A Place for Trades

One thing that really gets under my skin is paying for insurance. I realize that some forms of insurance are critical to maintaining our society, auto insurance for example, but other forms of insurance have become a requirement for more insidious reasons. I have no intention of wading into the health insurance debate, but homeowners’ insurance is the kind I have a bone to pick with. Having just gone through the tedious process of refinancing our home, I was forced once again to deal with homeowners’ insurance because one of the requirements of the HARP loan program is to establish an escrow account that is used to pay for both insurance and property taxes.

That got me thinking about the costs involved to repair the damage done by some of our recent natural disasters and about what that means in the big picture of how we build. Hurricane Sandy clearly caused distress for a tremendous number of people on the East Coast and reportedly caused $62 billion of damage. Hurricane Katrina changed the lives (and took many) of the residents of much of the Gulf Coast and reportedly caused a record $81 billion in damage. The unfortunate truth is that these numbers represent the amount of damage paid for by insurance. The actual impact is unknown in both cases. We will never know the dollar value attributed to what was lost by people without insurance or damage that wasn’t covered by insurance.

After Katrina, I was asked to represent PTN, in an effort involving the National Trust for Historic Preservation (NTHP) and the World Monuments Fund (WMF), in appraising the damage done to the historic structures in and around New Orleans. The focus was less on the storm damage than on the damage that could happen following the storm. The effort was named Alternatives to Demolition. The concept was to assist in keeping historic buildings with storm damage from being bulldozed because they had been condemned during the ensuing assessment process. Inevitably, it was an effort that was easier for some to see the value in than others.

I was not prepared, in more ways than one, for what I would see in the path of Katrina’s destruction. The devastation was staggering, as was the lack of animal life, including human. The storm had rendered much of the Gulf Coast temporarily uninhabitable for both man and beast. It was difficult to grasp, but it created a perspective from which I was allowed to see, appreciate and question my understanding of our environment, both natural and built.

My mandate was to focus on the built environment, and I quickly realized I had to un-focus my attention on the storm damage and learn to relate to the myriad other factors that were a threat to the historic buildings I had come to assess. I was engulfed in the reality that buildings can’t take care of themselves and soon became acutely aware that entire neighborhoods were at risk because the people who lived there had been evacuated. Before people were allowed to return, the risk of doing so had to be assessed by government officials who were in way over their heads, even though the water had receded.

Part of the problem was that the homeowners could not influence the decision-making process because they weren’t able to be involved. For the most part, their buildings had to fend for themselves in an environment resembling the scrape-and-build mentality so prevalent in areas where gentrification, investment and development combine to cause old buildings to be viewed as detriments to progress. If no one had come to their defense, many historic buildings would have been demolished because their value could not be perceived by building inspectors and insurance adjusters.

What really began to come into focus for me was the fact that I was looking at historic buildings in the aftermath of a hurricane for the very first time, but the historic buildings around me were looking at the aftermath of another hurricane. Depending on their age, they may have weathered 10, 20 or more hurricanes. The same could not be said of the newly constructed buildings, which suffered significantly or were lost completely.

Before and after shots of Dorothy Phillips American Cottage on North Beach Boulevard in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. Top photo: After Hurricane Katrina. Below: During restoration.

Katrina had come ashore in southwest Mississippi, where the storm surge in the historic town of Bay St. Louis was 24 ft. above sea level. Entire historic districts suffered very heavy damage, but as I walked along what was Beach Boulevard with Marty Hilton of the WMF and Lou Linden of the NTHP, several houses stood out in that they had suffered damage but appeared to be in good condition structurally. As we got closer, I realized I was looking at one home in particular where siding and part of the wall had been torn away to reveal timber framing with pegged joinery.

The owner’s son and daughter were there with some friends cleaning up debris and invited us to come in and see the historic American Cottage style home. Because the house was built on a ridge roughly 10 ft. above sea level and was also raised up on brick piers, the surge water hadn’t made it to the high plastered ceilings but had filled the house up with several feet of sea water before finding its way back out through doors and wall openings. Studying the hand-planed, tall single-board trim around the floors and the water mill-sawn framing, it was clear the structure had been built in the very early 19th century. Katrina was clearly not its first hurricane rodeo.

The family questioned us about what they should do, since they had been told by local contractors and their insurance adjuster that the house should be demolished. We explained to them that their house was a wonderful example of both a classic architectural style and a house that had been built to withstand the force of hurricanes and had done so for nearly two centuries. In effect, the way the house had been constructed was its own form of insurance. We explained that with some careful cleanup and repair, the home could easily be returned to its historic majesty. The bright smiles on their faces may have been the first ones since the storm had challenged their lives and property.

As we continued on our quest to save the historic homes along the Gulf that had survived Katrina from destruction by the human aftermath of the storm, the reality became clear that the best insurance they had was how they were built. The lime-based plaster walls with cypress lathe held up totally intact after an extended period submerged in flood water, compared to homes that had been re-muddled with modern drywall and were covered with wide bands of black mold. The quarter-sawn heart-pine floors were still pristine under a layer of mud, while the modern replacement floor systems were swollen and buckled beyond salvage. The reality that the older homes were built for disasters, decades prior to the introduction of homeowners; insurance in the 1950s, was becoming glaringly obvious.

How quickly we forget how and why we should build to withstand the forces of nature. In today’s world, images of neighborhoods demolished by natural disasters are commonplace, but how many people realize that the real reason we see higher and higher damage estimates has largely to do with how substandard so much of what we build today is when subjected to the powerful forces of nature? In truth, building codes were created for the most part to protect mortgage and insurance companies, but why is the bar set so low? As my builder friend John Abrams once said, “When someone says that everything they build meets code, what they are really saying is that if they built it any worse, it would be illegal.”

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying we should do away with homeowners’ insurance, but if the mortgage company is going to force us to pay for it, shouldn’t there be a sliding scale that provides traditionally built homes with lower premiums because they are built to survive the environment in which they are built? If it doesn’t really matter how well your home is built, I guess it makes sense to build it cheaply so you can afford the insurance that will replace it when Mother Nature throws another temper tantrum.

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The Grailville Oratory, a very large adaptively reused timber-framed barn from the late 19th or early 20th century.

Several weeks ago I was contacted by an engineer, with whom I had worked longer ago than it’s polite to talk about. He needed some help with the structural assessment of a building. He had been asked to look at the Oratory at the Grailville Retreat and Program Center, a Catholic facility with 14 buildings on the outskirts of historic Loveland, OH. The director of the center asked him to look at some damage that had been reported by a young architect who had recently done condition assessments of several of the buildings on the campus.

The management staff of Grailville had an interest in investing some money into some of their buildings as part of a program upgrade in order to make the buildings more useful for an expanding program schedule. Wisely, they decided to have a professional assessment done of the buildings in question to determine if there were unrecognized condition issues that might affect their decisions as to how to invest in the improvements.

The architect, who was a member of the facility’s congregation, was presented with a sizable challenge when assessing the Oratory due to the fact that the structure was an adaptively reused 42×108-ft. cattle barn that had been rehabilitated in 1961 so that services could be held in the building. As with most architects, she had little formal education in understanding timber-framed structures but did a very comprehensive assessment as had been requested and in doing so reported to the director that she had found a number of structural problems with the building. That was the origination of the call to my acquaintance Tom, the structural engineer.

Damaged mortise-and-tenon joinery in the Oratory that occurred prior to the rehabilitation for adaptive reuse in 1961.

Tom and I had worked together on a timber-frame project involving the construction of what was to be called the “Earth Connection.” The facility was to be used for educational programs directed toward sustainable living in the early days of recycling and alternative energy, well before the marketing of “green” everything took place. The building was to be timber framed, using locally harvested timber, and the frame was cut and raised during a two-week-long hands-on workshop in which my wife Laura and I served as instructors.

Tom accepted the invitation to do a structural assessment of the damage reported by the architect and was a bit perplexed by the extent of damage that existed. Attempting to understand what he was looking at, he searched for possible sources for the damage and concluded it may have been caused by straight line winds, which last year had damaged several buildings and toppled a number of large trees close to the Oratory.

When asked by the Grailville director if the building was safe to use for Easter services, Tom decided to give me a call and ask me to assist in assessing the structural integrity of the building and potentially designing emergency stabilization that would make the building safe for use until repairs could be done.

Always glad to have a chance to meet with an old acquaintance, and to look at a historic structure to boot, I agreed and asked if it were possible to send me some photos of the building and the damage that had been reported. He talked to the director and soon there were 82 images for me to review before my site visit. Looking at the photos was invaluable. There was without question damage to the timber frame, but the real question was whether stabilization, or even repair, was necessary.

Arriving at the Oratory, we were greeted by the director, Becky, who was both happy to see us and concerned about what we might have to tell her. As we began to talk, several other people associated with Grailville arrived, as did Tom the engineer and Heather the young architect. I had brought along my usual “building doctor’s” toolbox and had included a 150-year-old piece of timber (a cut-off end with a tenon), which exhibited both “checking” and “shake,” as a way of doing a little show-and-tell before I started my walk-through and ladder climbing.

I explained how “seasoning” causes green timber to develop stresses over time, a term based on the fact that it takes seasons to dry, and how natural materials behave differently than man-made materials. I explained why timber faces show splits, which we call checks, that are the natural result of seasoning and how timbers with spiral grain, sweep and slope of grain distort as drying occurs, as well as how the timber frame itself acts like a giant restraint to counteract much of the distortion while absorbing the stresses. Most important, I explained that we had to think of the building as a time machine as we began to understand how natural and man-made forces had affected it over its lifespan.

Based on my experience, it was clear that we were standing in a frame that was built roughly a century ago, give or take a few decades. This meant we had 100 years, give or take, to attribute the existing conditions to. Immediately, we could assign two waypoints to that timeline that were of significance: the date it was constructed with a natural stone foundation and a freshly harvested pine timber frame (a date we can only guess at) and 1961, when adaptive reuse modifications took place based on drawings by Garber, Tweddell & Wheeler Architects.

The significance of these waypoints is that the building functioned differently prior to the adaptive reuse modifications than it does now, over 50 years after the rehabilitation took place. As the walk-through progressed, I confirmed what I had seen in the photographs. There were significant joinery failures, most of which could be attributed to defects in the timbers, distortion caused by deformation or accumulated shrinkage, but some were clearly due to some other conditions that most likely were either significant wind or snow loads.

However, what the engineer and architect had thought were recent failures caused by a weather event or some type of structural degradation were not so recent at all. In fact, if they would have been able to see the damage through time glasses, they would have understood that nearly all the damage they had discovered existed in 1961 when the building was converted, and the architects and general contractor had not included repairing them in their scope of work.

Furthermore, the dark patina of all of the exposed damage, in conjunction with the lack of any cracking or failure of the interior plaster surfaces abutting the damaged joints, clearly showed that the added building envelope had acted as a reinforcement cloak, which had preserved the unrepaired failures for half the life of the building.

As I completed my assessment, as I all too often find, the real danger to the building had been overlooked with so much focus being placed on the damaged joinery. I found several areas where stained plaster and stained timbers clearly showed the roofing system on the Oratory was in failure. The fact that the building had survived both nature and mankind for over 100 years of time traveling, Mother Nature, in her gloriously insidious way, was working slowing but surely to retrieve the trees that had been harvested a century ago. I was reminded of what my time-traveling friend Jim Askins taught me about building maintenance, which is the real process behind preservation. Said Jim, ”There are three things that damage historic buildings: water, water and water.”

It’s best to remember that every time we see something that has happened to a part of our built environment, we need to include the dimension of time in our understanding of what we observe. Without time on our side, we often miss what the structure is telling us altogether.

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In my last blog we discussed whether or not today’s tradespeople were capable of the same level of craftsmanship their predecessors possessed, but I feel it is just as important for us to consider whether we have the ability to recognize, and truly appreciate, quality craftsmanship when we see it. I have talked before about how different today’s world is and how that can impact the work of the tradesperson. The reality is it affects the tradesperson’s patrons just as much, if not more.

A masonry sample extraction that most people would walk right past without thinking about the skill and knowledge of materials that make it work. Photo: courtesy of Ken Follett

We live in a world where it is difficult, if not impossible, to recognize the hand of man in the modern things that surround us. Oftentimes, it seems that there is an automatic assumption that if something was made by hand, it must be old, an assumption that is anything but odd considering the fact that things that are old are the very things we associate with craftsmanship.

How we got here is not difficult to understand. The system of capitalism we employ to sustain our economy, and many of the economies around the world, demands that products be competitively priced to be marketable. This in turn often means that the best way to make something is most likely not by hand. The catch is in the term “best,” because marketability becomes the standard by which value is assessed.

When I was young, I remember my German grandfather owning a Cadillac. He didn’t purchase it as a status symbol. He drove it because he felt it had the most value for the money he had used to purchase it. It was the best investment. Today, value is rarely based on quality.

Instead we use various methods to associate value with an object, depending on what that object is and how we intend to use it. If it is food, we generally consider it a good value if it has a low price, because, for the most part, a cabbage is a cabbage. If it is clothing, cost is still a major factor, but now we have to add appearance to the equation. How this item will look on me or how it will make me look becomes part of the perceived value. Few people seem concerned about how the cabbage they eat will make them look.

When choosing a car, both cost and appearance play a part in the value we perceive it to have, but now we add other factors like fuel economy, performance, features and options, among others. And when we decide to invest in a home, all of the previously mentioned value items come into play at some level, but now we add potential resale value, neighborhood, school systems, access to mass transit and a myriad of essentials into deciding if the home is a good value.

At this point, I’m sure some of you are saying, “So what?” If you go back and review what we just discussed the one glaring omission is craftsmanship. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying no one pays attention to how well things are made or that some of us never even care, although that is clearly plausible. What I am saying is that how we value nearly everything that is produced in the world we live in is, for the most part, not based on our ability to discern the craftsmanship it embodies.

Why have we evolved into this value structure? I can’t say I can answer that question, with any degree of confidence. But I can ask it. I have been in many discussions, some more heated than others, about why so few people value the work we do, and in far too many of those interactions, I have come to believe that it’s generally accepted that very few people even care about craftsmanship anymore. I think the real truth is they may not even know how.

If I am right, how we market the concept of conservation can’t be objective. We need to see beyond the things we are trying to keep and learn to see where they really came from. The Secretary of the Interior’s Standards of Building Conservation (my name, not the actual one) are ever changing, as they should be, but they have one basic flaw; they are object oriented. In reality, they are the same as the educational guidelines used to operate the K-12 public school system; they are based on results, not process.

As many people have heard me state in the past, what we need is cultural change. I know that is not an easy row to hoe, but without looking at the value structure we have inherited and realizing how it is blinding us to what the real problems are in conserving our built environment, we only shadow box with our own images. Until we really begin the hard work of putting the tradesperson back into the perception of craftsmanship, we are kidding ourselves that treading water will work when the flow of the mill pond of society is simply driving the mill of manufactured values.

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Recently, in a forum discussion in the Historic Restoration and Preservation Group on LinkedIn, the subject of replacing “in kind” versus using modern materials was being discussed. Imagine that! As a response within the discussion, I suggested that it was important to realize that “in kind” should also be understood to include “by skilled tradespeople.” In fact, it might mean complete replacement of an object that is no longer suitable for continued use and is beyond repair – in effect, creating a new object that will, of its own merit, become historic.

One of the contributors, a tradesperson, suggested that this idea was not plausible because work done by a modern tradesperson lacks the “soul, character and artistry” of the historic work. I have heard this idea voiced before, but it strikes me as an odd notion, because if it is true, it means that tradespeople of today somehow lack the ability to learn to do their work as well as those who came before them. In effect, people today are innately different and lacking something that once was part of human nature. We have evolved to be less than we were.

I will admit that it is often difficult to source the knowledge needed to do a particular trade well, and I have often heard it said the we have somehow lost that knowledge over the centuries; but I question how that is possibly true. It often appears we have unlearned skills we once had.

Here’s a good example. I asked the phone company to add a new line in the office I had set up in my early 20th-century “rubber boom” house in Akron, OH. When the installer started running the new wire (for some of the younger people reading this, phones used to be connected to wires), he started to staple it to the siding below my office window.

When I asked the installer why he was doing this, he informed me that that’s how it was done. To this day, I don’t know if his look was surprised or confused when I took him downstairs and showed him the older phone lines disappearing through the floorboards into the wall cavities of my balloon-framed house. I’m sure he didn’t believe that houses could be built of balloons, but he did learn to fish a wire that day. To me, it was a good example of the phone company replacing the need to teach its installers how to do a concealed installation by simply lowering the standards the work was done to.

This Roman gate in Lincolnshire, England, is an icon of the trade of stone masonry. Photo: Rudy Christian

To some degree, I think that is part of the problem tradespeople face every day; the standards to which we are expected to work have been lowered in many ways. Clients who ask us to do our work as close to how it was originally done are few and far between. More often, their assumption is “that quality of work is too expensive” or “I realize we don’t do things that way anymore, so just make it work.” We don’t even have an opportunity to let them know that we not only do know how that work was done, but if it is done that way, it will have a higher value and longer usefulness before again requiring maintenance.

From my perspective, today’s tradespeople have both opportunities and choices to make, choices about how to approach those opportunities. There is no requirement that says a tradesperson has to do conservation work, any more than there is a requirement that a person doing hands-on conservation work has to be a tradesperson, but I can definitely see the value in the latter. One of the instances where we often see a line crossed and a lack of soul expressed is when companies without qualifications decide to wade into conservation work, often enabled by architectural “detailing” in construction documents. And as I pointed out in a previous blog, bidding on conservation projects is done in more or less the same way as it is for new construction.

I remember talking with Carl Elefante, who taught us that the greenest building is the one already built, at the APT conference in Denver a few years back. A renowned architect, Carl came up to speak with me after a presentation I had done and said, “Have you ever wondered why early construction documents had so few pages in a set?” He went on to point out that earlier architects believed they didn’t have to tell tradespeople how to do their jobs. In today’s conservation environment, tradespeople are all too often asked to make a decision between confronting the architect on what best practice is or just doing the work “as shown.” How much soul can you imbue in something that, if you had the choice, you would have done differently?

I think confusion between the artistry of the work done by the old masters and the modern ones, whether they be considered artists or tradespeople, is a matter of perspective. How art and architecture are created has continued to evolve since their inception. There are periods in which they blossomed, and when they languished. When the environment was ripe, artist and tradesperson alike saw an opportunity to create great works, many of which are now part of our cultural heritage, but does it have to be old to have soul or character or express artistry? Me thinks not.

It’s difficult to look at the great works of the past without a sense of reverence for the people who created them, but doesn’t that really mean that our reverence is for the person? When we look at great work, it has more perceived value when we have a sense, or even irrefutable knowledge, of who created it. The same should be said of what will be seen as great works that may not yet be a notion in someone’s imagination. Tradespeople today will be the creators of those great works, just as those in the past were. Whether or not they mimic the works of the old masters is irrelevant.

The decision to downgrade work being done today, or not, is our own choice. If we choose to do high-quality and creative work, then it should, by its very nature, have soul, character and artistry. The fact that it is new cannot diminish that. Great work stands on its own merit and will be the historical masterpieces within the cultural heritage of tomorrow.

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Quite some time ago, in my first blog for Traditional Building, I wrote about the formation of PTN as a special task force of APT. There was, at that time, a realization that there needed to be an effort to provide a voice for the trades. In many ways, it was more like realizing the need to return a voice to the trades. After attending the parallel APT/PTN conferences in Charleston, SC, a few weeks ago, I feel it is an appropriate time to return to that topic.

Ron Staley (left), of The Christman Company, a sponsor of the cannon carriage workshop, and David Woodcock (right), former president of APT, join me in appreciating the workmanship of the students.

The conferences were very well attended, with over 700 people gathering to celebrate the existence of a large and growing community of people focused on the conservation of the built environment. Several generations of professionals and tradespeople were in attendance, including students from the local trades and architectural schools, young apprentices of the trades and beginning architects and engineers venturing into the world of conservation, as well as many of us who have been in our respective fields long enough to see some very real changes taking place in the work place and in the field.

Charleston was an excellent location for this gathering, which represented the first formal meeting of APT and PTN in 15 years. The historic Marion Hotel provided space for the presentations, while the park that is Marion Square, adjacent to the hotel, was an excellent place to set up hands-on demonstrations. PTN collaborated with the American College of the Building Arts and Savannah Technical Collegeto to hold a workshop where students worked on reproducing two cannon carriages for replica Revolutionary War cannons at Fort Sumter National Park.

For me, joined by Laura Saeger and Lisa Sasser as instructors in the workshop, it was a perfect opportunity to communicate with interested conference attendees about traditional trades. The carriages were quite complex and required pulling several old planes and spokeshaves out of my collection. Truing up the blades and tuning the large hollowing planes proved to be of real interest to a lot of folks who visited the workshop, but watching the students using the 150-year-old tools was much more interesting to everyone, including me.

While we were there, working with the students in the shade of the trees, I had an opportunity to realize just how much things really have changed in 15 years. Within the conservation community, the concept of “preservation trades” (which I have dubbed an elitist term used to separate tradespeople into specialized fields) has largely been replaced with the term “traditional trades.” The value of including tradespeople in every phase of conservation projects is becoming more accepted as a beneficial collaboration. At the same time, the stigma surrounding the trades, which was part of our culture a generation ago, has been evaporating almost as fast as the melting Arctic ice sheets.

Today, young people who are given the opportunity to learn a trade are realizing just how rewarding it is to actually make something, and the educational opportunities available to them to learn how are increasing steadily. But the reality is when they matriculate, they may not be able to find meaningful employment in their chosen trade. The primary reason for this is that some parts of our culture have yet to find a place for trades.

Although the voice of the tradesperson is being heard more clearly by architects, engineers, historic property owners, the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the National Park Service, it has yet to be heard in the world of corporate contracting and the bidding process that employs its workforce. As my friend Ken Follett so eloquently states, “It’s not that the large general contractors don’t know there are skilled tradespeople out there, it’s just that they aren’t interested in paying for their qualifications or educating their own workforce to have them.”

It’s clear that much more work is needed to begin to create a world where the historic structures themselves are treated with enough respect that only people who are qualified to maintain them work on them. The process, as it currently exists, largely precludes this from happening. In order for a large company to survive, it has to be willing to accept being the “low bidder” in most cases. In order to do this, it also has to be bonded and insured. In order for these things to all work at once, most companies tend to keep the work in house, doing everything with their own employees who are paid as little as they are willing to accept.

In essence, we are punishing young people who have an interest in learning a trade, not because they will be considered lower-class citizens, as they once would have been, but because the companies getting the large conservation jobs aren’t interested in paying them for their skills. Unfortunately for our historic buildings, the result is sub-standard work compared with how the same work would have been done by someone with a quality education in a traditional trade. Unless something is done to change how this process works, our historic buildings and the people with skills in the traditional trades who built them will suffer.

There is some work being done to develop standards and qualifications for traditional tradespeople, as well as changes in the bidding process to exclude workers without those qualifications. If these initiatives succeed, it’s quite possible we will begin to see a cultural shift to a world where people have a better understanding of how important the traditional trades were in the building of our cultural heritage and how important they are in saving it. Then, and only then, will the voice of the trades have its rightful place again in our society.

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Several weeks ago I had the pleasure of participating in the Preservation Trades Roundtable, as a guest of the National Park Service‘s (NPS) National Center for Preservation Technology and Training (NCPTT). The roundtable was held at the National Conservation Training Center (NCTC), a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service facility built along the banks of the Potomac River near Shepherdstown, WV. The layout of the campus encourages walking through the scenic hills and woodlands that surround the lodging, dining and meeting venues.

I had the joy of crossing paths with this box turtle along one of the trails at the National Conservation Training Center during the Traditional Trades Roundtable, recently sponsored by the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training.

The Preservation Trades Roundtable was planned by Kirk Cordell, NCPTT’s executive director and Andy Ferrell, NCPTT’s chief of architecture and engineering, in response to the Cultural Resource Challenge NCPTT received as a branch of the NPS. The challenge, according to the formal language, was to “develop a traditional trades program within the NPS to produce training and technical briefs to support the efforts of the public and private sector.” Kirk and Andy felt a good place to start was a meeting, which included representatives from both the public and private sectors.

I was already acquainted with most of the 12 participants of the roundtable, but several were people I had the pleasure of meeting for the first time. Among those was Julian Smith, executive director of the Willowbank School in Queenston, Ontario, Canada. Willowbank describes itself as “. . .an independent and innovative educational institution in the cultural heritage field, operating within a dramatic historic setting.” The website defines cultural landscapes as environments “. . .that create a sense of place and sense of identity for cultural groups of all kinds, through the combination of artifact and ritual.”

It was refreshing to hear Julian describe his program as a place that crosses the boundaries between theory and practice to arrive at an integrated approach to design and development. I’m confident I’m paraphrasing, but the message I took from Julian is that part of the solution is to realize that the future of conservation is not the domain of “historic house huggers” any more than it is that of “preservation architects.” In truth, the future of our cultural heritage lies in our younger generations, who don’t necessarily view it with the same baggage that many of us blue hairs do.

He was quick to point out that the younger generations have grown up being taught the importance of ecology. Rather than seeing conservation as strictly theory or as a particular regimen of trades practice, they have the ability to realize the dynamic relationships that can exist between people who think of themselves as environmentalists and those who are motivated to maintain our built environment. Realizing that those environments, the natural and the built, both exist is less important than understanding how they are related.

The very fact that we in the U.S. are stuck using the word “preservation” as the generality, rather than conservation, points up a key difference in how we relate to the ecology of cultural resources. Conservation is about keeping things useful; whereas, preservation is about keeping things as they are. In truth, nothing in any environment ever remains truly static, and it is the understanding of the dynamics of environmental change that provides the types of challenges that make conservation work both challenging and rewarding.

I’m sure this concept flies in the face of plenty of preservation practitioners who have been trained to worship authenticity and resist intervention unless it is founded in strict theoretical understanding and approved practice, but the reality that our cultural heritage is the product of cultural tradition means that the conservation of tradition itself is as important as the conservation of the artifacts it creates.

The fact that the NPS is looking for opportunities to interact with entities in the private sector points up the reality that there is a recognition of the importance of the need to source knowledge outside the Park Service itself. This is a dramatic change based partly on the limitations that are being caused by endless budget cuts and the realization that a great deal has changed since the passage of the National Historic Preservation Act in 1966.

The existence of numerous schools with academic historic preservation curricula has been augmented in recent decades by many programs teaching hands-on trades skills, and the formation of organizations like the Timber Framers Guild and the Preservation Trades Network has created community environments that foster exchange of knowledge among professionals. Even the International Masonry Institute is adding education in historic preservation to its programs, and it is the connection of all these resources that could provide NCPTT with an opportunity to meet its Cultural Resource Challenge in an unprecedented way.

Those who know me and follow my blog know that one of my strong beliefs is that it is important to put tools in the hands of young people. Not only does this offer them the opportunity to realize how enabling it is to make things by hand, but I am realizing that it also is a direct connection to the cultural traditions that created much of the world they live in.

If we can create learning environments that allow educators, conservation professionals and students to learn in field-school-type environments in our national parks, conserving our cultural resources, we can truly offer them the opportunity to understand the ecology of conservation and lead the way to the cultural traditions of the future.

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Something that has been on my mind lately is just how much many of us don’t really fit in the world we have built. Obviously, I’m speaking of the “big we” here, but often I find that the biggest problem I face, when asked to undertake a conservation project, is the basic difference between the people who built the structure involved in the first place and those who own it now.

This barn, now lost to lack of stewardship, was built using traditional methods and materials. But what was the greater loss, its embodied energy or its embodied knowledge?

During the 20th, and now the 21st, centuries, we have seen changes in the way we communicate, learn and build. Because of the major transition that has taken place in so much of the world, we also have changed our basic understanding of the value of communicating, learning and building in a durable manner.

Instead of talking, we’re tweeting. We don’t learn how to make things anymore; we learn how to appropriate them, and because we don’t have the skills to build, the world around us is manufactured for us and marketed to us. In a world full of corporate eateries and big-box department stores, we are exposed to more “marketecture” than architecture.

A major factor in this rapid transition is the fact that you could be reading this blog from practically anywhere in the world on anything from a Dilbert box work station connected to a corporate server to a telephone connected to a wireless network, but the only way to read it as the printed word is to print it yourself. The human world is becoming increasingly media driven.

The world and the creatures in it have always changed, but the man-made impact of the greater rate at which things appear to change now has made it increasingly more difficult to relate to what the world was like when our built heritage came into being. Durability itself has very little value in a world where owning something old is often looked down upon in our throw-away society.

Those of you who have followed my blog know that for me, an important part of understanding how something was built is to try to understand it as if you were standing in the boots of the builder, but isn’t it just as important for the current owners of a building to try to look at it as if they were in the boots of the original owner?

Asking someone with 21st-century eyes to see something the way someone in the 19th century did is no easy task, but I’m convinced there is value in it. When I walk the owners of a historic barn through their barn’s past by showing them how grain was threshed on the barn floor, dried and winnowed and then stored in the granary before it was ground to make bread or help them understand the key role the barn played in caring for the cows and horses they depended on, it invariably gives them a better appreciation for how big a part their barn played in the lives of the people who had it built. Their barn becomes more valuable to them with the knowledge they now have.

It is much easier to see a building for what we want it to be than what it was. In the process of making it suit our needs, we more often than not overlook its needs. Because we really don’t understand it, we can’t sense what it is trying to tell us. Unless someone has altered the building, it is still basically the same as when it was built, but as it has traveled through time intact, other than wear and tear, we have changed significantly.

My friend Tom just finished working on a project at what sounds to me like a modern-day back-to-the-land community. The residents are trying to learn as much as possible about natural living through growing and preparing their own food, building their own homes and trying to use what they see as “green” technology through timber framing and straw-bale building, but what Tom found curious is they are trying to do it using pretty much their own creativity and ingenuity, rather than looking for the historic knowledge that exists. In effect, they are working on re-inventing the wheel.

I’m curious as to how we have created what we consider to be the “information age” and at the same time have systematically diminished the process of tranferring knowledge successfully from one generation to the next. The system of apprentice and master is practically extinct, and the curriculum in our educational factories is based on teaching what can be tested, while the knowledge of what we learned about how things are made is becoming hieroglyphs on the halls of time.

I’m not saying we need to slam this whole thing into reverse, especially at the speed we are moving now, but I am saying that one of the principal reasons we have difficulty keeping our historic building stock useful is because of how much and how we have changed. In my own trade, I am always elated when a historic timber tells me something about the person who fabricated it. Often, it is the only choice I have to learn how they thought, because that knowledge isn’t really a part of the world we live in today in any other form.

Traditional building is an endeavor not a structure. One of our most challenging tasks is to keep the understanding of tradition alive in our ever more fast-paced world.

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One of many wonderful things about living at the Center of the Universe, Burbank, OH, is the fact that many wild edible plants also live here. This year, the early warm weather caused the wild black raspberries to ripen in mid-June instead of early July, when they normally do. For whatever reason, this year also produced a bumper crop, so I’ve enjoyed spending quite a bit of time picking through the patches for the small, sweet fruit.

From left, Dave Caniglia, our son Carson and Steve Yatson (now deceased) use a rope and pulley to raise one of the tapered rafters in our adaptively reused 1815 church frame. Even though it’s our home, I guess you could still call it the Christian Church.

I like to approach everything I do in a similar fashion. To me, it doesn’t make much sense to put any less effort into doing a good job of gathering berries than carefully assessing the existing conditions of an historic structure. So I wasn’t really surprised, rather somewhat delighted, when my extra time in the berry patches helped me understand something that I had never spent much time thinking about before.

For me, one of the curiosities of gathering berries is that when I have finished collecting all of the ones that are ready to harvest and then realize the basket isn’t quite as full as I had hoped, going back to where I started picking quickly reveals that there are more ripe berries to pick. I’m quite sure the berries didn’t ripen in the short time since I had been in that spot, but lo and behold, there are more waiting to be picked. In reality, the berries that are waiting to be picked were there all along. I had just overlooked them the first time through.

More than once I have found myself in the same situation in my work. I really enjoy walking into historic buildings and playing detective, something that has given me many opportunities to lead historic barn tours for Friends of Ohio Barns, Barn Again! and even the National Trust for Historic Preservation. People enjoy walking along with me hearing my perspective on what I am looking at and asking me questions about why I think the builder fashioned a joint this way or put a mark in the shape of a Roman numeral exactly in that spot.

Invariably, in the course of helping people see historic buildings from the boots of the builder, I find myself realizing that going back and looking at something I answered a question about earlier gives me a different understanding of what I am looking at after I have taken the time to walk through the rest of the building. My nature is to be self critical and tell myself I didn’t do a good job of interpretation the first time, but, like picking wild black raspberries, the truth is, the second time I looked was with a different perspective.

In reality, I’ve come to realize it’s impossible to go back and look at anything without seeing it from a different perspective. Maybe I’m not standing in exactly the same spot. Maybe the lighting has changed ever so slightly. Maybe something else is in my field of vision, or maybe I just have more information to help me see it more clearly. For whatever reason, going back and looking at it a second time help a lot, and I wonder if, in fact, it isn’t the only truly valid way to see something.

I’ve written before about my friend Ken Follett and his son David. Part of their work, unlike rock stars who put holes in walls and then have to pay to have them fixed, they actually get paid to put holes in walls (and floors and ceilings), which are referred to as probes, and get paid to fix them! I like to think of what they do as enabling observation: creating perspective by moving something that is obscuring a view of something else and then putting it back where it was. I guess maybe they are rock stars when they work on stone structures, but I can’t help but wonder how many of their clients arrange to have them leave the holes open for a day so they can come back and look into them again.

I’m convinced that part of the value my clients see in hiring me is that I can look at exactly the same thing they are seeing and see something they can’t. The difference is that I have a different perspective based on experience. I find that stewards of historic property often have trouble knowing what they want done to their property because they really can’t see the problem. Rather, they see the results caused by the problem when, for example, paint no longer adheres to rotted wood or stone walls begin to crumble when the bedding has washed away and they are no longer stable.

Once I help them understand what is causing the problem, they can look at it differently and realize it really isn’t the paint that has failed. It’s the flashing over the window casing that is letting rainwater in and causing the wooden trim to rot, or it’s the missing gutter that is allowing rain to run off the roof and saturate the barn bank, causing the bedding in the bank wall to wash away. Hopefully, if I’ve done my job well, the next time they see a problem they will realize they need to look at it again with the understanding that what they are really looking for is what is causing the problem.

One of my favorite personal experiences of seeing things from a different perspective happened when we were raising the timber-frame roof system on our home. It’s an 1815 church, which we tagged, deconstructed and had shipped from Binghamton, NY, to the Center of the Universe here in Ohio. The hand-hewn rafters are tapered, an attribute not uncommon in 18^th- and early 19^th-century timber frames. The understanding of the reason they were tapered has always been elusive; it’s a topic commonly discussed among my colleagues and members of the Traditional Timberframe Research and Advisory Group.

Many possible explanations have been bandied about, like the idea that they were larger at the bottom so they could handle the accumulated snow load at the eaves, an idea that of course assumed they were actually engineered. Another popular notion is that the trees the rafters were hewn from were tapered; hence, so were the rafters, an almost plausible notion, except that the rafters are typically tapered more than any tree stem I have seen. But when it came time to pick up the rafters with a sling we attached to a rope run through a pulley that was attached to the principal purlin (the timber that supports the rafters at mid span) in our adaptively reused church frame, the answer to why they were tapered revealed itself as if by magic.

Tapering the rafters moves the center of gravity towards the heel of the rafter and well away from the joinery at the purlin, where the rafter rests. If the rafters were straight, the center of gravity would be in the middle, and the sling to lift them would have been in the way when it got into position to be set. I looked down and realized I was clearly wearing the boots of the builder at that point and that I had looked at tapered rafters for many years, but now I could see them for what they were: a very elegant solution to a problem that was part of the process of putting timber- framed roof systems together, and nothing any more complicated than that.

So for me, it’s more important than ever to take advantage of the opportunities we have to learn from, no matter how simple and basic the activity is we are involved in. It makes me think that when Little Village wrote the song “Take Another Look,” which is on the group’s 1992 album, “Little Village,” the band had just been out picking wild black raspberries. There’s probably no easy way to find out, so I’ll just assume they were.

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In the History of the Lumber Industry of America, published in 1907 by The American Lumberman, (available online through Google Book Search),  James Elliott Defebaugh tells us of the history of the harvesting of the white pine forests of the Northeast. He states in the introduction, “The history of those wonderful, virgin forests which stretched from the St. Croix River of Maine to the Red River of the North has almost been finished, and there survive only the remnants of those great resources in scattered groups of trees or in decimated woodlands, which stand as reminders of once magnificent forests of an extent and a value to man never excelled, if equaled.”

A lone virgin white pine stands where once there was a great forest. Was it saved because it was finally of value?

Although no one alive today can remember those great forests, few if any realize just how much lumber affected not only the building of America, but the exploration of it as well. Throughout the Old World, much of the forest resources had been devoured during the Iron Age for the production of coal. Although the sawmill dates back to the Iron Age, in early England the powerful guilds kept businessmen from setting them up as a way of protecting the tradespeople who were skilled at converting lumber and timber by hand.

The guilds had no control over the unexplored American continent, however, and the first sawmill was built here in 1623, in what is now York, Maine. Although lumber and timber were needed for building the settlements of the New World, large quantities were shipped back to the Old World as well. Unfortunately, little had been learned about forest preservation, and no legislation was put in place to protect forest lands until 1885, by which time the majority of the Northeast had been logged out. The great white pine forests were gone and now resided within the walls of much of our built heritage.

As the importance of forest preservation was beginning to be understood in the eastern states, the Gold Rush in 1850 in California was the beginning of major deforestation there. Gold miners who had failed to “strike it rich” turned to logging the great redwood forests as a source of income. It wasn’t until 1911 that legislation was proposed to protect what was left of the redwoods, and Redwood National Park wasn’t established until 1968. Now 133,000 acres of the 2 million acres of redwoods that existed prior to 1850 are protected.

Today, much of what was once a vast forest resource is either nonexistent or poorly managed, to a large degree because of the logging industry, which supplied yesterday’s tradespeople with the resources needed to build the cities and towns across our country. I often tell people, when I am asked to run a barn tour for a conference, “If you want to see our virgin forest, walk into a historic barn.” Unfortunately that is far from a safe haven for those old timbers, which had started growing long before we settled the Midwest.

Today, it’s the buildings that were built with those forests that are threatened. Obviously, this isn’t news to most people reading this blog, but what I find interesting is how the process of loss itself remains so misunderstood. Sure, most of us realize that buildings that have no value to anyone are doomed, but the ways in which they are lost often disguise themselves under the banner of being “green” or “economically progressive.”

In my own business of repairing or restoring heavy timber buildings, I find the threats to be numerous. Pick up any local newspaper in my neck of the woods and you will find ads that read “Cash Paid for your Barn!” In truth, the majority of barns that were built in the 19th and even early 20th centuries are of little value to the farmers who own them. Faced with the cost of maintaining a building they have little if any use for, farmers often take the cash from hungry barn harvesters.

Some of the barns (the lucky ones) end up being adaptively reused, although rarely on their original sites. Although this does temporarily keep them intact, the negative impact it has on our historic architectural landscape is irreversible. All too often, the “barn” in its new life not only no longer functions as a barn, it isn’t recognizable as a barn from the outside either. Some architects and owner builders do a pretty respectful job of repurposing old barns, but there are also some real monster pieces out there.

Another threat to our historic resources comes in the guise of “salvaging” building materials. With terms like “embodied energy” and “sequestered carbon content,” salvaging can sound pretty high tech, and there are numerous arguments that it makes sense economically. The fact that it has been such an uphill battle to get the LEED program to recognize the value of conserving buildings doesn’t help, but I can’t help but wonder where the line is for someone who “harvests” historic buildings, between seeing a building as a good restoration or adaptive reuse project, or a profitable salvage operation.

I have seen far too many historic timber-framed barns demolished (believe me, it’s anything but deconstruction) for the timber so it can be resawn into flooring or paneling or turned into furniture. Unfortunately, these are very marketable products because of the “ancient” wood and the “greenness” of recycling, but I can tell you for certain that some of our most wonderful and reusable barns have been lost to the sawmill. And the truth is, the mansion the wood became flooring for will most likely be “scraped” long before that barn would have become unusable.

So, I really do think we need to realize that a very real part of the problem of saving our historic buildings is the fact that we can’t see the forest for the trees. When the harvest of the redwoods began, it was commonly said that you could never cut them all. I wonder if part of our problem is we aren’t close enough to running out of historic buildings yet. Maybe when the crane shows up to harvest the last barn in Ohio, someone will stand up and say, “You can’t do that! It’s an important part of our history!” Then again, maybe not.

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During a recent trip to Charleston, SC, to participate in the Masters of the Building Arts Festival, followed by a timber-framing workshop at Savannah Technical College, we spent the night just south of Charlotte, NC, in hopes of avoiding heavy morning traffic on our way south.

As usual, I Googled local restaurants and found quite a few in a little town called Fort Mill about five miles south of our hotel. After reading a few reviews, we decided to try an Asian place called Liu Liu’s.

These buildings on Market Street in Baxter Village, SC, were designed to have the architectural appeal of buildings of the Old South. They are actually 21st-century buildings, as are all of the commercial and residential buildings in the village.

The directions were pretty easy to follow, and as we turned onto Market Street, we were greeted with the Classical architecture typical of the South, with large galleries and bracketed eaves. What seemed strange was how crisp and clean everything looked. Instead of the typical streetscape, where some buildings are well maintained and newish looking while others are waiting for some important maintenance, all of the buildings on Market Street looked brand new; in fact, they were. It was as if Fort Mill had been designed to look Classical, a modern creation built to replicate the feel of the Old South, which in fact was a 21^st-century fabrication.

Since that evening, which aroused my curiosity, I have learned that Fort Mill is a settlement that dates from the early 1800s and was established in 1873. The town center is actually about three miles to the east of the Market Street development we had been directed to by Google. Some web research turned up the city’s website, which proudly displays the city’s “comprehensive plan” containing its “community node descriptions” that include node 4a, which is actually called Baxter Village, where Market Street is located, and node 5, which is downtown Fort Mill.

The plan lists advantages and challenges for each node. For Baxter Village, the advantages are “community identity, new site of Fort Mill’s first hotel,” and the challenges are “traffic congestion, lack of pedestrian infrastructure.” For downtown Fort Mill, the advantages are listed as “building stock, downtown parks,” and the challenges are “lack of draw for many residents.”

Clearly, the bias for development of the area is toward constructing new buildings, rather than investing in the old ones, even though the result is congestion and lack of sidewalks. But in the process, entire new neighborhoods, including residential subdivisions, are being constructed, devouring huge quantities of resources, while the historic building stock languishes in the unattractive environment of poorly maintained buildings. This is a reality that can be seen all over America in areas where developers have chosen to invest. The question for me goes well beyond how “green” this growth is; it goes to whether or not it makes any sense at all in the long run.

In the last ten years, our little town of Wooster, OH, has seen a Lowe’s big-box store built and then abandoned when the corporate overlord’s market research showed that what was really needed was a Lowe’s super-big box instead. This is becoming the norm across the country as commercial developments become temporary in response to fluctuations in the economy and corporate competition. In Baxter Village, it is well disguised behind a façade of traditional architecture. In this world of shiny new old buildings, the Stepford wives can enjoy sushi and Starbucks any time they want.

Lisa Sasser, past president of the Preservation Trades Network and current president of the Timber Framers Guild, and I have been part of many discussions about the fact that one real value of keeping the traditional trades alive and viable is the fact that it enables building tomorrow’s historic buildings today. The concept that historic building stock should only consist of buildings that have already been built assumes we no longer know how to construct buildings which can last for centuries. In truth, we should be questioning why we aren’t. Obviously, this isn’t an easy question to answer, but what concerns me about Baxter Village, USA, is the faux nature of the buildings.

Interestingly, we seem to have taken a curious route to get to this point. In the mid-20th century, we witnessed the creation of shopping centers followed by shopping malls, which were built in suburban areas where huge parking lots supported the crowds of shoppers. As more and more people were drawn away from downtown, the historic buildings there received makeovers to appear more like the modern ones where people now went to shop.

Unfortunately, the historic character of many American towns and villages was badly damaged in the process due to modern methods and materials being applied to old buildings, and as these modern façades began to fade, downtown areas began to look shabby and unattractive instead of historic.

Many cities have seen an attempt to solve this problem through “Main Street” programs, which are working to counteract the sprawl created by the suburban malls and subdivisions that grow up around them. But the concept of returning shopping traffic to historic downtowns that long ago lost their public transit infrastructure to the pressures of big oil companies is problematic at best. Ultimately, construction financing, approval and contracting mechanisms can convince investors that creating new commercial districts is more financially viable than investing in the restoration and reuse of existing ones.

For me, these types of fabricated communities are a waste of resources beyond justification. The idea that a Classical façade is somehow the new authenticity is little more than public brainwashing. Unlike historic towns and villages, which supported traditional tradespeople, we become immersed in a completely manufactured environment.

Instead of traditional methods and materials being used to construct buildings that are meant to last, what exists is the appearance of traditional building, and I have little doubt that these buildings will do anything but age gracefully. When they begin to show their weaknesses, their maintenance will require the latest iron-on patches applied with the latest greatest spooge.

Unfortunately, the creation of these manufactured villages is doing little more than undermining the belief that we still know how to build for the future. Instead, the concept of building for the future is replaced with the concept of building simply for the here and now.

How can it possibly matter how many LEED points are attached to these modern atrocities when in fact the materials used to manufacture them will end up in a landfill long before the historic buildings in downtown Fort Mill cease to exist? And can we expect anything else than the loss of the traditional trades when the world we manufacture has no need for them?

I feel strongly that if we want to see our historic built environment survive, we need to invest both in the buildings we have today and the builders who will take care of them today and tomorrow. In a perfect world, those same builders will also be building the historic built environment of the future.

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