings?

The 20th-century movement away from traditional building systems and architecture unquestionably reduced the expected useful life of new buildings compared to our wealth of historic buildings. The 20th-century building boom was also a major underpinning of its boom economy, but as we move further into the 21st century, we begin to become acutely aware of some of the side effects of both.

Can we logically move toward solving the problems those side effects have produced without combining the knowledge and energy of communities that are rapidly evolving as people realize the importance and crucial nature of joining forces? Is there really any basic difference between people who are working to save our historic buildings and those working to save our environment?

When the National Heritage Training Group conducted its skills-needs analysis of the built heritage sector in England in 2005, the group interviewed high-school-age young people in an effort to determine how to motivate them to pursue an education in trades. The heritage group asked them if they could have anything they wanted, with no restrictions, what would be the top three things. They overwhelmingly replied, “Sex, drugs and to save the world.” To save the world. If that isn’t a challenge for us to learn to work together toward our common goals, I’m not sure what could be.

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Have you ever noticed that the older people are, the less likely it is they find it easy to make sense of the whole “green” revolution? But, at the same time, start talking to those people about the need to bring back trades education and to teach people how to “make things” again and they have no problem understanding what you’re talking about and probably will agree with you completely. To me, this speaks volumes about how much the world has changed, or at least people’s perception of it, in just a couple generations.

I’ll never forget something that happened in one of the historic houses, owned by the Preservation Resource Center, in the Holy Cross Historic District in New Orleans during the “Spring Greening” organized by the Historic Green organization. PTN was a partner in the event, and I was working with a group of young volunteers when Jeremy Knoll, one of the lead organizers of the event, came in with the captain of the local Red Cross unit, which was one of Spring Greening’s main sponsors. The gentleman had his mother and one of her friends with him on a tour of the project houses, and Jeremy asked me to explain what we were doing with the volunteers.

As I began explaining to them that we were teaching these young people how to carefully remove the historic windows and repair and restore them, the captain’s mother began to light up with obvious enjoyment. When her son noticed this, he explained to me that when he was growing up they never threw anything away. If something was broken, you fixed it. His mom joined in and said that it had always been that way in her family, and even today they would rather fix something old that can be fixed than replace it with something new that couldn’t.

It’s important now more than ever to understand just how deeply people’s lives used to be founded in sustainability. When most of what you have has been made by hand, and maybe your own, you don’t automatically throw it away when it needs to be repaired because you know it can be repaired and because you or someone you know knows how. When everything around us is manufactured instead of being created with skilled hands and minds, it becomes easy to forget the days when something’s value was more than just its usefulness.

We can’t forget that the need for skilled tradespeople goes far beyond their value as a resource for preserving the things of the past. The woman who met the volunteers in New Orleans wasn’t pleased because she knew the old windows in that historic double shotgun were going to be saved. She was overjoyed that we might be instilling in those young people the kind of values that existed in the world she had grown up in–a world where sustainability was not something you had to figure out how to create, because it already existed.

Re-creating a place for trades in our society will undoubtedly be a good thing for historic preservation, but it will also help build real foundations for a greener future by enabling people to once again make things that have value and will last because that value is tangible. If that isn’t building sustainably, I don’t know what is.

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Recently, I asked a friend to review something I had written on trades education. He was kind enough about his opinion of what I had written, but he did suggest that I take my blinders off. What I think he was saying was I needed to be careful not to focus so much on trades education in formal educational programs and remember that much, in fact most, education in the trades happens on the job, and quite often it’s because people looking to add to their crew would prefer to train the new employees directly, rather than have to “de-educate” them or deal with a student who was taught in an environment that didn’t prepare him or her for the challenges of a real, on-the-job environment.

The truth is that for that period of time when the trades became nearly obsolete and the recent period of realization that the trades played an important role in preservation, trades education took place entirely on the job, with apprentices learning from masters as the work was being done. If this hadn’t continued to occur, as it has from time immemorial, we might have actually lost the trades, which would have been a true cultural disaster.

In my mind this begs the question as to which form of education in the trades is more appropriate, or are both important in the development of a workforce that is so desperately needed to save our built heritage; or do we need something else entirely?

What’s important here is to realize that we can’t use the past to fix the future, not entirely anyhow. This is because so much has changed, is changing and will continue to change at a mind-numbing rate of speed. In order to build a system that educates enough people to create the workforce needed, we will need to have an organized approach to teaching them.

We cannot expect the individual companies and master tradesmen who are out there to organize that educational system, or even expect them to participate in it, for that matter. But it would be beneficial to everyone if they were expected to at least support it. If supporting it means nothing more than teaching apprentices in house that’s fine, but if we were to go a step further and look at the model created in Germany, we might consider actually asking shops that don’t have a training program to financially support the programs that do have hands-on trades education in their curriculum.

The Timber Framers Guild has invested a great deal of time and money developing an apprentice curriculum for teaching timber framing and the U.S. Department of Labor has endorsed it. These types of efforts point up the need for a standardized approach to raising young people to the trades. Whether that is done in a shop, a field school, a classroom or a lab isn’t what is important. What is important is that trades education, formal or informal, occurs and that young people realize it is available and that learning a trade is rewarding and fulfilling, both personally and financially.

Obviously, learning directly from a master will bring this message home most effectively, but we cannot limit the opportunity for young people to know what is available to them; and this has to happen before they leave high school. Whether it’s done by bringing the trades back into the public educational system or by repairing the mistake we made by downgrading tradespeople to second-class citizens or both; it must happen soon.

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Working for the last couple of weeks in New Orleans, directing the 2009 PTN/TSA summer field school in partnership with the Tulane School of Architecture, has brought me back to a confusing reality. In what is arguably one of the most historically significant cities in America, you can’t buy hydraulic lime for restoration work. What’s more, finding a mason with experience or even an interest in using it is just about as challenging.

My first experience with this came in 2006 when PTN held its IPTW in the Holy Cross historic district. The concept was to hold a conference about preservation and traditional trades, in the area devastated by Hurricane Katrina, to offer both local tradespeople and displaced residents an opportunity to watch demonstrations on best practices for restoration work on historic homes. The demonstrations included wooden window repairs, traditional porch bracket making, traditional plaster work and several other disciplines relevant for homes in New Orleans. Four on-site workshops were held as well, including roof repair, decorative wooden porch restoration, lime plaster wall repairs and brick pier repointing.

The workshops involving lime plaster required bringing traditional hydraulic lime from Virginia Lime Works because none of the local suppliers carried the product. The closest thing available was, and still is, a product called “Southern lime type N,” which, unlike hydraulic lime, cures very slowly and reaches a much lower PSI rating. Consequently, masons make it “richer” by adding a little Portland cement, which causes it to act more like hydraulic lime. The local historic district preservation guidelines actually specify “Vieux Carre” mix, which includes type N lime, sand and Portland cement.

Because this has become the product of choice, hydraulic lime is not only unavailable, most of the local masonry supply yards have never even heard of it. In effect, using Portland cement has become the right way to do preservation work in the minds of preservation professionals, historic district managers and local tradespeople. Even the Barthe’ family, which has been plying its plaster trade for five generations, considers leaving out Portland cement to be bad practice.

Trying to comprehend how this all came to be is a bit beyond my capabilities, but it would appear that what was once standard practice, what literally built historic New Orleans, is now considered to be bad practice. To be fair, the beautiful historic brick buildings of New Orleans were not very likely built with hydraulic cement, but they weren’t built with Portland cement either.

A study of buildings in the ca 1835 Jackson Barracks, on the down river edge of Holy Cross, seems to show that natural Rosendale cement, from upstate New York, was very likely used in its construction. Access to materials from distant places is a part of New Orleans’s history, but for the most part, this city was built with lime created by burning oyster shells that were readily available locally, as was the sand it was mixed with to make mortar and lime plaster. When that was the available material, it was the right thing to use.

It’s interesting to me how changing economies can change how we perceive right and wrong when it comes to building and preserving buildings. In reality, a mason working in New Orleans today can’t afford to use lime mortar and plaster because of the slow cure time. To put it in the words of master mason Raphael Perrault, who’s working with our field school students this year (think Southern drawl), “Lime mortar is too poor.”

When the field school program was put together for 2008 and 2009, the decision to use hydraulic lime was based on what the academic and trades education staff considered to be best practice, but working with our local tradespeople has made it quite clear they do not agree. It begs the question, who here needs to be educated?

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Last weekend, I had the pleasure of spending time at the Preservation Institute Nantucket, a well-respected and established summer field-school program of the University of Florida. The weather wasn’t much to write home about, unless you’re one of those people who enjoys cold wind and rain, but the historic architecture was interesting, if you like grey weathered wood shingles and white trim as far as the eye can see.

My wife, Laura, and I had the opportunity to put on a traditional timber-framing demonstration for the Nantucket Preservation Trust, on the grounds of the Athenaeum, which was open to the public. We had more than 40 people brave the elements to learn a little bit about the ancient trade that built most of the historic buildings on the island. I also gave a lecture on the role of trades in preservation work followed by a tour of two historic timber-frame roof systems on two 19th-century churches, where I introduced the students to my method of looking at historic buildings through the eyes of the tradesperson who built them. I helped them understand how looking at buildings from a virtual time machine can help you better understand how and why they were built as they were and what has happened to them between then and now.

In the evening we had some time to chat with Marty Hylton, the program’s current director and a good friend, and the conversation led to trades education. Surprised? Marty was instrumental in PTN’s introduction to summer field schools, and it was his idea to bring tradespeople and trades students together with academic students to create a new education dynamic. Marty agrees that trades educations programs would benefit greatly if it were possible for master tradespeople to actually hold teaching certificates, making it possible for students to receive college credits for taking courses taught by them. It would also be very beneficial if colleges and universities had access to tradespeople with teaching certificates who could act as visiting professors.

So why isn’t this happening? It would appear there is a lack of a champion. Even though trades organizations would like to be a part of creating this much-needed tool, the way that higher educational systems have evolved in the U.S. creates some pretty serious roadblocks. Tenure is a major one. Academic systems are highly competitive toward tenured positions. It would appear that tenure isn’t something that can be acquired effectively through lifetime experience in a field; rather tenured positions are quite often the result of the creation of abstract positions in a rarefied social culture.

The fact that someone has reached master craftsmen status means little or nothing in the academic world. Tenure in the academic world is gleaned principally through a rigorous process of obtaining the right degrees, actively teaching in a classroom setting, research and publication of that research, research being the principal factor looked at by the provost in evaluating an individual’s qualifications. This has created an environment where publication channels are readily available for academics to present their research and theses, but avenues for publication of the work of the trades are generally not financially supported or readily available.

The heart of the problem seems to rest in the fact that success in the educational world is reached through academic activities that are based on teach-what-you-can-test programs, while success in the world of the trades is reached through experiential activity, which is gauged by cultural or social approval and appreciation. What is common in both worlds is the fact that mastering any field requires acquiring the skills to teach others what you have learned. If this alone were what qualified someone to be certified as an educator, the resource would be both larger and truly interdisciplinary, but as my friend Marty might say, “Don’t hold your breath. Higher education is private enterprise.”

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I was talking to a friend yesterday about some ideas for trades education initiatives, and he mentioned how much had changed since he and I started getting involved in projects together five years ago. It got me to thinking how much really has changed since the Whitehill Report. The Whitehill Report, a product of the Committee on Professional and Public Education for Historic Preservation and Restoration formed by the National Trust for Historic Preservation (NTHP), was published April 15, 1968. The committee was formed in January 1967 less than three months after the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) became law.

The NHPA had given us the National Register of Historic Places, the list of National Historic Landmarks and the State Historic Preservation Offices, but it did nothing to enable the actual process of historic preservation or restoration. The Whitehill Report, named for the committee’s chairman, Walter Muir Whitehill, was the NTHP’s attempt to establish the extent or limitations of the human resources to carry out this work and the degree to which the educational system of the United States was able to produce them. The conclusions it came to were as disheartening as they were enlightening.

The report states: “Technology has displaced the traditional building craftsmen as effectively as industry previously displaced the handcraftsmen who made the objects of domestic use and commerce. Not only has prefabricated and disposable construction destroyed the general need for such craftsmen, but artificial materials have replaced many of the natural materials used in earlier buildings whose properties are part of the craftsmen’s lore.” In other words, the committee came to the conclusions that the trades had not just vanished, but had been methodically made obsolete, while recognizing that “earlier buildings” required both natural materials and craftsmen skilled in their use.

The report went on to say: “These ancient crafts are a significant part of our national cultural resources. Their continuation as a living tradition is essential to insure the authentic conservation of our early buildings. The survival of these crafts will require the most thoughtful solutions to human as well as economic problems. No existing formula can be used. A new solution must be found, based on a national realization of the importance of these skills to our continuing culture. Public knowledge of the standards and objectives required in such craftwork should be developed through education at all levels.” Again, the commission recognized the crucial loss of the educational resources to even create modern craftsmen with the skills needed to work on our architectural heritage.

Forty years later, the National Council for Preservation Education’s (NCPE) Guide to Academic Programs has 59 programs, including both colleges and universities with undergraduate and graduate programs in historic preservation. Many of those programs date back to soon after the Whitehill Report was written, but until 20 years ago, only academic programs were available to students. Even though the report clearly stated that skilled tradespeople would be needed to carry out the actual hands-on process of historic preservation, formal hands-on trades education only started to become available 20 years after it was written. Even today, there are fewer than ten programs offering hands-on trades education.

It’s important to note that the Whitehill Report was wrong in its assumption the trades had “vanished”. In reality, there have always been highly skilled trades people, and the NHPA was an important law in that it started a process that gives more and better work to those skilled craftsmen today than they have had for generations. Much is being done to pass the knowledge those tradespeople possess on to future generations. The Preservation Trades Network is holding its fourth hands-on summer field school program in New Orleans in partnership with Tulane University in July. The Timber Framers Guild’s apprenticeship program has just been granted approval by the Department of Labor. The Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission has partnered with Thaddeus Stevens College to teach hands-on trades education through their Preservation Trades Technology Program.

I’m happy to say there are more programs available than I can list in this blog, but the need for skilled tradespeople far outweighs the number practicing their crafts today; and the problem will get worse every year if more high quality programs aren’t created at a much faster rate than they are being created today. The fact that America is finally beginning to see the value of its historic architecture is in many ways a double-edged sword. But I guess a sword is just another tool, and we need to learn how to use this one for the good of historic preservation and the good of the trades.

Some useful links:
The PTN field school.

The “Guide to Academic Programs” listed in the article.

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This last weekend I had the pleasure of representing the Preservation Trades Network (PTN) as a guest speaker at a hands-on historic window restoration workshop in San Antonio, TX. I shared the guest speaker role with Walter Sedovic, AIA, LEED, who gave a very concise presentation about the research he has been doing on performance and investment return of modern replacement windows. His presentation was eye opening and appropriate to kick off the workshop, which took place at historic Fire Station #11 in San Antonio.

Fire Station #11 is a 1924 building that was built on land owned by the Steves family. When the fire department decommissioned Fire Station #11, it was returned to the family per terms in the 1892 deed. The Steves family is currently working with the University of Texas San Antonio (UTSA) to turn it into a preservation lab and office space for the newly established preservation program in the architecture department. This concept will allow for its adaptive reuse to both restore and preserve its historic character while guaranteeing its usefulness for decades to come.

The workshop was the brainchild of Bill Dupont, professor of architecture, who heads up the preservation program at UTSA working in concert with San Antonio’s historic preservation office. Bill and I had worked together involving PTN in the Historic Green conferences, which have taken place for the last two years in the Holy Cross Historic District in New Orleans. We were invited to assist in bringing preservation programming into the conferences, and during this year’s conference, we had introduced historic window restoration.

Hands-on workshops involving historic windows are not a new idea, as many such workshops have taken place over the last few years as awareness grows of the critical need to save historic windows and stem the relentless marketing efforts to sell the idea that old, ”drafty” windows need to be replaced with modern, energy- efficient “green” windows. The historic wood windows have performed well for a century and often more, historic metal windows for nearly as long, and both the historic wood and historic metal wnidows are restorable. For the most part the modern “replacement” windows are not.

What was refreshingly new about the workshop at UTSA was the degree of networking that took place.

Among the partners who where involved in presenting the workshop were the City of San Antonio Department of Historic Preservation, National Trust for Historic Preservation (NTHP), San Antonio Conservation Society (SACS), UTSA College of Architecture, AIA Center for Architecture, Alamo Hardwoods and ARTchitectural Interiors who’s principal, Victor Salas, acted as instructor to the students during the workshop. This diverse cross-section meant that a city government (San Antonio), a state university (UTSA), a local preservation non-profit (SACS), national educational non-profits (AIA & NTHP) and local business had all partnered to provide an educational opportunity in historic preservation and good maintenance practices to both university students and the general public.

When I had the pleasure of being involved in ITES/IPTW 2009 in Tallberg Sweden, one thing that really struck me about our collaboration in developing the program was the fact that in Sweden, government, industry and the public education system work together. Ever since that event, I have posed the question, when presenting and lecturing at events and conferences, as to why this doesn’t happen in America. The logic involved in this collaboration appeared so obvious, and yet it would seem to be quite uncommon in the United States. This weekend’s workshop in San Antonio showed me that there may be an opportunity for change. To me, it was a window to networking opportunities that more of us need to look through.

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