 I'm Elaine Stiles and I teach Historic Preservation here in the School of Architecture, Art and Historic Preservation for those of you who don't know yet so far, who haven't met me so far. So I'm really pleased to introduce our speaker tonight because for more than 25 years, if you have been a preservation or an architecture professional in the northeast, and you've been interested in the preservation or conservation of modernism or resources from the more recent past, it's almost inevitable that you'll encounter and learn something from our speaker tonight, David Fixler. As a preservation student and then a young professional myself working in the region in the early 2000s, David's education, advocacy and awareness building for the preservation of these important buildings and landscapes was a welcome voice for those of us who are interested in concrete and steel and suburban peripheries as well as timber framing in center cities. So as he describes himself, David Fixler is an architect specializing in working with existing buildings, something many of us in the room have an interest in as well. And as a graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, he directed the efforts of two large firms on the conservation, renewal and adaptive reuse of significant 18th, 19th and 20th century properties prior to opening his own practice in the spring of 2017. Since the mid-1990s, these efforts have been particularly focused on the development of a critical framework and implementation strategies for the rehabilitation of 20th century modernism in the recent past. And his projects include work on an array of modern icons such as the rehabilitation of Alvar Alto's Baker House and Eero Saranen's Kresge Auditorium and Chapel both at MIT, Lukan's Richards Laboratories at the University of Pennsylvania and the United Nations headquarters in New York City. David Fixler has also completed a significant rehabilitation expansion and conservation planning projects for Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford universities as well as for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts where he worked on the master plan for the Massachusetts State House. And in addition to his practice, David Fixler teaches at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, has lectured around the world and played a leading role in a variety of global conservation organizations, most notably the Association for Preservation Technology, the Society of Architectural Historians and the best acronym of any preservation organization in the world, DOCO MOMO, which stands for Documenting and Conserving the Modern Movement. And his published works include a 2012 book on Alto in America co-edited with Stanford Anderson and our very own Gail Fenske. So if you're an Alto fan, check that out. So without further ado, I'd like to welcome David Fixler. Thank you, Elaine. It is a pleasure to be here and a pleasure to be able to talk to you all about my passion tonight. So what I'm going to talk about is I'm going to give you a little bit of just a sort of a background about modern movement preservation. And if any of you, if it seems like things you already know, just bear with me because it's sort of their setting a table. I'll talk a little bit about some of the issues confronting the field of modern movement preservation and then finally I will give a case study on this building, Louis Kahn's Richard's Labs at the University of Pennsylvania. And we'll see what kind of time we have after that. So start out with this. I like to start with these sort of combative images of the Le Corbusier's Villassova for a number of reasons. One is obviously it's an iconic modern building. Two, it fell into a state of deep decay at which point Bernard Chumay proclaimed, right, now it's architecture. You know, all of the original meaning, all of the original purposes have been taken out of this. It is left to its raw essence. Is it architecture? It passes the test. It's architecture. And of course, because it was very early on in about 1959 when it was in the condition that you see in Chumay's photograph falling apart. Le Corbusier actually raised a hue and cry about this saying somebody has to look after my building. Hence the birth of modern preservation by, of course, someone who as a young man did his very best to deny history. But that's how these things work. They come around. And in fact, the first official recognition sort of state recognition of a modern landmark was another Le Corbusier building, this unité d'habitation. And it was declared in 1964 when it was at the tender age of 12 to be a national landmark by Henri Malreau, who was then the French Minister of Culture. So this is obviously not only is it important because it's a modern building, but it's important because it's only 12 years old. And this whole idea of the 50-year rule is one of the things that has been hotly debated for years since the sort of growing movement to preserve modernism has come along to saying we need to recognize these things early. And in this country, the first example of that was none other than the National Park Service declaring Eero Saranen's Dulles Airport, which you see here actually in its expanded form, at the age of 18 eligible for listing in the National Register and for to be considered for landmark status. So that's one of the first big things that's got sort of jumped out of the gun here, is that the idea that you don't have to wait, and in many cases you can't wait until something is 50, especially because there is that what I believe the heroic people call the ugly trough. When a building is typically 30, 40 years old, nobody likes it anymore. It's starting to really show its age and fall apart. And it has the least chance for advocacy. So you've got to be very careful not to let undue damage happen during that period. So let's talk a little bit about, get our term straight here, modernism and modernity. The modern movement was all about, it was social, it was technical, and it was aesthetic. And how these things all come together was very important to consider when you're looking at modern buildings because they all play an equal role in establishing significance. And I'd like to begin with J.J. P. Aud's key folk housing in Rotterdam for two reasons. One being that it is an iconic modern building. It has a strong social purpose. It's clearly aesthetically something new for 1930. And because it was technically experimental, it also failed completely and utterly technically. And consequently, what you see here is actually a simulacrum. It is a rebuilding of the original complex. It is not the building itself. Now, this, of course, as you might imagine, raised quite a hue and cry in the Netherlands where people are very purist in their positions, whether before or against. But to walk around here and to experience this is to sort of say, well, you know, this is really great, but I guess the question really here is, is it quote-unquote authentic? And authentic in the words of one of my co-editors for the Alto book, Stanford Anderson, who's also one of the great architectural historians of the 20th century, that's the third rail of architectural discourse. I mean, you can turn yourself into all kinds of knots when you start talking about authenticity. So the question really here is, is it, however, a legitimate strategy? I leave that all up to you. I think it's a great point of discussion. I think it's great to be able to have this neighborhood there. But on the other hand, it's whether or not it makes itself sort of evident as being something that is, in fact, a recreation rather than the original is a very real consideration. Staying in Rotterdam and looking at the sort of celebration of technology, the Van Nella factory is a perfect example, and I like to use this one because it's also been, is undergone a very successful adaptive reuse by sort of dropping a building within the building, which enables this very unsustainable, thin, single-glazed steel curtain wall skin to be maintained as it is because it no longer is really critical to regulating the interior environment. That's a nice sort of, if you like, almost a knee-jerk strategy for making this kind of renovation really work very well. And finally, of course, if you're looking at pure aesthetics, where better to land than Mies van der Roos' Barcelona Pavilion with its free-floating planes and its use of beautiful materials and really to create this sort of precious object. And of course, as you all know, this also is a simulacrum. This is because it was an exhibition pavilion. It was torn down after the close of the 1929 exhibition in Barcelona. But it was decided by the Spanish government in the 1980s that it would be great to recreate this. And it was recreated actually from photographs and very little in the way of drawing. So we're not even sure that what's there is really what was originally there. But it's certainly something very close. And again, it's a very pleasant thing to have. It's great to experience it. It's a great teaching tool for what it is. But it is, again, from the point of view of the sort of strict authenticity and the kind of guidelines that one is typically given when you're developing a philosophy of preservation. It's a little out of the ordinary, which goes to show you that I think one of the most important things that one needs to consider about preservation is there is no absolute right and wrong. There's no black, there's no white. It's all shades of gray somewhere in the middle. And anybody who tells you otherwise or pretends otherwise is diluting themselves because you're always going to be able to find an instance where that spectrum shifts. And it makes it interesting as a practitioner to sort of find where the optimum pivot point is on any given project. So we'll back up for a second and remember though that I've been talking about what is sort of in Orthodox preservation practice and what has defined how it has evolved over the years. Here's a listing of some of the major charters. This is by no means comprehensive of everything but it hits sort of the major things and it doesn't even mention the secretary of the interior standards which of course begins to be developed in the 1960s and really gets codified in the 70s. But the charters outlined or highlighted in orange are ones that were specifically designed to deal with modern properties. Recognizing in the late 1980s that there really were things about modernism which potentially could be called different. A group of very enterprising young Dutch architects got together, formed this group called Documomo in Eindhoven and produced a little charter called the Eindhoven Statement which was modified to become the Eindhoven Soul Statement to bring in a whole raft of sustainability guidelines along with it to basically talk about the fact that modern heritage was important, it was unique and it was something worth sustaining. But I think one of the things that distinguishes Documomo and I think distinguishes a lot of the people who work on modern buildings is that not only is this about preserving a kind of heritage which typically is viewed in the traditional charters as the other. And remember that the whole idea of preservation is really itself a modern construct. This idea that we live in the modern world and there was a world before that which is a world that we need to honor and curate and take good care of but it is a world that we are now no longer a part of. Hence the idea in all of these charters that when you're adding to a traditional building you should do it in something that is of the time you are adding it, not of the time when the original building was built. So that whole idea is one thing and when you then translate that to modern properties it gets a little fuzzier because many people are still using language which is still very much like what these buildings were and making that distinction becomes a much finer line than it is in say adding to an 18th century town hall or a church or something like that. So that's one thing. And then as the sort of technical idea, the technical issues have come up things like the Icomos Madrid document and the APT principles for renewing modernism get into more of the larger issues both from a technical and from a larger heritage standpoint like urban heritage standpoint as to how to deal with these properties and especially the ones which don't necessarily rise to the level of the icons. One group that's been very active in this and has put out a lot of literature and also initiatives towards really documenting and developing conservation plans for these buildings is the Getty Conservation Institute and I had the good fortune to be part of their and their conserving modern architecture initiative to be a recipient of one of their first grants for doing a conservation management plan for the Jewett Art Center. So this is a way of bringing some real conservation discipline but with a healthy dose of flexibility to looking at some of these complexes understanding that they're going to need to change and that by doing a conservation management plan one can do that in a way that can be well managed. One of the most comprehensive and complete of these was done for Alvaralto's Pamio Sanatorium. Now in some ways Pamio's a little easier because they don't envision a change in use which would require any sort of a major reworking of the building. It's really in a way almost a museum at this point but it is nonetheless, it nonetheless gives you a great set of curation guidelines for how to work with this building from the sort of day-to-day maintenance to the much larger issues. Now sometimes you don't have the luxury of spending two years doing a conservation management plan and you are also dealing with a commercial property. This is an example of a property that I worked on up in Regina, Saskatchewan. It is called the most important Brazilian modern office building in Canada because it's got this curvy shape so they call it Brazilian modern but it is actually a very interesting building and this is an example of what I call sort of a high quality but ordinary modern building. There are hundreds if not thousands of around the world that deserve attention, deserve to be treated well but we have to accept the fact that they're going to be altered and in four months I gave them a plan that they could work with so that they could give that then to the building renovation architects who had been stopped by the local heritage authority saying we consider this building to be important and you're not going to touch it until you get a conservation management plan in hand and we were able to help sort of steer that to a more sanguine solution to something where the changes that they made were much more in sympathy with the original architecture of the building and then sometimes you even do these sort of little workshops sort of even conservation management charrettes like we did for Alvar Aalto's Sanyatsalo Town Hall after it was announced that it was going to be essentially disposed of as surplus property by the city of Sanyatsalo because they're the town of Sanyatsalo because it no longer had, it was no longer going to be a town it was going to be subsumed into the larger municipality of Javascula and so this became surplus property so efforts are afoot to try to find a good use for this and this of course being a world heritage quality building this is not a building you take lightly but nonetheless even in a building like this the idea of going in and looking quickly and being able to formulate even the roughest set of an outline of guidelines is very useful in determining a position so that going forward nothing negative happens to the building but is this really different than what we do with any property? so let's run down a few of these things and look at material and idea the notion that because so many of these buildings were built of experimental materials or very thin materials that are prone to failure and often cannot be restored or not easily restored so is then the idea of what the architect's intention or the architect and building owner's intention was does that take priority and is that what you honor when you go back to restore the building and not worry so much about the material the value of change modernism is a dynamic phenomenon it's all about change it's not about standing still it's about constantly progressing and looking to the future and so honoring that as a character defining feature of you like of the building itself the importance of technology the celebration of technology both in the material and in the process of making it character defining features kind of sort of went through but newness value if you look back at Lois Regal and all of his modern cult of monuments he tax on at the end after using age value historic value and use value he adds newness value and newness value is the idea that once when something sort of loses its sheen it also loses some value now in most traditional buildings that's just seen as acquiring patina and the question is how well can a modern building acquire patina I would maintain that many modern buildings do acquire patina it's not the kind of patina we're used to but it is a patina nonetheless but nonetheless it is the I mean if you compare it to an industrial object like a car car is much more valuable when it looks new than when it has patina and then of course this issue that I mentioned of the temporal and aesthetic proximity the fact that we are close in both time and if you like design philosophy at least aesthetic design philosophy so that these this kind of fungibility of style Delcomomo has been working diligently as I mentioned since 1988 on sort of sorting this out and their first project the thing that really kicked them off was the zonestral sanatorium which looked in 1988 very much like what you see there on the left and then the building on the right had undergone a very bad restoration so these architects in raising this hue and cry set out to try to find a way to use this as a demonstration tool if you like for what could be done to save what they felt was a very important piece of Dutch history and here again what you see here is by and large a simulac I mean it is the original frame but all of the finishes the windows the systems they're all new I mean it's so you are this is a and it's superbly done it is a beautiful restoration if you like but very little original fabric outside of the raw concrete frame of the original building was able to be salvaged again take that for what you will it's a very interesting monument but it's not it's hard to sort of take this and say this is an example for how to do a large number of buildings going forward it really becomes kind of a museum piece so again there are these this is not to criticize the efforts of the architects who did this because they did a superb job but what it does point out is that when you are looking to do a lot of these kinds of things you often have to make judgment calls which might not enable you to do something quite as precious as this was done and the other thing of course is there were no real sustainability upgrades I mean they put in more high performance systems but it's still single glazed it's still uninsulated so again from an environmental standpoint these are things that now really have to be factored into a much greater degree on most any building except the ones that are really at the sort of top end of the landmark status and we'll get into that when I talk about the Richard's Labs and here again Alvaralto's Vibery Library the beautiful beautiful wood ceiling that you see there on the left and the restored version on the right below again it all had to be taken down and rebuilt they were not able to salvage even in this case the original wood ceiling it had become so degraded through through water infiltration so these are things you just sort of have to accept but thinking about the challenges and the necessity of looking at these buildings especially the sort of broader urban fabric that we're dealing with a couple things to point out between 1945 and 1980 all of we doubled the amount of building that had been put on the earth and since then we've probably doubled it again so we're dealing with an awful lot of buildings of the recent past that are going to be coming due for renovation and I think so what this really talks about is the necessity for coming up with not only a philosophy and guidelines and attitudes but really just sort of inculcating with people that from a resource use standpoint every effort should be made to save as many buildings as we can you can't save everything it's not worth saving everything but it also means that we can't treat every building as a sort of preservation project and that's what the APT Principles for Modernism which I'll show you later are starting to talk about and this is something that we very much have in development at the moment because it's a hard thing to do to basically write a charter as you can treat buildings in a fairly robust fashion you should apply a preservation ethos but that doesn't mean that you can't change things again it's that grayscale and not everybody's comfortable with that so the major challenges there's a lot of it there's the balance of character retention and the improvement of performance particularly from an energy use standpoint the educational challenge of promoting and appreciation I think there we've come a long way in the last 20 years I think that there are a lot more people find this fashionable and frankly it's getting older I think that's helping it the fact that it's becoming in itself more historic and then this affirmation of the human skill this is a big issue particularly in buildings built in the later part of the modern movement the more brutalist kinds of buildings and things like that where they often didn't meet the street in very friendly ways and I think the idea that you need to create a more fine grain interface with the public in many of these buildings to really make them work then of course there are the technical challenges and I won't go down all these I'll just say you can look at what we've got up there but I think that there are things that you're not shouldn't be a surprise to anybody but you know the last thing is the last couple things is that the public changes over time tend to sort of get extrapolated into to make small problems big problems and facilities people sort of throw up their hands and don't often know what to do with these things in order to come up with a sympathetic solution so very often it just means trying to get yourself back to square one you know if you can just get the building back to where it was when it began and use that as a starting off point you usually solved about half the problem so a typical challenge might be curtain walls and here are two examples of different approaches to a curtain wall restoration building on the left is a is the Celebrisi building in Cleveland it is a GSA property owned by the general service administration we're one of the best biggest landlords and also one of the ones who are most interested in developing these principles for renewing modernism because they've got a lot of these buildings which aren't particularly distinguished but they don't want to throw out they want to treat properly but they don't want to be too precious with and so hitting that sweet spot is very important to them and for instance in this case they determine that the best way to make this building more sustainable and serve their needs was to over climb so the middle photo is actually a new skin that was dropped over the original building and makes it much more energy efficient and enables them to enable them to run this building as a much more much more profitable energy energy efficient and pleasant environment to be in now on the right what you see is the Leverhouse by Skidmoreings in Maryland New York of course one of the first curtain wall buildings in the United States and in the world and what you see there is a new curtain wall that is an exact replication of the original so this again this is another simulacrum this is an instance where they just took down the original curtain wall and put back something that looks the same but is a much much higher performance system it has all of the contemporary bells and whistles as far as glazing and weepage it is very well insulated they were more successful in how they dealt with the spandrel panels the areas right in whoops let's go back okay right here that used to just be a piece of clear glass with a shadow box which means just a very dark painted CMU wall behind it and it would get up to about 200 degrees in there and start to sort of fry things around it and cause distortions and leakage in the curtain wall so they found a way to ventilate that and to make it work as part of the the physics of that curtain wall system so again Paul Goldberger former New York Times architecture critic and someone who has written for the New Yorker and many other he wrote a long article for Preservation Magazine about this when this came when this was finished in the early 2000s basically making this same argument saying is this preservation or isn't it and there's you know everybody has to sort of come to their own conclusion about that you sort of make up your own mind as to what's important so the other big thing that we're dealing with of course with modern buildings and is of particular importance these days is concrete and I like this I picked out this quote from that from really I picked it out because it was in Colin Rose introduction to his essay on Le Cours Bussier's La Tourette which of course is the building illustrated here to talk about the qualities of concrete as a visual and tactile material and in particular to stress the importance of concrete as a natural material in a way I mean it's synthetic but when I say natural I mean unpainted so that you can read and there's an amazing difference because I think you see you get the little white hints of the in the photograph on the right where some painting was done and it is very I don't really know why they have painted this building but if you look here you can see very clearly the difference between the painted surface there on the left and what it was before on the right and how it has kind of flattened the building besides the fact of making it sort of look striped building in a way which takes a lot of a life out of the concrete and I think there's a because and it also highlights just how different the different kinds of concrete that you see elsewhere in this photo the different textures and colors and all of the variation that goes along with that I did a concrete restoration project on Boston City Hall and even as a public bid project we had 30 different colors of concrete just to patch different areas because there is so much variation in that and it's really really hard to patch concrete well and the fact is of course concrete whether you paint it or not moisture will get into it and there will be eventually through a process of carbonation as it hits the reinforcing steel if you don't do something to counter if the steel is not protected and you don't do something to counteract it there will be there will be rusting and rusting produces expansion which pops pieces of the concrete off and you have to do things like this on this I am pay building and never call an I am pay building brutalist he hated that term but he loved concrete and there you see what has happened over the years with these patches which matched very well when they were first put in but over time depending upon what the weather was and you know how much water was in the mix and any one of a number of things that might ultimately affect the way the concrete dries and hence colors this is it is a real it's an art it's something that the Getty Conservation Institute is paying a lot of attention to these days and very much wants to sort of develop you know advance the science of this there are a lot of very good people working on this but it's it's something that is very labor intensive and is much art as it is science as you might expect other kinds of materials we're dealing with are things like these glass reinforced polyester fiberglass essentially panels this is James Sterling's all of any Hasselmeyer wing and you can see the distortion in these panels right here and again there this is not something that is easily repaired or restored although there are people who are looking into the science of trying to find a way to repair this but ultimately it is a panel produced by an industrial process and the by far the simplest thing to do if you can find the industrial process that made it to begin with is just to go back and make some more of them and consequently that is what they're trying to do here but I also like to show this building because it shows a sort of fetishization if you like of systems behind the Curtin wall there and the fact that building systems really become very much a part of the architecture and in this next example the Wellesley College Science Center in Wellesley, Massachusetts you have both the celebration of technology here and the strobe fans on the roof of the building but also in another polymer which is cow wall right here all of this stuff right here which actually I would maintain this is an early photo when the cow wall was still white over the years it turned yellow much to Wellesley chagrin and much to cow wall chagrin I actually think it made it look it gave it a warmth and kind of an interesting quality and in tandem with the concrete because one of the things that happens to concrete as the carbonation process occurs is that it also gets a warmer color and as a matter of fact if I just go back for a second to the this the warmth that you see in this this was a it was a grayer concrete 20 years ago than it is now it kind of as the process of carbonation gives it in a strange way of patina which also makes patching that much more difficult too because the patches themselves will change color over time and what are you trying to match it's like trying to match weathered wood so unfortunately and this is where the building codes often come in as they went to renovate this building they were told by the building inspector in the town of Wellesley that they couldn't use the cow wall anymore because it is ironically enough it was chosen originally for fire protection reasons they had to use it instead of another material 45 years ago and now it is deemed a threat it is deemed to be a threat because apparently when it does if it actually gets to the point where it burns it gives off gasses from the plastic and the polymers so they have to go back and replace it with something else and this is again something that that bedevils a lot of modern buildings especially ones that were made with asbestos cement board or transite panels which was very frequent between the 1950s and the early 1970s and obviously those all have to come out which means there is really no argument about what you do with them so one of the things so I want to talk a little bit about sustainability and resilience and program fit and modern architecture is often accused of being sort of environmentally insensitive and while it is true that many of the buildings were not well insulated and used a lot of fuel there was a certain amount of sensitivity however to orientation and to using the sun and to really designing sensitively with nature particularly at the domestic scale as you see in this New England solar house by Carl Koch and the McNeil passive solar house by O'Neill Ford in San Antonio in Texas and a lot of this was because of fuel shortages and just pure comfort I mean people typically at least in this part of the world until the 1960s or 70s did not air condition houses I live in a modern house that was built in the early 1950s and all of the overhangs are calculated so that you get sun coming in in the winter and it stays out in the summer and it stays remarkably cool the way that the plantings were done around it and everything else it's not perfect but there was attention to that and I want to remind people that particularly even in larger buildings a building like this the El Panama Hotel in Panama City by Edward Durell Stone actually in the early 1950s there was an article in Life magazine about this and they trumpet its sustainability the fact that the use of the balconies and through breezes and things like that as means of natural cooling of the structure so it isn't something that we have invented in our time and that the modern buildings were unaware of although I will confess that there was this period which I kind of call the period of architectural amnesia from about the mid-60s to about 1980 where an awful lot of buildings were built that really just didn't pay attention to getting in good natural light didn't pay attention to energy use didn't pay attention to a lot of things and why that happened I'm not really sure but we are living with the results of that and having that every day. In the planning of the United Nations Le Corbusier originally wanted to put Brie Soleil on the glazing of the secretariat and here you see his proposal for a green roof on the General Assembly so again these things were very much in people's minds even 50, 60 years ago, 70 years ago almost now. The idea so much of the mantra of sustainability looking at looking at these older mid-century buildings is they were energy efficient therefore we need to take them down and either rebuild them or do something completely different and that's very much the argument of this mid-century on modern although they fault these buildings not only for energy reasons but for reasons of column-based sizing and floor-to-floor heights of class A office space but consequently what they're advocating is tearing down millions of square feet of otherwise perfectly good space so I think there's a certain amount of pushback that's been going on with this but a lot of this comes to from the initiative promulgated by the Bloomberg administration which isn't bad in itself to densify even to an even greater degree the area around Grand Central States has predicted this now what the image on the right is all about is what typically happens in Washington DC where this building has had its original facade stripped off and they're putting up a unitized curtain wall system now one of the things about a unitized curtain wall system is it is a hermetically sealed unit it is something that is that you take from the shop and you clip it onto your structural frame in the field and you walk away and as soon as the seals break on the glass on the inside you have to take the whole thing off and throw that away and replace it so it is inherently in that sense the sustainability is questionable you might say because there really is a you are really putting up a facade with a limited lifespan that you don't have a means of repairing there are people who are starting to work on solutions to this who are starting to try to develop facades that can be taken apart and rebuilt and there is precedent for that and one precedent there right in Washington DC is this building that I worked on back around 2000 the international union of operating engineers and this is both an interesting technical and a philosophical issue because you see the building there on the upper left that is the original building by Hollerberg Root and Berge the young John Berge who went on to become Phillip Johnson's partner built in the late 1950s and in a very typical 1950s kind of green glass okay so over time the building by the late 1990s need a lot of work but what the owners really wanted is they wanted a new look they say this looks tired we want we want to reskin this building we want to put a new skin on the building so we looked at a whole bunch of different options but what we discovered when we went in and looked at that curtain wall at the stick system in the curtain wall is in fact it was stainless steel it's pretty robust and because it was stick built which means that you put the framing members up and then you glaze the glass into it into the field rather than having that done in the factory we were able to take the original glass out fit an insulated glass unit in there weep the system and because it was sufficiently strong to hold that it all kind of held together so it's not perfect you don't have a thermal break in the framing but the glass itself is insulated and it performs to a much higher degree the compromise that we settled on with the owner is we went from green glass to blue glass said okay we'll give you a newer look with this contemporary blue glass and since you need a whole lot of work done on the penthouse and want to add some space up there we will give you that new little cornice piece that you see up at the top so they were satisfied and a new entry we redid the entry but we were able to save much much more of the building than the owners originally thought they would save this was not their idea going in but they were perfectly happy coming out and I think this kind of attitude is hopefully what is going to start to inform more and more projects like this I wish I had a lot more examples to cite to you but it's something that's coming preservation is a design discipline and I think one of the places where that comes out is looking at the interventions and additions that have happened with a lot of modern buildings and talking both about their successes and their difficulties I won't call this a failure this is the Yale Art and Architecture building by Paul Rudolph Hall as it's called now the renovation by Guac Miesigel and Associates the photo on the left is the photo that's the building as it was built and opened in the mid 1960s this is the plan of what's there today what you can see here Rudolph's building basically stops right around at that line and essentially this addition enables Rudolph's building to remain pretty much untouched to be restored because there's so much in Rudolph's building in terms of clearances for stairways elevator access because there are many different floor levels different sectional aspects bathrooms, all kinds of things that you simply to bring up to code without an addition you would take much of the primary space out of the building so this addition that goes off to the side which holds offices and bathrooms and fire stairs and all kinds of other things like that as well as some classroom space really enables the building to have a nice restoration so here you see the addition it actually works pretty well on the back here the front is less successful I think this points up the difficulties of working with certain kinds of buildings I think Paul Rudolph's buildings are right up there in terms of the challenges of what it takes to add to them because it's folly to mimic what he did but yet when you try to come up with something that plays off it as a contrast it can be tough to sort of find just the right language and I think that this this rear elevation here which is not the one that you typically see as as the public on this building actually works pretty well and it does enable a beautiful restoration inside and you know you can tell by the there are certain accommodations that one might need to make for ADA which aren't strictly speaking met here but you're able to do that by initiating in other areas to be able to make the building work to code and the other thing that they did was they went hog wild on sustainability strategies for this to try to make it to try to make it as high an energy performer as possible they were able to put in very high performance windows but they did some really ingenious things with the building systems and with being able to find clever ways to introduce daylight into the building and be commended and really should be a model for more buildings of this nature however I have to say one of the reasons that this building is as successful as it is is because Yale decided that they were I won't say spare no expense but they certainly put an inordinate amount of resources into this to make sure that they got something that was really of the highest quality speaking of Paul Rudolph I don't know how many of you are aware this has hit the press in the last week but the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is going to be not yet happening but it's going to be sometime later next year sending out a request for proposal to do some work on this but this is where this is the hazards of preservation you can see they reading this article you would think this entire site is being torn down and A the building that you see here the one of course prominently featured this is the Lindemann building nothing is happening to that building that building is staying regardless no matter what happens to the rest of the site and will eventually be something will be restored or repurposed but it will stay essentially as is this building here which is this building here the Hurley building the state wants to do some sort of redevelopment with this building this building down is by no means a done deal they're going to be exploring options for lots of other different ways to go about this which may save considerable parts of that the main issue here is that this is a site that's very under built and they want to take advantage of an FAR that was built into the site a long time ago because originally there was a tower which I don't actually have a picture of but it was meant to go right here 23 stories tall, never got built they built a courthouse here instead and the state badly needs office space so they're looking to do some development here and there was a very good studio at Wentworth a few years back that Mark Pasnick and Carol Burns ran that actually looked at some proposals for what that might mean to sort of meld the architecture of the Hurley building and some new development in there how this plays out but you're going to be hearing a lot about this in the months and years ahead here's again it's obviously a stunning building this is in the Lindemann building that's the chapel that's another view of the Lindemann building this is largely the Hurley building here and of course it's Rudolph's characteristic rib concrete the same concrete that used at the architecture building and it has its it is in many ways a sinister building and especially when you consider that this particular part of the building and this with the frog leering over the entrance there is for developmentally challenged people who are whose minds work in strange ways so it was a but I think that nature was very well very nicely captured in the department for those of you who are familiar with Scorsese's film but there's there's a lot of brutalist buildings are under very real threat and I won't try to minimize the threat that's potentially there with the government services building but the Apprentice Women's Hospital fought long and hard for and in the end they could not come up with a viable use that was acceptable to the owner of Northwestern University although some brilliant ingenious schemes such as this one by Studio Gang done in concert with Michael Kimmelman the architecture critic for the Chicago Tribune at the time came up with this very interesting scheme which I actually think is beautiful and this is again this is an idea saying listen you're never going to let this building is never going to be viable on its own like this so much like the state may want to do with the government services building in Boston why not put something on top of it use it as a podium and have some fun so this is not your grandfather or grandmother's preservation certainly but on the other hand it is a way of thinking about creatively adapting and reusing buildings which otherwise are very difficult to adapt and in that spirit there's not been a lot of overt change but there's been some fairly substantial reworking of the public spaces in the Barbican little photo on the upper left shows but one of the things that the Barbican has done so beautifully over the years is that they've gone through a long conservation management planning process and have developed really good design guidelines for how to sort of live and work and play in this enormous complex I don't know if you are familiar with it, I don't know 20,000, 30,000 people live in this complex it's a huge complex in East London and very poetic it's some of the nicest concrete architecture you'll encounter anywhere and now very fashionable of course but it's sort of balancing the need for change and upkeep and with hanging on to the essential character of what this thing is so a reminder about looking at additions we're going to look at a few more additions the Secretary of the Interior's standard standard nine, this is what I mentioned earlier there should be a distinction now we're getting pushback about that, there are people like my former graduate school classmate Stephen Seames who runs the Notre Dame program who says, well wait a minute, for thousands of years people did buildings and then they went back 200, 300, 400 years later and they did an addition and it looks the same and it's subtle differences but you don't necessarily have to be of your time you can be of the building's time and just sort of extend that across and there's a growing cadre of professionals that prefer to work that way these days even though they may be preservationists and challenging that sort of essential doctrine and again what that is a challenge to is really this whole idea of modernity saying we are a new, distinct and forever different epic in history everything that came before us is the other and we will treat it with respect but it's the other and this is an idea that is more and that history rather than being something that is linear and progressive the sort of Hegelian idea of the history moving along a continuum is something that cycles back on itself and it's really more of a field and these are very interesting philosophical issues to dive into if you've ever got the time and it can make your head spin certainly so the I wanted to point out though an example of a fairly robust addition here to to O'Neill Ford's Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas that was done by my former partner Paul King at EYP so here you have a building by Ford and over here a piece of the building by Ford right in here used to be an old power plant this is a way of doing some strategic selective demolition of underutilized buildings and putting in signature pieces with this little sustainable garden but something that is meant to blend these pieces together in a way that is sympathetic to the language that Ford was using but still distinctive of our time and I think there's enough in there that is new and different that no one's ever going to make that distinction but it's trying to use Ford's architecture to its best degree to sort of coax the best out of it on the other hand a project we did for GE up in Schenectady where again they knew in its value they wanted a show piece for their own sustainable design initiative so we dropped this very sustainable new skin over the building and built an atrium here around a windmill to sort of showcase that as a little demonstration area for this building so it doesn't really look anything like what's there before but it is a it's a successful adaptive reuse of a building that gives it a whole new identity Boston University and Ford has been doing a lot of work on Jose Luis Cerch's legacy this is the BU law school tower by Cerch and then this is his library and the student center and what they were hired to do was basically to make this building work which it hadn't for a long long time it was very dysfunctional building and they did it by adding an addition and that addition is what you see here they created a winter garden entrance and this is the kind of example of what I was talking about of the mitigation of the human scale mitigation creating spaces for people to come in and out of the building which are warm and welcoming and generous and gracious rather than just being a little hole in the wall which is all too often what these were to begin with for some reason there were a lot of modern architects didn't really care how you got into their buildings but including this guy Louis Kahn but this was a fantastic project for me and for my team and basically what this involved was taking one of the most important buildings of the second half of the 20th century and one of the most dysfunctional buildings ever designed by anyone and to try to take those two things and get rid of the dysfunction and make it work this building was called by David Baltimore Nobel Prize winning physicist the worst laboratory ever designed anywhere and it wasn't entirely Louis Kahn's fault but there was a lot in play there suffice to say but it was nonetheless we had to fix it so the basic schema of the building is you see here it is when it was first built before they put on the Goddard labs which kind of extended it off in this direction but this is the original complex right here this is the Old Penn campus and interestingly enough at the time Kahn was a student at the University of Pennsylvania the architecture school was right here so he spent years looking at that site not knowing what would eventually be in store for him and as I say I think this is a great quote from from Louis up at the top about why he did what he did he thought he thought scientists were like architects and like to work in big open spaces and so he designed these trays these glazed trays so that you could look across and across the space of the tray itself and from one tray into the next when in fact they all wanted little cubby holes and even Vincent Scully who is the one who called this one of the most important buildings of the 20th century a town of colleagues in a material sense they function not perfectly at all so the plan I have here is sort of this is an idealized plan and the pink are the Richards towers you see these three glazed towers that pinwheel around a solid brick service towers this used to be an animal holding area for experiments and then all of the other sort of core functions and then the labs like this and this is the way Conn envisioned without lots of partitions inside and then these are the Goddard laboratory additions which were also done by Conn but Penn was so a lot of things went wrong with the project construction and Penn was so frustrated towards the end that they actually fired Conn before this was finished and consequently there are a lot of the architectural moves that were eventually carried out that really don't come up to what happened in the original building because Conn did not have control of it up to the very end it's interesting to look at the way he kind of thought this through though and what his major concerns were this is his first real serious exploration of exposed reinforced concrete structure and it's also his first real look at what to do at bringing large volumes of air and exhausting large volumes of air out of a laboratory structure and the funny thing about Conn is you see things like this like these arches and these very very the sort of very very literal moment diagram of these cantilevered verandial frames off of these posts in his early explorations the structural engineer for this the design structural engineer was August Commendant and Commendant worked with Conn from this point through to the end of his career but this was their first collaboration together and it was also the time when Conn was most under Commendant's spell so I think that that's one of the reasons that this building is so much about structure is he really wanted to he wanted that to sort of emphasize the the power and potential of these reinforced concrete cantilevered frames and then of course you see these huge exhaust banks of ducts on either side of that sort of literally adding with every floor getting more and more and more as they go up to the roof so this is in schematic design and then here on the plan you can see this in the very early stages of design the you can see the form of the concrete piers the Vierendiel grid and this is when it was still a nine, it's a nine square grid which is subdivided now into four square grids within each of the nine squares it was originally nine and nine and that's why you had so many just going back to this why you had so many steps in the Vierendiel's going out there cantilevering off the towers off of the piers there are the piers there's a typical nine there's a typical nine square bay within the greater nine square of the whole grid but the real point of this is again the fact that at this very early stage he's already looking at what's happening how do you organize the systems and the systems are very well organized so here you see a nice photo of the concrete frame and it's purity and there's no other structure besides that, that's it everything else is infill which gave us a little problem but not an insuperable problem and then you have the ideal of the structure there you see again the nine square the four square within it but then this is the reality this is in the end what they had to build they had to put all these partitions in here and while Khan was very good about coming up with a system for the for the logic of how to do those partitions he never really wanted them and it never really meshed with his original idea of what the building was so here you see pictures of it going up again they those corner posts on the glazing being only glazing stops there they have no structural purpose whatsoever so consequently the concrete has a tendency to creep the brick has a tendency to push out and we did get distortion and fixing that distortion as we were renovating the curtain wall became one of the more interesting challenges that we faced but you can see it's a very very literal even in this iteration which is actually the simplification of this was a result of a value engineering process which in the end even Khan had made the building better that it was too fussy before but you see a very literal idea of how these diminish as you come up to the corner so these are right from Khan's working drawings and they are very very explicit about how you stack the systems within these virendil frames they're not really trusses they're really frames you have a clear space of about two and a half feet between the top of the bottom cord and the bottom of the top cord in which to run all these systems but they are incredibly well organized as this photo which is really again this is the space Khan wanted this was really his idea but you can see already there are stub-ups for tables and equipment and eventually partitions that go in across here that interfere with the purity of that but even the idea about how you the ceiling lights to make sure that all of these systems are above we call that we ended up calling this zone between the head of the window here and the silver sacred zone so everything below there came all the systems came up from the floor and everything above there they came down from above but nothing ever crossed that plane in reality that was that was not the case but that was the ideal and that was what we got back to in our renovation so here again by Tom Leslie for people who are interested in Khan building art, building science, it's one of the most intelligent and insightful works on Khan's very balanced between the philosophy the aesthetics and the techniques and it was a great source to us in figuring this out so here in as it was nearing completion but before they put all the interior partitions in so there is kind of the building in its idealized state really like a series of stacked vitrines like little modern jewelry boxes and then this great picture that was taken by Mildred Schmerz showing the obviously the ability to kind of not only work within one of these open areas but to look across and understand what is happening in there Khan had this very poetic idea about how scientists work together which unfortunately was not really realized and although he simplified the exhaust ducts you can see by the height of these and the particular attenuation of the tops he still wanted to make them this kind of baroque gesture and really create these very very strong vertical emphases because even from an air quality standpoint you didn't have to throw the air that far away but he really wanted that as a visual marker I mentioned that there was this original idea about okay if you are going to put in a partition you do it along a line of structure so there you see both the primary and the secondary structure and this becomes important because it was frankly a rule that we had to break in order to make our renovation work for what Penn needed but it was nonetheless something we paid close attention to and there is a lot of documentation in the drawings about holding to certain lines and I particularly like this because you can see what you've got here at these doors is they are headless so that the frame of the door there is only a jam and then the header is just the concrete opening and that way you don't have two lines when you have the head of a you have the line of a head of a window and door it's just one line very pure so you just have this three quarter inch stop there's the that's the head detail and then the typical jam but I have never seen a building anywhere else where someone was that obsessive and that fanatical about maintaining a datum but over the years of course you went from the ideal that you see here here is con with the model from the Museum of Modern Art and it got cluttered up here you see a lot of things crossing what we call that sacred plane and these are things that we sort of had to get out so I'm going to pick it up because I'm running out of time here but then here you see this is these are in a nutshell what the challenges were and the drivers for the project things that and Century Bond that was actually this was a mandate to make the building more energy efficient but because it's a national historic landmark we were it was deemed that it had to be energy frugal which means that we had to sort of make our best effort and I'll talk about that a little bit these are the goals and looking at the sort of areas of typical upper-level areas of significance the blue are really in some ways the most significant areas because the A, B and D the areas that you think would be the most significant in the lab since they were so cluttered up with these partitions that we knew we had to get rid of we were able to work with the Park Service to get them to say okay it's really the public space that's important here and that's what we need to improve so here's a typical six floor plan original on the left there you can see that's the service tower and then the glaze tower and then on the right the scheme that we used to pull that away and then the for looking at just point out right here that there the lines of structure here and here but we actually pulled these back and used a little infill device which I'll show you in a second in order to close that off in order to equalize the size of the offices here so to make a corner office which used to be that big and an interior office which used to be a little tiny thing like that to equalize them that was an absolute programmatic dictate that was the one thing we could not vary from is everybody had to have equal size spaces so we found a way to do that by borrowing light putting some putting the second glass inside the primary light and using non-glare glass so you don't get bounce reflections off of that and pulling these petitions away from the and also gave us enough room to populate the center with work stations like this so you were able to get all these graduates in here and very important finally we always left one corner open so that this idea that when you walk in to this renovated suite here and look out you get a sense of the expansiveness of what he was trying to do the glass was very important I'll go again I'll go through this quickly he began to experiment with this sort of break form stainless steel glazing system of his own in this building here the AFVL medical services building and you see that the develop piece right here this is a that's it right there that's a kind of a z-shaped piece and then the corner mullion I mentioned that the the sort of sighting down the corner the idea that this is not it's not plumb and therefore that led to sort of some problems with the fabrication of the glass it also made it easier to convince Penn that we were really better off not using insulating glass units but using laminated glass which would have more durability, longer life and more chance for being able to be cut in these unusual shapes in order to fit the distorted areas so here's here the details of that you can see the profile of the frame like that and the actual elevation of these very large pieces of glass he had originally designed these sliding screens which were completely ineffective and eventually were pulled off that they were originally put on the western south side of the building called cool shade screens and then I got very excited about the idea of could you put a could you could you make a thermally broken system out of this and I think the serious answer is no but the dreamers answer is you should explore whatever you can and this is a we did a lot of thinking like this to try to come up even with the solution we did and then we even tried this this is a proposal for a thermally broken frame we were working on this with Bob Heinchies' office in New York or Rada Polinsky and Aaron Davis and but we eventually settled on this whoops oh I'm sorry we eventually settled on this which is a high performance laminated glass which fit within the original frame structurally glazed able to cut to shape we needed for to accommodate the deformations of the buildings and gave them a reasonable increase in energy performance but very importantly though we now were able to seal the building up really tight and use a very high performance HVAC system this is from the guidelines reminding anybody who ever works on this building in the future about how this whole idea of stacking the systems that Conn originally designed really works and then we put in these chill beam systems we're able to use chill beams which are much more energy efficient than a VAV system and that is where we really realized the savings so it's not the ideal our baseline was here to start out with our optimum the very best we could have done with the chill beams and an IGU is right here but we got to we got to about 80% of that and we feel that that is that's a good balance considering the architectural quality of the building but again it's sort of putting all that together to make sure you come up with the optimal the optimal solution so that's what these are these adaptive solutions and in coming up then with a with a system to build out this thing we said okay we have to we have to do something new we have to we're going to work off of Conn's language and there was a sort of a decision that we would be distinctive and different but not radically different and we looked to Conn's own work for precedent this is the sort of the typical kind of oak and either mill finish aluminum or stainless steel that he uses at the Yale Center for British Art but also this idea of offsetting partitions because I mentioned we had to offset the partitions in order to to right size the offices something Conn did himself where he takes a line of structure here at the Kimball Museum he offsets using the same kind of bent stainless steel plate offsets the partition here and here and actually creates a room in between so within the structure he pulls that out enough to have a bonus space that occupies the actual line of destruction we thought well this is this is a great sort of pragmatic precedent to be able to use in coming up with our system so there is again looking again at this diagram looking at the corner that's what this is right here there's the glass inside of the larger light of glass there and then the primary lines of the structure and then here and here and here and here where we pull that out in order to make that work and that that is done with these panels that you see right here and there is actually a precedent within the building in a storage area where he had used in his case asbestos cement panels to offset some partitions from the grid we used a matte finish aluminum which looks just like an asbestos cement panel but it isn't of course and it also gave us the opportunity to put in some additional lighting from a conservation standpoint we gave the concrete just a very very light wash a couple of washes with simple green we made no effort to take a lot of the soiling and standing off that wouldn't come off with a simple wash because we wanted it to be part of the patina of the building and actually there is this wonderful glow that happens because of that and then this idea here that we created these lounge spaces by taking away closets and making this now space big enough to serve as an anti-room for the laboratories themselves and in order to accommodate a whole raft of new systems which had to go above here we took another idea from Khan's own sketches which was to create a kind of a shroud a hanging shroud in which to embed some lights and to provide some screening for the work above now this is all mesh so if you're sitting here and looking up you can see the stuff above it and be aware of what's going on but it gives it a little bit of a finish to the space just restored areas and the use of these vertical radiation units where they used to be there had been no heat there to begin with they discovered that they had to put heat at these windows at some point and they had these pedestals but the pedestals interrupted the floor to ceiling view of the window so we decided to use these runcles instead and that's basically it so I think since I have run over I was going to do a little more but I think I'm going to call it there and turn it up for questions and thank you all very, very much questions, comments people are hungry and tired I know actually again unfortunately I know I got a little I got a little ahead of behind myself I should say but what that is that was to illustrate this building had horrible solar problems and people tried desperately anything and I love that picture and that picture was actually taken by Julia Shulman and these no, this is people use mylar people use different kinds of blinds and in this case they actually hung drapes up there but that was it was every principal investigator for themselves in terms of the in our renovation we developed a mechoshade not only a mechoshade system but a mechoshade hanging system that works with cons stainless steel framing system which I think actually came out very elegantly and now they have they all have mechoshades that they can use and it's much better they also have better cooling okay we were awarded the project in 2011 we really got underway the end of 2011-2012 we spent about a year and a half in design and testing and then it was built between the first phase was built between 2014 and the end of 2015 the last phases were just completed about a year ago so that's a long we interviewed for the project in yeah we interviewed in the very beginning of 2011 we interviewed in the very beginning of 2011 well no that was I mean that was very important one of the things that we got very excited about there's a whole book to be written about the development of cons way of glazing buildings I have a longer version of this which compares it with the which brings in the Salk Institute and the Yale Center for British Art and how he was constantly refining and making more robust this system so we felt honoring that system was fortunately in the end it was so well built that we had no problem restoring we had to correct some distortions but then the question really became I bring up this slide because it was how do you what do you use for a system what is the right way to do this and there was no hard and fast guidance except for the old laboratory entrances and frankly what we did is this is call us cheating or not but what we did was we took the original design that Kahn used for the interior entrances to these lab suites which was also a brake form of brake metal he wasn't clear in the drawings whether it was stainless or just painted hollow metal it wasn't a typical hollow metal system which is what they put in so we found these drawings and then we found big voids, big X and in the end they put in a much heavier and more commonplace hollow metal typical hollow metal frame with a wood door so we developed from this a few principles we said alright we want to honor the idea of the brake metal now we actually tried doing a custom system that in the end did not work but what we did do is we did find the one steel interior partition manufacturer who could do something sort of like what we were after but again do it in a way that is contemporary that's clearly not Louis Kahn but that we felt had more empathy with the detailing ideas that went into the rest of the glazing of the building the other thing we did is we decided that everything had to be one material from the floor up to the underside of the truss so if it was glass it was all glass if it was wood it was all wood you know a lot of the professor says we want windows on our doors and we all finally said no we don't feel that that there was a rigor in Kahn's scheme and even though there were doors with windows in the original building they don't appear on his drawings it is again so we said we're going to do this in a way that we feel when some of the tries to capture some of the rigor of Kahn's architecture in a way that we see as appropriate it's subjective I mean I can't I can't tell you again that it's right or wrong but it felt right to us these were design decisions and putting this all together this all kind of felt right and fortunately most of the people who walked through it and reviewed it and subsequently afterwards have agreed with us so we were I guess we got this one right and we even to the point where we built these wooden wood panels we even cribbed the detail of just using the stop at the head without running the frame across the head we felt that was it that and that we would honor Kahn because I think anybody else looking at this looking at it from any other angle you would never suspect you would never confuse it with what Kahn had done originally but that's there was a lot of debate and I have to tell you our chief lab planner when I proposed this that we were going to move off the grid and put these things in, he almost quit Kahn you can't do that this is a preservation is a highly emotional discipline I mean people get very very excised about what is right and what is wrong and that's why I say there is no right and wrong it's whatever you can best justify and you just look at the grand scheme and hit your optimum point anybody else? yeah unfortunately we did for some of the piping but for the most the one thing I didn't say which I realized in my haste we changed the function of this building fundamentally we changed it from a wet lab to a center for cognitive neuroscience so all of a sudden we didn't need the vast amount of air changes that were required of the original building so that made our job a lot easier in terms of the HVAC so it was new systems but there we did have we did our best to honor the spirit of what Kahn did Kahn actually put in something called seamless duck work and the seamless duck work is a very expensive very exotic way of doing exposed duck work in the end we couldn't afford that but we got the next best thing which was something very close to that but we had to it was the one time we actually had to go back and have the contractor re-do something because they just they weren't getting it quite right so that stuff was very important and to your point if we could have saved it we would have but we were so radically changing the sizes and configurations but the spirit of how it stacks is the same that layering idea didn't change in our scheme anyone else? GSA and other buildings they were changing the way that they looked they did that GSA building I gave you it absolutely changes the way what was the sudden reaction from the general public who remembered the building now sees this as an almost new building now that they did was it adverse or was it not important up to date for the 21st century the former? much more of a ladder than the former I'm sure there are some people who were nostalgic for the old celebration building but not much remember this is a building of no great architectural significance you don't pay fast and play fast and loose with this but no they saw it as generally as you've modernized it modernization I don't know how much any of you have heard this term being thrown around these days much renovation work going on an awful lot of people nobody calls it preservation they call it modernization and even a lot of preservation projects are called modernizations it seems to ring true with people so anyone else? ok thank you