Restoring Reason, Beauty, and Trust in Architecture, Part 10: Preservation Today

Episode Topic: Preservation Today

Join the School of Architecture for the annual Michael Christopher Duda Center for Preservation, Resilience, and Sustainability Lecture "Preservation Today" by Ashley R. Wilson, FAIA. Wilson will explore the role of preservation in addressing contemporary architectural challenges, from sustainable development to the conservation of recent heritage. Drawing on her extensive experience, she will discuss how preservation practices can foster community development and urban regeneration while maintaining the integrity of historic sites.

Featured Speakers:

• Sister Ann W. Astell, professor, University of Notre Dame

Read this episode's recap over on the University of Notre Dame's open online learning community platform, ThinkND: https://go.nd.edu/5d9a83.

This podcast is a part of the ThinkND Series titled Restoring Reason, Beauty, and Trust in Architecture. 

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Transcript

Speaker Reflections and Career Path

1 0:06

Good evening. those of y'all that don't owe me, I'm new here. I'm Paul Kapp, and I, teach historic preservation with the Master's Historic Preservation Program at the Michael Christopher DEA Center here at School of Architecture. And it gives me, it's my great privilege and great pleasure to introduce our speaker tonight. Ms. Ashley Wilson and, Ms. Wilson. has a very accomplished record in historic preservation, 34 years of experience, and also a proud graduate of the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture. I'm sure she'll talk about that. Ms. Wilson, has done, has been a preservation architect on working on some of the most, interesting and important buildings in historic sites in the United States, I would say. she started out at the, as the Assistant architect for the Historic Buildings and Grounds at the University of Virginia, her other alma mater. later she worked in Washington DC doing, working on some of the most notable buildings in dc and then, became, the, Graham Gun Architect for the National Trust for the Historic Preservation. Among a lot of other things, but, I won't, she's gotta give this lecture, not me. anyway, I, without, I'm not gonna, without any further ado, I wanna present Ashley Wilson. Thank you.

National Trust for Historic Preservation

Balancing Career and Family

Challenges in Historic Preservation

Architectural Integrity and Modern Proposals

Preservation Standards and Affordable Housing

The Value of Historic American Building Survey

3 1:32

Thank you Paul. And thank you Steve for inviting me and everybody here that are old friends, new friends. I appreciate you being in the room. I have to admit, this is something I never thought would happen in my life, which is I was just introduced by my first husband and when Steve mentioned that last week, he's Paul Cab works here now. I was like, oh, this will be fun. So I, Yes. So that's what I was gonna say. So Paul K's on the other side of this camera. I normally don't talk about my autobiography when I'm giving a talk, but and all. And also, I think given that I was sitting where you guys were sitting in another building 28 years ago, I think my path is interesting to where you can go because I exist in an orbit that's adjacent to Notre Dame grads, but not in the same orbit. So I'm gonna quickly go through sort of what Paul did really fast, and then I have some case studies and then we end with, some other things and then we end with like hot topics and preservation really quickly. so like many of you, I came to preservation from a place of like deep joy and love, When I'm around historic buildings, that's what moves me. Some people's music. Everybody in this room, I know it's architecture. So I grew up in Florida, a place of not very much good architecture, headed off to UVA and was really fortunate they, there was no preservation courses. I was there as, architectural history architecture major, and the one preservation course I took was by the architect for the historic buildings on the grounds, and I became his assistant. So I got to work there right out the box. And from there I needed to come to graduate school. And Notre Dame was really the only place I looked at seriously because I felt like having a classical background would best set me up for the world I had in front of me. And I definitely wanted to do preservation architecture even after being here for the two years where they could have converted me. After UVA, after Notre Dame, I did one year in high-end residential. Then Paul and I worked together and we were doing a lot of rural preservation in the middle of the country. And then I moved to DC and I worked for a powerhouse preservation firm and started working on, you are looking at Tu place on the left, Dunbar Oaks, the jury on the top, the US Capitol. And I really fell in love with working in public buildings. Like I decided this is the direction I wanna go.'cause it's nice when your mom knows what you're doing. And so I, I learned a lot of valuable lessons in this office. I learned how to deal with a sort of very difficult reg regulatory environment in the District of Columbia. I also learned that a lot of preservation architects don't like design. And I had such a strong design background because I was here and I was at UVA, so I got to do all the design work in a fairly big office because they're all Conservator types, like that's what they're interested in. So it was really like a wonderful opportunity. We did mostly like visitor centers, but like any new building on the National Mall, I did it. Like we did a whole series of eight buildings on the National Mall, did visitor centers at different historic sites. So it was, I just found like you guys here, this is such a good avenue in the sense of how much is exposed. So like I was young, I was in my early thirties, late twenties, and I got to be the chief designer. this job was really fulfilling, but the pace was like soul crushing. it, it's the kind of work that's super fascinating. But after I know four or five years, I was like, I need to do something different, change my pace. So I applied Clemson University was starting a Master's of Science in Historic Preservation down in Charleston. I. The university president at the time was an architect and he got it. he knew, heritage tourism is one of the big businesses in Charleston. We're gonna support this full out. And they actually hired me the year before the program started and I got to do everything. I got to pick the buildings we were in. I got to design the curriculum and get it through the State Council of Higher Education, Clemson's a public university. we got to pick the students. and I had no academic background except for going to school, but I basically designed it how I thought a graduate program would be really fun, aim, preservation. And I cannot say enough good things about Clemson, the state of South Carolina and Charleston, because they're very preservation focused communities. It's like a once in a lifetime opportunity. So all of the professionals, they're part of our adjuncts. They helped get us going. it was an incredible experience. And I have this image up here because this is like my one direct line back to Notre Dame, which is, I did this little doodle sketch when I was there and we were, Clemson's got, I'm sure Notre Dame does too. Very serious branding. It's the tiger paw and this color orange and this purple. And I was like, we need thank you notes and we need like our own stationery'cause we're in Charleston. So I did this little typology study of the, iconic buildings of Charleston, of House, church, city Hall, and Marketplace. And, they still use it like we got in a lot of trouble for doing it, but it's still on all their T-shirts. So this is, definitely from what I learned here in all of our studies. but, so you saw everything I was working on DC everything, I was working on UVA Charleston, these are 18th and 19th century buildings mostly. And I was very focused that way because I had spent so much time in Virginia and definitely Charleston, like this is our study collection of Things that have been salvaged, but we didn't, and that, this is a long time ago now, but we weren't really looking at preservation into, we were looking back, we weren't looking as much forward, that I have next. So at that point I was married and I had a kid and we had to make a choice, like where are we gonna live? And I always tenured, but I decided to move to DC'cause we wanted to raise our kid in DC So that's when I became the chief architect of the National Trust. And the National Trust really changed my perspective in a lot of ways. I had never worked actually in a nonprofit like this, which is a nice merge of, it's pretty academic, but you're still practicing. So it was like the perfect merge of the two. What you were saving was entirely different. Their portfolio goes from Jane Hall, which is 1760s, up into basically the best of the modern buildings they own. And I have, so what you still got to work on the really beautiful classic buildings is shadow on the tesh on the left. And this is Lyndhurst, which is what was outside on the right. You were still working on those and really understanding like how they fail to fix them. But they also had a pretty big modern portfolio. So I got to work on those buildings and it was here that I realized I like it just as much. Like it's just as much fun as a preservation architect to work on any type of building. And it's actually a lot more accessible because people are more excited about these buildings in many ways, right? The how they're interpreted, how they're in the community. But we also did a. A lot of more grassroots things than what I was used to doing. Like the best thing about Clemson is it is very community based. If you work in a community, you make a difference at the National Trust. Like this is a project I actually did it through, I used to work as an expert for the, I think it's called the Rose Center for Public Policy. It's no longer there, but it works with the Mayor's Institute. And a mayor would pick these experts to come into the community and deal with a problem, or deal with something that they wanted to change. So they were doing sort of their civil rights trail. And this building, which is the AG Gaston Hotel, was there and just abandoned. it's been abandoned for years. So you look at it, there's clearly no. Architectural fabric here to save. And there's nothing important about the building except for what took place in it, which is the war room from MLK while he was planning his protest. So we were there getting this going before the trust even got started. And then the trust, it became one of the 11 most endangered, and now it's actually a national Park service site. So it was just really interesting work to go to places and look at things that have no architectural merit. if you're looking at this architecturally, you kinda wanna get in your car and drive away. so I developed a lot of personal and professional sort of takeaways from working at the trust. And I need to go back a little bit and talk about the trust because the National Trust for a stroke preservation is a place that everybody has heard of and nobody knows what it does. And so I'm just gonna give you a quick little background, which it was Congressionally Chartered in 1949. The park service they didn't think was the place to park buildings. And so as buildings came online that should be in the public realm, they created the trust to be this collection consortium of buildings. It's before the national register. Over time, it's so much like the sites department now is probably the smallest thing they do, but they really, what they're known for, I think what they're strongest in is government work and advocacy, the tax credit and their legal department, which is dealing with sort of preservation issues across the country. It had appropriated, because it was congressionally chartered, Congress would give us money every year, and that was our budget. And so that money is what they would use on these historic houses. And of course that just dried up and dried up. So by the Clinton administration, it became a full 5 0 1 C3 nonprofit where they had to raise money to do ev anything. By the time I got to the trust, it basically had been 20 years of disinvestment in all of the properties they owned, which were a lot of these buildings I just showed you. So when I landed on the ground and saw the amount of cyclical maintenance, which had to be well over 60, 70, a hundred million dollars, I became the cheapest, most practical, most tactical person ever. I didn't think I had it in me, but it was like, how? How do you take whatever money you have and actually get stuff done? And one of the problems at the trust is this was my office when I first moved in. It was at 1785 Massachusetts. So the previous architect had sat here. Is because it was a trust and it was trying to do everything perfectly and really study everything. We had yards and shelves and archives of reports, but never getting any of the work done. So the first thing I do did is turn that culture around and stop hiring preservation architects. this sounds really bad and you had to hire them on certain projects, but basically you could just, you could hire really good architects and not do the HSR in front of it and have them figure it out as sort of part of their working going forward. And then it, it's interesting'cause in private practice, like a Hi, an HSR is a historic structures report and like a conservation management plan, it's your bread and butter. Like in private practice in DC we wanted these because it's a hundred thousand dollars a report and it floats a lot of other projects. Then when you're teaching your students how to write them because that's what makes them marketable when they go into work. And yet here I am and I'm like, stop. I, we don't need these in any one of them. When you read them, you also get a list. This is the image on the right. You get a list of all the other reports you should do before you do any work. and so that it changed me forever on how I look on how to save these buildings. And I worked with craftspeople and I would often, I would be everything. I would be the contractor. I would be the architect. So I just pulled everything in house. I had great interns working for me. I had really good fellows, a lot of them for emo. So there were internationals. So the quality was excellent and we got a lot done. It's still, if you have an extra$300 million, send it to the trust'cause they didn't get it. the other thing I really learned at the trust is how preservation got so bogged down in like your purative significance, right? Like the edit Farnsworth house, the of significance is basically. The day that Meese finished before Edith walked in. And what's fun about the place is all the changes. Lord Peter Palumbo owned it after Edith Farnsworth owned it and he had really good landscape architects coming in from England. all of that is just as interesting, if not more And so the National Trust was actually pretty good about supporting this initiative of we're not gonna interpret one time because it's, it locks you in. And that's not what's interesting. And then number two here, authenticity is a very loose concept. I don't think there's a world in a, a building in this country that actually has all original materials. Like it's just, everything's been rebuilt so many times and it's changed and it's it's all like a fake construct and it, once you know all of this, I feel like you have so much, it's basically you have to be able to present it in a clear way and then you have a lot of looseness in how you work as a preservationist. So everything I, that was like the biography part and everything I showed you basically had me in a plane every week or every twice a week for 15 years. So I was always flying over.'cause when I lived in Charleston, I was still working for the firm in DC and then once I was at the National Trust flying all over the country. And my child at this point is a tween. He reminded me of my cat when my cat comes in after being out overnight, where they like aggressively purr and push on you and then knock things over if you don't give them attention and love. And I felt like that's where I was with my kid, which is if I didn't spend some more time being at home, I would lose that time because he was entering middle school. And I also know I, my husband has a more serious job than I do, and so it, there was an unfairness of me never being there and trying to balance it. And I was really good at figuring out carpools from a different state in a different time zone. But once the pandemic started, we actually, and we were very fortunate, my whole family, we just pulled the plug, I said goodbye to the national chest and I was ready to leave. I had been there for 10 years and felt like I had learned what I could learn. My husband quit his job too, and we homeschooled our kid for two years. And so this picture, which actually looks like my sister, which is weird, but this picture like, it wasn't just mom, it was mom and dad, but it was the best two years I could have spent my life. And so I, I only say this out loud in public is because none of the women in front of me said that. And in my generation, we did everything. some of my friends just worked and worked and didn't have, didn't get married, didn't have kids. Some of my friends had kids early and now run companies. Some of my friends worked hard and then changed. it doesn't matter what you do or how you do it, like it's fine. And there's no, I think what, whichever way you go with our, you always are looking at the other way. And so just my experience on it is like quitting now.'cause everyone's what are you doing? You just quit. And I was like, yeah, and it's really great. But I didn't really just quit. I am still, I'm still doing a lot of work. So now we're gonna go into some of these case studies to, to show you some of the things I'm still involved in. so who here has been to Talls and Italia and West? We got a couple people. So being from this place myself, being from Notre Dame, I have never once been on that. Oh, I love Frank Lloyd Wright trade. And even when I go to these buildings, I find them slightly incoherent. Like I, I find them difficult to, I can't. I like, where's the bathroom? they're hard to navigate. They're hard to understand. But you cannot deny that he is the center line of American architecture. He has changed so much in the Midwest. You can't drive anywhere and not see his influence and, but it's all over. He practiced all over and so I got involved in these buildings because they were going through this really interesting transition and I don't know if you know anything about it, but basically, so he had this fellowship, so he grew up in the one in Wisconsin, had the fires and the murders that were the fire that killed his wife and his stepchildren. And then the winters are so brutal there. He moved to the one in Arizona and he, because he couldn't get a job in Notre Dame, I learned today and he applied, but he can never, yeah, he could, like we need that lake. But he was a desperate to work in. An established institution and he could not, no, but Wisconsin wouldn't hire him. Notre Dame wouldn't hire him, no one would. Chicago, I, IT wouldn't hire him. So he started his own school and he has this kind of weird cult following and keep this, I'm glad there's not many people here'cause we keep this in the room. But he has this like strange cult following. We had these fellows and they, they did their music together at night and they saw concerts and then they built the buildings during the day and then half of the year later they would go to the other campus. But these two campuses are pretty spectacular in the sense of you cannot understand Frank Lloyd Wright without being in these places. None of the other buildings give you that whole life story. And these, and they're big, 2, 3, 400 acres still farming. but this site, the school finally, he dies in 1959. He puts all of his work. he was famous where he was alive. So all of his work goes to a organization that he set up called the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. And it has all of his copyright, everything there. His wife keeps the school going until 1985 and it just devolved in 2020. So there were still students living in perpetuity. It's basically, it still has a couple 90 year olds on these campuses. I'm serious because once you work there, that's all you did. So they had the school that devolved that. They also had something called TIUs and Associates Architects. And that was all the people who were sort of followers of Frank Lloyd Wright, who had individual firms and they got to use this as their office. So really quirky and strange, fascinating. but with the school being gone, they're. They became a un UNESCO World Heritage Site, the same year that the school went away and the architecture firm finally closed. So now all of a sudden, they never considered themselves a house museum. Franklin Drive was like, we do not wanna be a House Museum here. He even wrote that in his will, and yet basically, even though they don't call it a house museum, they sell tickets and people are walking through it every day. So I got involved with them probably five or six years ago because they saw how practical I was at the National Trust trying to get stuff done, and they thought that I would be a good person to help balance them because, and I do, I respect everybody there very much, but because they work there, they think everything is super sacred, but they, it's not because of the whole nature of it. It was built cheaply. It was built by students. There's no drawings for a lot of it. Frank Lloyd Wright touched little portions, but you don't quite know what it is. It's a, it's like it UVA in reverse, like it's been used for all these years, but it doesn't have any of the. The same authenticity. So this is just a picture of, and I always laugh too'cause I'm like, I don't wanna work for a master architect. Like the whole, the everything about his personality is not where I'm going, but I find the place fascinating. And it's still used today'cause they do consortiums with other architecture schools. But this is what it looked like right before the school closed. And then they do give tours. And the tours are fun because you, they don't only talk about the CD stuff, but they let you sit. because it's always been used. Nothing's precious. So you can sit anywhere. You can go anywhere. So the tours are actually really fun. They're not like a house museum tour. There's a hundred things I could talk about that we've been working on with them.'cause I've been working with them through many things. But I thought I'd just do one small example to show you how. How they're an unusual client, which on the left is the historic way to get up to this is Allyson in Wisconsin, how you would enter and on the right is once you're inside the compound, you go up to, they call it the T Circle on top of the hill. And everybody wants to, right? You always wanna be at the top spot and look out. It is so dangerous. Like this picture, these pictures were taken 10, 15 years ago before the steps have pulled away from the building.'cause they said there nothing was built. here and people fall down these steps all the time. You can't see them, you can't see the change of plane. And I was like, of course you should put up a handrail. And I, it became like a big deal. Like the board is upset that I said that and I. I got myself in trouble, but because I'm a nice person and everybody doesn't like me anyway, I talked them into, let's just do, and we just did this last month. I'm like, let's do a workshop. Let's just get us all at the table together and we can talk about it. And I picked the person she's running their conservation master plan. I picked some group preservation architects and then them, like the people who are giving the tours recognize how dangerous it is. And then you have all the architects who are engaged that don't want any changes. And it's, it will be a long process. Like we evaluate the tour route. We figured out, like basically right now it's like they can't take the steps. Like we basically, we cannot let the tourist on the steps. And I think look back in five or six years, we might get a handrail done, but they're not ready for handrails yet. And so we've made some other changes to accommodate tours until that happens. So this is just like the diagram I showed that, at our. Little accessibility workshop, which is you are not a public. you are not a private house anymore. And so you do have to take these considerations. And that's the thing like the national trust, because we were the owners. Like I really understand the backside of owning these places because we have our own insurance. And I had to deal with all of the slip and falls. And then finally, this was the example I showed them.'cause they're like, it's organic architecture and organic architecture is no good if it has a handrail on it. And I was like, national parks have handrails on them.'cause sometimes it's safer. But I just actually heard last week, Monticello is putting handrails up on this front portico and they have resisted handrails for over two, over a hundred years, since it's been in the public realm. So I'm hoping that as other people fold down this, slippery slope, we'll get a handrail up. So my second case study, this is Decatur Hall. It's at, Lafayette Square in dc. So it's the front of the White House or the public square, and it's a Benjamin Latrobe building. And if it was in Charleston, you'd call an urban plantation because it's one of the only buildings that ster will have the enslaved quarters behind it. And so you have this courtyard behind it, and it's the only public building like this is the Blair House, basically is the rest of this square. And so everything is private and you're not allowed in it, but this is the one public building you can get to anywhere near the White House. And the National Trust's got a weird history, which is, it was private home for a long time. And then actually. The A I A was in it, so it was their first headquarters and then the National Trust had it as one of their first headquarters. So this building has been, because the National Trust was there, it was Overstudied, they've spent a lot of, all those plans were getting done here, and yet the rooms basically looked like a funeral parlor, right? Like the last place in the world you wanted to visit. It has the fake fruit on the table and like the bad lighting, but Bench and Latrobe built 70. Residences in this country, there's maybe six left and there's maybe, I don't know, two or three that are actually in the public realm. So it's a really important building to me as an architect that should be interpreted. So they went, this is actually before I got there. You can see on the dust on the floor that there used to be like a parquet floor above it. So they actually started to go back and they're like, okay, we're gonna interpret Benjamin la trope. So they went back, they did their like axminster carpet and they started making it look like a house museum. And then the person who was using it, the it was a house museum in dc but the person who was using it switched. It became the White House Historical Association. And the White House Historical Association decided that they didn't want to use as a house museum anymore. They wanted to use it to raise money and to entertain their sort of. They're guests. So they went through this period, the part on the left where they did like funky installations that were like a little more accessible. And then they started doing a lot of weddings and finally they ended up like just interpreting it, a really lovely home would be interpreted. And it was an interesting process for me mentally to go through because they wanted, they did wanna change a lot of the Latrobe details and I have final say of things that are done on this building. So I was like, you can do whatever you want. You can put, you can see they took the Parquet floor and they brought it back'cause they thought it was prettier. We keep everything in storage at the National Trust. All of this furnishing is from like the second or third generation. it's lovely. It's a much more beautiful space, but the little fine line we had to It's like you can't, one of the things actually I should, one in DC cornices aren't expressed like it's a very stodgy federal city and we tend to, you can't tell in this picture, but we tend to have walls with just little bed molds before the ceiling. And the architect who is doing this, who I'm sure is a friend of all of yours, they wanted to put in a nice, beautiful cornice. And I had to say no, only because it's Benjamin true, like we're gonna keep the architecture as it was otherwise have at it. So this is just an example that shows you, depending on the audience, it can be lots of things. And these houses have the flexibility to change and change again. So this one is another where preservationists go down the rabbit hole a little bit, but this is Streton Hall in South Carolina as like the best palladium building in the country, I would like to say. and I've been on, I've been involved with them now for 20 years, both through being on the student now I'm still on the board. it came to the National Trust in the seventies. And it seems so simple now, but remarkably, it was the first building ever to be preserved as is, which is we're not gonna take it back to a period of time. We're not gonna change anything, we're just gonna take it as it is. No furnishings, which seems so okay now. But that was like a really unusual thing that they did. And so it basically, because it's, it does have a huge endowment, so it's been well funded. And with that endowment, they've done a ton and ton of studies on it because it's this great building study. So this is preservation in its sort of top form. So I show you, this is the habs drawing. So what I'm gonna talk about is the above The Great Hall, which is the center room is the Great Hall ceiling. And that's what I'm gonna talk about. So that W roof shape leaked always, and at one point it probably collapsed those two. Floors down, and it's been rebuilt. So the ceiling that we have now is second. It could be third generation, yet it's still a hundred years old. When it collapsed, they decided to take the summer beams out and not put them back in. So you have a 30 by 27 foot room with 11 inch interstitial. So 11 inches of structure. Incredible deflection, right? and a lot of tourists, 30,000 people walking through this. So this has been studied, I would say, by every preservations in the country since the 1980s, seventies, 1970s, of what do we do with this deflection and how do we make it better? And if you visited Drayton Hall during this time, there has been crazy, like bridges over, tourists have to stand only against the wall. They can't stand in the middle of the room. And the conversation that I've been involved in lately. Is the plaster gonna fall? Because plaster basically had especially plaster on a ceiling where it's keyed in over time, it's not screwed, it's gonna collapse. And we know it's at least a hundred years old. So it was like, is the plaster gonna fall? What do we do about it? And nobody wants to take it down. Meanwhile, they've done all these campaigns. So Frank Matero in the, I guess nineties, the first thing he did is he picked up the floorboards and he poured in a plaster, consolidate on top. So that's step one. Then they do bridging underneath everything, in between all of the joists. So they add bridging, they add in that plaster, and then on the third campaign, it's still deflecting and it's still too heavy. Came in from the other side, the underside, because you still have three layers of plaster, right? So only the top one was adhered. So the second and the third layer of plaster, they came in and did the drywall wash or the plaster washers and then plastered over it again 25 years later, they basically just added 500 pounds of weight. And so the problem hasn't gone away. And so when I was, this is back when I was still teaching, I made the comment of you just have to take it down, right? Like you, at a certain point, you, but they're still studying it. And I'm sure there's this everywhere, but I, they're not quite there yet. But I think where we're going now is there's an agreement that we do need to take it down. You can take all the decorative molding off exactly how it is and then redo it, put in some summer beams, and it's still, it's, the span is too long and too thin. It will always have deflection, but at least it will be safe. So this is if you, a PT is Association of Preservation Technology. I think there is a report on Drayton Hall at every a PT conference for the last 30 years, is the most studied, most precious building. So then I thought I'd swing around and talk about some other things I am working on, which is I sit on the old Georgetown board and the old Georgetown board is in DC and it is. So we have in DC if a new building is being built, if it's a monument, if it's on the National Mall, if it touches federal land, any other, any of the parkways, then it's reviewed by the Commission of Fine Arts and it's really an incredible public process. It's been around since 1910 and because everything in DC TE is federal land, it became too burdensome for the. Commission of fine arts to do the old Georgetown board because the old, because Georgetown is really dense. And so it got sub delegated basically to a review board. And it is really one of the more interesting review boards in the country. Like when you think about review boards that are famous, there's a Charleston BAR, and it has I think seven members and they come from different parts of the community. That's how they do it. And I think there has to be two architects. The New York Land Conservancy, I think they have 11. And it's people interested. It's architects, planners, historians. It's people interested in the urban fabric. The old Georgetown board is three architects. That's it. Which is really great. And so it, it's actually not a preservation board, it's a design review board. So just to show you, so Georgetown is probably the only historic district in DC that you actually know you're there when you're there. Like you cross over a park, you've got the water on one side, you have another park on the other side, and it is the microcosm of a city. It has every type of building. It's got the hospital, it's got Georgetown University, it has a lot of K twelves, it has world class museums, it has big buildings, small buildings, residential. It's all there. And it's really fun. Like it's because it's so close to the district, it's always it hasn't really risen and fallen. It's always just been loved. So that's from their Instagram page. And it also has the problem of having a lot of famous people who move into it. And you can even tell from this photograph, like things don't change that much in Georgetown, but the legal sort of underside of the old Georgetown board is, this is a public commodity beauty. Architecture around you is for all of us. And so that's why it's reviewed, because it's not fair if your neighbor changes things and it changes the neighborhood and it can make your property values go down. It's an interesting legal construct. And then this picture on the left is just showing the major streets. So I'm gonna just run through the different issues that we deal with. Oh, and before I get to that, so when I joined it, and I don't like controversy, everyone's like, why are you doing this? Because you cannot sit on the public board and not get a lot of criticism. we're written up in the paper all the time. There's always quotes. she said this and he said that. I think it's the nature of public review. But I felt like I was ready. I started this after I left the trust and I felt like I was at the right age to do it. And I also felt like it was a good experience.'cause I really do believe in the public process. I think most preservationists are much more rigid than I am. And so I thought that I would be a good spokesperson for the community because I'm gonna be nice, I'm gonna listen to everybody and we're always gonna suggest, because it's design review, you can suggest the direction you think it's gonna go. so what do you guys have bids out here that are in the communities? So bids are business improvement districts and they tend to pop up in cities that aren't doing well. And so DC because they can't afford to do anything, has basically neighborhood bids and they do the things that the city should do but is not doing, dump the trash, figure out festivals. And Georgetown has a really, it's like staff of 10. They have a big bid and the bid is who presents to us a lot of the big public works going into Georgetown. And so of course during. Georgetown where everything is micromanaged. this happened and the neighbors were furious in one sense because it looks so bad, thrilled in another, which is there had never been sidewalk seating before and all of a sudden it's here and it does make it better. And so the bids sort of job is to un unify this and make it look as it should look in Georgetown. And so this probably gets the most public comments of everything we do, which is, how do you do it? How do you make it, how do you make it, how do you take care of it? But this is the bids sort of problem and mean thing that they do. So they always just want to extend things like, we'd like to keep the, we call them streeties. We'd like to keep the streeties up for five more years. And what we've done is we basically say, you have to come back to us every quarter or every six months. And show us like if the restaurant's outta the business that you removed it, how the buses work. So we just make them publicly accountable and it also gives the public an opportunity to actually weigh in. And I think that's the most important part of this sort of community process because everybody writes in letters and we read them and everybody hears both sides. I think eventually those major streets I showed you before are gonna end up with this sidewalk. The sidewalk, right? From building front to building front, because there's so many things going on underneath them. It's just gonna take them a long time to get there because there's so many different entities that coordinate. They also propose like wackadoodle stuff to us. And so our job, this didn't come in front of us, it went to the Washington Post. So our job is basically to decide like what's appropriate for Georgetown that would not be. I feel like there's this monoculture placemaking going on where they go to Europe and they see something cool. They're all, I'm not bashing planters, but they're all planters and then they wanna do it in Georgetown. So there's always these proposals of like plastic benches that looked really good somewhere else. And like tcs like 3000 degrees in the summer. You do not want a plastic bench that you're sitting on. And so we're known to be the strictest regulatory agency. But I think our bias is a good one, which is these buildings speak from themselves and we don't need to decorate them like everybody else is decorating their buildings. we get all sorts of development on all sides of the scale. more trans, transitional, modern styles, probably more traditional and classical work in Georgetown'cause that's what the clientele wants. But we get everything. This is a Robert Stern building at Georgetown University that was just approved maybe five minutes ago. And then of course you've got like these weird dumpy holes, right? So this was a building clearly no one loved. So a developer got it in 2012 and tore down as fast as he could. And then he left the site abandoned for, I don't know, almost a decade, right? So this is right on M Street, like the most important sort of entrance into the community. And in that time, developer, after, developers all go bankrupt right? During this, and we're having a pandemic. So I think we had six or seven different proposals come to us. and you can only do what you can do The complaint about us is that we take, we make everyone take too long, but none of these schemes, like they need six months of review. They all need, like you can only push a developer that doesn't have that much talent so far, but you can make it a lot better. And so that's what we keep doing is we just, of course they complain, but we make them come back until we feel like we're getting something acceptable. And these are things we don't like these, like our job is scale mass architectural character and this is outside of Georgetown. This is not in Georgetown, but this is what's happening elsewhere in dc. So that's an example of what you won't ever see in Georgetown. But also things like the plastic flower phase that you see everywhere. It's like you can have flowers but they have to be real, like trying to stay off trend. And then these are a couple things that sort of were new to me coming onto the board that I was surprised by. But'cause Georgetown has a ton of these gas lanterns. Because of the energy codes in DC they're all phased out now, so everything has to be electric. the building on the bottom No more uplighting in DC'cause we have a Dark Skies initiative. And then the other thing that we do for any building south of M we can, you can have rooftop, but anything in the residential, no rooftop, because most of these buildings weren't designed to have rooftop. And especially because it's a university town, we feel like it's a rude encroachment on your neighbor to be able to occupy your roof. And so we're, that's one thing that every developer that comes wants a rooftop space and we don't allow that. Unfortunately. This is what we get all the time, is people buy these beautiful historic buildings and they just make them boxes inside and there's nothing left. And we don't have purview over the interior of a building because it's the public view that we have purview over. We keep our mouths yapping about why are you taking out the fireplace? Where are the stairs? We need pictures. At least document everything before you do it. And you know who's gonna do it.'cause you know by which architect is coming in front of you. Oh, and the picture on the left is, I won't even go into windows, but we make you keep your windows, which I think were the only ones left in the country that are making you keep your windows. But one of the problems is all the replacement windows are green because of the low E glazing, which it looks bad. So this is just an example of sort of the Georgetown Board's perfect additions. And none of these are new, but we like to see the different layers of time. So on the one image, like it was, it used to be a one story building, then it became a two story building, and then it had an addition. And so what we're always trying to do is make sure the additions are subservient to the main building and that you can change, you can see the pattern of change. One place that. I don't know if my other board members agree with me, but I feel like there's a lot of creative licenses in the alleyways'cause they're, Georgetown is full of them and a lot of them have no character at all. So I feel like these are the places that architects can come in and do whatever they want and as long as the scale is somewhat in tune with the neighborhood, I think there's a lot of movement here. But I probably get, there's three of us, I think one of the other architects agrees with me, and this is just showing, an alley that has been made into much more than there was before on the right. And then the one on the left is actually an example of one in the opposite, which is Blues Alley is this jazz club that's a hole in the wall. It's been there forever. And they tried to come in with a new commercial building and we wouldn't let them do it because we're like, you're missing the point. this is why you're so cool. So we had them stayed the way they were. All right. So I'm just gonna conclude with like this. Fly through of the things that, like we're looking at in the preservation community that I'm sure you were discussing in your classes, you can't have a preservation talk and not talk about the Secretary of Interior standards. Yeah. I'm glad you came back, Steve. So this is, brown Morton over Covid. He's an author of the Secretary Interior Standards over Covid. The A I A asked me, he lives in Leesburg, which is near where I live. They asked me if I'd go out and interview him so I could get on tape in the archives of the a i a, what he was thinking when he wrote them, because it's been so confused since he wrote them. And then the backstory, which I'm surprised not more people know, but the Secretary of Interior standards came with a preservation tax credit. So when you had the tax credit was passed by Congress, it referenced. The building has to be on the National Register or eligible, and it has to follow the Secretary of Interior standards, but there were no standards written. And so Brown Morton and Gary Hume were tasked with writing them. And he says in this interview, like we knew it's every building in the country left to up and down. It's a hundred different thousands of different building types. There's no way to be specific. And so they wrote them very loose with the point being, we're just trying to get people to the table to talk. That's all we're trying to do is get people to hash it out. but they've been misinterpreted so much that the Advisory Council on historic preservation last year did the call for people to write in which ones to change. I stand on the side of they need to, they're so loosely written and anybody could it, it's. The people who are interpreting them that need the lesson, not the standards. And so if they could just retrain all the, shippo offices and all the people interpreting them, I think they actually are pretty great document. this is a big thing on the National Trust agenda, which is all these old buildings of the perfect place to do affordable housing is cheaper, it's easier. The new, international existing building code is a lot more lenient than the new codes. And so I think it's actually a great time. Like preservation can be like a weird wonky field sometimes depressing. But knowing that this is coming down the pipe makes me a lot more excited about it, which is just building reuse and having people build buildings that last more than 15 or 20 or 30 years and just constantly reusing them. of course you cannot do anything without thinking about this. These are like Charleston, Venice, right? it's looking at not just the city, but like how do you change the lagoon around it, right? There's all sorts of studies, I'm sure you are very familiar with, but when it comes to the buildings, there's something buzzing right now that I think is gonna be a little bit problematic, which is, it sounds great, but the advisory council for stroke preservation is wanting to streamline annual review in this climate area, but I think it, it imposes on the good laws that are already there, which is section 1 0 6, review and stakeholder engagement. And that's something we're gonna see play out in the next year. So keep your eye on that one. I didn't talk about solar when I was in Georgetown, every other house wants to put solar on them. And our rules are that you can't be in the primary facade and you can't see it from the public way. So they have usually this little image shows like solar panels on the flounder. That's the perfect way to do it. But we get, I think this was in New York Times, like the historic preservations are ruining our climate friendly direction. But Georgetown, I think the city understands actually that the individual solar is not the solution that they're gonna do collections and they're gonna do them in public sites and then parks, and then the whole system is gonna be redone to power. The house is, and solar really is, it's I don't know whether those discs that went up like it, it's so ephemeral that the technology is changing so fast. The homeowners don't recognize that they need to inspect their roof before they put it on because if the roof leaks, they have. No way to take the solar off, like it's so problematic in so many ways. So we're just seeing a lot of this sort of talk. And then the example on the bottom is, this is up at Theand at Kiki, which is in Botanica, New York. But this is one approach that preservation projects take is they just put the field behind them rather than on the building. and in the rural world, the data centers are a big problem. Like you're getting these huge data centers that have these huge power lines. So I think you're gonna see a lot of legal fights on these. I, I dunno if you guys have studied this, but this is like one of the big case studies going on, which is Marson SP Spencer in London. When they wanna demolish the building and they tried to pass a law that you cannot demolish a building until you prove that the embodied carbon is accounted for. And that, because everyone else is just operational carbon. What's it take to build it and what's it take to run it? But they're the first ones who tried to pass a law that says, no, you have to prove what are you losing? So I think actually this is the whole direction the field's gonna go. I don't think it passed. I have to look up on that. But I think it's something that we're gonna see as people are forced to reuse their buildings. I saw, I went into the library and saw all your 3D laser printers, so I thought I'd bring this up'cause it's really cool. So Mount Vernon right now is redoing the entire like subbasement and they laser scanned in between two of the fireplaces. It was a big firebox that became Mumford eyes. So there's a little interstitial space in between and you have 3D printing the ducks to go in it and they're like double layered, insulated ducks. It probably is not gonna work, but it's exciting to me that preservations are embracing more technology to get the solutions they need. And then I put these in'cause they're just the things I love. And I wanted to end on a positive note, which is, this is in Charleston, it's many people's favorite bars, but in Charleston, in the sixties and the seventies, the gas stations were like the bane of the preservation existence. They were, were tearing down really good buildings and putting them up. And here we are 30 and 40, 50 years later and they really are part of the fabric of the city once they get fide. So all of these like good restaurants are there. And I think it helps explain why Charleston is like I, I am so much happier that they're using this than having another developed building. And so this is another, this is in St. Michael's, Maryland. So you've got this beautiful historic district, but they kept all the warehouses, same block. This is all the same block. And the really fun place to be is in the warehouse. if you don't have the old and the old new, you don't have enough variation to make a place. Interesting. And so I've always, with the don't go back in time, just keep these layers of the city that help you understand how that city worked. This is one of my favorite, I have nothing to do with this, but I think it's so cool, is all the alms houses that are being reused. I just think it's such a great way to deal with assisted living and retirement, which in the alms houses, they were connected with the church. They became the predecessor to the hospitals, and now many of them are being converted into, over 50. Over 60 homes. And then these are my last two slides, but I wanted to end with the historic American building survey because. It's where I started. So many preservation architects spend the summer at Habs, and I think the Habs collection is incredible because it's the whole American songbook and they just look at what makes this country unique and they document it. And it's actually, it's the oldest preservation program in the country, 1930s, WPA before any other preservation laws are passed. And it's got this really unusual public private partnership where it is the Library of Congress, the American Institute of Architects in the National Park Service. So anything in the Habs collection is in the public realm of the Library of Congress is searchable, the most search thing they have at the Library of Congress. And it not only helps preservation architects as we're restoring and working on buildings, but it helps all of you all as you're looking for precedents in how things were built. And so I have some images. One good one bad. The good one. CJ Howard, he was an undergrad when I was here, and he did this one on the left, and it's the Athena, which is in, and I don't think he did that long ago. Maybe like just something to do as a professional when you're bored at work. And so he did, they have these one page, exercises, which are perfect for Notre Dame students. You guys are so good at doing these that I feel like you should do more of them. And the image on the right I put here of why you need to do more of them is the students who are engaged in this. They go out in their communities and they document what's important to them. And so the image on the right of the tree, this is the Auburn gates. And before those two trees are no longer extant because before an Auburn, Alabama game, an Alabama fan came. Poison them. And so they're not there anymore. And the students were like smart. And the architecture students who don't do preservation were smart enough to come out here and document it because there is such an important moment in history for them. And so that's why I always encourage students to do as much habs work as possible because it really does, like what you think is important, is what's important to this country. And that's what sort of needs to be in this public record. And once it's in the public record, then everybody else is starting to look at it more. So I think that's it. That's my last slide.

1 51:02

Thank you, Ashley. that was very, that was great. I really enjoyed it. And now I would like to turn it over to questions for,

4 51:11

What a great presentation. The last bit there was historic American Buildings survey. oh. About 12 years ago I was taking a studio down to, to, Alabama. I didn't know anything about Alabama architecture except for the main, the big things. And so I spent, three months just going through heads looking. And at that time it was very slow. Yeah. But, I have, hundreds if not thousands of images, and I've used these in all my classes in one way or another. And I also urge every student to, when they're doing a precedent study to go to Habs because there's so many, there's so many wonderful drawings there and so many interesting projects. I learned a new appreciation for Alabama architecture. I learned how to teach my classes better and I. I agree with you, but there's a lot of other things I could talk about too. But I'll let someone else.

3 52:00

thank you for supporting it. I know Paul is a habs guy when he teaches, and so I'm hoping to see some good,'cause Notre Dame doesn't submit often. I typically, I'm on the historic American Building Survey advisory team, so I know who, which schools submit. And it's really interesting which schools do, because it's random schools pop up all over, but you guys don't have a big enough presence given It's right in, like it's what you do, you'll win everything. Oh, and you know what the prize is for the best drawing$10,000. You don't share that with your professor. That's you walking away with$10,000.

2 52:36

And CJ got the Holland Prize for that drawing. Did he? Yeah.

3 52:40

That was before they moved it up to$10,000. I think so. So he probably walked away with 2000. Yeah.

2 52:45

CJ's drawing that was on the left. Yeah, Howard, yeah, he got the Holland Prize for that. Yeah, there it is. That one on the left. Yeah. Ashley. Fantastic. presentation. My, I have a sort of personal history related question. That is, is that interview with Brown Morton available?

3 53:01

Yeah, I'll send it to you. Oh, we transfer it to you. I would

2 53:03

really love to, to do that. And I think it'll be interesting for a lot of us to hear. I did hear him, give a talk, oh, I don't know, maybe 15 years ago, Uhhuh, where he revealed that, the way that the use of the standards had evolved was something that gave him great pain.

5 53:21

Yes. That

2 53:22

he was not happy with the way people have, turned the standards into a kind of a national policy on historic preservation, which they were never intended to be.

3 53:30

No. that, that was one of the best lessons I got out of that office I worked for in DC

2 53:36

cause can you tell us the name of the office?

3 53:37

it was Mary Airlines. So airline associates, architects. Yeah. She actually shut down the office and became the architect of the capitol and then retired. Oh. So now she's retired. Okay. But, she was the one who was like, this I found was really insightful, but asking her like,'cause we did a lot of additions and we did a lot of new buildings. And I was like, how about the differentiation? if it's different.'cause sometimes you don't want it to be different. Sometimes you want it to be exactly the same. And she's everyone can tell because there's drawings, there's a record of it. Yeah. You don't need to do any more than that. And so she opened my eyes to oh, this preservation stuff is bs.

5 54:11

Thank you.

6 54:12

Thank you Ashley. it was fantastic to, understand all the process of, preservation, all that stuff. So based on your experience, what would be like the most important skills, a preservationist should have to be successful out there in the market?

3 54:29

I think these are the skills you will all get naturally, which is to be convincing speakers, right? Because basically when you get outta school, you guys are gonna be spending the next 10 or 15 years like really learning the craft. Like you're learning how buildings fail, you're learning how to fix them. You're but then as you move up in your career, you're convincing people to do what you think is the right thing. And the worst audience is a group of preservationists because everybody has their own opinion. And so it's really whoever can speak the most, impactfully and I think practically'cause money does have a lot to do with what's preserved. so I think it's your public speaking and your writing skills.

5 55:07

This may be building off the, previous two questions, but I was wondering, particularly with the Secretary of Interior standards, have you had any particular avenues of success, crafting arguments that you've been able to win?

3 55:22

I have lost quite a few. Yeah. but what, you can lose the argument and win the game because, and maybe this was the luck, but you guys, as architects represent the owner is just, don't necessarily do the things that they're saying you have to do. you just they come and they tell you what to do and they walk away. It's different when you're getting your tax credits, but a lot of times you're not, you're just getting approval and so you keep something or you don't do it and you just wait it out. Preservation's a waiting game. Yeah. Or you try to prove that like the community cares about this, that you don't want anymore, whatever it is.