Design Historic Preservation

Historic Preservation for Designers offers a comprehensive overview of historic preservation with a focus on historic interiors, historic building materials, and the adaptive reuse of interiors. This text includes a brief history of preservation in the United States, criteria to determine whether a building is historic, a discussion of preservation law, and how to document historic buildings with a focus on design and understanding functional and aesthetic requirements. The text explores issues including building restoration and rehabilitation standards, adaptive reuse principles,and codes and accessibility requirements. Designers will discover timely information on inspecting historic buildings to determine their age and condition as well as the growing relationship between historic preservation, green design, and the environment.

This collection of papers addresses two questions central to design and historic preservation: what are the parameters of 'compatibility' in the design of additions to historic buildings and of new infill buildings in historic districts and landscapes. Presented at the 'Third National Forum on Historic Preservation Practice: A Critical Look at Design in Historic Preservation', held at Goucher College, the authors include practicing and academic historic preservationists, architectural historians, architects, landscape architects, and engineers. Organized under the themes of 'Melding Contemporary and Historic Design', 'Design Standards in Changing Environments', 'Modernism and Post modernism in Preservation Design', and 'Engineering and Preservation', issues of compatibility are explored through diverse projects in locations across the United States from historic Charleston, SC to downtown Los Angeles.

A comprehensive overview of historic preservation topics relevant to interior designers, architects, and preservationists.

The construction and operation of buildings is responsible for 41 percent of all primary energy use and 48 percent of all carbon emissions, and the impact of the demolition and removal of an older building can greatly diminish the advantages of adding green technologies to new construction. In Building Reuse, Kathryn Rogers Merlino makes an impassioned case that truly sustainable design requires reusing and reimagining existing buildings. Additionally, Merlino calls for a more expansive view of preservation that goes beyond keeping only the most distinctive structures based on their historical and cultural significance to embrace the creative reuse of even unremarkable buildings for their environmental value. Building Reuse includes a compelling range of case studies—from a private home to an eighteen-story office building—all located in the Pacific Northwest, a region with a long history of sustainable design and urban growth policies that have made reuse projects feasible. Reusing existing buildings can be challenging to accomplish, but changing the way we think about environmentally conscious architecture has the potential to significantly reduce energy consumption, carbon emissions, and waste.

This classic text covers the gamut of preservation issues in layman’s language. Historic preservation, which started as a grassroots movement, now represents the cutting edge in a cultural revolution focused on “green” architecture and sustainability. This book provides comprehensive coverage of the many facets of historic preservation: the philosophy and history of the movement, the role of government, the documentation and designation of historic properties, sensitive architectural designs and planning, preservation technology, and heritage tourism, plus a survey of architectural styles. An ideal introduction to the field for students, historians, preservationists, property owners, local officials, and community leaders, this thoroughly revised edition addresses new subjects, including heritage tourism and partnering with the environmental community. It also includes updated case studies to reflect the most important historic preservation issues of today; and brings the conversation into the twenty-first century.

Winner of the Society of Architectural Historians' 2013 Antionette Forrester Downing Book Award, this provocative analysis of historic preservation's past and future will transform contemporary understanding of the movement. Buildings, Landscapes, and Memory: Case Studies in Historic Preservation explores historically and critically the historic preservation movement in the United States. Analyzing ten extraordinary places, this provocative analysis of historic preservation’s past and future will transform contemporary understanding of the movement, examining assumptions about why history, heritage, and place should matter. It ranges broadly from a discussion of the commemoration of place in the Marquis de Lafayette’s triumphal tour of the United States in 1824–25 to speculation about the cultural and political import of interpreting history on EPA Superfund toxic waste sites. Thinking critically about preservation requires also thinking critically about its opposite: destruction. The book treats the movement to conserve the Hudson River Palisades from destruction at the hands of trap rock quarrymen as well as the effort to save Dutch-American homesteads that stood in the path of development in Brooklyn. It explores the intersection between race, culture, and preservation in the 1940s effort of African Americans to preserve the Mecca Flats in Chicago, an apartment building that was the subject of popular blues music and that was threatened by Mies van der Rohe’s designs for the Illinois Institute of Technology. Focusing on the relationship among tradition, preservation, and modern design, Buildings, Landscapes, and Memory explores the making of Eero Saarinen’s Jefferson National Expansion Memorial Arch on the historic Mississippi riverfront in St. Louis as well as the tension between tradition and modern design at Thomas Jefferson’s University of Virginia, declared a World Heritage site in 1987. Engaging early efforts to build an economy on preservation and heritage tourism, the book also looks at the creation of Virginia’s historic highway marker program in the 1920s.