One way people understand preservation of historical buildings is by restoring the look – making the colors, hardware, window trim detail and other surface elements look the same as the original. Not being into surface things, my interest in historical preservation has always been active in another sense: making the building act like it did originally, exposing its original architectural concept, its integrity and flows as it was originally meant to be used.
Clouds of clues
In our second Albuquerque house, from 1940, it took years to figure out what happened and where it went awry. I saw a bunch of facts immediately and then gathered more facts as we took apart things and inspected behind the layers. This builds up a cloud of informational clues:
Image contains this text: rough cut wood here, square nails there, floor transition mid room, curved wear mark, 3 layered sill plates, old lintel 24″ higher, repaired hole in ceiling, gap behind furred-out panel, floorboards wider here than there, step down
Some of the clues point to specific places in the house:
Image of floor plan with clues: indoor window, block, frame, slab, glass block
Each data point is something that would not have been done had they built all at once, so each clue is about an addition, renovation, or other change. The problem is that we have a jumbled cloud of clues that ask why, and it is very hard to align them into a historical narrative with answers why things changed. The people who made the changes intentionally wanted to hide the past in most cases, since that was part of their motivation to make a change. Because I’m working against their intent, it can be easy for something I see plainly at first to discharge its explanatory power over years until I’m no longer conscious of it. I’m just so used to the door being in an odd place that I stop wondering why. Other clues are behind layers. I’ve had to come up with alternate theories and simply live with them (sometimes for years) without being able to convince myself of the narrative. I would tell my partner “I think they built this part first, so the bathroom must have been there, because where else could it have been?” She says OK, as we don’t really know. The verbalization of the theory helps it sit there to either get better with age or be thrown out. Finally some clue is a keystone that releases an avalanche of order, where all the cloud of clues fall into place. Then almost all doubt is resolved:
Image contains same floor plan with house areas labeled with a historical narrative:
(1) Tiny house with 2 rooms, kitchen alcove and bath, block walls, oak floor
(2) Extended to living room, new larger (but still small) kitchen, converted old kitchen to closets, now 3 bedroom
(3) Extended kitchen and added garage
(4) Added carport without floor, and converted old garage into a room with glass block wall
(5) Filled in carport walls to make work room
With each of these steps, the quality deteriorated, so within 60 years, the newer things had come to appear older than the original things. This age illusion is part of why it’s hard to see the narrative sequence up front. But we should not blame people for the ever-worsening quality, because those choices are a direct result of economic incentive. The most cost effective kind of maintenance has the same perceived lifetime as the thing being maintained. So we might take newish, damaged hiking boots in to get repaired at a cost of perhaps up to half their purchase price; later when they are old and we still need to get another hike out of them, we would wrap them in duct tape and call it good. With a house, once someone has made a DIY decision to modify something, the perceived lifetime has gone down, and each subsequent decision sensibly requires a lower investment. Then at some point, no investment is worth it, and it has to be restored or destroyed.
My first house, Truffula House from 1910, was easier to piece together:
Image contains same floor plan with house areas labeled with a historical narrative:
(1) Majestic tall house on a hill with door on south side
(2) DIY addition, and reconfigure bathroom, and move front door to west side
(3) Garage addition
(4) Garage converted to apartment.
When I’ve heard of “historic preservation” before, it has seemed as interesting as stamp collecting or civil war regalia, activities that seem to be arbitrary and only interesting to some people because they randomly chose those hobbies. But it does matter to me. Truffula house was ugly when we found it, not because of the paint or trim or any surface feature, but because the additions were a wound that could never heal. They ruined the original concept. One day, after living there a long time, we found a clue in a closet that there was a front stoop on the south side, and that triggered the avalanche of ordered clues. It suddenly made sense that you would get the winter sun, that the entrance would be a more rational access to the rooms, and the whole thing felt unitary. I had not noticed that it was a majestic tall house on a hill, but when I erased the additions and the neighboring (newer) houses from my mind, I could see what the original builder meant.
Did people build better in the past? Some did, but also some built worse, and the mistakes are gone now. There were fewer standards and laws, so there was more variation and experimentation, and I think those that did last really are usually better than current standards.
A tangent on architecture
Here is how the Boston public library feels when you walk in.
(1) From a busy, loud street you trudge up the stone steps thinking about the appointments you must make later.
(2) A great entrance hall leads to another set of stairs that narrows into two stairs, left or right, and your pace slows.
(3) You reach a large corridor, by which time you’re deep in curiosity and forget about those appointments.
(4) A tiny door leads to densely packed books and you see a title. Now for the first time you are genuinely curious about the Peloponnesian war.
Architecture did that to you. Architecture makes you feel something and alters time perception, because the arrangement and purpose of rooms triggers states of being. It’s not just about appearance, nor just about utility.
An older house
Casa Grande (1860-70), the house I’m currently wrapped up in, upon first visit, imprinted this idea on me:
Image shows floor plan labeled: Five rectangular sections made of 3-foot adobe, with vigas running East-West across each section. Second story repeated the same with thinner 2-foot walls.
There were no nails, and it was not that different from Anasazi buildings, which have lasted even longer. But my concept from the first glance was not right. Here is the actual layout of the thick walls, along with some much thinner walls:
My first data point in the cloud is that interior thick wall. Why was it not just five simple rectangles? Sleuthing is hard after 150 years of continuous occupation. If people redo a kitchen or other major feature every 24-40 years, that is a lot of remodels, and the older clues have been written over.
I spent four months taking off layers, focusing on newer materials first, like wood-fiberboard drop ceilings. The house gradually traveled back in time, to expose a porch and clear signs of an exterior in places that are now interior. I had seen the sloped floor with my eyes, but was not sure if it was falling or intentionally sloped, so I had not really seen it. That part of the building had three floor layers, so multiple decisions were made to hide history over many decades. The original structural integrity is perfect, while each remodel got worse. Some of the old ways were unknown to me so it made it hard to see the clues. For example I saw that there was wood in the adobe wall, both gringo blocks (horizontal) and studs (vertical). I could see it, so my eyes were working, but I could not see it really, as I kept thinking of it as an adobe wall. That wall is not adobe; it is a frame wall with adobe fill, a very distant relative to the European style half-timber frame with stone fill. I could see a skewed window frame with poorly done “new” stucco ineffectively hiding the problem. I could also see a cantilevered beam and that the stairs were out of level. It took some literal prying though to find the sinking connection between all of this, and still it remains unclear if the beam’s unsupported end pulled down the stairs and the window frame (with the DIY room over the porch adding weight), or if the wall settled independently. It is also confusing whether a load-bearing trim piece was meant to hold up the stairs and failed, or if it was an honest trim piece at first and inherited the job of bearing load only by some other neglect. At this point, the Simpson’s line “Careful, that’s a load bearing poster” is no longer far-fetched.
I don’t feel the need to unwind the building to some arbitrary point of original purity, but only to where the scars are cleaned out and everything remaining is integral with the original concept.
Carbon footprint
One problem with the surface-focused preservation philosophy is that it precludes things like insulated windows, or any visible element that is not true to the era. If you are not focused on those details, you can still preserve and restore, while also bringing a building into modern times. With the massive funding for “Electrify America” and related initiatives, we can super-insulate and seal old buildings, which does make them look different, but can still be true to the architectural intent.
Casa Grande will be all about “old meets new” – adobe with a heat pump and electronic zoned thermostats, and vigas topped with a polyurethane foam layer. All the new helps the old work better as it was intended, not fight against the old. An old stone house can be encapsulated inside a glass house, so the old materials are still exposed and continue to perform as thermal mass, which they do beautifully, while we are not asking them to seal or insulate, which they do poorly.
The carbon footprint of Casa Grande’s original construction is pretty close to zero. People cut trees, transported them by horse, and lifted them into place atop earthen walls. But the footprint of the wood fires, and the added gas and electric heating systems over the years is of course significant. By insulating and leveraging solar energy gain without replacing large amounts of the materials, we get a low-footprint building that is not feasible to build from scratch today. It promises to lower the footprint even below what its impact has been in any of the last 150 years. Although it may be possible to achieve this and include surface historical preservation at the same time, it would be at greater cost and would only be done for the love of preservation. In my case though, I’m betting that I can achieve structural preservation at market cost, and lower the carbon footprint, just by forgoing some of the expense of surface-level preservation.
Star Ford 
Leave a comment