Reciprocal Relationship Between Preservation and Material Reuse
•
1 like•142 views
I. This document discusses the tensions between historic preservation and material reuse, but also notes areas of resonance between the two fields. II. It provides encouraging policy examples from New York City, New Jersey, Vancouver, Portland, and Milwaukee that have promoted deconstruction and salvaging of materials from demolished buildings. III. The document argues that preservationists and those in material reuse could collaborate more by assessing significance together, sharing findings and documentation, and crafting supportive policies jointly.
Recommended
More Related Content
Similar to Reciprocal Relationship Between Preservation and Material Reuse
Similar to Reciprocal Relationship Between Preservation and Material Reuse (20)
More from Build Reuse formerly Building Material Reuse Association
More from Build Reuse formerly Building Material Reuse Association (20)
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
Reciprocal Relationship Between Preservation and Material Reuse
- 1. Locating Heritage Value in the Reciprocal Relationship Between Preservation and Material Reuse Allison Arlotta BMRA Decon & Reuse Expo 9/20/18
- 3. I. Tensions II. Resonance III.Encouraging policy examples IV.Potential for collaboration
- 8. Deconstruction of row houses at E. 40th St. and Madison Ave to make way for an office building - 1924
- 10. National Academy of Design - 23rd St. & Madison Ave Our Lady of Lourdes Roman Catholic Church - W. 135th St.
- 11. NYC LPC Salvage Warehouse (& the Baltimore Salvage Depot) “We intend to create a recycling program which is efficient, effective and economical.” - Edwin Friedman, LPC Director of Planning and Field Services
- 13. Borough of Mountain Lakes, NJ Preservation Shed
- 15. Vancouver Green Demolition By-law - 2014 “Encouraging preservation and renewal of character homes in Vancouver” Portland Deconstruction Ordinance - 2016 “Preserve Milwaukee’s historic architectural features and building materials” Milwaukee Deconstruction Ordinance - 2017 “Our existing older houses are assets: They preserve our built history and contribute to neighborhood character. If they must come down, materials from these houses can live on in new buildings.” - Mayor Charlie Hales
- 16. Why? - Dealing with the same stock - Passion How? - Talking to each other - Assessing significance/researching histories - Sharing findings and documentation - Crafting policy together Collaboration
- 17. Association for Preservation Technology, Buffalo, NY - Sept. 23-26 Heritage in Reverse Symposium, Ottawa, ON - Oct. 26-27 Susan Ross & Alison Creba - Carleton University allisonarlotta@gmail.com
Editor's Notes
- Hello, thank you all for being here. I’m Allison, I just finished up a Master’s degree in Historic Preservation at Columbia in the spring and I’m going to tell you a little bit about some of the research I did for my thesis. I came to preservation because I was interested in reuse from a sustainability perspective. As we are all aware, some of the greatest challenges we currently face are environmental – like climate change, environmental degradation and over-extraction of limited resources. Heritage has been recognized as having a crucial role to play in both mitigation of these threats and adaptation to the immense social changes they bring, but the convergence between the heritage field and environmental sustainability is yet to be fully realized. I felt like one of the common denominators between sustainability and preservation was this desire to avoid waste, you know why let something valuable, usable go to waste. So material reuse seemed like a really interesting way to look into this idea, and something that wasn’t getting a lot of thoughtful attention from the preservation field.
- So this story began last fall, when on a whim I decided to come to the Decon & Reuse Expo in Portland and I was surprised and excited to find three other preservation graduate students who were also thinking about preservation in the same way I was. Alison Creba on the right, was a student at Carleton University, and she gave an excellent presentation on the ways that preservation activity can actually produce a lot of waste, and how deconstruction of buildings might be one way for the heritage field to start dealing with loss. I hope you’ve all met Tina McCarthy on the left, she is presenting this afternoon at 3:30 time on aligning preservation and deconstruction, and Scott Crotzer who isn’t pictured here but was also there, and is presenting tomorrow morning on demolition in historic districts. So speaking with them, being with all the wonderful reuse folks in Portland, was an amazing introduction to my thesis research.
- So here’s what I’d like to share with you today. First, I think it’s important to establish some of the tensions between the preservation field, and material reuse/deconstruction work, because I definitely encountered some resistance from preservationists as I wrote this thesis. Then I’d like shift over to a more positive perspective and share some of the areas of real resonance and common cause, and move into some of the encouraging examples from both preservation and waste management policy that point towards the potential for future collaboration.
- Because the modern American preservation movement was born out of the destruction of mid-twentieth century urban renewal, the field is really built around a fight against demolition. And it naturally follows that heritage work overwhelmingly focuses on “saving” buildings from “loss.” So when it comes to talking about deconstruction, there’s a resistance to engaging with something that involves loss. And something I learned is that this can be a very emotional topic for preservationists who have fought really hard battles to save buildings and had developers offer up salvage as a consolation prize. So it brings up these scars from past battles. And finally - there’s a control issue.In the US, the preservation movement was shaped by an art history perspective, and a curatorial approach. Preservation was sometimes called curatorial management of buildings. So I say this with a lot of love and respect for my preservation colleagues - but there’s a control element to all of this. A lot of preservationists have expertise in architectural history and feel really strongly about appropriateness.
- A lot of these philosophical underpinnings have been codified into preservation policy, and really it all comes down to one main policy tool, which is designation, designating properties as landmarks at the local level or on the national register of historic places. And material reuse isn’t threaded into this policy. For example, I’ve highlighted an excerpt from the Secretary of Interior’s Standards for rehabilitation of historic properties. The Standards were created as guidelines for projects that are making use of federal historic tax credits, but they are widely used in preservation practice generally. The Standards is a really long, and detailed document, and at best it offers sort of vague or unclear opinions on making use of salvaged material in preservation projects, and at worst, it repeatedly discourages it as “presenting a false sense of history.” And that phrase “false sense of history” is really hitting on the idea of “authenticity’ which has been built into preservation, even though it’s hard to define and can be impractical.
- But with all that said there is a lot common cause between the two fields. Encouraging the reuse of salvaged building materials really resonates with a lot of people who are trying to use preservation as a tool for meeting larger social aims. For example, last year in Portland, the keynote speaker Jim Lindberg, the head of research at the National Trust for Historic Preservation, presented on their work, what they call re-urbanism, basically trying to understand how older buildings contribute to cities. And a lot of heritage scholars are trying to push the field to engage more with loss, change, fluidity, especially as climate change compels us to change the way we make decisions about the built environment. And really, preservation is about heritage, and heritage isn’t a thing, it’s a process that all people engage in. Historic fabric isn’t inherently valuable, it’s valuable for the associations we attach to it and the re-use of building materials are a great example of this. These objects have their own meanings and they gain more layers of association as they circulate through space and time – people recount stories as they sell things, which they then remember and value, and build onto with their own experiences and stories. So heritage value can be located not just in a building or even a building fragment, but in the dynamic process of reuse and reconfiguration, and although our policy framework may not be set up to understand heritage in that way, a lot of preservationists do see this.
- And really, preservation is about heritage, and heritage isn’t a thing, it’s a process that all people engage in. Historic fabric isn’t inherently valuable, it’s valuable for the associations we attach to it and the re-use of building materials are a great example of this. These objects have their own meanings and they gain more layers of association as they circulate through space and time – people recount stories as they sell things, which they then remember and value, and build onto with their own experiences and stories. So heritage value can be located not just in a building or even a building fragment, but in the dynamic process of reuse and reconfiguration, and although our policy framework may not be set up to understand heritage in that way, a lot of preservationists do see this. What’s pictured here is the Ningbo History Museum in Ningbo China, designed by Wang Shu in 2008. Ningbo is a coastal city in china that is thousands of years old and has historically been home to stone masons and craftsmen. Wang got this commission to design a history museum in this new central business district that the national government is creating,, and they presented him with a site that was basically the rubble of the small fishing village that had been demolished to make way for the museum. Left with only rubble on the site, Wang employed a traditional local construction method called wa pian qiang (clay-tile wall). This technique was historically used in this area of China to quickly rebuild after typhoons, and it involves salvaging bricks, tiles, and stone –in this case from the demolished village structures – which masons then use to build walls. So he’s preserving this traditional construction method, and reusing the physical remnants of this town. It’s a really interesting example.
- So I mentioned that the preservation movement came out of the urban renewal era. Well, the demolition that was happening in the 1950s and 60s was so destructive not just because of its scale but because it was really different than what people were used to - this was mechanical demolition. Before World War II, building demolition generally meant deconstruction, meaning buildings were razed manually by “house wreckers.” When a building owner wanted to clear his site, house wrecking companies would bid to get the job. And the resale value of a building’s materials was so high that wrecking companies would pay owners for the opportunity. Wrecking would start on the roof, and then move down each floor, with material being sent down chutes to the street. You can see that in this photo from 1924.
- Because we have time i want to show you this short video of the demolition of the Star Theater in New York in 1902.
- Usually, wrecking companies maintained stock from various jobs in large stock yards on the outskirts of cities, but sometimes sales happened on-site, or even before wreckers began work. And there are some really cool old buildings where you can see the evidence of this. This is the National Academy of Design building in New York. In 1902, the rector of a small catholic church wanted to give his congregation a state of the art church on a budget, so he purchased much of the Academy’s distinctive “tiger-striped” white and gray marble façade, which was being demolished when the academy moved uptown. This church is a designated local landmark in New York today and in the designation report it praises the church for “providing the community with a lasting reminder of the city’s recent past.”
- Speaking of New York city landmarks, that takes us to my first policy example. In New York City, designated historic properties are regulated by the Landmarks Preservation Commission, or LPC, which is the largest and arguably the most powerful preservation commission in the country. And from 1980 to 2000 operated its own salvage warehouse. In the 1970s NYC suffered from a lot of disinvestment and decline in population, and this resulted in huge numbers of abandoned buildings in disrepair to the point where it was a public safety issue. In the 70s and 80 the city was trying to manage the crisis which ended up leading to a lot of demolition. At the same time, the the LPC was about 15 years old, it was an established agency, and was trying to expand its programming beyond just designating landmarks. So the salvage warehouse was conceived as a way to “help homeowners complete authentic restorations”. There’s that word “authentic” again. The LPC coordinated with the city and their demolition contractors to facilitate the removal of some salvageable items in the demolition of city-owned properties, and then also encouraged homeowners to donate material from their own renovations - this was mostly Interior fixtures - but sometimes exterior pieces like cornices and railings. The primary motivation of the operation was helping New Yorkers maintain their old homes and buildings - and this help was both financial - you know helping people get the material they needed at fair price, and curatorial - helping them put them use “appropriate” material. That said, they weren’t very strict - the only limit on sales was that you had to be NYC residents. And I should mention that the LPC warehouse was inspired by an earlier example in Baltimore, where the preservation commission there opened up its own salvage operation - that one did not last more than a few years, but did serve as an inspiration for New York.
- So I live in New York, and I deal a lot with the Landmarks Preservation Commission there, and even worked for them for a summer, and I was shocked to find out about the salvage warehouse. Like this operation has been all but forgotten, the LPC Warehouse got a lot of press in the 80s and 90s - there’s Martha Stewart doing a segment at the warehouse - and it was a beloved by those who knew about it. But New York changed a lot in the 1990s, the economic situation reversed, the demolition of city-owned properties which had been widespread, dramatically decreased. And whereas earlier the LPC had wanted to expand beyond designation, by the 90s they were regulating tens of thousands of properties in the city and needed to scale back. So the warehouse started limiting its collections, and its hours and eventually in 2000 it closed for good. The material remained in the possession of the LPC until 2011, when it was auctioned off and the warehouse was sold. And the warehouse itself was demolished last year to make way for an affordable housing project.
- An example of a much smaller, stricter salvage warehouse run by a local preservation commission comes from the Borough of Mountain Lakes, a small town in Northern New Jersey. This is a really interesting example, because Mountain Lakes originated as a planned residential development in the early 20th century. So all of their historic homes are from the same era using very similar materials, and with similar styles. The preservation commission there developed this very strict salvage program where the material can only come from these original homes and can only go to other Hapgood homes.Its a closed-loop system. The whole thing is entirely voluntary and volunteer-based, and was developed as an incentive for owners of these historic homes to keep them. Because these houses had interior finishes made with American chestnut, black walnut, and specific hardware that would be impossible or incredibly expensive to come by today, so the commission wanted to help people do this more feasibly. None of these examples expressed any ideological qualms about their salvage work, and all described this saving and reuse of material as a form of preservation, that helped make maintaining historic buildings easier - either by making hard-to-come-by material available and affordable.
- That said, outside of preservation commissions, you see a lot more engagement with salvage and material reuse. There are a few local preservation nonprofits that have their own salvage warehouses, like the historic Albany foundation in New York state, and Preservation Greensboro in North Carolina. So although I didn’t cover this work in my own research, I it’s important to acknowledge that nonprofits have a lot more flexibility to coordinate this work than government entities like preservation commissions.
- And then I also looked at waste ordinances to see how these policies were viewing their connection with preservation and heritage - the Green Demo By-law in Vancouver, the Portland deconstruction ordinance and the most recent milwaukee deconstruction ordinance. All three of these ordinances talked about the material reuse in terms of associative value - the historical or aesthetic association with certain material - and the functional value - how this material can be put used. The legislation suggests a desire to see reused material on both ends of the spectrum – something to be valued for its historic and architectural associations, but also instrumentalized – put to use and not “wasted.” The common theme between the three is that “historic,” “surviving,” material with “character” can be put to use in new ways to achieve a host of other goals – job creation, waste diversion, carbon footprint reduction.
- And speaking of talking to each other - this conversation is going to keep going - Tina and I are presenting next week at a preservation conference in Buffalo, and then in October Alison Creba and Susan Ross, who is a professor up at Carleton University in Ottawa, are hosting a symposium on heritage and deconstruction. Susan has really been spearheading discussions about deconstruction and material reuse in the preservation field, and if you’d like more information on that symposium let me know. And to finish off I would like to thank some of you in the room today who graciously helped me in my research - Joe Connell, Jordan Jordan, and Shawn Wood, you were incredibly helpful - thank you.