Modern Architecture

Preservation Round-Up: Contradict and Complement Edition

Posted on: June 13th, 2011 by David Garber 1 Comment

The Lumenhaus, now on display at the Farnsworth House outside Chicago. (Photo: Flickr user Bizjournal)

Sometimes it's important to step back, pause, and think about the reasons preservation matters. It's easy to get caught up in the movement, especially on a local level, without stopping to remember the purpose behind the passion.

This week's round-up begins with a story from the New York Times about the much-celebrated contemporary architect Rem Koolhaas' exhibition at the New Museum that calls into question the need for and importance of the preservation movement.

...Rem Koolhaas accused preservationists of aimlessly cherry-picking the past; of destroying people’s complex sense of urban evolution; and, most damningly, of bedding down with private developers to create gentrified urban theme parks.

Some of Mr. Koolhaas’s criticisms are on target — but his analysis is wildly off-base. It’s not preservation that’s at fault, but rather the weakness, and often absence, of other, complementary tools to manage urban development, like urban planning offices and professional, institutionalized design review boards, which advise planners on decisions about preservation and development.

What do you think? Should these other complementary tools be bolstered to help flesh out preservation policy and activism?

Down in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, the most important section of the Fredericksburg Battlefield is finally being reclaimed. The Free Lance Star reported on Saturday that the Civil War Trust is in the process of purchasing an old GM auto plant on the southern edge of the battlefield.

The trust would raze the defunct, 300,000-square-foot GM plant--a victim of the automaker's decline and subsequent Chapter 11 reorganization--and restore the property to its appearance on Dec. 13, 1862, when the battle took place. Some original contours of that landscape survive, along with a historic road trace, the trust said.

Purchase of the 77-acre parcel and creation of a new national-destination park would help visitors appreciate that the southern end of the battlefield was the pivotal one, not the far better-known Sunken Road area to the north, the trust said.

Outside Chicago, the Farnsworth House is host to the Lumenhaus, a solar-powered home that won the 2010 Solar Decathlon competition in Madrid, Spain. The Chicago Sun-Times wrote about how the house complements the historic mid-century modern home.

The Lumenhaus sits in a cornfield by the visitors center and does, indeed, look like the modern-day spawn of the Farnsworth House. And if you love the Farnsworth, you’ll want to live in the Lumenhaus.

Equipped with smart-grid technology, geothermal heat and materials chosen for sustainability and beauty, the Lumenhaus also is surrounded by water gardens that repurpose gray water and rain water. A zero-energy home, it is completely powered by the sun.

Kinda makes me wonder: which low-impact "green" houses will be considered historic in forty or fifty years?

David Garber is a member of the Digital and New Media team at the National Trust for Historic Preservation. He's kind of obsessed with the intersection of contemporary, green, and old/historic.

David Garber

David Garber is the Coordinator of Blog Content & Outreach at the National Trust for Historic Preservation. He is a native of Washington, DC, and loves the intersection of preservation, innovation, and sustainability.

Preservation Round-Up: View from the Street Edition

Posted on: May 19th, 2011 by David Garber

A block of Washington, DC's fast-changing H Street NE. (Photo: Flickr user tedeytan)

Another reason we love preservation? Because it helps deepen the context and expand the stories of the streets, neighborhoods, towns, and cities that our work is part of. The further we go in the past, the more important specific places were for where buildings were located. People relied on weather patterns, natural light, and horse-drawn carriage travel distances. This house was built on that hill because it needed a view of that field. This building was built on that axis because it needed sunlight in that room. This community was built on that land because of that soil. It’s easy to forget those contextual needs in an age when we can light any room at any time, buy any kind of fruit in any season, and travel great distances in a short amount of time. But there’s a richness to the historical context. Today’s round-up is the “View from the Street” edition because these stories are just as much about place and placement as they are about the structures themselves.

What got me thinking about this? Earlier this week, Knox Heritage released their “Fragile Fifteen” list of endangered historic places, and most of the buildings listed are treasured because of the way they add historical context to the changing areas around them. Interestingly, most of their sites are at or controlled by the University of Tennessee (alumni, raise your voices!), whose master plan eliminates many old and original structures. Another, the Martin-Russell House, in danger of being moved:

The Martin-Russell House has remained at its original location for 175 years, a rare feat in this part of the world. Its location was determined by the modes of transportation employed during the era it was built and it still stands at a heavily traveled crossroads.

But chin up, friends, there’s a lot of good news to be had. The High Line Park in New York City is a total triumph of contextual preservation and adaptation, and Phase 2 of the elevated railroad-turned-urban-oasis is opening in June. Enjoy this crazy awesome video that celebrates the new section of emerald goodness:

Across the country in Los Angeles, the Glendale City Council approved the design for the Museum of Neon Art. If we’re talking about views from the street, this museum is kind of the perfect fit. You’re going to want to click through to see the renderings of this building (and, if you’re anything like me, fall in love with the Virginia Court Motel Diver sign that will serve as the museum’s figurehead). Most of the signs were designed and built for very specific contexts that no longer exist, so it will be interesting to see how the museum celebrates and examines the signs’ original homes.

Here’s a fresh idea: new art designed for an old building context. In Ensched, Netherlands (but this would most definitely work in America, too), URBANSCREEN came up with the idea to project a video onto a building’s façade that examines the relationship between inside and outside, privacy and publicity.

It’s easy to think of built context apart from people and population context. For the neighborhoods surrounding Washington, DC’s fast-changing H Street NE, it’s impossible to separate the two. Sarah L. Courteau at The Wilson Quarterly wrote a piece called “New to the Neighborhood: How can you be called an urban pioneer when you move to an inner-city neighborhood where families have lived for generations?” In it, she talks about the people, relationships, and power struggles at play as her neighborhood transitions.

Walking down H Street, it’s hard not to feel a heady sense of inevitability. Change! Progress! And to hold the conviction that all the choices I make about how I live—the way I keep up my yard, the restaurants and shops I patronize, the kinds of foodstuffs I buy at the local grocery store—are contributions to a joint project of incremental improvement that’s spread among thousands of households.

The places we interact with and invest in are all part of larger contexts, and preservation and adaptation are important tools for giving those contexts character, new life, and an increased communal pride of place. What are the pieces of your community that need to be highlighted? In what small ways can you give depth to the story of your street, neighborhood, or city?

David Garber

A Modernist Masterpiece at Grave Risk in New Orleans

Posted on: May 10th, 2011 by National Trust for Historic Preservation

Written by Brad Vogel

Phillis Wheatley Elementary is emblematic of a regional modernism seen in New Orleans. The hyper-cantilevered, elevated structure served the functional purpose of providing shaded place space for school children. Despite outcry from supporters, the building is in imminent danger of demolition. (Photo: Brad Vogel)

Phillis Wheatley Elementary is no stranger to the improbable. Designed by New Orleans architect Charles Colbert and built in 1954, the elevated steel truss school building cantilevers crazily out from concrete piers, hovering in symmetrical balance like an angular modernist cloud. Its form seems untenable at first glance. And in a city renowned for its eighteenth and nineteenth century architecture, it’s a rather unlikely building amidst a thicket of shotgun houses and creole cottages.

Unfortunately, the building’s continued existence as a striking example of American mid-century modernism is looking increasingly improbable. The Recovery School District (RSD) set up by the State of Louisiana to operate many of New Orleans’ schools, has issued requests for demolition proposals for Phillis Wheatley. All this comes despite a Section 106 process and the involvement of various organizations, including the World Monuments Fund. While some racial and neighborhood issues have contributed in part to the current status quo, the RSD’s refusal to consider meaningful alternatives and the funding restrictions that accompany a $1.8 billion FEMA settlement are the real reasons that the iconic school is still headed toward demolition this summer.

Supporters of Phillis Wheatley Elementary join in a "Hands Around Wheatley" event on April 17, 2011 in a last ditch effort to save the 1954 modernist school building. Among those joining in the event were Phyllis Montana-LeBlanc, an actor in HBO's Treme. (Photo: John Stubbs / World Monuments Fund)

New Orleans has already lost several of its most high-profile modernist schools since 2005, and more, like Wheatley, remain in imminent risk of demolition.

But even after the functional death sentence, it’s clear that Wheatley, named for a colonial-era African American poet, is not dead yet. A group of fervent supporters, including former students, modernism enthusiasts, and local architects has refused to give up. On April 17, supporters held a “Hands Around Wheatley” event to raise awareness and stand up for the building. Leading the group were Wheatley alumna and community activist Phyllis Montana-LeBlanc (familiar to some as a character in HBO’s Treme) and Francine Stock, who blogs at REGIONAL MODERNISM :: THE NEW ORLEANS ARCHIVES. It was clear from the turnout and the words spoken at the event that Phillis Wheatley Elementary, as a place, matters.

Over 1,500 people have signed a petition to New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu since April calling on him to intervene to halt the unnecessary demolition of the school building located in the Treme neighborhood. You can sign here.

As Montana-LeBlanc noted, “This structure can be renovated, repaired and returned to a school facility to teach the children in the neighborhood.” And as John Stubbs with the World Monuments Fund made clear, “If the Wheatley school is lost through demolition, it will be the 1st site on our World Monuments Watch List that died in our hands.” Here in New Orleans, we’re hoping the improbable happens - that the wrecking ball can be avoided.

To continue to follow the story, follow @docomomo_nola on Twitter. The National’s Trust’s Christine Madrid-French also covers mid-century modern preservation issues @trustmodern.

Brad Vogel is the Ed Majrkzak Historic Preservation Fellow in the New Orleans Field Office of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

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The National Trust for Historic Preservation, a privately funded non-profit organization, works to save America's historic places.

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Preservation Round-Up: Cleaning Out My Inbox Edition

Posted on: April 28th, 2011 by Sarah Heffern 3 Comments

Doug StanWiens of the Boise Architecture Project.

One of the things that's cool about running the PreservationNation blog is that people send me interesting articles, announcements, and assorted links. I follow preservation pretty actively via RSS and Twitter, yet I invariably get new and different things via email. I had a particularly large collection waiting for me after a back-to-back stint of vacation and sick time - enough for a round-up post. And thus, you all get a peek inside my inbox.

Shelby Graham Larsson at Historic Boston Incorporated wins the prize for the most unusual note to accompany her story: "Just to pique your interest, this is the title of the post: Stuff-We-Find-in-Historic-Buildings #2: On Preservation and Pornography at the Hayden Building." Ahem. Well. Interest piqued. As it turns out, the cache of blue documents relates to a now-demolished theater near the Hayden that started as a vaudeville house and then, well... transitioned. Among the papers found is a hand written list of actions to take in the event of a police raid, most important of which was "Remain Calm." Mmm-hhmm...

There's no smooth transition from the history of adult theaters to the next item in the queue, so I'm just going to abruptly start talking about something else, specifically, our friends out in Boise who wrote last year's Teaching Preservation series. Teacher and preservation guru Doug StanWiens is the featured speaker at the Boise City Department of Arts and History's May "Fettuccine Forum." Doug's topic (“Boise 360: Preservation, New Media, and the Boise Architecture Project”) is near and dear to our hearts, so if you find yourself in Boise next week, stop by and say hello.

Another educational opportunity that found its way into my inbox sounds so totally cool I'm trying to find an excuse to head to Chicago in June: In Wright's Drafting Room: Architecture Fantasy Camp. Designed specifically for non-architects, "campers learn basic drafting techniques and execute frameable floor plans of their own dream creations" at the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio. I wonder if they need someone to blog about the camp experience?

Farnsworth House, a National Trust Historic Site.

Unfortunately, not all experiences at our sites are open to the public - like spending the night inside their historic walls. Recently, however, Wall Street Journal writer Marc Myers was given the chance to sleep in the Farnsworth House, our modernist icon in Plano, Illinois. In his article Transformational Transparency, Myers presents insights that few daytime visitors get to see:

As night falls, light from the floor lamps bounce off the wood core, bathing the neutral space in an orange glow. This is especially true of the living area—where three brown leather-and-chrome Knoll reproductions of Mies's day bed and two Tugendhat chairs pose dramatically on a plump rug the color of poured concrete.

Leaving the modern behind - sort of - two other links in my inbox focused on the 19th century. One, a story from the Albany Times-Union sent by my former roommate, was about grant funding having been secured to save a local Underground Railroad stop. I particularly enjoyed the message my friend included with the link: "I think you see too many sad stories about threatened historic sites...how about an almost happy ending?" The other was a very "now" angle on history: a review of the History Channel's Civil War iPad app.

The Civil War Today app is not an entirely tranquil experience. Its daily helping of manipulatable pixels, which promise to let users “live” the events of the Civil War, bring disturbing news from America’s bloody past. With its newspaper-like format, and new offerings each day of photos, features, games, maps, documents and videos, the app is designed to transform this day into one of the morally overcast days in the spring of 1861, when, as one diarist put it at the time, “a foreboding for the future” weighed on everyone.

Bonus points to the New York Times' copy editors for their pun-tastic headline - App-omattox: The Civil War Goes Virtual.

And last, but certainly not least, someone forwarded a very important press release to me - our friends over at the National Park Service have just released their new Sustainability And Historic Preservation Guidelines - something I'm sure I'll be hearing more about soon.

With an empty (or, at least emptier) inbox, I throw it open to you, readers. I can't be the only one who gets great info by email. Share what you've gotten lately in the comments!

Sarah Heffern is a member of the Digital and New Media team at the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Her inbox has only been really, truly empty a handful of times since she came to the Trust in 1999.

Sarah Heffern is the social media strategist for the National Trust’s Public Affairs team. While she embraces all things online and pixel-centric, she’s also a hard-core building hugger, having fallen for preservation in a fifth grade “Built Environment” class.

Saving the 20th Century at Modern Phoenix Week

Posted on: April 20th, 2011 by National Trust for Historic Preservation 1 Comment

Written by Chris Madrid French

Frank Lloyd Wright loved Arizona; he enjoyed it so much that he created a second homestead near Scottsdale, named after his beloved Wisconsin home. But Taliesen West was neither an addendum nor a copycat. Indeed, it embodied and built upon the dual opposing natures of the desert landscape—both infernally hot and teeth-chattering cold, macro big scenery and infinitely complicated micro environments, monotone at first glance, yet Technicolor brilliant on closer inspection. These sensory ironies and disparities in scale attracted not only Wright, but a legion of others who attempted the impossible: creating modern designs to comfort and protect humans in this volatile yet inspiring environment.

Last week, I made my second visit to the Phoenix area in Central Arizona (a metro area that includes Scottsdale, Mesa, Tempe, and Glendale). The first time, I have to admit that I wasn’t impressed by the architecture there. Ends up, I wasn’t really looking much past Wright’s legacy, because during this last trip I found a “secret” cache of incredibly diverse and interesting buildings, particularly from the 1950s, but certainly not limited to that time period.

My architectural epiphany came during Modern Phoenix Week. I was there to deliver the keynote on Saturday, after a slate of speakers addressed local preservation issues and a long list of remarkable modern buildings in the area. One message resounded through each of the presentations: mid century architecture is in danger. Yes, you’ve heard this before, and we who work in this field of preservation are familiar with the many threats to historic modernism, including a lack of contextual studies, absence of protection for buildings less than fifty years old, and fluctuating public tastes (love me, love me not, love me…).

Luckily, advocates have a new tool provided by the City of Phoenix Historic Preservation Office. Midcentury Marvels, is an insightful full-length book detailing the commercial architecture of Phoenix from 1945-1975. Completed by the HPO with Ryden Architects, Inc., the book is an illuminated offering from a civic organization. Part one is entirely dedicated to context—national, local, architects, and buildings. Context is to history as location is to real estate: priceless and critically important. Part two of the book takes readers on a tour of Phoenix, with pairs of buildings demonstrating the variety and scope and, ultimately, the impact that architects had on the landscape.

I learned that 1959 and 1972 brought the most growth to what was once an isolated western outpost. During that period, and in the intervening years, private investment and public contributions brought billions of dollars of growth to the state. Thousands of buildings were constructed and hundreds of miles of roads were built, to crisscross the desert and deliver people, jobs, and prosperity. In fact, most of the Phoenix area was developed after World War II and almost all of the built landscape we see today was constructed during the 20^th century.

The book was highlighted during Modern Phoenix Week, where a few hundred people gathered at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art under the guidance of long-time local preservationist Alison King. The strong numbers at this annual event are a strong indicator that the growing movement to appreciate, enjoy, and save modern buildings is being embraced by advocates nationwide. And thanks for the City of Phoenix there are new tools to help keep this regional heritage intact.

Chris Madrid French is the director of the Modernism + Recent Past Program (TrustModern) at the National Trust for Historic Preservation.