I’m down in southern Illinois at the statewide historic preservation conference which as set up shop at Lewis and Clark Community College. The campus is beautiful and kind of looks like Hogwart’s country cousin.

Ten points to Gryffindor!

The theme is “Old is the New Green”, which is true and bears continued discussion. But it isn’t the reason why I’m so jazzed that I decided to come.

I attended three great and thought-provoking sessions today and got to get up in front of a crowd of about 200 and share my three (or five. or six.) minute “success story” about what’s been going on at work for the last year. I’ve gotten to meet some great people – some new, some faces to go with names.

One of the sessions I went to discussed how to incorporate New Media into preservation. It really wanted to make me develop this space – or start a new one – in my ongoing campaign to bring context to the people. To do it, I need a platform (easy: wordpress, twitter, tumblr, etc.), a voice (which I continually develop but I think is starting to get its… um.. sea legs? yeah, let’s go with that.), and an audience. This last one is the hardest one for me to wrap my head around. If I build it, will they come? Is it that easy? I’d love to learn more about how to build an audience. A couple of the New Media presenters stressed the importance of variety to keep viewers coming back. I think I’m good with that. I always have a camera for the hey-isn’t-that-cool’s, and as my archives will show, I can rock out a 500 word post like it’s nobody’s business.

Anyway, if you’re into preservation or green stuff or old stuff you should follow the New Media presenters. They’re all on twitter and are: @blisl, @PreservationSTL, @urbanmatt, and @BuildingRevival.

In any case, it’s been a good day, with another in store for tomorrow. Now I’m off to the evening social where, god willing, there will be beer.

Seacrest, out.

Considering I live in the 3rd largest U.S. Metropolitan Statistical Area and work at a very urban-focused museum, I sure spend a lot of time thinking about barns.

This is partially because of where I grew up, and partially because of my work in grad school. And it’s partially because of where I live – surrounded by hard surfaces and right angles, and grey, and glass, and smog. I don’t see a lot of rural agriculture in my day to day and maybe that’s why my mind goes to barns when I need a little escape.

My thoughts can be summarized like this: What should we do with them?

I wish I had a good answer. Hell, I wish I had a consistent answer.

Yesterday, I was talking to Mom about barn salvage companies that dismantle deteriorating or collapsed barns and relocate, rebuild, or resell them. For a long time, I’ve had an aversion to these operations because of the way they divorce the building from its site. Sure, technically materials are preserved in that they don’t burn or rot away but I shy away from calling it capital-P Preservation. It’s conservation without context. It creates spectacle without teaching anything. It serves an individual good, not a greater good.

But Carla Bruni brings up an excellent point on her awesome blog that by design barns (and other agricultural buildings) were designed to be used and reused, torn down, reassembled, lather, rinse, repeat. Indeed, if you’ve ever seen a rambling barn way out in the middle of a field and wondered what it’s doing there, the answer is that it probably was cobbled together out there – put together out of one or more disassembled buildings that had been moved for the purpose of having a temporary place to stash hay. Or maybe a local crop. Or something.

Point is, barns were made to be modular and reusable, so why should I get in the way of that? Carla points to John Ruskin, who – when I’m talking preservation to students here at the museum – I like to put on a Preservation Spectrum (I call dibs on that phrase) with Eugene Viollet le Duc. Ruskin thought that the best and most truthful a building could be was one that was never monkeyed around with. (His words. Ok, fine. My words.) You built it, let it live and decay over time, and it would only get more truthful and beautiful with age. Bob McCullough, one of the finest teachers I’ve ever had, would ask “Why don’t we have ruins in this country?” That’s Ruskin right there. Viollet le Duc was about 180 degrees away from that approach. He thought that historic preservation should be embodied in restoration, which was the “means to reestablish [a building] to a finished state, which may in fact never have actually existed at any given time.” To le Duc, restoration was a way to improve upon history to create the idealized whole of what an historic building should have been.

The thing that’s great (and harrrd) about preservation is that it’s different for every project and that it usually falls somewhere in the middle of that spectrum. The preservation of our built agricultural heritage is no different. There’s no overarching RIGHT ANSWER. There’s just a thought process and a continuing conversation about how we can best be served by the historic building stock and how it can best be served by us.

As a grad student, I was privileged to work with the early stages of the Vermont Barn Census – a project to record information on the state’s five to fifty thousand historic barns. During my time there, I helped to develop the process for volunteers to follow, wrote a visual glossary for them to take into the field to help identify building types, and found time to give an interview or two. The goal of the census isn’t to tell property owners what they should do, but to foster a conversation within the state and around the country about what’s out there, what best conservation practices should be, and how barns and such can be used going forward.

It’s worth thinking about, especially when you learn how much rural, and specifically agricultural, landscape we lose every year. Staggering amounts. History, as they say, is written on the land. Buildings, in this case buildings related to our agricultural heritage, are a big part of reading that history. What are we going to do when they’re gone? What’s going to tell the story then?

Remember, culture and heritage are sustainable resources. Barns present unique challenges and opportunities, but what’s important is that we open our eyes, see what’s out there, and start a conversation

Last night, I was proud to be inducted on to the board of directors for the Pleasant Home Foundation. Located in Oak Park, Pleasant Home is a grand Prairie-Style home designed by George Maher, a contemporary of Frank Lloyd Wright. The Foundation is responsible for the restoration of the building and its operation as an historic house museum. Most visitors to Oak Park who have an eye for architecture naturally gravitate toward ol’ FLW, and understandably so. But it’s important to remember that the village is home to much more than Wright’s work. Indeed, Pleasant Home is a local landmark, was listed on the National Register in 1972, and became a National Historic Landmark in 1996.

Pleasant Home

For me, there are some interesting parallels between this new house museum with which I’m associated and with the one where I work. Sure, Hull House predates Pleasant Home by about 40 years but both, I think, do a good job of illustrating the “embodied history” that give a building its significance over time. In Hull House’s case that embodied history came from the vision and work of Jane Addams and the other settlement reformers. Pleasant Home, as sort of proto-Prairie writ large really provides a grounding and foundation for that architectural movement and makes it easier to read its development over time. Both properties are local landmarks, National Register-listed, and National Historic Landmarks. Both are associated with larger governmental organizations – the University of Illinois in the case of Hull House and the Park District of Oak Park for Pleasant Home. Both seek to interpret the lives of those who lived there, and both recognize that that’s not enough to keep people coming back.

Hull House Museum

In a recent entry on his excellent blog, Vince Michael says that house museums typically make no more than 20 or 25 percent of their operating costs through admissions and tours. In the case of Hull House, we don’t charge admission and with tours we ask for a non-mandatory donation. We’re blessed by the fact that the University covers basic operating expenses: keeping the lights on, providing basic cyclical maintenance, and making sure the staff gets paid. But beyond that, we have raise any other funds we need. And that’s pretty much for anything else: exhibits, programs, renovations, etc. I’ve only been on board for about 12 hours at this point, so I can’t claim to know the financial picture at Pleasant Home, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it’s much the same.

There’s a great push these days to demonstrate the environmental sustainability of historic buildings, but historic house museums are a good example of the fact that historic sites have to be economically sustainable. Vince says, “Creative programming and appropriate income-generation are necessary for all sites.” That’s 100% correct. Whether the income’s generated by admission or by donation, the more people through the door, the further along an historic site will be on the path to sustainability. And you can get a lot of people through the door by having a diverse and engaging suite of programming. I think we do that pretty well here at the Hull House museum, although – yeah – I’m biased. And we think its important that the programming be faithful to the significance of the site. Unasked but always subconsciously present whenever planning an event is the question, “Is this the type of event that Jane Addams would have hosted.” I like to think that we get it right for the most part. In its way, Pleasant Home does it well too. The Farsons (who built the house) had a reputation for throwing large and lavish parties. Today, the house earns income from rental for use as a venue for weddings, parties, etc. The house is also used as a space for lectures on architecture, history, and art. The local historical society has offices and exhibit space on the second floor. I haven’t fleshed out the idea fully yet, but I think there also might be a real opportunity to use the house as an “architectural history lab” and use the design, features, systems, etc. of the house to help explain/provide context for the era in which the house was used. (i.e., being led on an examination of the servants’ spaces to learn more about changes in domestic life over time, looking at the building’s electrical features and learning about what it was like when electrical lighting was the cutting edge.) We do something similar here at the Hull House Museum in our ‘Architectural Encounters’ exhibits and it seems to be working well.

My least favorite kind of historic sites are the ones that seem to exist only because they’re old and offer no other context. If, like me, you’re a sucker and pay the admission anyway, all you find are dusty old rooms that feel more like your grandmother’s little-used guestroom rather than a piece of history come to life.

I’m happy, proud, and energized to be associated with two historic sites that aren’t that at all.

History should lean forward.