PCLS: N, V, I & U

Critical Thinking in Histo Presto

2011-12-05T03:51:00.000-08:00

Critical thinking is of value in how we approach issues of Means and Methods in the hands-on practice of conservation of the built environment.

It encourages curiosity as well as a willingness to question our own acquired assumptions and beliefs before we move forward and touch, cut, alter, interface with and otherwise adjust heritage fabric.

Those who have a tendency to avoid failure tend to ask many diverse questions and to move forward in incremental steps. Think, then verify, cautiously.

But there comes a point where the pattern of question and verification needs to be set aside and an action taken. A goal is to discover the optimal point of invasive action. Not too far to one side or the other, a balance.

To have a good team helps.

It is at this point where one of us takes the screwdriver and puts it in the electric socket in hopes that the current was actually turned off.

Work safe.

Coffee & Bagel, NYC, October

2011-10-14T06:59:00.000-07:00

Coffee & Bagel NYC
October 26th, 8:30 to 10:30 am

at the

Neighborhood Preservation Center
232 East 11th Street, NY, NY 10003 [map]

Hosted by: The Growth Coach of New York, John Stahl.

Please RSVP to John Stahl jhstahl@msn.com

Reaching Through the Shadow

2011-09-14T05:48:00.000-07:00

Our friend, the architect Jim Rhodes, has been working on design of a 9/11 memorial. Here is a video that very nicely communicates the conceptualization and design work. An inspiration and affirmation of our day.

What I particularly enjoy about the design of this memorial is that the interpretation will always be accessible.

This is in contrast to such structures as the Old Stone Mill in Newport, RI.

A while back on a visit to the mill I remarked to our group, as we contemplated a bid on repairs, that we ourselves could build a funky masonry structure with all sorts of odd elements to it, stones sticking out here and there and geometric alignments with the nose on the Face on Mars... and 300 years hence people would stand and look at what we done here with our time on the planet and wonder what in good graces was in our heads, if anything. My personal vision to construct a giant brick bear out of old salvaged bricks in the side yard out near the street. Such a project, as with a 10,000 year clock, could fuel much speculation of future generations and lead to the creation of currently unknown religions and the comfort of other movements of contemplation.

So, with Jim's memorial design I am very pleased that all of the elements in the composition feed smoothly and clearly into an accessible narrative.

And then, I also like this video of the movement of the steel beam. The convoy on the highway with the flatbed truck in the lead, the flag draped beam, and the lights flashing on the vehicles behind must have been an eye turner. It would certainly turn my eye.

As many will know I like to play with stone and a need of the memorial construction is to split a large boulder of basalt. I and a few other friends have been feeding in to Jim our knowledge of precision stone splitting.

But I have another story to tell here, about steel.

One of our former employees. in a former company, went down to Ground Zero on 9/12 and got himself signed up with the Iron Workers. I always called him the ROMANTIC when he worked for us. His spirit of volunteerism certainly was in a romantic spirit. He spent the duration of the 'clean up' at work to cut steel beams. At the ceremony of the last column to be cut it was he that worked the torch.

The iron workers were in the habit to cut out pieces of steel, many of them in the form of crosses. After all was said and done he came back to visit us in our shop with a basket full of cut pieces.

This here is my piece of remembrance.

Lastly, I have always been moved by my friend Michael Drummond Davidson's account of his 9/11 experience published in the Gator Springs Gazette.

Whitewashing: by John Speweik

2011-09-12T09:05:00.000-07:00

Check it out at John Speweik's blog.

My Favorite Polish Dutchmen

2011-09-05T12:33:00.000-07:00

To hide a repair to historic fabric is to graffiti under another name.

In the USA in a repair to historic fabric the tendency, what I contend is an illusion of falsity, is to hide the repair.

I, for one, take a delight to see repairs that are obvious and that shout out that they are an historical intervention. They took place at a time with materials and technique that we can read as strongly as any patina. If we have the eyes. All within themselves they become as micro-fictions to the overall narrative of the entire built landscape.

Should the bullet holes be covered over any more than the thorns?

The clean lines, the invisibility of matched color, the exact tone of surface to make the repair invisible reveals a preservation philosophy driven by an abstract bureaucratic aesthetic of rule that has lost respect for the innate qualities of the material, of nature and of the environment that we exist within.

These Polish dutchmen, for me, illustrate in their detail and over-profiles, in the lack of their precision to hide, an understanding of the long-time of an older culture. They reveal a sensitivity to the temporal nature of the traditional tradesperson who yesterday and today had a hand to touch and was not an egoistic trickster made to hide their smile.

Breathability

2011-09-04T12:41:00.000-07:00

Hammer in Hand: An e-newsletter from Preservation Delaware devoted to hands-on preservation.

IPTW 2011 Video, Random Scenes

2011-08-24T11:09:00.000-07:00

Patrick's Rock

2011-08-22T13:18:00.000-07:00

Patrick Kennedy at the IPTW in Lancaster, PA in the silent auction won the chunk of rock that I had brought to the event. I promised that I would tell Patrick a bit about the rock since he had to carry it all the way home back to KY.

This is most likely Tuckahoe Marble. If it is then it originated from a now closed quarry hole in the ground north of New York City in Westchester County. This stone represents one of the earliest marbles commonly used in America and predates the discovery of marbles in Vermont. There is a whole lot of history associated with this stone.

It is a stone that was used in the 19th c on a number of buildings, most prominently Tweed Courthouse (connected to the political corruption of the Tweed Ring), Brooklyn Borough Hall, Grace Episcopal Church (where Tom Thumb and Lavinia Warren were married), the Washington Memorial Arch and Federal Hall. Over the years I have worked on several facades and structures that have this marble in it.

This particular chunk came from a demolition underway at Snug Harbor Cultural & Botanical Gardens on Staten Island. This site, comprised of a complex of buildings, was formerly known as Sailor's Snug Harbor, a 19th c haven for worn out and retired sailors. Currently a National Historic Landmark. This chunk was a portion of a much larger earth, concrete and stone removal underway and was quickly being loaded into a dump truck to be hauled off to a landfill. We were working on a nearby building when I managed to grab a piece before it got loaded and hauled off.

Thomas E. Bodine

2011-08-21T05:41:00.000-07:00

Bill Gould at the Coffee & Bagel: Providence, RI 08/19/2011 shares: "Thomas' occupation was that of a painter. He also did graining and gilding. A person purchased Thomas E. Bodine's painters tool box at a Massachusetts antiques auction in 2005. The tool box was filled with his graining and gilding tools and brushes. The "proof" that it was Thomas' tool box: there are two places where it is signed by Thomas. In the tool box, there was also a glass bottle with Bordentown written on it and a piece of glassine envelope wrapped around a sample number plate."

What Gap? At the IPTW There is No GAP - Only Kool People!

2011-08-12T14:08:00.000-07:00

Patrick Kennedy and Duffy Hoffman at IPTW 2011, Lancaster, PA

While recently at the IPTW in a conversation in line for dinner I was reminded of a passage I had once read in a book that described the history of the profession of architecture in America. We had been talking about the trend for specifications for things like mortar mixes to go from one sentence in the old days to several pages these days.

It seems that there are so many reasons in our modern culture to not trust each other and to not bother to get to know each other before we are all thrown in to work together... or as the case may be enough of the time to not work very well together at all. Obviously we need more instructions because they keep us insulated like a wall of granite away from the messiness to engage with each other face to face in the field in any sort of an harmonious work team.

Is it much better that there be a gap and a construction bible that tells us so?

“Accounts of building collapses caused by the shoddy work of unscrupulous builders and speculators filled the pages of the first professional architectural journals. The subtext was the promotion of the architectural profession as the only safe¬guard against incidents like the collapse of a Massachusetts mill in the 186os where the builder had used sand rather than mortar. A verse entitled "Death, the Builder" in the Architects' and Mechanics' Journal for 1860 attacked speculators and builders who maximized their profits and endangered the public with flimsy construction. Accompanying the verses was a drawing of a building mason as the grim reaper who serves the "lords of enterprise" by making the wall look strong; the blood and bones of his victims ultimately bind the wall. In the background the speculator, Shylockian with his greasy hair and hooked nose, turns away, clutching his bag of coins. Builders were responsible, the professional press also reported, for illness as well as injury and death. The American Architect and Building News published an account of a builder who refused to spend three hundred dollars to connect soil pipes to street drains. As a result, raw sewage discharged into the party walls, spreading illness throughout an entire residential block. Meanwhile, speculative builders who used architects' plans for their residential developments and discountenanced such deadly economics earned praise from the American Architect editors.” From Craft to Profession, The Practice of Architecture in Nineteenth-Century America, Mary N. Woods, p 150.

I was raised in a family of trades and though the schools did their best to dissuade me from pursuit of a building trade my natural inclination to build, and to read books and think for myself, won out in the long run.

Something that comes up quite often, particularly when I am around architects that fancy they are a separate form of human from the trades, and when they get into a gaggle of a group, invariably there is the pronouncement that there is a GAP between the architectural professions and the building trades. What I have come to understand from a lifetime of experience is that there is no gap at all, but there is a need for some people to make out that there is a gap as they have a career investment to make up a difference where in point of fact there is none.

Without a GAP, and a really big one that is to behold grand and magnificent with balloons and frilled lightning struck whistle moonshine bubbling a brass band and confetti streaming out of their earballs they are empty husks like the Nowhere Man.

Flim flam.

Mary Woods has more to say in her book on the subject of a need for a gap than the above paragraph.

But it is the self-serving propaganda to paint the builders and contractors as louts who would not use mortar but sand to build a masonry building, in the 19th century this was promoted in public media no less, it is the one fact from the long book that has welded itself to my brainpan. Since reading this book in 1999, and writing a review of it for the APTI Bulletin (it has the word CRAFT in it and I think they sent it me to review by mistake), my observation of this need of some people to promote a gap has stuck with me to want to figure it out. Do they need help? Is there a cure?

The way this gap myth operates is that once in a while someone falls in to believe that there is a gap and if they are sweet folks they try to do up some anxious remedy about it. Often enough this consists to start a project to put together a manual on how to build a thing... a thing maybe like stone walls or a log synagogue.

The focus is on what the trades do with their hands, their tools and their materials. Some discerning person will always jump up and say, “Oh, but she lands her hammer at the wrong angle and she should turn it ¾ of a degree at the 15th second of the swing.” What those who try to erase the gap end up doing in a focus on tools, techniques and materials is that they make the non-gap look even more like an expansive wide yawning earthquake tsunami volcanic irradiated gap that can never ever be bridged... for the fact that the poor architect probably does not even know how to hold a hammer, let alone swing it and hit a nail without bending it over. Why make them feel bad by pointing out their lesser talents? Why make them stress their imagination to pretend that they are armchair blacksmiths?

Or, maybe the trades need a gap cross-over book that shows how to draw a line with AutoCAD. Would this serve much better than to read an autobiography?

Yet there is really no reason to single out the physically challenged as being less worthy as long as they stop with the pretension that there is a gap.

Where it all vanishes though is when we get to know each other as people -- which is what really happens at an IPTW despite however much anyone may actually try to learn how to solder a copper seam properly. In the hot sun we share bottles of cold water. In the evening we share bottles... and bowls of salted almonds. It is this gathering of community, architects and trades all dressed in grub, where we come to understand that we don’t need no stinkin’ gap. That time when we suddenly all realize that we are here on the planet on the same day under the same sun as each other and that if we work together with our unique and individual differences of character and personality and common interest to fix old buildings good that so much more interesting things can be accomplished.

As they say on the Subway, "Watch the gap."

IPTW 2011 Photos

2011-08-12T03:53:00.001-07:00

IPTW 2011 Flicker Slide Show

August: Coffee & Bagel, Providence, RI

2011-08-11T10:07:00.000-07:00

Who: Heritage Restoration, Inc.
Where: 122 Manton Ave, Unit 622. Tower on the right, 2nd floor.
When: August 19th, 2011 at 9AM
RSVP: Rob Cagnetta @ 401-490-0888 or rob@heritagerestoration.net

The PTN “Shop Stop” - A Regional Preservation Gathering

Helifix Patch Pins

2011-07-31T13:36:00.000-07:00

More vids at ‪Follett-PCLS Channel‬‏ - YouTube Please subscribe.

PCLS Interview: Marek Baranski, Ph.D., M.Arch

2011-07-27T05:13:00.001-07:00

I first met Marek Baranski some 16 years ago when he was introduced to me through our mutual friend and business associate Witold Karwowski. Marek was then in the United States to represent the Polish Ministry of Culture. As I recall he was attending a Restoration & Renovation Show (now known as the Traditional Building Exposition and Conference) in Boston in search of business connections between Poland and the United States in the historic preservation industry.

Subsequent to our first meeting Marek has made numerous visits to North America. On occasion he has brought with him a number of Polish conservators and associates in the heritage conservation network that radiates out into the world from Poland. Likewise I have with Witold and other associates made to date three trips to Poland.

My first trip was the one where I spent four days in cardiac intensive care in a hospital in Szczecin. That was an education.

The second trip was involved with the Annihilated Heritage project related to reconstruction of a 17th century log and timber Zabludow synagogue at a skansen near to Bialystok. That trip included an intensive tour of historic sacred sites, churches, synagogues and mosques throughout the Podlaskie Voivodeship. For me the the log and timber synagogues were like rocket science in log building when compared to the same era of work on rectangular-boxes with a trussed roof of Christian churches in the region. It was on this trip that I became intensively interested in historic preservation issues related to Chernobyl.

The third trip was for a representative group of Americans to present at a preservation conference in Krakow. This junket included Marek leading with whirlwind gusto a private tour of historic sites scattered around the countryside between Warsaw and Krakow. Having worked for a time after High School at a salt mine in the Finger Lakes Region of NY State I enjoyed the tour of the Wieliczka Salt Mine. Of all places that I have visited in Poland I fell in love with Kazimierz Dolny along the Vistula River with the old buildings, igneous cobble streets and stone castle on the hill.

Marek has attended a number of conferences and events in North America. He has spoken at APTI conferences (notably the one in Montreal in 2008 where the film Srebrne Wrota that documents the reconstruction of the Silver Gate of St. Sophia of Kiev was shown) and Marek has presented at several Preservation Trades Network IPTW events as well as participated in several Traditional Building events.

It was in October 2001 at the IPTW held at Floyd Bennet Field, Brooklyn when Marek as a gesture of solidarity with the newly stunned Americans, right after 9/11, proposed an American contingent of timber framers and log builders to visit Poland for a workshop on the Annihilated Heritage for the Zabludow Synagogue. The Zabludow Synagogue project is a long and complicated story that continues to this day.

This interview was recorded on the event of Marek making a presentation in Philadelphia. It is shortly after his six year tenure as CEO of PPKZ. Trivia related to this particular trip is that Marek on behalf of the son of an associate in Poland returned from the United States with a Lego Death Star. If you are not familiar with this object suffice it to say that it comes in a very very large box. Much larger than two standard suitcases in my estimation.

PPKZ was the organization that at one time employed approximately 14,000 people and was responsible for the reconstruction of destroyed historic and heritage sites throughout Poland, most notably Old Town Warsaw. PPKZ included a widely diverse working group consisting of archeologists, architects, planners, stonemasons, carpenters and conservators. Subsequent to perestroika the network and connections of PPKZ became fragmented at the time of Marek's tenure the organization was down to roughly 200 people, but with a vast network of connections.

Marek now has his own firm, of which we are associated, for which you can find information here. Working with our business associate Witold Karwowski we provide support and representation for Marek on his various visits to America, as he so generously provides his time, support and hospitality to us when we visit Poland. If you have an interest to work with Marek and his associates, or would like to know when he will next make a visit to North America, then please connect with us.

There are 6 videos in a series.... each of less than 10 minutes in length.
Introduction, Those Stones, The Winchester Rifle, To Begin

The Over Material Approach

Chopin Birthplace, Salt Mine, Wyckoff House. Wyckoff House and More

Doors to Nowhere, Preservation Poland vs USA, Silver Gate of Kiev

Silver Gate of Kiev, New Company, PPKZ

PPKZ to Mount Everest

Ruminations on RFPs 001

2011-07-23T09:40:00.000-07:00

One cannot get the best response to a Request for Proposal (RFP) just because one believes that it will happen – although that desire must come first. A person must communicate their needs into words and actions. This is the RFP – a document that puts needs into words and actions. “We need this and that done. Could you please provide us a proposal?” If one wants a good response to an RFP then the author(s) must be pro-active in their attempt to compose a document that will be clear, understood and well received by the intended recipients of the RFP.

It is not enough that the author understands what they have assembled; it is necessary for an RFP to be effective that the recipients of the RFP have a reasonable opportunity to understand what is intended to be communicated.

Unlike with a fiction story read for enjoyment and subject to a wide variety of personal interpretation an RFP is a document that by intent is designed to solicit an active and focused reaction. The intent of an RFP is that someone will read it, understand it well enough, and be able to respond with a proposal.

An RFP is a call for someone to do something in response.

The quality of the response to an RFP will be conditioned by the quality of the RFP to begin with. To compose a poor RFP, one that leaves out information that may be essential to the understanding of the recipient, is to invite a low quality of response.

If we ask someone to do something, which is essentially what an RFP does, it asks for someone to respond, this creates a one-sided negotiation where the person asked to do something will inevitably wonder what is in it for them. “If I respond to this RFP what is the likely result that it will be to my benefit and justify the expense of my time and resources for me to respond?”

If the balance of this knee-jerk Return on Investment (ROI) analysis comes up that there will be negligible benefit to the recipient in their response to an RFP then there will be no response. The action desired and put into play by the expense of time and resources on the part of the author will go to naught as nobody will be persuaded to do what the RFP requests. Nobody will respond.

That is one extreme and it occurs where there are situations where projects are put out for bid and there are no bidders. It is not necessarily in these cases that nobody wants to do the project or would not be capable of doing it; it can quite simply be that nothing was communicated in the RFP to persuade recipients to want to respond.

In a case let us say where a public agency regularly issues RFPs that are inadequate in the content of their information and where there is a patterned reputation of not answering questions put forward by informed and qualified recipients, then the tendency is, if there is anything better to do, for the more informed and qualified recipients to ignore the RFPs. This is an example of a situation where an individual author could assemble a very competent RFP and it be ignored for the fact that the reputation of the agency is not a very good one.

There are a whole lot of highly qualified practitioners in the historic preservation industry who will not even consider to look at work from public agencies in part because of the poor quality of the RFPs combined with a reputation for difficult to survive business practices. This is not to say that there are not plenty of people that will respond to the RFPs as much as to reinforce that a poor quality of RFP invites a poor quality of response.

An RFP needs at least two elements:

-- A description of what is needed.
-- An indication of the form of the response that is desired.

These may seem like very obvious elements but it is surprising how often one or the other, or both, is not included in an RFP.

It also quite often helps to include information as to why something is being asked for.

On historic projects we very much appreciate when the author of the RFP has assembled and provides a package on the history of the site. We enjoy it even more when provided with previous investigation reports from other design teams. If the author then includes a brief summary of why they are looking to do what they are looking to do then we tend to feel an investment to help them reach their goal, simply to show that they trust to let us in on what they need to accomplish and why it is important.

A good RFP in historic preservation reinforces that all players, the author and the recipients, have the mutual respect that everyone cares about a good outcome. If you care that we care then we will care even more.

If you want an RFP to work then regardless of any other element to the communication show that you care. Do a good job to communicate the essential elements in your RFP and prove that you give a damn.

The response to a good RFP is rarely only about cost and when cost is the only driving factor of a project then the worse an RFP is constructed the more likely the better it will attract cheap -- dumb people that have no clue what they are doing but are hungry tend to go cheap. The question though is cheaper for what? Maxim here is, be careful what you ask for. Or, know what you ask for and be very clear about it.

Too many RFPs that we get for historic projects never say anything about the history of the site. The focus of the author is on their interest, what is in their trance-head, what it is that they need done, and not on the goal to attract the interest of the respondent. It is like with authors of fiction stories who do not care if anyone on the planet now or forever gets it. They get it just fine, no bother, and the remainder of us can suffer, or go do something else like deep sea fishing.

One thing that we try to do when we receive an RFP is figure out if what is being asked for is anything that we can actually do. If the initial indication that we get from an RFP is that there is no chance in hell that we will succeed in a win-win with the project, that there is in the RFP a clear indication of something being asked that we can excel at, that we can provide our best product and response, then we do not want to be involved.

I say that because when a project goes sour we usually hate it terribly, end up not liking everyone involved, and have trouble to get rightly paid. I know this the hard way from having responded to all sorts of really terrible RFPs.

Beside all that, the time taken to read, evaluate and respond to an RFP is usually a loss. The more complex, difficult, or unmanageable an RFP the greater the loss, taking into consideration that no risk advanced leads to no gain. Then again, no risk advanced rarely leads to a negative loss.

If you really want to get me with an RFP then it would have a cover letter to go something like this:

Dear Ken,

We understand that you come from a family of electricians and that you were called Sparky. We see that you have been involved in three projects closely related to Thomas Edison. Edison Barn #11 at the Edison Memorial site that you moved from Greenfield Village, your assistance in the investigation work at the Edison Memorial Tower and that schoolhouse from Edison’s iron mine that you helped save and got turned into a Hungarian cultural center when everyone else thought it was a piece of junk. In respect of this we have been referred by one of our board members, Nathaniel Woodhull to send you the attached RFP for an on-site facsimile reconstruction of Nikola Tesla’s Wardenclyffe Tower.

Best,
Friends of Tesla

Now, the RFP itself for this project can be terribly structured but I will certainly perk up to respond not so much due to the ego stroking as that the author took the time to figure out who they were sending the RFP to and to align their need and their project with a relevance to our perceived ability and interest.

A closer on cost... if with an RFP well made you capture the imagination of a preservationist who has a passion quite often they will go out of their way to cut their costs so low that they can't survive on the work... but they simply love to do that.

Keep in mind it is not the number of dollars that is important, it is what you get for the dollar.

Got Goop? IPTW 2011

2011-07-19T12:31:00.000-07:00

IPTW 2011, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, August 2-6, 2011

At this one PTN event we had in Delaware was where Glenn started on a rant about the conversion of trees into timbers. His education is in political science but his love is in timber framing. Glenn went on for a good twenty or thirty minutes with a small group of us hangers-on to move back through the steps of how timber frame materials come to the hands of the trades. Glenn claims he does not remember any of this. I believe that he does not remember -- but I certainly do remember as I was a captive of his audience.

I have always been interested in where the materials that we work with in our projects come from, how they get to us, and what are the networks of business and delivery systems that bring them into our environment.

I got in a bit of a controversy when I wrote a letter to the newspaper about our nearby Home Depot possibly closing. I had already seen it wipe out all of the small hardware stores and we would be left with no place to buy anything.

A fellow at a local lumber yard did not like what I had to say and claimed that real contractors don't shop at Home Depot.

Big box stores create controversy for how they push out small and local suppliers. I shot back that I thought I was for real a contractor and on a mahogany and lead-coated copper lined set of box gutters we had built for an historic site in Brooklyn I listed all of the sources of our materials. The project was paid for by a grant from Lowes, and we did buy a few of the materials at Home Depot. The mahogany came from a local lumber yard. The little copper nails we bought off the internet.

We invite all hecklers.

Ken Follett and Glenn James – Got Goop?
Tell us how you got it. Where do our materials that we work with come from? How do we go about procuring them? This is intended as a group discussion and not a presentation. Participants are expected to come with their own examples and questions about where their materials come from as it relates to their trade interest. Glenn James: Will focus on conversion of raw materials into usable building elements. Ken Follett: Will talk about why he likes to shop at WalMart, Home Depot and Lowes and why you can too. The intent of the session is to explore the supply lines that follow back to their sources for the materials that we use in our historic conservation work. If we can't get it then we can't use it, and if we can get it sometimes we wish we did not have to use it. What is your problem?

Ken Follett, Owner, PreCon LogStrat, LLC
Mastic Beach, New York
Ken Follett has been active in the construction and contract business for more than thirty-five years, with specific experience in historic conservation, exterior façade maintenance and waterproofing for the last twenty-five. Projects, primarily in the NYC environment, have included work at the Brick House at Philip Johnson's Glass House (LSA. National Trust), High Bridge (JBC, LSA, TransSystems), Carnegie Hall, Grand Central Terminal (Bovis/LaSalle Partners), West Point Military Academy (EYP), City Center (BCA), New Amsterdam Theater (Tishman/Disney), Horace Greeley Barn, Chrysler Building (TT), General Motors Building, Cable Building, Puck Building, Huntington Hilton (Arnold Associates), Neiman Marcus (White Plains, NY), Edison Building #11 relocation (Edison Foundation/NPS, BBB), Edison Memorial Tower (FMG), and the award winning restoration of the Barnes & Noble headquarters at NYC Union Square (LSA, project received awards from Municipal Art Society, Victorian Society, and NYS Parks –SHPO 1996). As former executive vice-president and partner (1987-2002) of Apple Restoration & Waterproofing, Inc., a specialty restoration-contracting firm, Mr. Follett was actively involved in the varied tasks of marketing, estimating, business development and project management on small and large historic preservation and exterior maintenance related projects. Varied exterior envelope and heritage conservation projects ranged from $20,000 to $6M in scope.

Glenn James, Owner, Craftwright, Inc.
Westminster, Maryland
Glenn Allen James has been a woodworker since childhood and in business since 1983. After graduating college and discovering his passion for historic building techniques he established Craftwright and began producing custom-handcrafted timber frame structures, including barns, homes, chapels, museums and home additions. Craftwright also has restored many antique and historic timber frames structures throughout the Mid-Atlantic.

Sand for Historic Mortar

2011-07-19T08:11:00.000-07:00

On the premise that historic sand is local.

Duffy Hoffman A-Z Window Sash

2011-07-19T07:52:00.000-07:00

Our friend Duffy Hoffman has been working on a DVD and workbook to instruct on wood window sash repair.

Duffy has always been hyper and moves along in his presentation sometimes at warp speed. One needs to either know a bit about wood window restoration, or want to know a whole lot about wood window restoration and play his DVD over several times to capture the details of the wealth of lessons provided.

Duffy is also a jazz drummer and the music on this promo vid is original.

Some years back a group of us purchased Duffy's giant steam box (5' x 10' double shelves, stainless steel}. It is one hell of a fine machine and works real well for shutter work.

Window Preservation Summit: Pine Mountain, promo

Lessons in Project Management

2011-07-17T10:09:00.000-07:00

Sand in Mortar

2011-07-14T15:10:00.000-07:00

A fine example of how it is the composition and mix of an aggregate that gives character and color to a brick mortar.

From the Greenwich, CT public library.

Strategic Psychological Intelligence

2011-07-12T04:46:00.000-07:00

From Selling Power
Kerry Sulkowicz, Founder and Principal, The Boswell Group

Though this video is related to sales activity the exposition of the concepts portrays elements of a B2B service that we provide as a strategic consultant on projects. Quite often our associate in business will provide us a description of the players to a scenario where they are having a difficulty and based on our questions we respond with perspectives and tools with which our associate can better deal with the scenario.

It can be as simple as our responding, "Call them back and say no. Do not say anything else. Don't explain. Say no then say nothing. Let the target fill in their blanks." When the target asks why then tell them, "Because I said no." Be calm, don't be threatening, don't be emotional.

Often people do not really know why they are doing what they are doing and when you say no it can force them to step back and think about why they think that they need what they have asked for. In my example here, from an actual interaction with an associate, the goal is to let the target figure it out.

John Weiss, Sr. died 07/02/2011

2011-07-03T06:22:00.000-07:00

obit and memorial service information

A memorial service will be held at the St. Stanislaus Church, 57-15 61st St., Maspeth, New York on Saturday, July 16, 2011 at 10:30 AM.

John Weiss, Sr., my good friend, mentor and former business partner, had been in poor health for more than a decade. He passed away due to a variety of health complications. He will be missed, and remembered by many for his kindness, patience, and willingness to share his trade knowledge with those around him and with those with whom he did business.

When I first met John in the early 1980's I had been assigned to work under him as a field supervisor on a project in White Plains that he was managing. His first thought on meeting me was, "What the hell are they doing to me now?" It was the beginning of a long friendship that for both of us led to a whole slew of curious adventures.

In his better lights John was always willing to play along with whatever games were afoot. He enjoyed time with children, and animals as he was always somewhat impish himself. It was often difficult to keep him out of trouble.

A child of Maspeth, Queens from a Polish-German background one character trait of John's has staid with me as the most valuable lesson. He had a blindness to ethnicity or race and he always saw past these false boundaries to reach to the core of an individual and encourage up their best merits to the fore. Through the years of our business partnership we held together a very mixed crew of employees and subcontractors of a multiplicity of race, nationality, background and life circumstance. Quite a few individuals John pulled up out of bad circumstances, supported, pushed, cajoled along and they remained loyal employees and friends for decades. In a few cases they moved on to steady and prosperous careers elsewhere in the construction industry.

One time John walked around over near the Puck Building in Manhattan, back at a time when it was not exactly the safest place to walk around, a mugger came at him with a knife. The employee that was with him that day jumped in front of John and thwarted the attack. That was how it was with John. At times he could be a real pain but he had a very good heart.

He had a passion for dirt track auto sports, a passion he had inherited from his father, and one big trouble I could not help John with was when he drove a modified on a dirt track into a wall at 90 mph. This incident over time caused him considerable long-term health issues. For the remainder of his life he was in chronic pain. John, for all the years that I knew him, survived on coffee, twinkies, an ever-ready wry smile and chain-smoked Marlboros.

Here he is in one of our last shared adventures, a little shopping trip to the Home Depot where David and I brought John along for his advice.

Koolhaas or Kunstler?

2011-06-24T15:11:00.000-07:00

This brief vid illustrates the sort of perspective on historic preservation as an engine of economic development, neighborhood and community revitalization that I intend when I urge that the modern architects, such as Rem Koolhaas "...should get out of their cloud and take this argument to the heart of Brooklyn and tell us what they see."

This is an approach of value in revival of many historic urban communities including restoration of Holy Cross in post-Katrina New Orleans. It may not be glamorous or monumental but it is the built environment serving the needs of life lived human to human.

Background on Koolhaas
An Architect’s Fear That Preservation Distorts
Inga Saffron: Is Historical Preservation Strangling Cities?
NY Landmarks Conservancy weighs in -- “Cronocaos” or “Crockocaos?” Rem Koolhaas vs. Preservation

Other Views
Death by Nostalgia
Historic Preservation and Our Cities

And for a considerably different view, James H Kunstler is someone that I have been paying attention to for more than a decade now. My having spent 12 years at 5 hours per day commuting, driving alone on the Long Island Expressway, usually in the darkness of early morning or early night, it really bugs me that we do not have a world built where we can afford to live near where we work.

LinkedIn Discussions related to the Rem Koolhaas exhibition at the Group: Means, Methods & Materials for Restoration of the Built Environment
Discussion thread started by Steve Stokowski
Discussion thread started by Jana Gross

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Networking: Fishing from CT takes me Back Home

2011-06-06T05:34:00.001-07:00

International Concrete Restoration Institute - CT chapter (ICRI-CT) 2nd annual fishing trip, June 3, 2011.

Though based on Long Island this year we have been doing a good bit of work in Connecticut and Rhode Island. I'm not quite sure why we are doing this but I am very happy to do so as the commute involves taking a ferry across the Long Island Sound.

I characterize the ferry as 'the poor man's yatch'. I never regret the experience, even on dark rough night crossings in fog -- the bagpipes in the hold were fantastic. Though the ferry trips, either of the two available across the sound, take about an hour and a half they both cut off at least 3 hours of additional driving (with traffic), one way, which in a round trip can quickly add up to 6 hours on the road.

So, on a day that I was working in CT I was invited as a guest to a monthly meeting of the ICRI-CT.

There was a presentation on the use of Cintec anchors on a church steeple, a technology that I am quite interested and involved with in a number of different directions. Least of which being our work with our friend Witold Karwowski to help him build up his masonry drilling and anchor installation resources. I was invited to go on the ICRI-CT fishing trip.

Even though I live on Long Island, within a half mile of the Atlantic on the south shore halfway between Manhattan and Montauk the fact that the majority of my work career has been in NYC, and with way too much commuting time in my life, the career has not given me much opportunity to get to know neighbors -- with whom, the water people, I may on occasion go fishing -- but since I do not really know them very well I never do. So, as I enjoy the water, networking, spending time with friends, doing business, and fishing I immediately accepted Bill McGloin's (friend and ICRI-CT chapter president) invite. It had been a long time since I was out to fish on a party boat. (My last time being with the Extech staff out of the Great South Bay.)

The Friday morning, clear, no threat of rain or tornados, started out with a drive to Orient Point to catch the ferry to New London. This is about an hour and a half drive out to Riverhead then out on the upper road across the wine country of the North Fork. I always enjoy this relaxed trip... then again I tend to make the drive in off hours when the weekenders are not in force. Once on the ferry we moved out past Plum Island. I was wearing my Plum Island t-shirt. I made sure to check out that the light house is still intact on the island. Enjoyed the sun, read a book, then as one waits in a relaxed atmosphere, we arrived in New London.

The trip on the ferry was a bit windy and colder than I expected so I ended up at Kohls to buy a pair of long pants. I then wandered my way w/ the GPS to Waterford, CT and just as I got real close and was convinvced that I was lost to find the Mijoy 747 at dock then Pat Morrissey called me on the cell. A jig and a jag in the road and under the bridge and I arrived, in time.

Introductions and the formality of making sure everyone was on board then we were off.

The boat immediately churned off across the sound and headed south. We spent the next four hours or so floating around in Plum Gut, between Plum Island and Orient Point. I told Bill and Pat that next time they can meet me at the dock in Orient.

I caught a blue fish.

Of some thirty or so people on the trip I believe that five (5) fish were caught and one person caught two. It seemed a bit surreal to me. I honestly did not expect to catch a fish. The last week I had been fighting a cold, and the pain that I get in my shoulder from time to time was killking me... so when I caught the fish my comment was, "This will make my wife happy." The boat hand, working at removing the hook and shad quipped, "It should make you happy!"

But, going on a fishing trip is not about fishing (and my experience of the ICRI is not all about concrete, a whole lot else interesting goes on at the meetings). It is about the time spent doing something, or trying to do something, with friends and to meet and get to know new people. Much was gained from how we all learned to work together to untangle our lines.

It is an experience that will come in handy when we face the next inevitable and unexpected but always anticipated problem on a project.

The way it works is that everyone stands on one side of the boat and when the boat stops moving then the Captain signals with a horn and everyone drops their line down to the bottom. Keep in mind the boat is probably rocking and as we stand there we dip down close to the water then rush up higher into the air. Hopefully everyone drops their line in unison but more often than not we are all out of sequence.

As the boat drifts the lines tend to come together in pairs, or triplets, or quadruplets or worse. We all stand shoulder to shoulder. On occasion it is politic to stop and go grab a drink, a sandwich or some potatoe salad. The cell phones ring... I kept wondering if anyone would overboard their cell phone. On occasion someone catches a fish and everyone gets cheery. A crew member comes over and gafs the fish, throws it up on deck, then puts it into a burlap bag. Wham, bam. Then in a bit of time the boat drifts over near to Plum Island and the Captain blows the signal and everyone pulls their lines back up. There is more untangle that goes on here.

Repeat, repeat, repeat. While all that drop and untangle is going on we have conversations about life, business, and how to get our clients to pay their invoices... stuff like that. Oh, yes, and I got to take video of a bit of the event.

Eventually the boat headed north back to the CT dock. I could have hung around and chatted more but I had to rush to catch the ferry back to Orient Point. A few weeks back I had worked a long day at Fort Adams in Newport, RI and made it away too late to catch the ferry and ended up overnight in a hotel in Mystic, CT. It was not such a bad outcome as the next morning I got to visit Fort Griswold, in Groton, CT. Where I took the pictures of the cannon ball furnace.

When you come into the port in New London there is a tall stone obelisk up on the eastern hill. Over the last year it has had pipe scaffold up around it, down now, but I had been curious about the project. But this night after fishing I wanted to get home.

On the ferry back I spent most of my time on the upper deck in the air and enjoyed the weather, the sunset, and as darkness came along the crescent moon.

One thing about landing at Orient at night is on the North Fork everything shuts down... and there is not a whole lot of everything. It is 'country' of sorts, very agrarian with a mix of weekenders and the full time residents. It was not until I reached to Riverhead that I found a McDonald's to catch a meal. Another thing about getting off the ferry in Orient is that, unless you hang back, you get stuck in a mess of vehicles that all try to get down a small road at once.

My wife was impressed with the bluefish. I cut off and buried the head beneath an heirloom tomato plant. The chickens enjoyed eating the guts. Yesterday I cooked the fillets up on the barbecue with tomatoes and white wine and it made for a real fine meal.

On Friday it was a really long day but I had a hell of a good time of it.

NYC June 2011 Bagels & Coffee

2011-05-31T11:36:00.000-07:00

Beyer Blinder Belle Architects & Planners, Tuesday, June 14, 9am to 11am.

41 East 11th Street (second floor), between Broadway and University Place (halfway between Union & Washington Squares)

RSVP: Pat Morrissey at ConSpec

Attendance limited to 25 on RSVP due to space restrictions.

Notice: We seek venues for future gatherings (July is in process of being lined up). If you have an interest to be a host then please contact: Ken Follett.

Shot Furnace, Fort Griswold, Groton, CT

2011-05-30T08:31:00.000-07:00

Though I doubt highly that we will be called on any time soon to build or repair one of these unique structures there are a few neat things to say for a shot furnace:

•   They are built of masonry, with iron. Black stars, no less!
•   They involve fire, like with fireplaces or bake ovens they are masonry machines.
•   They are related to cannons, a sophisticated and loud means of 3D bowling.
•   They are used to burn things, like wooden ships.

But what I like best about this shot furnace is that people have carved their names into the brick. The earliest that I found, in a brief visit, being MR in 1930.

frm Friends of Fort Griswold

History No. 7: Hot Shot Furnaces

Friends of Fort Griswold

Vid Shoot Tips

2011-05-30T06:07:00.000-07:00

North Shore Book Notes: review of the book by Rae Francoeur

How to Shoot Video That Doesn't Suck: Advice to Make Any Amateur Look Like a Pro: Steve Stockman

Brick Concrete Arch, Fort Adams, RI

2011-05-23T12:42:00.000-07:00

Here we have a bit of masonry candy for those who are into historic concrete and brick.

This arch to an embrasure at Fort Adams is an oddity being made of a concrete with random brick as the aggregate. It is understood that the military engineer Colonel Joseph Gilbert Totten undertook an experimentation in the construction of masonry fortifications at Fort Adams, but it is something of a mystery that this one embrasure arch is composed of a brick concrete whereas the others around about are more traditional brick arches.

The concrete is quite weathered. Consider that it has probably had very little attention since, as we can only assume, it was built in the first half of the 19th century.

Note what looks like a vertical pencil line. It appears that after the concrete was placed that a render coat was smooth over the concrete and that then radial lines were drawn on the surface, possibly to give an impression of the arch not being concrete but an illusion of stonework.

Lean more about Fort Adams: "Willard Robinson notes in his detailed work on the fort that bricks for the vaulted casemates came from local kilns."

NYC May 2011 Bagels & Coffee

2011-04-27T10:17:00.000-07:00

NYC May 2011 Bagels & Coffee

SUPERSTRUCTURES Engineers & Architects, Thursday, May 12, 9am to 11am.
13th Floor at 32 Avenue of the Americas, NY, NY (The Long Distance Building - http://www.superstructures.com/pdfs/Long_Distance_Building.pdf)

RSVP Barry Drogin bdrogin@superstructures.com (names need to be provided to building security a few days ahead of the event -- no RSVP then kindly anticipate a tough morning)

Notice: We seek venues for future gatherings. If you have an interest to be a host then please contact: Ken Follett.

Construction History Society of America, Save the Date -- 10/29/2011

2011-04-19T15:56:00.000-07:00

Click on the picture for a more clear resolution of image.

PCLS: What do we do?

2011-03-23T18:24:00.000-07:00

I am often asked what it is that we do. Usually I say, "We make holes," which makes people either think I am an idiot for saying that, or that I think they are the idiots and cannot handle a more complete explanation. People who have known me for years still ask me what it is that we do, and the explanation must sound like a rambling nonsense of details and qualifications of details. We do stuff, we make holes.

We make holes because we really enjoy finding out what is in them, and in helping our professional friends find out what is in the holes that we make. There is something fascinating about discovery.. like finding a time capsule buried in a corner stone of a building... and it is all the more fun if the hole making and the discovery has a value toward the future retention and health of an historic structure.

But we don't just simply make holes. Maybe it is that we make smart holes, sometimes they do prove to be smarter than us. But all told, where the non-destructive testing stops, or needs a nudge into the next dimension of accuracy, we are there ready and willing to make smart holes.

You will find the vid easier on the eyes in full screen mode.

NYC - Histo Presto - Coffee & Bagel for March-April 2011

2011-03-15T13:06:00.001-07:00

The coffee & bagel in NYC for March has a problem... due to a slight technical difficulty where we thought we were going to gather we are not now going to gather.

So, if enough folks respond we will look into the Neighborhood Preservation Center, for a next date, but we need an RSVP of at least 24 individuals all willing to fork over a small amount of cash to cover the rental cost of the room.

Or, we need a kind soul to volunteer a free space where they get to show off and be otherwise famous for a few hours.

The two sessions to date have been quite well attended and despite that they are advertised as not being about anything in particular the discussions have been very interesting.

Estimating Dreams in a Dead Economy

2011-03-12T09:27:00.000-08:00

Estimating Dreams in a Dead Economy

Selling and Business Acumen Training

2011-03-02T10:13:00.000-08:00

From Selling Power, Daily Report
Ray Green, Co-Founder - ParadigmLearning

This is a series of videos on the subject of selling and business acumen. An emphasis is placed on the need to understand business models and cash flow in particular in order for sales people to better partner with customers through a depth of realization of the customer's business strategies and initiatives.

Our business as consultants with tools is a small one with a very particular niche in the historic preservation industry. We wear all of the hats of a business and do not have a separate sales force, marketing, operations or financial departments. Our silo is full of a mish-mash of ingredients. We are all rolled into one. We need to understand our cash flow and our financials and to handle marketing and sales and operations all together every day-to-day.

Regardless, it has always proven to our benefit to understand how larger business organizations perceive their operations and market environments and for us to learn from their knowledge and experience.

Ray Green Part 1

Ray Green Part 2

Ray Green Part 3

Animoto Sample 02

2011-02-18T11:47:00.001-08:00

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

Selling Power TV: How Social Media Has Changed Our Business

2011-02-18T06:54:00.000-08:00

Columns on Greek Reivival made by

2011-01-06T15:12:00.000-08:00

carpenter

How do you think that these columns were built?

Check the year for the Nathanial-Rogers House

Flocculate with Expansive Clay

2011-01-02T03:39:00.000-08:00

This entertaining topic comes up once again, this time in reference to a thread on Pat' Morrissey's LinkedIn Group, Means, Methods & Materials... in an ongoing discussion regarding rising damp in masonry.

Google books, "Clay Materials Used in Construction " edited by G.M. Reeves, I. Sims & J.C. Cripps

12.1.2. Bentonite

The name bentonite is popularly used for a range of natural clay minerals of the smectite group, principally potassium, calcium and sodium monnnorillonites derived from the weathering of feldspars. The name derives from the discovery of large deposits near Fort Benton in Wyoming. USA. Because of the chemistry and micro-structure of the clay particles they have a strong ability to absorb water and are able to hold up to ten times their dry volume by absorption of water. Montmorillonite (after Montmorillon, southwest of Paris) consists of very thin flat crystalline sheets of clay minerals which are negatively charged and are held together in 'stacks' by positively charged sodium or calcium ions in a layer of adsorbed water. In particular the soil particles comprising a stack of sheets of sodium montmorillonite form extremely small and thin platelets, being typically of the order of 1.0 pm or less in length and 0.001 um thick. The ability to absorb water comes from the relatively low bonding energy of the sheets, which allows water molecules to be adsorbed onto the internal and external sheet surfaces. Calcium ions provide a stronger bond than sodium, so that calcium mommorillonite swells less readily than sodium monnnorillonite. Potassium ions provide much stronger bonding between clay sheets as the potassium ion is of exactly the right diameter to fit between atoms in the sheet structure with negligible gap between the clay sheets. A similar material to mommorillonite but with potassium bonding is the non-swelling clay mineral known as illite. The substitution of sodium by calcium or potassium ions in monnnorillonite greatly reduces the ability of the clay structure to hold water.

The very small particle size of bentonite results in an extremely low hydraulic conductivity for intact clay, with a coefficient of permeability of typically less than 10-1" m/s. This allows the clay to be used to form 'impermeable' or 'waterproof layers and sustain high hydraulic gradients across thin layers with negligible water flow. The swelling property is also important in such applications, since should water permeate a layer of dry bentonite it will swell even against high pressures and tend to seal any crack or fault which might otherwise develop into a leakage path. The volumetric swelling of particles can be up to 13%. but that of an agglomeration of particles is somewhat less depending on their packing.

Many applications of bentonite involve the use of slurry. Mineral particles in a slurry generally carry electrical charges, the nature and intensity of which vary with the particle surface characteristics and the chemistry of the liquid phase. Polar water molecules may then be adsorbed on to the particle surface, forming a layer of 'bound' water surrounding each particle. The result of the two effects is to produce repulsive forces between particles, which are greater than attractive Van der Waal's forces except when the particles are very close together. The particles in a slurry therefore tend to keep apart from each other in a 'dispersed' condition (Fig. 12.1a). The effects are most noticeable with small particles (clay/silt rather than sand/gravel, and in practical terms only with finer clay particles) since the relative surface areas are much larger. and gravitational forces are much smaller. Under some conditions the plate-like particles of clay minerals may have different charges on the edges and faces of the particles, and are able to clump together in a 'flocculated' structure (Fig. 12.1b). The large flocs settle out of the slurry much more readily than the small individual particles.

Some slurries demonstrate the effect known as thixotropy, whereby they 'set' into a gel if left undisturbed, but revert to a viscous fluid (sol) when sheared. The alternation between sol and gel may take place any number of times. The phenomenon is well known in 'non-drip' paints. A gelled 'house-of-cards' type of structure with edge to face connections is illustrated in Figure 12.1c; gels of thin clay particles may contain only a few per cent of solid material. The gelled structure is also able to support larger soil particles and prevent them from settling out. Bentonite slurries are thixotropic and typically form a gel at concentrations of a few per cent by mass in water: this is an important property of bentonite slurries in many applications. For a more detailed discussion of the nature and properties of bentonite slurries see Jefferis (1992).

Bentonite clays occur, and are mined and processed commercially, in many parts of the world. Some natural deposits, notably those from Wyoming, have a high proportion of sodium. These tend to produce slurries with high viscosity but relatively low gel strength. The deposits mined in the UK, near Woburn, are mainly of the calcium form, and these are converted by ion exchange to the sodium form by ball-milling with sodium carbonate. These materials tend to be less dispersive and give lower viscosities for the same slurry density, but higher gel strengths. As natural products, bentonites vary widely around the world in quality and content of other minerals, even after commercial processing, and these variations must be taken account of in their specification and use.

Bentonite is available commercially in a variety of forms. but nearly always in a dry state, as powder (in bulk or bags. like cement), pellets or blocks. For applications in construction it will usually be hydrated, although in some waterproofing materials the hydration is allowed to occur in situ. For use as a slurry, the bentonite is mixed with water at a rate of a few per cent of solids by mass. The aim is normally to produce a slurry in which the bentonite particles are well dispersed and fully hydrated. For good mixing and rapid hydration, a high-shear colloidal mixer (shear rate >900/s) should be used, and the slurry then left to stand for some time while the clay particles hydrate. The quality of the slurry obtained depends on the hydrogen ion concentration (pH) of the water used in mixing; saline or acidic water or water containing impurities may cause the clay particles in the slurry to flocculate. This may initially cause the slurry to 'thicken', but there will then be a tendency for the flocculated particles to settle out of suspension and form a sludge. However there is not normally a practical problem with seawater coming into contact with a slurry, provided the slurry cannot mix freely with the seawater and has previously been fully hydrated with fresh water. Deliberate flocculation with flocculating agents may be used to help remove bentonite from suspension when the slurry is no longer required or has become too contaminated with cement, clay or silt. A combination of low hydraulic flow into the slurry (so long as hydraulic heads are low), and long diffusion times for salt compared with exposure times, usually causes few problems in the presence of seawater.

Bentonite is also used in combination with other materials, in particular other soil materials and Portland cement. At one extreme a small quantity of bentonite may be added to a concrete mix to produce highly plastic concrete able to undergo quite large deformations without cracking: while a small quantity of cement in a bentonite slurry can produce a hardening slurry with a small shear strength. Natural clay, silt and sand may be used as 'fillers' to produce cheaper material while keeping most of the benefits of the scaling ability and low permeability of the bentonite. Gleason et al. (1997) found that about 5% of sodium bentonite and 10-15% of calcium bentonite had to be added to fine sands to achieve a sand-bentonite mix with a permeability of less than 10-9m/s. Hardened bentonite-cement slurry mixes containing 180 kg/m3 of cement and 60 kg/m3 of bentonite had permeabilities of about 10-7m/s with calcium bentonite and 10-8m/s with sodium bentonite. These mixtures arc discussed further below in relation to various different applications. Small quantities of polymers and other chemical additives may also be used to enhance or modify the properties of bentonite slurries for particular applications. These are also discussed further below. [not below here, though, you gotta go read the book if you want more!]

From our small perch what can we see ahead for the future?

2010-12-27T04:39:00.000-08:00

As a New Year approaches and despite that we are unable to see very clearly into the future we are able to appreciate the future’s potential to be of interest and entertainment.

We were asked to list projects that we see on our horizon but there is a superstition that we abide that to talk about future work, or even to talk about ongoing work, has a tendency to skunk the odds.

We have been involved with a number of projects that we will likely have nothing to do with in the future but that we will continue to be interested in their progress.

Though it is proper to mention the lead of the design teams in each case we worked with a number of friends and associates who we will not mention here as the lists would get long winded and complicated.

The Edison Memorial Tower in Menlo Park, NJ, where Edison invented the light bulb, is currently working through a prequalification phase prior to going to bid. The project involves restoration of John Earley pre-cast concrete panels -- this is artisan work. The lead architect is Farewell Mills Gatsch Architects. We very much enjoyed working with them to provide in-field support during their design phase investigations. The most memorable statement of the project, "Where is the water?"

The McCarren Park Pool restoration in Brooklyn, NY (in hip Williamsburg) is a Robert Moses structure that we lived across the street from for a number of years when it was an empty and abandoned mound of brick and concrete. It is currently an ongoing project. I had an opportunity to meet the contractor at a holiday party and enjoyed hearing tidbits. The lead architect was Rogers Marvel Architects. We worked on their design team to provide field mock-ups and probes. One memorable adventure was the entire day that it took to do a 1 sf of repointing mock-up in a blizzard... the drive to NJ to get 2 bags of the specified sand took up most of the day. We also regret that our friends at Brooklyn Brewery will probably not be able to continue to host concerts at the pool once it is completed. I also managed to get a flash fiction published about a dead man found at the pool as reported in a small news clipping. He was missing one arm. We did not get to meet him.

The Brick House at Philip Johnson's Glass House. We were advised to be discrete when talking about this National Trust site. I enjoy informing non-architect friends about the glass house by talking about the brick house first. Though a relatively small structure thie project should prove to be an interesting one. The lead architect here was Li-Saltzman Architects.

High Bridge Aqueduct is a curious project for us in that rather than being a vertical logistic problem, as occurs quite often in the NYC environment, it is a horizontal one. We did a series of probes there and with the 1,600 ft length we had to bring in our tools and equipment and materials each day and remove them at the end of the day and fully transport them out of the area (we bought a small yellow wagon that we are very happy with)... nothing could be left behind for fear it would be thrown over and off the bridge. We also had a really good time exploring the innards of the aqueduct pipe, and I mean that literally as our last steel coupon we extracted by cutting from the inside out. The lead on the project is TranSystems.

The Fulton-Nassau Crossroads Program is down near Ground Zero in Manhattan and we had an opportunity to do a few facade storefront probes. Lower Manhattan has to rate as one of the most congested and street populated areas of the planet other than maybe urban population centers in Japan and Asia. Managing to go down there and grind and cut through stucco on the street in broad daylight, safely, with tourists and such walking past, and then to come back again and patch it all up to look good was a tiny but interesting accomplishment. The first day it took us an hour to figure out how to get our small truck, when we were only a few blocks from the site, through the maze of narrow one-way and blocked streets to actually end up at the site and parked. We cheated. Lead on this project, for us, was Li-Saltzman Architects.

It was a year ago the day before Thanks Giving that we did a probe in a plaster ceiling at NY City Hall for Beyer Blinder Belle Architects and it is this year, a year past our initial brief escapade in making another hole in the built environment that we have got ourselves involved in wondering what will happen to the restoration of the wood windows. We remain wondering.

Our friend Leland Torrence up in Connecticut involved us in an exterior condition survey of two public schools in Providence, RI and other than the usual fun filled field days for the survey the major task was sorting through 1,000+ photographs then assembling them in a Blogger based online visual report, with a few drama laden videos and to do so in such a manner that a report would be produced that would convey the magnitude of the exterior conditions of the masonry of both schools, with a conceptual budget that we also worked up for a 5-year remediation plan. We had thought that it would be really neat to produce a visual report on an iPad and then to send the pre-loaded device to the architect... but the budget for the project did not include for expensive toys and thus we went with wrestling the nearly for-free Blogger format to produce an intelligible online report experience. It helps that once something is developed in a Blogger format that it can be easily cut and pasted into a for-print hard copy report. Now that we know how to do it we hope to have more of this type of communications work in the future.

Warning: turn down your computer volume.

We await what will awake in the New Year. May we all be blessed with work, health and good business!

For Drill Bit Geeks Only!

2010-12-24T06:51:00.000-08:00

As a probe contractor for investigations of existing historic building fabric, which can include anything from silk wall covering to pine floors to concrete cores to marble and steel... we enjoy drilling holes and the technology of the tools.

Seasoned Greetings

2010-12-22T07:54:00.000-08:00

Should unit prices be required in the bid process?

2010-12-22T02:46:00.000-08:00

I could not sleep last night and it had nothing do with the moon eclipse. But I did run across a discussion on unit prices in bids and it is a topic that I find interesting. I got into a bit of rant on it. Rather than do one throw away into the I-way ozone cloud I figured I might dress up my thoughts on unit prices and share them here and elsewhere as well.

I enjoy estimating and bidding as a sport.

I consider estimating for historic preservation work to be the most challenging, complicated and rewarding form of estimating in the entire world of construction.

I have been doing it for a long time. Over the last few years I have been working on writing a book about misadventures in estimating in historic preservation with a mind to reveal enough secrets, foibles and weaknesses that I will never be able to return to doing it again.

I am not quite there yet.

I am interested in sharing, ranting on all sides our thoughts and impressions on the estimation and bid process as it applies to historic preservation work.

The initiating question is: Should unit prices be required in the bid process?

Unit prices do complicate the bid process but what I find most difficult with them is that it is not always clear what their intended use is.

I agree that if they exist that they should be for the purpose of pricing additional work or reasonably unanticipated conditions but in my experience that use is rarely the primary reason that they exist, or that they seem to increasingly proliferate in number. My first leaning toward a recommended practice would be toward a clarification in the bid documents as to what the intent and fair use of the unit prices would be applied to in the management of the project.

Compared to other areas of the construction industry in historic preservation (and I do not mean our bread n’ butter maintenance projects) there is not a great deal of standardization of work activities but there is a great deal of need for and reliance on specific labor skills of unique individuals. When I encounter unit prices they range from work activities that may on the surface look to be relatively simple but in fact be quite complicated to activities that are so unique that nobody, including me, has a clue what they should cost.

A price in economic parlance is information and what I find is that the first use of unit prices is as information used in evaluation of the honesty of a bid.

People – friends of mine -- who evaluate and compare bids quite often have no idea what a work activity should cost and so they line up all of the bids, and all of the unit prices in a matrix, and if the unit prices appear to be deviant from the comparative trend then they place a focus on the areas of greatest deviancy.

An honest evaluation would look at where unit prices run low as well as high, but a less than honest evaluation will only focus on higher unit costs in an effort to negotiate them lower. That lower cost being an objective where the goal of the evaluator is low cost and not necessarily the eventual economic and qualitative success of the project.

I run across clauses such as, “Unit prices that are deemed excessive in cost will be cause for rejection of the bid.” A problem with this approach is that though the unit prices provide information what they reveal can be false and misleading, and generally the people making the interpretation have no clue as to an objective truth or falsity of the information as they are usually the ones who wrote the specification that may very ambiguously describe the scope of the presumed unit price. And in a majority of cases they will never have been in a situation of themselves having to actually provide the specific item of work out of their own resources.

On a bid sheet a unit price may be described in two to three words and a problem in bidding is figuring out what those few words will mean later in the management of the project.

For example “Repointing of brickwork”. I am quite often asked by contractor associates what this unit price should be. Without knowledge of the potential complications one tends to assume that there is a standard market price. There is a perceived standard market price, a price that those who evaluate expect to see listed as the unit price, and in general it is too low of a price for the reality of the resources needed to do the work. Beyond the issues of quantity in a small or a large amount, which is generally a question of logistic and mobilization overhead wrapped into the unit price item, there is also a question, at least in historic work, of skill technique that can vary quite widely as well as a range in cost of specialty materials.

Are the joints to be cut out with a diamond grinder or by hand with a hammer and chisel? Do we actually expect that the joints will be cut by hand with a hammer and chisel as is often specified but as is nearly impossible to actually do in practice? Does the sand for this repointing cost $2.98 per bag or is it a specialty sand to replicate historic mortar at $25.37 per bag? Are the additional units to be done in the same general area or on another portion of the planet? Will our competition on the bid know the difference?

This gets very complicated when the unit prices are reflected back into the number of units in the base bid and the use of the unit prices is an expectation that the lump sum in the base bid reflect the unit price times the number of units but not accommodate other needed resources to complete the work.

This becomes a real problem when one is dealing with public works bids where, depending upon the practice of the public agency, everything is based on unit prices applied to quantities of units, and worse where the logic of the separation out of the units is inadequate and poorly thought out. Made all the worse when there is no room for discussion as in bid sheets that clearly indicate that prices are not to be annotated. [In my old age I refuse not to annotate bid sheets in the determination that it is better to shoot me now. I have been known to scribble all over bid sheets in my irritation that they were so poorly constructed that I want to scream and do other unseemly unsocial acts of vengeance.]

I have always been of the contention that when the quantity of additional units exceeds the base bid by 10% that there should be a change order negotiation. This is not always well received or accepted in argument as a 10% deviancy tends to reflect that the bid documents were not very well put together to begin with.

I recognize that one driving motivation behind the honest making factor of the use of unit prices is that we all operate in a world where we often either cannot tell who is cheating or honest, or that we have no choice but to contend with cheating as a standard way of contractors managing projects and therefore need protections. We also need protections from the protections. Whatever I may think of unit prices it can all be folded into strategic game theory and like sinking into a cosmic worm hole we may find ourselves coming out of the argument before it even started.

I have also been of the contention that deduct of units should not include deduct of profit and overhead. This is the general argument in favor of having unit prices listed as Adds and as Deducts. This can work well in practice as long as it is clearly understood what resources are applied to the unit cost to begin with.

The spread between the Add and Deduct is also information and the estimator needs to accommodate how that information will be interpreted and used. If it is used to interpret that overhead and profit is 500% and that the entire bid is overpriced because of that then it provides one more problem to deal with.

Most specifications that I encounter stipulate that the unit costs will include all overhead costs including taxes, fees, mobilization, logistics and profit. I am in favor of unit prices being bare bones and clearly defined and that overhead and profit is included in the base bid as separate line items, excepting for the problem when unit prices exceed a reasonable threshold, referring back to the 10% margin I mention above.

NYC: monthly Bagels & Coffee and conversation between peers... Preservation Industry Network = PinHeads

2010-11-11T03:32:00.001-08:00

Some of you may remember so far back in time. An invitation to get together and do nothing much in particular.

We want to host a monthly get together for people working in historic preservation for a morning bagel & coffee (or donuts or whatever, even green tea) pretty much for no better reason than to get together in Manhattan.

More than a decade ago we did this on a monthly basis (as I was recently reminded by one of our past gracious hosts) and a whole lot of good came of our seeing each other for reasons that had nothing much to do with the day-to-day pressures of business.

Unfortunately just plain getting together always seemed to need a purpose and out of that sense of purpose a number of things occurred (Preservation Trades Network, a revitalization of APTNE, and the IPTW at Floyd Bennet Field in October 2001... right after 9/11) and in the complications that developed we all stopped just getting together to say hello and gossip and chatter and grouse.

We want to get together again with the express purpose of NOT doing anything more than getting together.

Think of it as a pre-bid walk about only there is no project to not get... just friends.

No organization, no charter, no pledges, no conferences, no mission. We intend to do this near 2nd Ave. & 12th Street on Wednesday, January 12, 2011 or wherever manifests at that celestial time as most convenient and hospitable. If you are interested in a visit and congregation then please give a shout.

For those who can't make it to Manhattan we can provide advice on how to have coffee and bagels in your neck of the wilderness!

John Stahl Growth Coach

2010-11-03T14:58:00.000-07:00

I have been friends with John Stahl for a few decades through his previous business incarnations and having attended his recent presentation session at the IPTW 2010 in Frankfort, KY I was quite impressed with the manner in which he interfaced directly with the needs of his audience.I believe that everyone who attended the session left with really good ideas as to how to improve their business situations.

Theory of the Conservation of Bright Ideas

2010-11-01T07:17:00.001-07:00

I have been working on a Theory of the Conservation of Bright Ideas for several years now.

I know of people who have too many bright ideas, they have bright ideas like a horse pie has mushrooms. What I have learned, having had my own bright ideas, is that the idea in and of itself is not of value, but the sweat and commitment to realize the idea is the most important element. This said, what I find is that if bright ideas are too freely traded around and have no bone to them that they tend to lose their luster. At issue with a bright idea is that simply having it, or having the most remarkable bright idea is not a guarantee that other people will pick it up and move forward with it. In other words, if a bright idea does not have LEGS then it won't walk.

One bright idea I had was the Traditional Trades Education Resource Directory and I was really into it and had structured a 'team' of partners and advisers and written a nice grant proposal until it was pointed out to me that the acronym is T-TERD.

But as to the Theory of the Conservation of Bright Ideas what I find is that folks who have a bright idea and then commit to doing the hard grunt work of realizing the one idea into the world, that they stick to it tenaciously through thick and thin, that they never take defeat for an answer, that they are not dissuaded or drawn off track by other competing bright ideas, that they tend to have fewer bright ideas than the person who freely willy nilly invents bright ideas in the gross -- the bright idea fountain that spews forth without ever having any hope or intention of realizing the ideas (they are already very bright and shiny), for the most part expecting other folks to catch on to the magnificence of the bright idea and be inspired to do the work.

There is only so much energy and attention that an individual, or a group of people, can put into the world in the realization of bright ideas.

One aspect of the Theory of the Conservation of Bright Ideas is that in a culture and economy where it is not possible to do anything to realize a bright idea that there seems to be a direct correlation to the production of bright ideas. It is as if when one cannot work to realize bright ideas then it is just as well to have an abundance of them. But in an environment where people can actually work to realize bright ideas they tend to get caught up in following them to the exclusion of coming up with all freshly minted new ones.

Where Do Stonemasons Come From?

2010-10-16T03:49:00.000-07:00

Marshal Pruitt and Ken Follett

Bull manure. Thirty plus years ago, at the age of 20, I was self-employed, selling bull manure. It was all 100% grade-A prime bull, from a cryosperm facility at Cornell University, not far from where I grew up. Mostly the lab was known as the place that had the cow with the glass stomach that school children would visit and giggle and watch as it ruminated. While dropping a load, one day I met a 62-year-old stonemason named Marshal Pruitt, and he offered me a job. It was a step up. I had a respect for and wanted to learn traditional stonework. He needed a donkey.

When I started, Marshal said that if I lasted three months I would be a stonemason forever. It would be in my blood. A few weeks later, I suppose he figured I was not wholly wore out, he offered me a choice of his educational curriculum, either to be the best cocksman in the county, a different sort of stonework... or the best stonemason. Though I might have had an interest in the former, I told him I was not sure I would survive, and chose the latter.

Marshal had a reputation as a bitter, overbearing, cantankerous, irascible white racist, the most opinionated, drunken and unfriendly craftsperson in all of upper New York State. I loved the guy.

He had a ten-year waiting list for new fireplaces. It was years when streakin' was popular and set up one night at the Rogue's Harbor Inn in Lansing, NY we got somewhere after the sixth round when he challenged me to go streak with him in the parking lot. I countered him that he was an old man and should show me how to lay stone before he dropped dead and the old art was forgotten (I think there is a missed “f” in this sentence). We never did streak, leastways not that way, but he wanted his glory. For the first year Marshal would only let me cut and carry stone. It was hard for him to give up his secrets. This was not from some honorable plan of apprenticeship, whereby I had to learn the simple skills before the true craft. Instead, it was his worry that I would steal work from him. In the end, I did. I did not exactly want to, but I did. When he gave in to teach me he vowed that even in death he would sit in Heaven and tell me to get to work. We did not streak that night, or any other. He taught me to lay stone.

His fireplaces were traditional brick, not metal boxes with electric fans. In the good summer months the two of us averaged one fireplace per week, included with the chimney. It worked for me. I lasted three years at twelve-hour days, six days a week. There were a lot of days when we said nothing to each other; each of us communed solely with the stone, sand, brick, and block. It was a meditation in motion.

Occasionally the mortar mixer did the talk, it spoke in a muddled language that resembled chicken-speak. It could have been hawg speak or creole voodoo or simply the yap of a mechanical beagle, but we thought it sounded like chickens. However, if our customers heard us cluck, it was us talkin' to each other. It was our shorthand work code; we would be taken too long to say longer words. We had little idea then that we were politicians. Water was “aga.”

Damned stubborn glacial till is what we mostly worked, boulders many of them harder than granite. Split them with a 20 lb. sledge, a sledge blast. It is like with an axe you let the hammer do the work. Smack! Just as the head reaches out to the stone you turn it so the corner strikes. There is perfection to be achieved in the accuracy and the motion of the swing. The boulder is split like a Faberge egg. All of a day spent clambered around on a farmer's pile in a hedgerow; stepped from boulder to boulder, grazing they call it now. We called it nothing. No words for this work. Hot sun. Old age and mud hid the secret interiors of the boulders that would be full of color and crystals and odd shapes to keep us in wonder what would be found next with the sledge. Hammered.

One day it was hot and we must have been succumbed to heat stroke. I looked at this one flat rock; it was gray with white stuff on it. I asked Marshal what he thought it was and he said it had to be pheasant shit. From then on whenever we got to advertise ourselves with a new customer while we set up in the yard I'd tell them how Marshal had such a good eye he could tell the difference between pheasant and chicken shit at fifty yards. A stonemason needs a good eye.

One day I was cutting a corner out of a stone and a chip hit my stainless steel thermos and put a dent in it. He told me then about the time he put out the eye of a kid at the school where he had been employed. The union had kicked him out because he taught boys in a reform school how to work with stone. Marshal was pissed at the union. Pissed at the school too because they had fired him after a girl accused him of rape. Marshal never had too much luck with schools.

Our long days often ended in arguments, and then in a drunken stupor. Jobs were paid for in cash and booze. Whenever we finished a fireplace, we would call the family around and start the tiny, sacramental first fire. The first flame always the sweetest, most memorable. This flicker was usually doused with a generous libation of Canadian Mist or Rheingold beer. A fireplace built in a bedroom, with its implications of fertility, would be an occasion for an extra-rowdy bash. Sometimes we did not make it out of the yard until the next day.

I'll not forget the evening I came home and sat on the floor inside the door to take my boot off then woke up next day in the same spot to put it on again. Or walked two miles in the night in an ice storm where I slid in and out of the blind ditch, just so's I'd be on site on time. The time we were snowed in overnight in hills near Enfield and the fat girl of the house that was takin' after her grannie with three chins, made me cookies while Marshal coached her that I was quiet and shy but sweet on her. I wanted so much to stay outside that the mortar froze on my trowel. When I asked Marshal said it was settin' up real fast is all and to hurry it up. I got a cold in my back that year that ached me fiercely for another decade. This one job the owner had recently moved up from Brooklyn to the country and had cut down the dead elm tree right next to the house. He did not like the majestic looks of a dead tree. The roots rotted out, a year later Marshal and I was there in good weather to wonder at how the chimney leaned out about a half foot from the top of the house. We built fireplaces in rainstorms, ice storms, and blizzards. I slid off a roof in the middle of a snowstorm when I had gone up to cap out a chimney. I never did get frostbite.

Marshal became a stonemason at the age of 12. He said it was because a homely, one-eyed girl out back of a school playground seduced him on a Saturday night. He felt sorry for her. This would have been in the early1920s. The matronly principal of the school was only too happy to expel a boy who was overly energetic, and overly empathic towards the needs of one-eyed girls, and who was also Jewish. He always told me he was a Hebrew. He had to have been lost somwheres. Marshal began work as a bull. He carried double bags of Portland cement in the Sierra Nevada, the Devil’s Backbone, for two stonemasons who built wilderness cabins. He survived and began to learn this trade. I don't think he ever learned to read.

During World War II Marshal worked in the San Francisco shipyards where he chipped welds. He stood on a suspended two-by-twelve off the side of a ship, without safety harness, and held an 80-lb. air hammer. One day, hung 75 feet in the air, Marshal hit a particularly solid weld. If his partner hadn’t of grabbed him, Marshal would have gone down. When I worked with him, thirty years later, he still could not climb up a chimney scaffold more than four feet off the ground without he would shake the bolts out of it. I served as his upwardly mobile squirrel. It was me did the climbing for the two of us.

If he saw a jogger, Marshal would say that anyone with a real job did not have to run around to no place. He constantly complained, with creative curse words, that the youth of America were lazy, pea-brained, and indolent. I wanted to prove him wrong, and worked harder. One time this one house there was a black man with his son with a tractor. They worked all that day to plow the field across the road. It was their business and not his. Marshal was a bundle of perplexed agitation all day going from his bancum set up before the breast to the window to look out. There was no rest for this man with the worry of what terror a black farmer could possibly be conspired after. He would go on about how the blacks had taken over basketball and what next the world was going to fall to. Hell was a toughened lump of bile on his narrow racial horizon.

My girlfriend at the time wanted to work with us but he would have none of it. I tried to explain to her that if she was around on the job that he would never go to the bathroom. She did not understand, besides, he said that she walked like a cowboy. He was always ready to give me advice on love. When I was fagged out from days and hours of pointing mortar and bored senseless from work on a stone house he told me the best way to get on with the hardship of work is to think about woo woo. We worked all winter on that house with the kerosene heaters burning to make us nauseous with headaches. In the spring I looked out past the canvas and saw the sun bright. I got up and walked out. It took him three days to find me.

Even though Marshal preached to me that universities only function as hotbeds of sex, drink, drugs and depravity, I spent what few free days I had in the Cornell architectural library where I read old books on stonemasonry. I convinced him to build Count Rumford style fireboxes. This was not accomplished by rational argument, or from me to show him the book with pictures, but by incremental misunderstandings and deliberate errors in my layout. Slowly making the masonry boxes shallower. Then showing him an improved draft. Marshal was always intrigued by the mystique of a strong draft in a well-built chimney.

Eventually we built what we imagined were close approximations of a Rumford design. The chimneys worked better. It sounded exotic when Marshal got into his sales pitch to the farmers in the rural counties. We built their decorative-masonry heat-machines based on colonial American thermodynamic science -- what he actually told them was an old American design he had learned in Ethiopia. Everywhere for Marshal seemed to be America, even when he spent a year in Saudi Arabia where he was dry. He told me about how they lay one concrete block per day like some people would speak of streets with gold pavers. It was his eye witness account.

We worked for this one farmer, a prosperous guy with a pallet mill, out north of Moravia. We had built a 6' wide firebox, a split cobble breast, and a raised hearth of bluestone. Marshal had spent a lot of time fussed up over this one fireplace. It had to be his best monument. We worked through all of the stones to pick the best and most interested of them. I spent an entire day to put a hole through the keystone so that we could fit the handle to the damper opener-spiral. Then we did a random flag floor, and then built a dry sink all in the same room. This was above their dairy room and had a hand-crank wood elevator to it. The farmer made real good apple cider that he kept cool in the dairy room below. Each day at the end of day he would give us each a cold tall glass. Pretty heady stuff it was. So when we got finished there we had to have a party and all the farm hands and neighbors around were invited. I met a guy that hunted rabbits. There were pitchers of the hard cider filled from the barrel brought up on the elevator.

It was not long before Marshal was fully animated, what with the first fire and the good draw on a tall chimney. He danced. Times like this I had learned it was smart to stand directly behind him because he had a tendency to fall over backwards like an ironing board let go all of a sudden. He jumped up on the hearth and danced like it was a jig, even without music, everyone watched. With their attention in hand he lit to tell the story of the stones that he had put into their fireplace. He pointed at the mother stone, it was yellow sandstone. Then he pointed out the father, a hell of a fat red igneous stone. Then onto the children in a row all the way down to the littlest baby. A family to ring the hearth of the breast. I was behind him; he kept going and did not fall. Then there was the moon stone, a heavy mother, a large chunk of natural iron that he had cursed because it would not cut. I had a crush on the farmer's daughter but would not tell her so.

One time we met a kid who had gone to a school in Holland to learn to be a stonemason. From the way this guy talked, I became convinced that to go to school would not produce a stonemason, only a talking imitation. I never saw him lift a stone (he probably would have herniated himself), but he sure could talk a good line. In my career I've met plenty of people with a desire to play with stones for a livelihood that would be better applied their meager talents to retail sales or as hair cutters.

It was not often we worked projects where there were other trades and for the most part we avoided a whole lot of people. When you work like forever there is little left over for social life. This one project the block mason's brother was a carpenter who had cut off all the fingers to his hammer hand with a dado saw. It was a Saturday and his 10-year old son was there to watch. The lesson was don't drink beer and saw wood at the same time, leastways, not before noon. He had all his fingers wired back on but he had no insurance so he had to work with one arm hauling blocks for his brother. That should have been the interesting part of this story. Marshal was convinced that one of the family members on the crew had stolen his wristwatch. In the morning he cursed the block mason under his breath and I heard all of it. Towards noon he cursed the block mason's son who was mixing the mortar. Then after lunch it was their wives who brought their meals and had left an hour before. Then the almost fingerless carpenter witht eh real sore arm was blamed. They were by all estimations a shifty and devious clan of thieves. I was agitated to hear of such despicable actions on the part of tradesmen to do such an underhanded thing as steal a working man's watch. It was a terrible thing. I vowed to Marshal that I would observe them and that if there was any opportunity to make amends and retrieve his watch I would not hesitate to beat them all silly with the 4' level. I worried the entire night.

Next morning Marshal revealed that his wife had found his watch tucked down between his mattress and the headboard. There is always a thing to be said for a bit of patience.

Some twenty years later, moved on out of the area and no longer any threat of competition for my mentor, I had an opportunity to do a small amount of work on the facade at Carnegie Hall. I contacted the local hometown newspaper and talked them into doing a short article with a picture. I later learned that Marshal happened to be lain in hospital when the article appeared. A tree that he had been cutting down for firewood had hit him. His wife showed him the article. Marshal had been through a lot and could not remember which of his many helpers I was, but his wife reminded him that I was the one who wore funny hats. He remembered. I was told that he cried. I was glad the article mentioned him, because Marshal died in that bed. And sure enough, not many days go by that I do not hear him tell me to get to work.

Boom Lift Safety

2010-10-11T15:43:00.001-07:00

Buster should have been wearing a harness!

007 Metabolic Rates, Speed and Consumption

2010-10-01T02:09:00.001-07:00

“Take any part of this book and go to the end of it. You will find yourself thinking of the next step to be taken in that direction. Perhaps you will need new materials, new technologies.” John Cage, "An Autobiographical Statement"

Do we live in the fast lane, or do we live slow and savor every second of our time on the planet?

In either case, fast or slow for a restoration project an histo presto estimator needs to be able to apply an appropriate cost value.

Fast or slow there is a disparity between high and low metabolic rates in the manner of learning that a workforce experiences when they work in differing geographic environments. This disparity of rate of skill learning, and differences in understandings of traditional materials and building processes from one geographic area to another can have a subtle and easily ignored impact on an estimate for historic work.

The rate of metabolism is the amount of energy used within a period of time. In our case here we are talking human energy expended as individuals, as tradespeople, as design professionals, as communities of teams working together on historic structures.

It is easily noticeable that the metabolic rate of human activity and social interaction of all types in a dense urban area tends to be higher than in a rural one. People who work together learn together. People who work close together in groups inevitably talk and educate each other in working groups, and where there is a concentration of specific types of work there are specific sets of skills retained, learned or expanded in their development.

When I first became aware of this notion of metabolic rate connected with geographic location was on a visit from Brooklyn to a meeting in Washington DC at the National Trust offices where I was asked, as an aside and not directly relevant to the topic of the meeting, “What do you think of aluminum siding?”

At that time we lived in Greenpoint-Williamsburg, Brooklyn in an Italian neighborhood where the aluminum siding salesmen had in the 60s and 70s gone bonkers and covered over all of the gingerbread and Victorian 19th c board-work of the three and four story building stock. What I saw around me was an aging aluminum siding that presented not only aluminum, but color selected by property owners with an expression of their own cultural aesthetic, and a community that had obviously bought into the expressed merits of aluminum siding. As a built environment in itself I found the exploration and detailing of what can be done with aluminum siding to be quite interesting and inventive. So, my initial reaction to the question was that I like aluminum siding.

Though I knew that there was something wrong with my answer I had not put the aluminum siding there on the facades, so I did not feel culpable for the existence of it, and I was curious and remain curious what will be decided in future to maintain or restore it. When the aluminum siding falls off there is often an asphalt faux brick/stone sheeting, and when that falls off there is wood clapboard siding, where it has not rotted, a case in point of preservation by neglect. Occasionally a house can be found where aluminum siding was never applied and the original fabric of the wood clad structure is intact (most often unpainted), and quite often the original carpentry work is elegant in simple details. To make repairs to aluminum siding when it fails can present as many conundrums as needed to restore historic brickwork, just that nobody on the larger histo presto radar particularly cares about aluminum siding. And I agree that there are a whole lot of envelope and moisture related problems with aluminum siding, as well as with vinyl and that neither material is the zero-maintenance solution that many homeowners may have bought into.

The person who asked me was the executive director of an historic trades training program for the National Park Service, an architect by profession, and it was quickly apparent to me that they did not like aluminum siding.

I note that, and based on my subsequent years of experience, that the National Park Service is not likely to initiate a program for restoration of aluminum siding, any more than they are going to be interested in restoration of historic house trailers, even if they have a few in their remote desert portfolio, but that if there is going to be a revival or development of the trade skills needed to restore and conserve aluminum siding it is likely to be driven by the local fix-it-upper folks in the urban communities of the likes of Brooklyn where aluminum siding is prevalent and concentrated.

Skill sets develop and are maintained based on an employed need. We have only to look to the development of the Brownstone revival industry, where stone facades are often scraped back and replaced with a faux brownstone stucco, and colored-stucco is the trade practice that is learned, to wonder what the future preservation movement will look like around aluminum siding.

But, moving on, in the New York City environment there is a concentration of tall masonry buildings and likewise a concentration on a workforce that becomes accustomed to the methods and skills employed to maintain and restore a masonry building stock, and to work on tall buildings. When one moves away from the urban concentration, say north into Westchester and Connecticut the historic building stock tends more toward wood construction and the buildings are lower in height and thus craftspeople who work in more rural environments learn to practice a different set of skills with a focus on differing materials than their citified peers. In this respect metabolic rate is associated with a geographic determinism rooted in the characteristics of the local building stock.

When one is looking at estimating labor costs when moving traditional trades between zones of rural or urban, even when from urban to urban (Boston to Philadelphia) then a consideration has to be made for a whole set of factors that may not be so readily apparent when estimating new-build work. In new-build work materials tend to be highly standardized and building methodologies applied to standardized materials tend to be similar where labor is perceived in an estimate as a commodity that may only require a cost-of-living factor of adjustment between one place and another. The process of labor and time involved in installation of sheetrock in Chicago is not going to differ in any significant manner from that in Houston, though what will differ is the local labor arrangements, wages and cost-of-living. Though a traditional plaster wall will require a similar amount of time and skill and methodology in New Orleans as in Scotland, there are trade skills and qualities of understanding and practice that are quite specific to local areas of concentration.

Regardless, not all differences of quality of level of needed traditional skills can be attributed to an urban or rural difference. Often differences are rooted in the natural environment where the traditional materials were derived, and in a context of historic transportation technologies as to how at the times of the original construction the materials were moved around. If a particular clay pit on the North Fork of Long Island was used to produce Salmon brick and the brick, which appear unique to the local area, were then moved to the local building sites by mule cart it does not provide quite the same dispersion pattern of building material as if they were moved by barge or rail.

Thus one can trace out the dispersion of Rosendale natural cement around the globe as it went by barge and boat and, as there is a slightly different method of working with the material when repointing stonework than if one is using a contemporary Portland cement based mortar it would make sense to employ tradespeople in restoration that are familiar with working with the historic material. But the number of tradespeople familiar with working with natural cement is going to be directly proportional to the application of the material in restoration work. If natural cement is not used, and other materials are substituted for it, then there will be a differing set of trade skills employed, even though differences of methodology may appear very small and subtle they can exist and they can have an impact on the end result and likewise on the overall cost of the restoration process.

A case in point, as to rural to urban, is the task to import a blacksmith, let us say from the Berkshires, with an idea for them to do in-field forge welding of wrought iron on an historic cast iron fire tower in the middle of a city park, on top of a tall rock, surrounded by a local network of drug dealers in Harlem, armed with golf clubs, cell phones and plenty of lookouts. First one has the cost to take the time to find a blacksmith willing to work in the city (there is not much call for blacksmiths to have established shops in Manhattan), hopefully a blacksmith set up to do portable work, and then one has to deal with logistics to get them situated to the top of the rock, and one needs to make sure they are happy (quite often rural folks are just plain not happy to work in the city), and then one needs to make sure they get out of the project, and the city whole of body, in a single piece with all arms and legs intact, healthy and alive. [I am reminded of the young fellow from Buffalo who worked for us in Manhattan and shortly after 9/11 had some sort of mental breakdown... as was evident from the patchwork mess he directed his crew to make of a flat roof project, and how he fled town to spend several months to ride around on a bicycle in what was for him a more sane Cambodian countryside and where he seemed happy to write us on the occasional e-mail to inform us that he was eating fried maggots for dinner. Who knows!]

Another variation is that outside of urban concentrations there is invariably the lonely and isolated stone or masonry building in the small town, often a bank, or a town hall, or courthouse that has been muddled and messed up with well meaning masonry fudges by the local masons who rightly know new brick or new block work, it is the new masonry that they are most often hired to perform, but that they have no practical training, experience or understanding of masonry restoration. In this case a restoration contractor can bring in experienced masonry restoration trades from the city, but as the city tends to have a higher cost of living, and higher wages, it becomes a competitive cost problem for the estimator to juggle against the lower wages and lower experience of the local rural trades.

It never helps if property owners do not know or do not care about appropriate methods of restoration repair and themselves have no clue as to what exactly is about to happen to their building – often irreversible damage through gross ignorance -- when the local mason, or the well meaning volunteer group patches over all the missing brick with a slurry of Portland cement, to make it harder, stronger and last longer. What they get is very durable with a longer lasting decay.

There is also pride of place or a natural desire to protect livelihood close to home. If Joe the Mason is your brother-in-law then why would you listen to Fred from Chicago? This conundrum of dislocation and ignorance of good restoration practice becomes more interesting if the masonry structure to be worked on is difficult to access, such as a lighthouse on a restricted access island. And not to forget out-of-town costs for accommodations, per diem, transportation and meal allowances. Think in terms of working on the moon or restoration of the face on Mars. Life support can be a problem.

Everyone does everything different than everyone else wherever you go to look. Just as there is a metabolic rate that occurs in the organic process of building up of traditional trades resources, and the differences between one geographic locality and another, there is also a disparity in the amount of hands-on ‘business knowledge’ one acquires in contracting histo presto work.

Most historic restoration work is undertaken by relatively small business concerns that can be as small as one sole trade’s practitioner up to larger organizations of several hundred employees, but even with the larger outfits they are many degrees smaller in scale and in business activity and accumulated business experience as say giants such as Bechtel or Halliburton. You will not find very many Harvard MBA graduates doing hands on work in historic restoration, leastways not if their drive is to earn money. In part this is conditioned by the manner in which small boutique construction businesses develop from bright idea with pick-up truck and shovel to larger entity but almost always remain connected to the leadership, sweat and inspiration of one or two key people.

The needs of the historic preservation industry itself, which can be very localized as we have expressed here, and the necessary fragmented knowledge of the trades skill sets for traditional work limits the degree to which projects can be reasonably managed in complexity, and limits the degree to which a company can develop an internal business structure able to interface within the environment of a market niche. The internal structure of a restoration business begins with a response to the needs of a local market, for the most part, rarely for a global market. If it does not respond to the needs of the local market, of any viable market then it will not continue to exist as a business.

There is a phenomenon in masonry construction that I know of as butter joints (I once heard them referred to as Coney Island joints, but I’m not sure what the speaker may have been smoking). These are extremely thin joints, often less than 1/8th of an inch in the horizontal or vertical. The industrial process of brick fabrication with metal molds and steam power in the 19th c resulted in compact brick with very clean dimensional tolerances and the practice of brickwork for a time took on the challenge of these close tolerances and the result was butter joints. Also a result was some very intricate corbelled work, molded work and complicated arches.

In general less exacting, less ornate brickwork tends to have joint widths of ¼” to 3/8” inch. In the business of repointing brickwork an industry has developed to cut and repoint these thicker joints that first began with cutting loose or deteriorated mortar out with chisel and hammer (sometimes pneumatic powered but not so early on before portable pneumatic power was widely available), a labor intensive process to use a hammer and chisel to be avoided if possible as it is costly in labor and can easily cause damage to the brick. For the most part due to the cost and the difficulty the cutting and repointing of mortar joints, as it is practiced today, was avoided. Then carborundum grinder blades came along and as long as the blades were thinner than the joint thickness they worked reasonably well, though the blades wore down in their diameter and needed to be replaced several times in a day. They required a good deal of fuss with labor expenditure to use them. Then 4” diameter diamond grinder blades came along that did not reduce in their diameter as they were used. Though they cost more than carborundum they worked longer and a laborer could go a few days without a need to stop to change them out. The drawback with diamond grinder blades is that they work too well, they cut through mortar as some used to say ‘like butter’ but they also cut through brick and stone and hands and fingers like it was butter. Thus, in unskilled and inexperienced hands, or with mechanics that don’t know or do not care, diamond grinder blades can be dangerous to historic fabric and to people.

We were doing a project on an old theater on 2nd Ave on precast concrete panels that consisted of white marble aggregate and a nice salmon colored mortar. With a bit of care it was not too difficult to match up patching materials and blend them in to make repairs. The task was to do a minimal amount of intervention, and to seal a few cracks here and there. Unfortunate for us the foreman (the one who was caught out on a penthouse terrace on his previous project at 1:00 am naked) was drunk in the shower one night at his hotel room in Jersey City, fell, broke his leg and was unable to work. Short a foreman on the project he suggested his buddy take over for him, with assurance that he would make sure his buddy understood the job at hand. I was not able to get over to the project to oversee the transition as quickly as would have been best, as when I arrived at the project the new foreman had instructed the crew to cut out all of the cracks they could find in the precast. There were a lot of them. It reminded me of snakes -- all over the wall. It was certainly a case of doing too much too quickly and it bore in on me the hard lesson that diamond grinder blades can work really really too well. There were already problems on the project, the shop steward was a meth head who told us that he had just finished up a prison gig for manslaughter, and after we made all those irreversible worms and destroyed the historic fabric the project went from unpleasant to total nightmare in very short order. After we were terminated and another subcontractor brought in a determination was made by the architect to put a coating over everything, a monolithic color. The character of the otherwise quite fine precast was lost.

For a while diamond grinder blades seemed to be universally taboo on historic work, but then in more enlightened circles it was discerned that not all restoration trades mechanics are created equal, not all of them are stupid idiots and that it was not the tool and the technology that caused the destruction, but the operator. In light of this knowledge some projects require that the mechanics prove out their understanding and competence to use diamond grinders.

A student in an academic program, a young well meaning person who had negligible trade experience but still an interest in hands-on devises a methodology for raking out and repointing of butter joints using a kitchen knife and wax paper. Their peer-reviewed article is published in a respected journal and then eventually filters along to be disseminated to mechanics in the field who are used to work with masonry, and have met up with some butter joints, and who find the proposed methodology and tools to not only be impractical in execution, but apt to cause an increase in significant damage to the brick masonry as well as laughter. In this example, and as it would be in most actual instances, damage to historic fabric is a result contrary to all desired standards and expectations.

But, going back to the need of a restoration contractor to have a business to satisfy a market need, and metabolic rates of learning -- there have never been chisels, carborundum blades, and not to date diamond blades, thin enough to handle cutting out of butter joints. Decades ago, before diamond grinder blades, I spent a day with a young graduate of an historic preservation program newly employed by the Landmarks Preservation Commission driving them around to look at early historic restoration work that we had done with our business. What they wanted to know was what experience we had with repointing butter joints. The answer at the time was an uncomfortable, “None.” With the qualification that if given the opportunity we were willing to invest in learning and training of a workforce to do the work, but only if there were a need for it and that we would be paid for the work and not do it as a charity for a non-profit or a demonstration for academic purposes. At that time if they could have found anyone with experience in repointing of butter joints it would have been remarkable and it was my impression that they should be happy that they had at least found someone interested to do it in a good way.

But it also leads to how theoretical expectations can be disconnected from what it is possible to accomplish when working with materials, technology and trades. Nowadays there are new tools and technologies, and understanding of historic building materials, that make cutting of butter joints less of a headache and there are people and contractors with experience, if you can find them.

There are a number of ways to structure a contract for work, lump sum, design build, time and materials and as many variations as people seem to be capable to imagine and agree upon. In my experience in the New York environment the majority of work is contracted on a lump sum basis and one would never think to do it otherwise. It is the expectation of the market that the contractor will provide a fixed cost for the work and to do this regardless of how complicated or tenuously experimental and open-ended the work is (remember the butter joints never before dealt with). In historic work there is often a venture into unknown but deceptively familiar territory.

There is the straightforward unknown that one can try to anticipate in an estimate. In the composite patch and repair of delaminated brownstone a difficulty is that one can never tell by looking at a façade, particularly when only able to look from the sidewalk, just how far back the stone will need to be removed before sound stone is encountered. A greater depth increases not only the labor to remove, and replace, but the composite patch materials are relatively expensive and over a large area an extra one inch of removal over the area of a townhouse façade can be quite costly in labor and materials. A sensible approach to reduce risk on the part of the contractor would be to go at this on a time and material basis, but in the city it rarely is agreed to by the property owner as they worry that they will be cheated, as they often are. People in the city may also learn to distrust each other faster than for people who live and do business in the country. To do work on a time and material basis requires a level of trust. A similar problem to the brownstone is in terra cotta repairs where visual inspection from the ground simply is not adequate to assess quantities of work needed until one is fully engaged in the work. The tendency is in these open-ended cases when an estimate or negotiation is short on adequate cost, to either cheat, pray for the best, or to over compensate in costing the work.

Another factor is that in histo presto work there is invariably an amalgamation of a whole grouping of needs that require different approaches, different sub-trades, and quite often these projects are wrapped in an RFP without the originating designer having any clue how complicated they have packaged the work. I would say in 80% of projects there is always one small task that the estimator has never encountered or experienced and subsequently has absolutely no rational clue how to cost out.

An associate based in Providence, RI, as well as a painter in Philly (now since retired to WV), does all of their work on a time and material basis and when you ask them for a lump sum, fixed cost, they are flustered and not prepared to think of their estimates in a manner to accommodate higher levels of risk in that they could be wrong. This difference of approach is not a bad thing in any manner, but it is a problem when one is not prepared in assembling a bid to realize just how differently everyone approaches costing of their work. The bid process generally runs to a deadline, a due-by date, and when time is short one does not want to have to backtrack and try to understand if the costs provided actually cover all of the described work, or leave a loophole that could later be costly, and more so costly in a crisis because not anticipated anyone at all.

A useful model by which to visualize these differences of metabolic rate is in the concept of pace layering.

I credit Stewart Brand in a keynote presentation at a conference in Chicago for the Association for Preservation Technology International for introducing pace layering to an audience of the historic preservation industry. Pace layering can be visualized as a set of concentric rings, like layers of an onion or planets revolving around the sun.

The concept is that there are slow moving communicators on the interior layer, and fast moving communicators on the outer layers – everyone co-existing in real time in the same world and on the same planet. Just some folks are slower moving and some are faster. Again we get back to that metabolic rate. Again we get back to, Do you live fast or do you lives slow?

In the center circle we may have equivalents of social communication through stone tablets and banging on drums. The stone tablets are difficult to carry around, they keep breaking, the pagans had been using clay tablets before this but the records kept melting in the rain. They went to stone, for the really valuable information, but it took much longer to record. By necessity the difficulty of the media itself confined one to recording only the most essential information, like the Mayan recording of the end of human civilization in the year 2012, and not a lot of vague and ephemeral twitter. The banging of drums reach as far as the sound will carry, similar to the messages sent out at noon or in an emergency call by our volunteer fire houses where the message is local. It is neighbor talking across the fence at the edge of the yard to neighbor about the efficacy of woodstoves vs. pellet stoves or the ambient nature of fireplaces. It is information that moves across the landscape slowly.

Then we have the printing press, people that read, books, newspapers, telephones and television, the internet.

In the outer circles we have a rapidity of distribution and process of information that is fast and moving information around between widely disparate groups of people, all of whom get to digest, or block off the stream. But this speed of information occurs in a world where the participant can be moving real slow or real fast at other times and on other layers, a day on the computer and a day in a rowboat without cell phone a day on the cell phone in a row boat on the internet. Or fast moving people can stop, get out of their high gear and talk to a slow moving person, go visit someone dying in the hospital. Or we can have the wheelbarrow operator talking on his bluetooth earbud to his portfolio broker while he moves we t concrete.

Information comes at us like sound to the ear, though we can shut our eyes, rarely are we able to shut our ears, and it is like this with information, once it hits us we have no recourse but to process it into our thinking. We may attempt to shut it off, but truly once something is known to us, as we can ask Eve and Adam who knowingly ate apples off the Tree of Knowledge; it is really really hard to put what we come to know back into a box of ignorance. We need in some ways to know what we know and let it be at that, we need to be able to go with the flow of our not knowing and our knowing in an indeterminate world.

One manner by which to deal with an influx of too much information, to the supernormal stimulation of FAST media is to play dumb, be dumb, and embrace the dumbness in ourselves. Or, as one business acquaintance says, “Put it in another room and shut the door, turn the key, voila!” Or we can step off the grid, step back from the flow, get out of the stream of information, stop watching television, don’t read newspapers and stay off the computer. But to play dumb in an estimate is to ignore the risk of losing against reality.

Though these days we can hook a text up to a computer that will cut letters into a slab of stone as if we were to push PRINT on our word processor the stone remains heavy to move around, as a stone is a stone. As to the drums we can do a video and embed it into our website, now suddenly the local alarm is made global, if there is anyone inclined to listen. But the post-Luddite population, off the grid, will remain as much as they can possibly manage to remain out of range of the barrage of communication. If the stone gets to them it will be by mule, if the drum sounds for them it will be by Jessie who makes a call to them for dinner. And for whom the bell tolls, though I had intentionally left bells out of this up to now.

The metaphoric construct of concentric circles has a few other interesting potentials besides slow and fast moving communicators tied or not tied to information streams. Stewart intimates that the circles turn in one world, like a prayer wheel or the tire on a car, or the device of the story here is as the black arm of a large clock. That there is a relative point of the present, the here and now, at which all existing, living communicators are on this planet earth in one time, today, now and that though the communicators on the most outer circles are covering more territory in any one day than those slower moving on the interior, everyone is in the same world, be here now, and most of everyone is hearing something, if it even only be a bird outside at the feeder that cheerily sings in the morning sun. There is no science fiction to this, while you are here doing this, reading this, someone is somewhere else, a whole lot of someone else’s, doing something entirely different than what you are doing now reading this sentence. I sip from a cold cup of coffee as we speak.

That blacksmith that we were looking for earlier to do the forge welding in Harlem is on the planet today. The masonry mechanic that we need to cut and repoint mortar joints on the sandstone of lighthouse this week is hanging off of the side of a building on West 43rd Street. The timber framer, having heard all of this stuff several times before is waiting patiently to read to the end of this paragraph.

Another aspect of this metaphor of concentric circles is the communication relationship between the rings of circles. One might presume that on the inner circles, where information is moving slowly, that those on the outer circle look like speedy ghosts whizzing past. They do, actually, look highly irrelevant if your sole interest and immediate focus in life is rearranging stones in a dry wall. Some would say, “Oh, that really fast whizzing past us person has poor timing.” From the outer rims of the wheel those on the interior look like they are frozen in space, statues of stone, as well they are in a relative manner stuck there not moving very quickly, like lizards with cold blood not able to get their scales up until the sun comes warm onto the rocks.

Often there are discussions on the economic disparity between those who can afford a computer and broadband and those who live off the grid, have no computer, and have no connection. An even larger issue in this disparity is not the economics but the exponential contrast in metabolic rate in the accumulation, processing and distribution of information, in short, how quickly and efficiently that we learn.

So one day we have this slow communicating person who bravely puts their arm out into the fast stream and suddenly gets it ripped off. Bloody unfortunate mess that is. Or, let us say, to jump onto a fast moving train you need to run along side of it a bit and jump. If you miss, well, good luck.

Or a person on the outermost ring finds a stone, writes on it with a magic marker, then throws it in to the inside core, I mean, we are all on the same field so why not throw things back and forth? It is like the e-mails that we get with the signature that advises us to think about what we are doing to the environment before we print out the e-mail. In other words, keep moving fast, don’t stop, don’t take what I tell you and carve a stone out of it. Besides, give me fifteen minutes and I will probably say something else to contradict myself.

My current business signature advises everyone to think about the environment before reading the e-mail that I have sent them. I strategically place my signature, as with every signature, at the end of the e-mail where most readers will not become aware of the environmental impact of the message until after they have read the body of the e-mail. Too bad.

You will never know the value of information that you receive until you have received it and had an opportunity to process it. Good to go to sleep. Sometimes you will know immediately the potential value of information, other times it can take a long time for a small piece of information to reveal value. In the majority of cases information may not be of any value to you ever. But in essence, all raw information for an histo pesto estimator is good information.

Ken's Mystery Mortar

2010-08-04T03:21:00.000-07:00

Four part video series... mortar aggregates extraordinaire...

Of Hearth & Home

2010-05-04T08:06:00.000-07:00

Newburyport Preservation Trust, September 16, 2008, Newburyport, MA

A lecture and slide presentation by a traditional trades brick mason "Dick the Bricky" with a lot of New England early fireplace and architecture information.

Stanford White Library Fireplace

2010-04-09T05:13:00.000-07:00

This fireplace resides within a Stanford White designed library interior at the former Lamb's Club on West 44th Street in New York City, currently The Chatwal, a boutique hotel. It is the larger of two fireplaces that we worked on at this project location.

As a subcontractor to Traditional Line Architectural Restoration, we documented and deconstructed the fireplace in 2007. At that time the bricks were crated and put in storage. In 2010 we reconstructed the masonry of the fireplace. All woodwork reconstruction is by Traditional Line. The historic reconstruction of the library, including the masonry, was subject to approval of the NY Landmarks Preservation Commission staff as well as the review of Li/Saltzman Architects.

For a detailed day-by-day photo portfolio go here.

After and Before

De-Construction of a Gold Paint Film

2010-02-01T06:15:00.001-08:00

Tony Shafrazi is known for a number of items the most famous of which being his attack on Picasso’s Guernica in 1974. A lesser known incident was his commission of the artist Zadik Zadikian to cover 1,000 bricks with gold leaf at a museum in Teheran, Iran.

In an odd twist these two incidents, one of symbolic desecration and the other of faux bullion, came together when an artist (or wannabe artist) who claimed a relationship with Zadikian threw a few gallons of gold paint onto the cast iron and glass façade of Shafrazi’s then Noho (Manhattan, North of Houston) gallery. Note 1: Shafrazi has since moved his gallery to new digs in Chelsea. Note 2: Shafrazi is also known for his connection with Andy Warhol, Dennis Hopper and Keith Haring.

Through connection w/ an artist friend who moves in those circles we got the call to come and remove the gold paint from the façade. It was a hurry up job, we had to get in there before either the paint dried fully or the television news crews actually caught on to the affair. The task was not quite as simple or straight forward as most graffiti removal gigs as the “artiste” who seemed to want as much happening as possible for his protest was present for the full duration of the deconstruction of his vandalism... I mean, excuse me, his work of ART.

We can only surmise how much he had practiced the dance-arc of throw of paint prior to the execution in a sort of Jackson Pollack enthusiasm. The canvas in this case being vertical and a somewhat permanent attachment to the street environment within a soon-to-be Historic District.

When I say the artiste was present for the de-construction I mean in the sense that across the quaint cobble street he parked his 1970s era convertible Cadillac that was painted in leopard colors (the hand-applied paint technique on the car was sophomoric and of little intrinsic expression) with all sorts of zoo-like fluffery on the interior and he proceeded each day to dance around in leopard skin tights, his hair cut like a razorback and bleached gold-blond, with a clunky camcorder on his lithe shoulder while he video-taped the process of the work. This was before YouTube and before cell phones with video cameras and I can only rely on the vision of my faltered memory.

The small crew, there are only so many mechanics that can be fit to work across the width of the usual cast iron façade of 20-25 feet, very little aware of their role in an ‘art happening’ -- or even aware of what an art happening is -- went diligently to work with paint stripper, water blast machines (noisy) and decked in full rain gear, boldly-yellow -- pants, coats and hoods. The artiste made his noise on the street, danced around and recorded the deconstruction event. He was lucky he did not get dragged into a back alley and clobbered a few times.

I am reminded of the incident this morning because tenants in the building on the upper floors participated by throwing small flower pots off of their fire escapes. Nobody was hurt in the process, as I remember, but the crew certainly did complain. They did not complain about the crazy man dancing around on the street, whom they mostly found mildly amusing, but they were concerned that they not get hit in the head. I shared their concern for personal safety.

I am reminded of the flower pots as I contemplate a possible future gig where we worry that monkeys may throw bananas at us as we work below them. If monkeys can type out Shakespeare then I am certain that they can mimic post-modern art.

The Sidewalk Lady

2010-01-28T02:53:00.001-08:00

The sidewalk lady started out as a potential business lead from an associate in our industry. The result was 1. that we got a pretty good story, 2. we now question any references from associates who do not investigate the leads that they pass on (we try to ask more questions before we say yes), and 3. we managed to extricate ourselves from further involvement with the sidewalk lady.

Our associate told us that the sidewalk lady had a problem with the platform of brick at the entry door on her house, her stoop as she called it. We spoke with her briefly on the phone. She asked us to visit her house and look at her problem. Though her house is on Long Island where we are located it is at a village quite a bit out of the way for any of our usual travels. We were not particularly inclined to spend several hours, let alone the cost of gas, to go look at a problem that we had no clue what it would amount to in a paying gig. So after much effort on her part to act the ‘desperate grandmother' in need of assistance, which took several phone calls with her calling us every day, at times several times a day to beg us to visit her house – we convinced her to send us a photograph. We had to promise to return the photograph. We promised.

A few weeks later a Polaroid photo showed up. It was a really bad photo and I could not make out from it very much of anything. It showed brick. For all the fuss we had gone through I imagined this had to be the side view to a large brick structure. The address was at a relatively well-to-do area of the island best as we could tell and we imagined this must be one hell of a nice house. We were trying to visualize what the problem was that we were being presented. She had told us there were white lines. We were clueless. What white lines? We sent the photo back. With it we sent a work proposal for what it would cost for us to visit and investigate the problems. We figured that it would take at least a day between going there, talking with her, doing some probes, knocking around a few bricks or whatever and then to write up a recommendation report and a repair proposal.

Here is an excerpt from our letter: “I have looked over the photo that you have sent to us. The photo is being returned to you enclosed. You are correct that there is not much that can be seen form the photo but it does provide us with a more accurate idea of the problem that you have. Though we are not certain that we can make much of a difference it looks like what we can do is use a pneumatic carving chisel to remove the harder portion of the efflorescence and then to use an acidic cleaner and see if there is an improvement. The appearance may be less than acceptable, but it will be better than it is now, and it will avoid the need to remove and replace the brickwork.”

She did not want to pay for our time to do that investigative work. We understood. No problem. We were perfectly willing to leave it alone. She kept calling us every few days. “Please please please come visit at my house.”

Eventually we got a paying gig in New Jersey and on the way back to Long Island, even though it was at least an hour out of our way in travel time, we made arrangements to visit at her house. Over the course of the previous weeks everything seemed to have gotten worse with her masonry and it had now spread to her concrete sidewalk. She had been talking with all sorts of people about her dire situation including the Portland Cement Association, including a contractor who was writ up in the NY Times for doing shot blast on concrete parking decks.

Shot blast uses a machine that shoots steel bee-bees at the concrete and at the same time sucks them and the pulverized concrete back up again. It is used to remove the top surface of concrete in order to roughen up in preparation for a surface bonded coating... it is a fairly standard process with large parking garages. The equipment is expensive, the crews need to be experienced, and the money is made in getting in, doing large areas quickly, and then moving out. It is paid for by the square foot of area blasted. Quite often it is done in an operating garage with the need to deal with the hassles of vehicles... but not always the need to deal with grandmother types.

It was getting toward evening and we were tired from a day of work. What we really wanted was to get home after a few days away. We also wanted to get her to stop calling us. We found ourselves slightly lost in a suburban neighborhood. Not as upscale as we had imagined, but not terribly shabby either. We finally found the address and our first impression was that the house, with wood siding, looked as if it was last painted in the early 1950s. Our other impression was that there must not be anyone home, even though we had called, and been called, several times to confirm the appointment. We parked. We went up to a door where there was a light on outside, not exactly sure we had the correct information. No, this was it, she answered the door. Through the screen we asked her where the stoop was at that she had the problem with. Mind you, we consciously did not want to be invited inside.

She said, “You are standing on it.”

I looked down at my feet and instead of a magnificent, even a modestly apportioned stoop what I found was about twenty brick laid flat for about nine square feet of area, I mean it was flat 3’ x 3’ in size., smaller than a kitchen table. The brick was trim around the outside of the square with concrete in the middle. It was not the side view of anything that I had been looking at in her precious photograph.

Well, if we were not raised to try to be polite, and if it was not that we wanted to get her to stop calling every few days, we may have been smart enough to turn around and run back to the street, get in the truck and keep driving.

We could not see anything at all wrong with her brick stoop. She insisted that there was. Not only was there something wrong with her stoop but her neighbor during the winter had thrown lime and rock salt onto her sidewalk and therefore she swore that her concrete was rapidly deteriorating.

Other than normal weathering, where the stone aggregate is lightly exposed, we saw nothing to complain about with her sidewalk. Mind you, this was not a 10’ wide sidewalk in 5’ squares like in the city; it was not even 4’ wide. It was a 3’ wide sidewalk, about as small as one can get with a sidewalk other than not having one at all.

She wanted to know if we could shot blast it for her. We expressed hesitation. She went on about how that was what she read about in the NY Times and it must be the only proper way to take care of her sidewalk. She was perturbed that the shot blast guy no longer returned her phone calls.

We told her that she had some very interesting problems.

“I need to show you what my neighbor did,” she said as she pulled us out further along toward the street. “You see that?”

What?

“He did that?”

He did?

“It was not there before.”

There was a slight indentation in the surface of the concrete. I got down on my hands and knees and put my head down close and looked across the surface. It took me a few minutes, with her asking questions the whole time and my trying to be polite, before I realized that it had to a child’s bare footprint from when the concrete was first poured.

She asked me what it was. I told her a footprint. She asked, “How did my neighbor do that?”

I said, "We have no clue. We don’t know your neighbor." Though we were worried at this point that she would go over and drag out her neighbor to engage in the debate. Instead she asked what could be done for it. I looked at it and told her she may want to consider telling her friends that it is the sign of a mysterious visitor.

I told her that a story may be the best option as to put a patch on it would only make it look worse, and the patch would not last, and the half cup of mortar needed was hardly going to pay for our coffee, let alone a lunch ticket.

We eventually got her backed up to her stoop. We told her we knew a mason in the area who was looking for work (we made him real happy when we passed on the referral, and I fully intend that note of happiness in a sarcastic manner).

And as she was standing on her stoop I had this impression that nobody would ever believe this story, so I asked her if I could take her picture on her stoop in front of her door.

She perked up, stood up in a proud pose in her house coat and said, “Are you going to make me famous?”

Google Wave for Historic Preservation Projects

2009-12-17T08:18:00.000-08:00

Within our small company, where our core capacity is to assist architects and structural engineers in their investigations of historic structures, we have been playing with Google Wave for more than a month now.

At first our reaction was, “What do we do now?”

It took us a while to catch on but we have increasingly been opening a Wave for every new project that goes to contract, and for every project that we have in the funnel with a hope to lead it to contract.

For the most part our projects are fairly quick. Our focus is on a rapid turn-over of 1-3 day field gigs with a combination of a long-range activity in our collaborative Business Development services that we undertake with a small number of associated partners.

Though there are a number of collaborative web based services that are available, and we have used and continue to participate in a bunch of them, we have found that Google Wave provides something that works fairly well for us. But what works for us is an asset that in itself may increase the confusion for others who want to use Google Wave – we like simple tools (screwdrivers, knives, hammers) and to build up complicated systems from scratch.

For more than twenty years I have been using my own scratch built estimating spreadsheet (begun with Lotus Symphony on an AT, but even before that on a Commodore 64, that I used to manage the cash flow of a $20M project) that as the years and the needs change I change the template and refine to suit the specific needs to estimate for all sorts of historic preservation projects.

But these complicated systems that we use are built on an aggregation of simple pieces. A drawer is a drawer regardless if you have three or four-thousand of them.

So, to have a toolbox of communication tools, as Google Wave provides, gives us the fine tuning with simple pieces that we need in order to adapt the media to the results of the desired goal of efficiently sharing of many different pieces of relatively simple information.

For collaborative work-teams on historic preservation projects it helps to be able to share and make accessible project information and files (regardless if it is room to room or country to country exchange).

Here is a list of comments on information pieces that we have assembled for our own in-house reference:

1. sharing of pdf documents

or other forms of documents that we have shared software for team members to be able to read/write/collaborate, though if we turn a written document into a pdf it is a whole lot easier to share it across platforms... and not everyone has the same document generating software, or the interest to use it

2. sharing of photographs, photographs can convey a whole lot more information in a hurry than a written document

quite often the information that a team member needs in order to take an action is information that we don't know that they need, in that case it is better to share information that we might think does not matter because we simply do not know what is important, or not

these can be photos that we take or they can be reference photos that we find online

progress photos

3. sharing of videos... same as for photos, lots and lots of information delivered in a painless manner

our original videos, store them elsewhere then connect them into a Wave (these can be project specific, or safety, training or how-to vids)

or find videos for reference online and connect them into a Wave

an engineering friend in Texas shared a video on replacement of rivets in an historic bridge and suddenly we had a more encompassing concept of what would be needed where we were being asked for a cost to extract rivets for testing on a bridge in New York

4. maps.... it helps if everyone knows where we might be going (in our case the logistic of where is the nearest clean and warm public bathroom is often a critical item in the success of a gig, or, as in one case, "Where is the water?")

satellite and 3-D views when they are convenient

how far away is it? how much will it cost to get there? Do we need a boat, a barge or a really large balloon?

5. information links

find URL links related to project sites and quickly aggregate them into a Wave where team members can use them for reference, quite often these links contain contact information that we would not otherwise think to connect with

6. cost information

entire estimate spreadsheets may not be the best use on a Wave, but small amounts of cost information can easily be shared (a short list of unit costs for a bid – information required under very short deadline by another team member who is assembling the bid package)

Google spreadsheets can be incorporated into a Wave, but we have not the incentive to move existing Excel estimate templates into the Google environment

7. convenience

having information about a specific project on a Wave makes it accessible from wherever we happen to be, it is also accessible when we have the time to make the access and not necessarily in-our-face like an e-mail that requires that we deal with it before we forget where it went

accessible from different computers, wherever we can gain access to the internet

we can access project information from a smart phone while up on a lift at a survey gig, eventually we may be able to figure out how to input information directly from the field as easily as from the office

8. contact information management

if we get in the habit to put contact information for individuals related to a project into a Wave then we all can share management of the information, I look forward to more tools along these lines

everyone on the team will know where to find it, we will avoid calling each other looking for contact information when we cannot find it

it will facilitate the 'team' to be able to move quickly when contacts need to be made in a hurry

9. team expansion

as a small group of team members becomes familiar with 'simple' uses of Google Wave then we can begin to add on, and bring up to speed additional team members (I can hardly wait until we have real-time language translation in a Google Wave)

10. project specific

Waves can be used to assemble collective information about individual projects that enables a team to work together as there are more team members with access to information pertinent to the project, and different teams associated with different projects can very quickly be assembled

11. task specific

Waves can quickly be built out from project specific Waves in order to put focus on specific task goals, once the goal is accomplished then the task specific Wave can be archived or erased, or folded back into the root wave for the project

12. scalable tools

though Google Wave at first appears to be an intimidating blank slate eventually new tools will be developed that will broaden the range of activities that collaborative project teams can engage with, the limit on tools is the human imagination and the need to solve specific problems

one example of such a tool is ongoing work on integration of collaborative real-time mind mapping (we like mind mapping for strategic planning)

another example is project related calendars, and ability to send out e-mail notifications from within a Wave, and other project management and scheduling tools

Three Syndromes for Traditional Trades

2009-11-20T05:51:00.000-08:00

In reading a column on problems that consultants have with their profession it occurred to me that traditional trades (and all the rest of us in histo presto) often have similar problems in our work when we are brought into projects, particularly at a late stage or to follow after someone else that has already mucked up the scene.

The consultant framed their issues as 'syndromes.' I assume this to mean situations that are encountered on a frequent basis and often enough to be noticeably a problem.

1. The first syndrome is coming in after someone else who didn’t do a good job.

In my book when we get to the jobsite we call this 'sloppy seconds'. There is nothing quite like when we show up at a project and find out that the previous contractor did a half-A job then split to 'unknown destination' and left a dumpster half-full in the parking lot that nobody, but nobody wants anything to do with removal from the site (been there done that, was not happy with the follow-up visit). Or the brownstone façade that is all mucked up and requires an extraordinary amount of fuss in order to straighten it out… and the end-client does not understand why (if they were overly parsimonious to begin with that could have been a root cause of the current scenario) and they are suspicious that they get ripped off once again… and they double-up on driving the 'qualified' carpenter nutso.

In historic preservation work it is more important than in almost any other construction industry to involve traditional trades early on in the plan process, trades who often bring with them a practical hands-on knowledge as to how to go at a project, let alone that they are the ones that eventually are given over responsibility to handle and interface with the heritage materials.

Then again, there is always a profit opportunity in chaos. Do not call us until you have done a thorough job of making the best mess possible.

2. The second syndrome is walking into a situation where the politics are intrusive.

We arrive invited to look at the problem with the stucco full of obnoxious cracks and we make a polite suggestion as to what to do with it and the ivy suckers.

The client DOES NOT want to involve an architect or an architectural conservator (these days that is like a giant red flag… poor mason with a love to play with stones is not in the business to help psychotic people work through their obsessive compulsive selection processes… I learned from my grandmother to avoid this choice-oriented involvement at all possible cost… I don't really care if the couch upholstery has pheasants on it or mallards – your building may be the most beautiful one on the block but to me it is one of another building, sorry) and the next thing we know is that it is not about problems with the stucco – it is about problems between the client and their family, or their neighbors, or their illicit lover, or their shrink. Yeeish!

I once got mad at the conservancy because they did not filter referrals from property owners to first see if they were insane or not. To have enough money to own a property does not immediately register a person as normal. You may notice this as well with how people drive expensive cars.

The adage that those who know how to hammer a nail believe that all problems can be solved if they hammer a nail is a bit passé.

Nowadays when I look at a project I am not so much interested in the physical aspects of the work as my first question is, "What is the primary problem that we are going to get saddled with here if we say yes?" Oddly, increasingly, we are hired with it in mind that we will solve these 'intangible' problems with a bit of sleight of hand to include judiciously applied caulk.

3. The third syndrome is the one where people are afraid you’re going to come in and make them look bad.

Well, as it is we like our clients and associates, particularly the folks that we have working alliances with – we want them to look good. It is a right golden rule thing to do.

We have no interest to make anyone look bad… well, usually we have no interest. On occasion there comes along someone that makes it very difficult to make them look good, even to make them look half ways decent, and there are the instances where it becomes a survival expedient to make sure that they not only look as bad as possible… but that you don't get any on ya.

We have friends who will stand up and punch it out when they get to this kind of an impasse. We do not agree with them, as passionate as they may feel about the wrongness of the unfairness of the dastardliness of the… in most cases, excepting those that embody a true manifestation of vile evil (in memoriam of a particular lawyer that we don't like), our advice is to wrap it up, smile, walk away.

Life gives us a finite amount of energy between when we are born and when we will be dead. Better to spend it on a laughing adventure than on a war (or otherwise figure out how to engage really good lawyers on your side and then laugh, but not too soon -- we know at least one kool nifty super spiffy lawyer to recommend).

Think about when you have encountered these syndromes in your dealings with project teams at historic sites. How did you feel about it? How did you react? Do you have any tips on best practice? If you are in the traditional trades do you think about these intangible issues with a project before you put your work proposal together? If you need help and you are not too terribly messed up in the head then call us. Then again, maybe not, we have enough problems already.

PCLS Interview: Rudy Christian

2009-05-10T10:57:00.000-07:00

Rudy Christian is currently executive director of the Preservation Trades Network as well as a partner and president of Christian & Son timber framers. Rudy was a past president of the Timber Framers Guild. His interview here will be followed up in a few weeks with an interview of his son and business partner, Carson Christian.

There is nothing quite so amazing as spending an afternoon at a pre-bid walk about, or in a remote church in Poland, or Kentucky, or at the Center of the Universe, with Rudy passionately exploring and explaining the workings of the frame structure to everyone present, at times including his competition. – Ken Follett

Where do you live these days?

Center of the Universe, Burbank, OH.

What is it that you tell people that you do for a living?

Depends on who asks. I have lots of hats, and like my shoes, I try not to wear the same one for two days in a row. When I’m talking to a potential customer I say I’m the president of Christian & Son, Inc. When I’m talking to a reporter, sometimes I’m the President of Christian & Son, Inc. and sometimes I’m the executive director of the Preservation Trades Network. I also have a hat that says timber framer and one that says carpenter, but my favorite one says non-profit junky.

Ohio Farmer Barn Alert 01 (pdf)

Tell us something we do not know.

Gambrel barn roofs were developed as a response to the hay track. The hay track was patented in 1872, when most areas of the country already had barns with gable roofs, which were built for storing hay that was stacked using pitchforks. Most barns built for pitchfork hay storage had side walls between 14’ and 16’ tall. Using a hay track to load hay meant that the haystacks could be much taller, so after 1880 barns were built with 18’ to 24’ side walls. The older barns had to be modified to accommodate the taller haystacks, and the gambrel roof was the most common solution.

How did you get into doing what you do?

After I decided that spending my life as an engineer was not going to make me happy, I started messing around with carpentry projects. My grandfather built an entire hotel/motel complex in Michigan, and I spent a lot of my summers there as a child. Later I realized that my great-grandfather was a Zimmerman and I was lucky enough to visit the family home he built in Germany. So I guess it was somewhat inevitable I would end up building.

How I got into timber framing was a bit more serendipitous. I’m lucky enough to have a wife/life partner who is not only perceptive but enjoys working with me and reads Fine Homebuilding. After leaving engineering school and drifting into carpentry work I ended up running my own business, named Mycroft Homes. Mycroft was Sherlock Holmes’s smarter brother, but pretty much no one ever got that. The business was successful enough, but Laura could tell it was not quite what I needed to be satisfied or challenged to make me happy.

One day she came to me with a little article in Fine Homebuilding about a timber frame workshop at Kenyon College in Gambier Ohio. We didn’t really know what we were getting into, but we had managed to collect some antique barn builders’ tools, so we signed up and I took the workshop. It was being taught by several guys from Vermont and New Hampshire and was lead by Ed Levin, who I consider my mentor. It was blazing hot, and we worked all day on an asphalt parking lot from dawn to dusk and never stopped smiling. I decided I wanted to do that for a living; something that made me smile. It does.

Of what projects are you particularly proud?

The Big Barn at Malabar Farms

Thomas Edison Lab Re-Relocation

Louis Bromfield’s Springhouse – “Preservation with Prisoners”

What was the most interesting project that you worked on? Why was it interesting?

The Detroit Farmers Market was and still is the most interesting project we’re involved in as a company. It is, to my knowledge, the only timber frame farmers market still in existence and the most ornate timber frame I have ever had the honor to actually work on.

What is your favorite and least favorite part?

My most favorite part is the fact that once it is reconstructed in Greenfield Village at the Henry Ford museum, the farmers market building will be enjoyed by many vistors for generations to come.

My least favorite part is the fact that after three years in storage the project finally became active exactly at the same time the recession hit, so it is on indefinite hold.

What happened on the best and the worse day?

The best day was when my son Carson and I spent the whole day assessing and documenting the building so he could model it in AutoCAD. It was wonderful to see him so curious about the complexity and decoration and so willing to take on the challenge of modeling it so it could be accurately entered into a relational database during deconstruction for storage.

The worst day was when we returned from spending the July 4th holiday back home in Burbank. Just prior to the holiday the company we were working with, which provided all of the heavy equipment and operators, decided to open a large hole in a section of non-historic brick wall so they could get their equipment inside. When we returned we saw the damage done by vandals who used the hole to get in. Many of the ornate, hand-carved filigree snowflakes which were part of the infill decoration in the braces had been sawn out and stolen. It was sickening to see. They were never recovered.

Influences?

The members of the Timber Framers Guild and the Preservation Trades Network, without whom I would not be where I am today.

Gerard Lynch has inspired me to work tirelessly at preserving the trades. Lisa Sasser has inspired me to help people understand the value of knowing what is really important to them, and stay on course to get it. And then there is this fellow Bohunk who has inspired me to realize the true value of networking.

If there is one thing that you can say is important? What is it and why is it important? Who cares?

Preserving the traditional trades is important. It is important because it provides insight into the past, which is our access to understanding the society in which we live and the culture we have created. People who are stewards of historic properties care, if they realize that maintaining them requires the same skills as building them in the first place. People with children or grandchildren care, if they want the world we are passing on to them to contain the works of great people and great minds who have been living and worked in it for millennia, which can stimulate the children’s minds and challenge them to do good work.

What advice would you give to a young person starting out?

Be honest before you are anything else.

Do you enjoy travel, or staying in one place?

Travel to foreign counties has changed the way I see the world in which I live. It has motivated me to make my world a better place.

Is there any extra special historic site that you want to visit, and if so, why?

The timber frame temples of Japan. I have met the men who are descendants of those who built them, and I want to see the work of those great men.

Education… what one thing do you think was the most interesting part of your education? Where?

Homeschooling our son, Carson. I learned more about education doing that than in all my own years in the public school system.

What one book have you read that you would recommend?

Understanding Wood, by R. Bruce Hoadley

What one book would you tell everyone to ignore?

Anything by Eric Sloan, unless you just look at the sketches.

Do you prefer artwork or music to books?

Only when I’m overcome by a wonderful piece of art or a great piece of music, but I would never give up my books for them. My books help me talk to people. I tend to buy books about things I’m studying, learning or places I’m traveling to. The books help me explain what I’m talking about, which often isn’t easy for people to understand without a picture or written description. I enjoy writing very much and am actually working on writing a book.

Do you mind telling us a bit about how your family puts up with your career and deviant interests?

Since we have a family business and a family estate, we’re all in this together. I count on them to help keep me focused.

What do you like to do when you are not doing this?

Anything that involves fine woodworking. Our home is an 1815 timber frame church that we deconstructed and relocated from Chenango Forks, NY to the Center of the Universe. We have done most of the work ourselves or with friends, so there are lots of woodworking challenges to keep me occupied.

What is your favorite music? Do you play any instruments? Can you hum?

Live acoustic jam sessions where folk or blues is being played can put me in a very happy state of mind. Since we had to give up our Chickering baby grand piano when we moved out of Akron, I haven’t played much music. I hope to remedy that soon. I played tenor saxophone in high school and was told I had talent, but I don’t have a sax anymore and probably never will. I prefer to whistle badly over humming, but humming keeps me from hearing my ears ring.

Ohio Farmer Barn Alert 02 (pdf)

If we left you alone what would you do next?

Try to find work for my crew. They are fine craftsmen, and they don’t enjoy or deserve to be without work.

What is your favorite tool?

My six-foot folding rule, which lives in my rule pocket and is always ready for work.

Do you have anyone that you want mentioned here?

My wife Laura is the wisest person I have ever met. What she is doing with me is a mystery.

How do you come at teaching others, at passing on your experience and knowledge?

I use numerous ways to try to pass on knowledge, but I think what’s more important is to motivate people to believe they can learn a trade. They should try as many trades as possible until the one that fits them becomes obvious. We are all born with a tradesperson inside. What is important is to learn how to connect with that part of your being at the earliest age possible. I believe children can learn to use tools before they learn to speak.

We understand that you recently joined the Central Ohio Antelope Rescue Running Squad... and that your most recent volunteer efforts were captured on camera here:

Crisis of Significance

2009-05-10T10:40:00.000-07:00

One of the struggles within the historic preservation industry is the interface that all practitioners have with the mass-produced commodity forces of modern life -- the dictation of people as anonymous -- finding our way past the shallowness of pervasive anonymity -- reintegration of significance into our lives... kinda like adaptive re-use for humans.

A final draft of a final video by Kevin Champion for Digital Ethnography at Kansas State University (Dr. Mike Wesch - Spring 2009). For more about where this video came from, you can check out the paper from which it was created: A crisis of significance.

Crisis of Significance by Kevin Champion is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

PCLS Interview: Ilene Rogers Tyler

2009-04-24T05:00:00.001-07:00

If you wander around in the histo presto universe it is difficult not to get to know Ilene Rogers Tyler and in time become infected with her overwhelmingly generous spirit of curiosity to explore old buildings and share with her peers, whoever they may be on any particular adventure. At the risk giving everyone the impression that a qualification for a PCLS interview is having written a book (which is not the case), Ilene is a co-author of Historic Preservation: An Introduction to Its History, Principles, and Practice (Second Edition). Google preview here. Amazon here.

Do you have a name? What is it today?

Hmmmm, still going by “Ilene Rogers Tyler,” last I looked. I like using my middle/maiden name, Rogers, because the moniker shortens to IRT, and not IT. IRT feels strong, whereas IT carries someone else’s baggage.

Where do you live these days?

Downtown Ann Arbor, Michigan -- and I do mean downtown. Sold the suburban bungalow seven years ago to really live in, and appreciate, our mid-sized city. Turns out it is the “green” thing to do, ahead of the trend.

What is it that you tell people that you do for a living?

I always say, first, that I am an architect. Then, I might go on to say I work on old buildings, figuring them out and describing what needs to be done to preserve them. I created a book in Shutterfly for my new grandson, and the funniest section is about what I do for a living. Photos of his grandmother climbing on roofs makes everyone laugh, but of course I’m serious about loving to do it and be involved in these projects.

What is it that your peers think that you do every day?

First, one must consider who are my peers? Other architects? Other preservationists? Most, I think, know I’m into old buildings, figuring them out and documenting the work to keep them whole.

Tell us something we do not know.

For three years my husband and I owned a fast food, or short order, restaurant in rural Pennsylvania. We made all our own stuff, nothing pre-packaged, and it was hard work. Been there, done that, and never again. While in PA, we also built our own “experimental” house and had a thriving small practice designing solar homes.

How did you get into doing what you do?

I joined Quinn Evans Architects in 1986, when I needed a job, and the firm needed a project architect to assist with documenting restoration of the Wayne County Courthouse.

How did you first become interested in your career?

High-school Career Day. “Architect” was one of three careers I chose to consider, and I talked to the local visiting architect. Next day, I convinced the high school shop teacher to let me join the mechanical drafting class.

Of what projects are you particularly proud?

Parthenon restoration in Nashville, TN

U of M Detroit Observatory, Ann Arbor, MI

Pere Marquette Depot restoration in Bay City, MI

click on photo for a larger version

What was the most interesting project that you worked on? Why was it interesting?

Parthenon, for sure, because I learned so much as part of the team charged with restoring the structure - Greek building terminology, John J. Earley concrete design, classical architecture, museum operations, teamwork.

What is your favorite part?

Inspection and quality assurance. Each month during construction, the project team reviewed finished pieces as they were delivered to the job site. As a unified voice, we assessed their overall design, colors, and mating to the existing structure.

What is your least favorite part?

Flying between Detroit and Nashville was relatively convenient for the job, but never fun.

What happened on the best day?

Flying in the gryphons as part of the completion celebration on December 31, 2000 was a thrill, capping the successful project. Fireworks and country music made it a memorable event.

What happened, if you can handle it, on the worst day?

David Evans died in the middle of the project. This loss had a tremendous impact on the project team. Having to step into the project as Principal, and getting the team to accept me, at the same time as coping with my personal loss, was the hardest thing (and worst day) of the entire project.

Who has been your biggest influence?

David Evans

Do you consider yourself an optimist or a pessimist? Or just plain worn out?

Optimist. If you can find something good to say, you just might find yourself believing it. If you say it, then you might affect others in a similarly positive way. Can’t always do it, though…

As a child what career did you want as an adult?

Teacher, 3rd grade, because that was my favorite year. Memorable from that year was the beginning of a six-year process to build our new school. I still have my 3rd grade essay on “The Day They Moved the House” to make way for the expanded site of the new school. This culminated in our 8th grade move-in, with many stories along the way.

As a child what career did you not want as an adult?

Auto parts sales manager. Family business that seemed decidedly unfriendly to women. When I worked there as a child doing inventory, I viewed the work as fun. As a career, though, it did not seem to offer much for me personally. I needed to do something as different from auto parts sales as I could imagine… hence architecture.

Who said that you are an adult now?

I don’t remember…

Did your parents influence you in a positive or negative way?

Positive. Good people and loving parents, but they didn’t understand my need to strike out on my own.

What advice would you give to a young person starting out?

Have a dream.

Do you enjoy travel, or staying in one place?

Travel, but from a home base I really like (i.e. Ann Arbor).

If you had a choice to do something else, what would it be?

More hands-on investigation and restoration of the projects I inspect. Of course, living in a historic house satisfies much of that.

Do you have any pets? If so, can you tell us about them? Spiders and pet snails count.

None currently. By association, I enjoy my husband’s reef tank. Georgie, the Jawfish, has personality. Our two sons have a dog and a cat, respectively.

Is there any extra special historic site that you want to visit, and if so, why?

The Acropolis. Seems logical to see the real Parthenon before I die.

Education… what one thing do you think was the most interesting part of your education? Where?

U of M Architecture School had it’s moments of sheer joy amidst the pain. I always loved our studio classes in Lorch Hall. I made great friends in studio, even married one, and have fond memories of everything but architecture happening there. I guess it’s where I learned about life in my microcosm of college. Sophomore year was the highlight, many stories, no worries.

Please tell us about a few of the people that you like. But not if you really don’t like them.

I like Norm, my husband etc. He challenges me and he supports me; he’s my biggest fan and my worst critic. He’s reliable and he’s annoying. Etc. I like a lot of other people, too, but I’m reluctant to single them out for this survey.

What one book have you read that you would recommend?

I read a wide variety of stuff, so it’s hard to pick a favorite. I suppose it’d be cheating to recommend my own book, but it’s so new that I’m still getting used to the idea of being an author. Co-author, really, but my name is on the cover! So, Historic Preservation: An Introduction to Its History, Principles, and Practice, 2nd Edition. W.W. Norton, 2009.

Beyond the self-serving nature of the above, I really liked Pillars of the Earth, and, more recently, Loving Frank, Omnivore’s Dilemma, and Three Cups of Tea.

What one book would you tell everyone to ignore?

Telling everyone to ignore a book is another form of recommending it, since you have to tell people what to ignore, and that mentions the name more often than it might deserve.

How many books do you think that you own?

A thousand, plus or minus a few.

Are they on shelves or in boxes?

We love our bookshelves, and almost all our books are out somewhere. We have built-in bookshelves in the library and dining room, and bought shelving units in our office. But then I have another couple hundred books in my office at work. I also feel personally connected to the library at work, since I purchased many of them for shared use at the office. These must number into a couple thousand, unless I overrate the collection in my mind.

Do you prefer artwork or music to books?

Books are the best, sometimes with a concurrent dose of music, and perhaps complemented by 2D art. There is nothing I like better than curling up in a cozy chair with a good book. It’s nice when the sun reaches this perfect reading spot, and great if the chair is comfortable enough in which to take a nap.

Do you mind telling us a bit about how your family puts up with your career and deviant interests?

There is a lot of teasing about when I’m really going to set aside my work, or give them more time, take more time off. I’ve even been recorded at four-year intervals repeatedly promising to cut back. My husband and sons always knew they could count on me in an emergency. However, they knew and expected that I would always be working overtime or on projects that looked a lot like work.

What do you like to do when you are not doing this?

For starters, reading a book. When available, walking a beach. Sometimes cooking will satisfy me, with the reward of good food that can be shared. Gardening is a great pastime, but only for half the year. Writing is becoming increasingly important. I have stories to tell, but I need to work on getting them out in a way that is interesting to read. Redoing our kitchen has opened up new avenues of entertainment and dining. Group cooking, like pizza-making or salads or latkes, is not only possible in our new kitchen, it’s fun and safe and satisfying. Gardening is an escape. I like the dirt and having a reason to be outside without too much thinking. It’s a great way to appreciate being at home in the city.

What is your favorite music? Do you play any instruments? Can you hum?

Folk music is my favorite. I can dabble at the piano, but not good enough to sing along with my playing. I like to sing along to my husband’s or sons’s playing, but mostly show tunes or old pop stuff.

Do you like to paint or draw? Or would you rather be carving? Do you like to write?

I took a watercolor class last winter with hopes of doing more on my own. I love the medium, but haven’t dedicated the time to be good…yet. Yes, I do like to write.

If we left you alone what would you do next?

Pick up a book and read until something else happened, most likely sleep.

How about e-mail?

Remember Pine? When email first came out, we had access using Pine through Norm’s teaching at EMU, and I remember the first days of Bullamanka-Pinheads email. Norm hated sharing what he considered spam, and I didn’t know how to get my own address until I had it at work. It’s hard to reconstruct how it all started, and gradually took over my life.

What is your favorite tool?

Camera, if I may be allowed to call the camera my tool. I use it often enough. If you mean hammers, and stuff, I’m not sure if I have a favorite.

What is your favorite material to work with?

Pictures, I guess digital, to create photo books, newsletters, cards, and posters. Does that count?

Do you have any friends or family that you want mentioned?

Husband, Norm. No pets. Sons Joshua (and daughter-in-law Gesara) and Joseph. Grandson Remy Jeht Tyler, born this year.

How do you come at teaching others, at passing on your experience and knowledge?

I love teaching my class at EMU, which transfers to informally mentoring younger staff at work. I love writing about it and presenting at conferences, because the process challenges me to learn new stuff. I love to facilitate the learning process, engaging with those who want to learn, not lecturing at them.

"Life is short, no complaints."

PCLS Interview: John Leeke

2009-04-10T13:53:00.000-07:00

John Leeke, based in his woodwork shop in Portland, Maine, has made a career not only as a woodworker but as a writer, with several how-to publications, as an internet videographer, and as a workshop instructor who draws on his extensive knowledge and experience to assist property owners throughout the small towns of America.

His website can be found at Historic HomeWorks.

John recently released a new book, Save America's Windows. It includes a section on how to avoid falling under the spell of the window replacement salesman.

Do you have a name? What is it today?

John Leeke

by hammer and hand great works do stand

by pen and thought best words are wrought

by mind and heart we share the art

My dad said I could be anything I want except two things, a roofer and a cooper. (His joke was, Who would buy a bucket or a roof from a guy named “Leaky”?) In reality an important part of my building conditions assessment and investigation work is tracking down moisture in buildings and discovering the water leaks. When I sit down to talk with a building committee about their roof leaks I overhear the whispered comment about my name, so I crack a joke about it and everyone laughs.

How did you first become interested in your career?

When I was two years old in 1951 my dad built the house where I grew up. In a recurring dream throughout my life I’m about ten years old in this house. If I lean on an interior wall just right I slip into a room that does not seem to exist in the real house. It’s sort of like the stud-space within the wall expands to become an entire room. My vision in there is bluish and a little fuzzy. There are many vertical posts and I can float around through other rooms, it’s like a maze that I can figure out if I don’t wake up too soon. Eventually I find my way out via the furnace room. Back in real life, as an adult, I told my dad about this dream. He grinned and said I was just two years old when he brought me to the house during construction and carried me around through the rooms after the stud walls and were up, but before the plasterers came. That was my introduction to modern building practice. I believe this dream is a memory. It is still a ready reference to that early experience.

Our family spent many vacations visiting my grandma Julia, who lived in a little Queen Anne house built in the 1890s. One Christmas when I was eight we had a big family reunion there. The house was packed full of uncles, aunts and cousins. My dad and I ended up sleeping in the attic. We went up the steep stairs with arms full of blankets, quilts and a candle. It was freezing cold up there. He spread out the quilts on the floorboards from the chimney over under the eaves, then we both crawled back under the eaves and rolled up in the quilts together, rolling toward the chimney, ending up with me between my dad and the warm chimney where it was nice and cozy. The first night we fell asleep counting the rafters up above. The second night we ran out of rafters, so we counted the shingle nails poking down through the roofer boards. They were easy to see and count in the dim candlelight because each one had a little tuft of white frost on it. That was my introduction to traditional building practice. We returned many times to fix the porch posts, mend the screen door, explore the cellar ….

As I grew up the comparison and contrast of those two houses and an early start in my dad’s woodworking shop led to my career as an historic building specialist.

If there is one thing that you can say is important, what is it and why is it important? Who cares?

It is the people who are important. The people who live and work in the buildings, and who work on the buildings now. The people who built them and lived in them in the past. After you understand and take care of the people, then the building becomes important.

Is there any extra-special historic site that you want to visit, and if so, why?

My 8th-great grandfather wrote and published the first English translation of Vignola’s Five Orders of Architecture, titled “The Regular Architect.” It was used by those ingenious tradespeople to rebuild London after the Great Fire of 1666. I would like to visit some of those classically styled structures to see if I can catch their vibes.

Education… what one thing do you think was the most interesting part of your education? Where?

When I was a kid I thought my dad was teaching me about working with wood. As an adult I talked with him about this. He said, “Oh no, I was teaching you about working with people. We just happen to know about woodwork so the people who need woodworking are the ones we can best help… I was teaching you how to use and make tools, so you can do any kind of work… I was teaching you about connecting with the real world…”

I went to public school to learn the basics, but my real education was when my dad sent me around town to sketch and draw the important buildings. When we meet up, ask me to tell the story about sketching the balustrade at the Nebraska State Capitol Building.

Books?

I have hundreds, perhaps over a thousand books. My high school physics and chemistry books are definitely on the shelves. I can’t possibly keep all that good info in my head. So my shelves of books seem like a kind of memory.

I think first books are important. My first trades-related book was Audel’s Carpenters and Builders Guide. My dad had bought the 4-volume set when it first came out in 1923, when he was 17. When I was 17 my dad handed them to me to keep at my own bench.

I grew up in my father's woodworking shop and had my own bench by the time I was ten years old. Occasionally I had questions he could not answer right off. I can picture it in my mind, as I stood at his bench he would reach up to the bookshelf above the bench saying, "Let's just ask Theo. Audel about that." When he bought his Audel's he was just starting in the trades. The small toolbox-sized volumes had a weighty heft that suggested the extensive woodworking information compacted on their thin pages. Gold embossed subtitles like “Cornice Work,” “Saw Troubles” and “Piazza Details” sparkled on the spines like gems--just a hint of the treasury in woodworking knowledge to be discovered within.

On the black leather cover was embossed an emblem, not in gold, but very subtle, barely noticeable: a hammer floating over the sunrise. My dad would take my hand in his and guide my fingers to touch and slide over the emblem and ask, "Where do we seek knowledge?" I respond, "In the east." He asks "What is the carpenter's tool?" I respond, "The hammer." --all mysterious to me, I didn't get it right away, thinking "let's just look up the answer, here's the index right here." Then he would say, "Yes, in the east, at the beginning," as he opened Audel’s up to the title page. At the top of the title page was printed:

"by hammer and hand all things do stand"

So, every time we looked up in Audels, my dad would begin by reading the motto there, "by hammer and hand all things do stand." Well, after a couple years I knew the ritual by heart and by the time his hand was up to the book on the shelf I could cut to the quick with: "begin in the east, by hammer and hand all things to stand." When I was thirteen I had arrived at that place in the east where the sun begins to rise, and I began making rather realistic pencil drawings and my dad said, "Anyone who can draw like that becomes the woodcarver of the shop." I was used to doing what my dad said, so I did become the woodcarver and when I was fifteen I carved a crest out of white oak for a fraternity down at the university. It was acclaimed by the client and by my dad as a "great work." I adapted and adopted the Audels motto as my own:

"By Hammer and Hand Great Works Do Stand"

which has been my motto ever since. So, it’s hard to tell what you will get from a book. Information for sure, but sometimes true guidance.

Do you garden?

One other thing I wanted to be, but did not become, was a farmer. Many of my early grade school friends’ dads were farmers. My own dad picked up on this interest real quick and we began planting trees as a hobby. No, “hobby” is not the right word. It was not an “escape” it was an extension of our shop work that transcended current time and place. The wood we used had started growing a century before us. Our goal was to replace all the trees we used in our shop, twofold, so there would be enough trees and wood for future woodworkers. This was an important part of our real work in this world. Arbor Day was more fun than my birthday and it came two weeks sooner. Over the years we planted two or three thousand trees. I forget the exact numbers—they are marked on a post beside the door of our shop.

I like to plant trees. I have always kept an acorn or buckeye in my pocket every day, so when I find a likely spot I can stick it in the earth. Last year I got back to Wabash, Nebraska, where, 47 years ago, my dad and I stopped by to talk with Wayne Robertson about his walnut trees down along Weeping Water Crick. I had stuck a buckeye in the ground at the edge of the lawn in front his old farmhouse. Wayne has passed away, but I was there with his son who had his little boy along. When I reached around that tree my fingers did not touch on the other side. We stood there talking about how old the tree is and how big it is. We all bent over to pick up a buckeye and put it in our pocket. He said his dad reminded him every summer to not mow down John’s horse chestnut tree. I said the tree didn’t belong to me, it must belong to him since he took care of it all those years. He looked at me, then at his own son and said, “Looks like I’m giving this tree to you.” His boy glanced at me, his eyes widened, bugging out. As he leaned back his gaze scanned up the trunk high into the tree and he fell over on the grass grinning then laughing.

Playing with Faux Doors

2009-04-10T07:46:00.000-07:00

This is a steel framed door in a church on 5th Ave., NYC, with a plaster inset panel made with an idea to blend into the limestone wall. The photo does not do full justice to our attempt to get the door in the ambient light of the church setting to become invisible into the wall. We did not make the door, our task was to clean up the existing for Easter 2009.

It still looks good and blends in now that it has had a bit of time to dry out.

Our friend Nick Micros was the last one, pre 2001, to work on cleaning up the door. Since he moved with his family off to Switzerland we get the fun of working in the path behind him.

The plaster takes a good deal of abuse and needs a spruce up on occasion.

Whippany NJ Obelisk

2009-03-20T07:32:00.001-07:00

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David and I worked w/ crew from Jablonski Building Conservation to re-erect a marble obelisk that had fallen over. It was a fun gig and we very much like working w/ the JBC crew.

Riverside Park, Probes

2009-03-20T07:09:00.001-07:00

Probes done on a very cold day on December 24, 2008.

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