Hannah Barker house – preservation and perseverance

circa 1900

Yesterday Historic Boulder, our local non-profit preservation advocate organization, announced that it has purchased the long-unoccupied Hannah Barker house.  Most folks here in Boulder know it better as that dilapidated, boarded up white elephant on Arapahoe west of 9th Street.  Buying the house themselves certainly is a bold put-your-money-where-your-mouth-is move.  And it is not the first time.

today

Historic Boulder largely got its start in an effort in the early 1970's to save the threatened Boulder Theatre.  Rather than just picket the building and shout at some public hearings, they bought the building and secured it for a few years until a buyer could be found.  They have done similar purchase-to-perserve efforts since including the Highland Lawn School which has become the Highland City Club building.

1880 drawing

Sitting on the Landmarks Board, I hear a lot of complaining about the entire preservation process.  Maybe more than most places, in the West there is a strong owner's rights ethic that often runs smack into perservation efforts which attempts to protect our cultural heritage by primarily regulatory means. The recent success of Historic Boulder purchasing the Barker house mutes that conflict and lends immense credibility to the organization and the act of preservation in general.  And in the end, Historic Boulder will take the risk and the community will gain the benefit of a truly architecturally and historically significant building saved.

One of the most interesting aspects of this project will be Historic Boulder's intention to use the renovation of the house as a model for demonstrating that preservation, old houses and sustainability concerns can all work seamlessly together.  In Boulder we have a wealth of talented and experienced architects, builders, energy consultants and building science professionals that can be brought to bear on this project.

The building is currently a much-abused shell, but even in that state it has a tremendous amount of embodied energy that needs to be accounted for. Embodied energy is the all the energy inputs that the existing building represents - the energy required to lay the masonry, frame the house, and it also includes the trapped energy that was used in the creation of all those bricks and all that lumber, including its transportation.

Most energy conservation ordinances and programs do not give sufficient credit for embodied energy and rely more heavily on building systems and performance to meet sustainability goals.  Embodied energy is difficult to calculate, but only by carefully stepping through this process can we have a quantitative marker that proves "the greenest building is the one already there."

circa 1885

Hopefully a careful and exhaustively documented renovation process can convince the City of Boulder and other municipalities that they must included embodied energy as an integral part of their sustainability regulations and give it it's proper credit.  At that point, perservation and sustainability can be partners, not often contentious constituents.

Congratulations to Historic Boulder and all its volunteer members who made this possible, as well as the City of Boulder preservation and planning staff that aided in this much-needed process.

(All image from Historic Boulder and/or The Boulder Public Library, Carnegie Branch for Local History)

Altona Grange hall

AG southwest

Just north of Boulder, Colorado is the Altona Grange Hall.  It is one of the original 492 granges in Colorado, established in 1891.  These buildings were built as part of the Grange movement of farmer solidarity known as the Patrons of Husbandry.  They advocated for modern farming techniques, water rights protections, bank farm loan policies and railroad price fixing.  The buildings become the social center, the "culture" of agriculture,  of often very isolated farming communities.

These are buildings built without architects, usually by the farmers themselves.  Unlike Europe where so many farmers live in town and migrate daily out to their fields, the homestead movement in the United States occupied the land in a much more dispersed fashion.  Farmers often lived great distances to cities or town and from each other.  These buildings are some of the richest examples of truly vernacular building in the West.

The Altona Grange has a long and rich history and is still a thriving enterprise.  http://altonagrange.pbworks.com/

I find the building fascinating in its lack of consistency to roof pitches, materials usage, etc.  As you can see, the siding and roofing changes for different locations, the various additions wrapping around the original building based on use and necessity, not aesthetics.  But what ends up is a really dynamic building.

AG south

AG east

This is architecture put together by the people who use it and have to maintain it collectively.  It is not graceful or delicate, but it has a solid presence that comes from occupation and some very clear relationships.  The main building is clearly dominant and the additions and sidecars are secondary.  You can tell from looking at the building that the main hall is the center of the community, the other forms are there to support that main function.  This is a simple, albeit not elegant, description of "spaces served and spaces in service" that Louis Kahn delineated in most of his better works and gives a building a clear sense of both its genesis and use.

AG sign

This modest building serves as a good lesson to architects designing buildings that stand isolated out on the plains.  A simple, strong form needs to be strongly articulated to sit in the massive panaroma of the landscape and the small additions lend human scale and occupation.  A beautifully simple building more satisfying that so many current architectural flights of fancy.

Richard Nickel – photographer, preservationist, hero

"Great architecture has only two natural enemies: water and stupid men."   -      Richard Nickel

The archive of photographer Richard Nickel was recently donated to the Art Institute of Chicago.  Nickel is a hero in the Chicago preservation and architecture communities for his early and dedicated work to preserve and document so much of Chicago's early architectural history.  Working throughout the 1950's and into early 1970's, Nickel tirelessly recorded much of the work of Adler and Sullivan, Daniel Burnham, Holabird and Roche, Frank Lloyd Wright and others.  These were the ugly, dark days for urbanism and architecture in the US, as hundreds of magnificent buildings were demolished by private developers and public institutions to make way for "progress" and urban renewal.  What was lost was priceless buildings, glorious creations of great architecture and great neighborhoods.

Nickel not only took countless photos of endangered buildings, but he was also an ardent campaigner against the kind of wanton destruction that some Chicagoans were attempting.  The demolition of Louis Sullivan's work was Nickel's prime target and his efforts included not only taking photos but saving actual pieces of soon-to-be-demolished buildings.  The interior of the Chicago Stock Exchange building is a part of the Art Institute, on permanent display, due his work and that of other zealots he recruited.  Louis Sullivan is now known as one of the greatest of all American architects and much of his body of work exists solely in Nickel's archive.

Nickel's story ended tragically and in some mystery.  His body was found inside the demolition site of the Chicago Stock Exchange building, buried under a collapsed stair.   Under great risk, he often entered building sites where demolition was already underway, and his photos are often the only documentary evidence that exists of so many buildings.  In the case of the Stock Exchange, he returned many times after the official salvage operation was complete to retrieve and document.

His archive, some 15,000 photographs, prints and negatives, has been held by The Richard Nickel Committee and available for viewing only by professionals and academics.  Hopefully now that it is housed at the Art Institute, some of this man's heroic and beautiful images can be viewed more easily by the citizens of Chicago, who have benefited so powerfully from his heroic efforts.

For more info on Nickel, I recommend They All Fall Down by Richard Cahan, on Nickel, his preservation efforts and those of Chicago architect John Vinci.