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Present: Jack Alvarez, Bill Barry, Bart Bauer, Matthew Bronski, Cynthia Chabot, Lorna Condon (Mass COPAR), Katherine Contis, Mary Daniels (Mass COPAR), Mike Dechano, Anne Marie Dilucia, Leslie Donovan, Marilyn Fenellosa, Jack Glassman, Sarah Grey, Jean Marie Hall, Kimberly Konrad, Ellen Lipsey, Laura MacKowiak, Tony Membrino (Somerville Old House Organization), Henry Moss, Ivan Myjer, Deborah Robinson, Brian Roche, Susan Schur, Malcolm Smiley, Robert Thomas, Erin Tobin, Sara Wermiel 1. Portland Brownstone Tour: Susan Schur, Matthew Bronski, and Henry Moss described the quarry/fabrication yard/building installation chain that this tour (co-sponsored and well-managed by Lisa Howe of APT Northeast Chapter) was able to follow. Mike Meehan's impressive presentation of historic and contemporary quarrying techniques was revealing along with Joseph Gnazzo's fabrication workshops and masons' yard. 2. Somerville Old House Organization: Tony Membrino, Founding Director of this energetic new group that shares information and moral support among owners of historic houses in Somerville told the Committee about their origins, their preoccupations, and the organization's activities. Encouraged at their inception by our former stalwart, Eric Breitkreutz; the organization is rapidly growing in scope and in ideas for new outreach and educational initiatives. Over 100 members already, the organization meets monthly and has a web site on the way. Contact Tony at (617) 625-5477. 3. 20th Century Exterior Metals Preservation Conference/AIA National Historic Resources Committee Boston Meeting: Susan Schur and her planning group continues to make progress in the development of the metals conference, has confirmed venues for the main events at MIT and at the Boston Athenaeum. This promises to be an interesting event. This is the technical material that others have found so difficult to assemble at such conferences as Preservation of the Recent Past in Chicago and Philadelphia. Stay tuned. 4. Mass COPAR, Managing Archival Drawings: Lorna Condon is Director of SPNEA's archive and an active member of Mass COPAR, an organization dedicated to strengthening the archival record of architecture. Lorna directed our attention to University Products range of archival quality materials and storage containers for various media. Her slides illustrated the different types of vulnerability and conservation techniques that are associated with photographs, heavy papers with ink wash sepia, ink on linen, blue prints, Ozalids, and other media. She discussed the short life phenomenon of CAD files utilizing evanescent software on perishable storage systems. Lorna's talk drew its illustrations from major collections that SPNEA has acquired; such as mid-20th century churches by Arlad & Derlay and the 105 year old office collection of Arthur Allen Cook of Milford. These collections include filthy rolls and flat files of brittle blueprints, yellow trace, trade catalogs, heavy paper, and linen drawings. Lorna introduced us to the mysteries of chemically inert sponges, acid free interleaf sheets for rolled drawings, and Scotch Tape, a sort of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde material that poses as a reliable quick repair and goes on to destroy everything it touches. [Please don't use it, even for those priceless but torn blueprints you found in your abandoned building.] Mary Daniels is Archivist at the Harvard Design School's Loeb Library. She addressed the temporal and fiscal limitations of archives. She noted that Architects' egos become most extravagant at about age 65. If they are alive, they want to offer their voluminous and unsorted records to Harvard, Yale, or the Morgan Library- perhaps even be paid. If they are dead, their spouse or offspring want to pursue the same offering, with even less sorting or volume reduction, and after all the valuable 100 year old trade catalogs have been auctioned separately. If the "infernal" Scotch Tape and newsprint are monsters from nightmare A, then the sheer magnitude of uncurated material that emerges from defunct, often uninteresting architectural practices is even more difficult. [You tell someone's wife or children that their work is not worth documenting, and that to accept their material might involve thousands of dollars of time sorting, pH neutralizing, interleafing, and storing in climate controlled space. Mary, not infrequently must do just that.] Mary showed examples from her archive at Harvard: Sert's sketch for Peabody Terrace on lined pages from a child's schoolbook, colorful presentation sketches for Caesar's Palace and Candlestick Park, Gropius' bow ties (truly), and CAD records for obsolete software and long gone equipment. Mary pointed out that all archival work is dependent upon grant support. As we circled around the table describing our offices' space and legal constraints for archives, it became immediately clear that no one was archiving the conceptual phase of their projects with early sketches, abandoned partis, or jettisoned elevations. [See Kahn's models of discarded elevations at Exeter Library to see what we don't save!] Surely, this is something that would be inexpensive to collect, sort, date and place in an acid free tissue folder amongst those documents that we keep to deter our incarceration. 5. Future BSA Historic Resources Committee Meetings: The next meeting will concentrate on the lessons learned in projects involving towers and steeples. Subsequent meetings will involve preservation topics from abroad, more problems with towers and steeples, and Erin Tobin on some vernacular siding materials. We may even impose on the BSA Codes Committee to come and discuss problems with the current draft of Chapter 34 as they are collecting ideas for its improvement. Focus Topic: Committee members' technical lessons from towers and steeples. 8: 00 a.m., Thursday, October 11, 2001 The Architects' Building, Fifth Floor 52 Broad Street, Boston |