 Mary Jablonski, an architectural paint researcher based here in New York City. Architectural paint is used on just about every building in the world. It's probably, I would say, 99% of our buildings have got architectural paint on them. And what's interesting is it is this paint that actually helps tell the story of not only how the building was used, but also by the people who used it. So it's very much in many ways a cultural history that you find. So paint is far more important than just saying, oh, look what the first color of the building was. But it's interesting to see how tastes change. Paint protects the material, but it's also about decoration. And the human beings that inhabited these buildings, used these buildings were just as interested in decoration as they were in the protection of the finishes. So as you go into a building, it's interesting to try and determine how those buildings were used by reading what the types of finishes used were. For instance, if you're looking at an office building, or if you're looking at a bank, or any other court building, they often, particularly the end of 19th century and early 20th century, had wood-grainning. And the wood-grainning was different depending on the hierarchy of the use of spaces. For the people that were at the top of the echelon, you might have a burled door panel or a quarter saw-note panel. But if you were lowered down, you were going to be in a room probably with a door with straight-grainning. Also, in a sense, you can read how rooms were used in a house. Again, you might find wood-grainning on certain doors of bedrooms, but the servant's doors would probably not have wood-grainning on. They would probably be more plainly painted. And rooms in a house always did have a hierarchy of space. You had public and you had private. And your public spaces, you were going to put your best finishes there. Architectural paint actually was changed drastically in the mid-19th century. Before that, it was basically artisans only that would be applying paint. You certainly as a homeowner or certainly as a business person would not be applying paint. It took too much skill and training to be able to do any work with paint. It was only when the commercialization of paint occurred in the mid-19th century that we actually start getting probably a loss of skill of how to make paint going on because you could now buy it either in boxes for water-based paint or in cans for an oil-based paint. Now, I'm going to simplify things drastically by saying there are two basic types of paints. There's a lot more to it, but it's easier to understand, I think, a little bit of what happened if you think about paint as either being water-based or being oil-based. Oil-based paint would have been mainly linseed oil until about the 20th century and they would have had a binder in a vehicle. The binder was often lead white and the vehicle was often linseed oil. Water-based paints, on the other hand, were easier probably to apply and far less toxic. The vehicle was water, so they didn't have a solvent which you would often find in the oil-based paints. They looked very, very different as well, but in the mid-20th century what happened is with commercialization of the paint industry, you started to get them into these containers and at the same time they were being sold to the painters and to the homeowners through brochures. And it is interesting in these brochures, unlike any other sort of brochure of this period, they actually had paint samples. And what it does is it allows us to actually have a peek into what these finishes look like. They look drastically different than any of this modern late 20th, early 21st century paint looks. Why don't we take a look at the water-based paint first? You will notice that these are the very velvety, very pastel colors. You do not get pastel oil-based paints in this period, so when you see those Victorian painted ladies, those are not accurate colors over the period, but you do find these wonderful pastel, very velvety looking paints that are called calcimines for the most part. We have these little snippets from history of what these finishes look like. Now these paints that you are looking at right here are basically a mix of whiteing, glue, and some water with pigment added to it. So you have basically a binder, which is your whiteing, and a vehicle which is water and the glue that helps hold that together. This is what are two examples of what you would find in a store if you went to go select an oil-based paint. Now they have also brochures, but they thought these were a little bit larger and a little bit easier to use. And you will notice that these are not flat paints. They were applied with a brush, and you could actually see the brush strokes in this paint. It was a firm called Walman and Martinez, and you would find these little boards hung up in the store and you could go and select what kind of paint you wanted to paint for your house. Now these were for the body of the house, and if you look here, you can see the color. This is number six, and this is number 73, but they also tell you what are the colors you could paint the trim and the windows and your shutters on your house. So these were guides to help people determine how they wanted to paint the building of the style they were interested in. So how do we go about doing the study of architectural paint? Most of it is going to be relatively low tech. We're going to do what we call cross-sectional analysis of the paint. In other words, we're going to look at an under a microscope in cross-section. The most important thing to start with is you must be very careful about how and where you take your sample. What we get are very small samples like this, as you can see in this bag, and we take part of our sample and we embed it in resin and polish it and we'll look this small. It is. It's very, very small, but it gives us quite a bit of information. When doing architectural paint research, it's really key that you have a good microscope and then a microscope that's pertinent to what you're looking at. What we have here is a stereo zoom microscope. It goes from a power of 7.5 to 40. You often do go up to sort of 70, which is quite useful, but it's very important to record the magnification of what you're doing, but also it's important to have the light source, and the light source we have here has got a daylight filter, which is basically what the paint should look like in daylight. As you can see here, there's an image on the screen that essentially you can see the number of layers. You can see the dirt layers. In this case, we don't have any elaborate paints. It's a very old house that you can see the multiple layers of paint that have been built up over the years. This is from a vernacular house, so it's not going to be multiple layers of primers. They basically just put finished coatings one right after the other. Now, one of the other things that when you are doing paint analysis, it's absolutely key is you really need to have your photomicrographs. You need to show people what it is that you were looking at under the microscope. What we're doing when we're looking through the microscope and we're doing any kind of examination of these layers is we are collecting data. We're not analyzing it at that time. We're actually just collecting data. But once you collect your data, your data should be separate from the analysis. It's absolutely key. Sometimes colors fade. Sometimes colors change. Some rooms have different painted finishes on one section of the wall versus another section of the wall. The whole thing is making sure that when you do your work, you record everything carefully and you make sure that you have these photographs so that other people can take a look at what you saw and see the same things that you did. I was a graduate out of the Columbia Historic Preservation Program. I came in thinking I was going to do more urban planning and we discovered the world of architectural conservation. In fact, I fell in love with it at the Diamond House, which is farther up in Manhattan, as it was one of the study houses in a conservation workshop. And of course, one of the things I looked at there was this architectural paint. So I have been working in this field since 1990, but I've had my own firm since 1995. Architectural paint research is actually not something new at Columbia. It's been going on a long time. And in fact, Columbia has been host to two of the major important architectural paint research conferences, one of them in 2008 and one of them in 2017. And both of the proceedings of that have been published. So when we look at architectural paint, we don't just look at the color. We take a look at all of the ingredients of the paint. We take a look at this whole series of colors. And in many instances, what we do is paint archaeology. And the interesting part about this paint is it helps tell the story of the building. We can look at the exterior of the building, but it doesn't really give us any sense of how that building has been used. If you start taking a look at the finishes in the building, and this includes paint, you really start to get an understanding of who it was and how this building was used. So paint just tells this wonderful story of what is going on in the buildings that we try and preserve.