iFacebook progress

This blog has occasionally taken issue with technology, especially when that technology seems designed not to facilitate a solution but simply to move product. But technology and desire, as Apple have shown us time and again, are fiercely interpenetrated, and often the hype of a technological advance like the iPod, iPhone or iPad is actually matched by category-creating performance. Suddenly we have a need we never had before.

Now the moralists and ideologists will fret that the new technology will transform us so much we will lose our moral or ideological compass, unless we can maintain control over the technology. That is the meme driving fantasies from H.G. Wells through the Terminator and the Matrix. If that idea makes you feel better, go ahead and have it. But it is wrong. Of course the technology changes us, it always has.


Most of our “traditional” culture from harvest festivals to religious holidays is based on agricultural civilization, which is to say a human society completely and utterly transformed by the technology of sedentary crop cultivation. A whole slew of domestic traditions and artifacts from the bowl of fruit on the table, the breadbox, the garden bed and even the domesticated dog are relics of the technology of agriculture and how it changed the way we live, interact, and think. Even many of our current cultural clashes derive from the clash of sedentary cultures with surviving migratory societies in places like Mongolia and Arabia.


Even more apparent in our 21st century physical everyday are the legacies of the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment, which is to say, respectable middle-class culture caused by the mass production of goods and services. The reason there is a lawn in front of my house (and a lawn mower in the shed), a dining room, a living room or parlor and bedrooms is a result of an entire moral universe crafted in no small part by industrialization and urbanization. If those room-sized artifacts seem suburban rather than urban, that is exactly the point: there is no need – no possibility – of the conceptualization of a suburban ideal in the absence of industrial urbanization. You need to be confronted by the technology that is the city before you can possibly desire a suburb as respite.

Even the artifacts within the home are evidence of the spread of this ideal and the emergence of a consumer marketing-driven technological advances. The ideal requires cultivation in the form of a piano, which industry transforms into the mass-market parlor organ, which eventually becomes the Victorola and then the HDTV. Each transforms our behavior, preparing the soil for the next new crop.


Now, in the 19th and 20th centuries as the suburban ideal spread and middle-class values took over, most of the artifacts and performances we now recognize as “traditional” in holidays were invented, which is why Dickens’ a Christmas Carol is so effective: it takes us back to the time our modern idea of Christmas began. The rise of middle-class living and ongoing technological revolutions in the domestic realm also meant that conditions enjoyed by a minority in 1900 – running water, water closets, kitchens, automobiles – were enjoyed by the majority in 2000. The tradition of having a stove in your kitchen, a bathroom in your house or a garage of any kind emerged in the last four generations.


So, I don’t wonder why I suddenly need an iPod and iPhone or an iPad – I wonder why I need a toilet or an automobile, because that was what the iPod was a century ago. My last house even had an “early-adopter” toilet with the water tank way up high (although that was actually a 1980s retro design, which introduces the idea of nostalgia, where I shan’t go today.)

Of course, the great game-changer today is “social networking,” the Facebook phenomenon. I have colleagues I have worked with since the days of typewriters and carbon copies who now longer telephone me or even email me – they simply send me a message on Facebook. I admit I got addicted to it two years ago when I was trying to find a certain song from a movie and one minute later I had the entire soundtrack – while I was on vacation in Mexico. The other night I chatted with a friend in Holland and my kids can visit their cousins in Far West Texas on Skype almost anytime they want. Last week we had houseguests from Japan so I got out the Japanese phrasebooks we used there five years ago but the kids simply carried a laptop around and let Google translate do the talking. I can lament all of the pre-Internet skills I learned that are no longer necessary, but History won’t be listening.


Why didn’t the moralists and ideologists convince us we didn’t need telephones and radios? God knows they tried, they always do. They fail. I read an article yesterday about the relative moralities (ooh – that is a fun phrase right there!!) of conservatives, liberals and libertarians, which had a nice analysis of that topic but then plopped an unexamined idea – Progress – at the end.

Progress as a concept emerges in the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution along with its yin-yang counterpart: History. Both imagine a trajectory, and that image was in fact a new image in 1800, because most humans had a more cyclical view of life and time (I dealt with the idea of linear time in the last blog.) Some aspect of what we call “Progress” may be a natural condition of the churn that is life but mostly it is a value judgment, and one I sometimes share because I generally prefer now to then. But I am not convinced that NOW is better, nor I am I convinced like so many that THEN is better, and I don’t think that is a moral evasion as much as the recognition of a scientific reality. My dissertation advisor Bob Bruegmann was constantly pushing me away from “either-or” historical analysis and forcing me to recognize the prevalence of “both-and.”


The moral question gets asked and re-answered with every technological and societal shift – that is why all ideologies are wrong, because they presuppose a static reality that never is or was – there is only historical and contingent reality. Part of that reality, is of course, a deep human desire for constants.

There are two constants: Humans have a deep seething desire to innovate and a deep seething desire to keep things as they are. And both are always true.

Preservation Education

This fall I handed the Directorship of the Master of Science in Historic Preservation program here at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago over to Anne Sullivan, AIA. Anne has taught in the program since it began in 1994 and is currently president of the Association for Preservation Technology, among other accomplishments. I of course remain the John H Bryan Chair in Historic Preservation.

But I also remain involved in preservation education and next week in Austin, Texas I will be part of a panel discussing the future of preservation education. This is a topic I spoke on in the Ukraine in 2006 and Sweden in 2007, and at that time I was focusing on the need for hands-on opportunities for students, and how important that is to the learning process. Haptic. Muscle memory. Seeing more by DOING.

I also talked about the proliferation of short courses, continuing education courses and “certificates” that bundle together various preservation classes, since we had just approved new standards for these non-degree programs during my tenure as Chair of the National Council for Preservation Education (NCPE).

But next week my role at the Conference will be to ask questions about where preservation education is going in the 21st century. A key question involves the NCPE Standards for preservation degree programs, which date back 30 years and are focused largely on history and documentation, a legacy in some ways of the Historic American Buildings Survey, crafted by the AIA and the feds back in the 1930s.

As usual, practice is outpacing theory. Almost all preservation degree programs include the following coursework, none of which is required by the NCPE Standards:

Preservation Law
Building Materials Conservation
Planning

And the following courses are rapidly expanding across our programs:

Real Estate Development
Curatorial Management
Sustainability

The last of course is the trendiest, but preservationists are better equipped than most to sort the wheat from the (extensive) chaff in the sustainability cornucopia. We have embodied energy, zero transport costs for structure, and landfill-light rehabilitation options that NEW construction cannot compete with in less than 30 years.

I will be outlining these issues for a panel and then we will hear about how preservation graduates are being employed: and what they are NOT learning that they NEED to learn. When preservation education began, we assumed we were training students for government jobs. Now, of course, the majority of our graduates are going into the private sector: federal programs never grew to their imagined scale and the introduction of tax credits 35 years ago means that much more preservation happens in the private sector.

What courses do our students need? What skills do they need? How have changes in preservation practice been reflected in preservation education?

The discussion will be next Saturday October 30 at 8:45 AM in the Hilton Austin, Room 406 – Register for the conference here. I will report on the results!

THE RESULTS: NOVEMBER 10 UPDATE

The session went very well and we had a really good discussion. Basically, the information Trent Margraff gathered from analysis of job listings and Ann Thornton’s analysis of skill sets all agreed on several key points:

Most new preservation jobs are in the private sector. This was not a surprise, but a confirmation of a long-term trend.

Students need more business, management, negotiation and innovation skills. These are the golden keys of the private sector and generally not central to programs based in architecture, history and planning. However, many programs do deal with these issues in real estate development and site management. But we need to do more. This is something I am very cognizant of in the realm of historic sites, which are desperate for more business management and operations skills.

Uptown Theater

When the River Forest Women’s Club was rehabilitated as a residence a few years ago, it had at least half a million dollars of deferred maintenance, and the average house museum probably has a similar total – or more, in work that needs to be done. Usually, of course the projects would only cost a few thousand, but they were put off and put off again and then a decade or two later you have a six-figure problem.

As the building gets bigger and the timeframe of deferred maintenance gets longer, the problems multiply. So today our Master of Science in Historic Preservation students toured the Uptown Theater, the biggest and most stunning vaudeville show palace ever built. With over 4,300 seats, it is more than twice as big as the restored Rialto Square in Joliet, and almost a thousand seats more than the restored Chicago Theater downtown, both designed by Rapp and Rapp for Balaban and Katz, who decided to do the Uptown as their crowning glory. It was phenomenally overbuilt, with 17,000 lights, an acre of dome above the auditorium (clear view from every seat) and a seemingly endless array of decorative corridors dripping with pomp and circumstance. I kept seeing griffins in the iron balconies, crests and even the remnant curtains and then at the top of the house there were 34 more griffins, each 8 feet high ringing the dome.

But the Uptown has been sitting vacant since 1981, and for about a decade it was owned by some of the worst slumlords in the city. They let drain pipes freeze and water cascaded down the building, destroying intricate plasterwork. The water collected in the basement several feet deep. Even the massive rise of the terra cotta facade has had to be partly removed to address three decades of deferred maintenance. This building basically needs $50 million to become whole again.

The number exceeds the deferred maintenance needs of three dozen historic sites.

We toured the building at the invitation of Jerry Mickleson of Jam Productions and with the expert guidance of David Syfczak, who has cared for the theater for many years, and Jimmy Wiggins, a mechanical savant who thrilled us with his stories about the systems in the basement, including three original boilers, a beautiful and ancient air conditioning system. and a stunning hydraulic piston used to raise the 70,000 pound steel fire curtain. Jimmy has figured out how to restore that system, which will save about $2 million in the rehab. In fact, the restoration plan starts and ends with the premise that the building was planned and designed well, a refreshing approach. Indeed, it is amazing how much of it survived completely intact into the 1980s before the slumlords took over.

I last toured the Uptown about 15 or 20 years ago, and I was pleasantly surprised that the deterioration is not much worse than then. A million or two of emergency repairs have been done, sealing the leaks, fixing the drainage and turning on the ventilation. Mickleson, who has been the butt of some bad press on the project, is spending the six figures needed annually to arrest the deterioration and keep the building alive until it can be fully rehabilitated. Syfczak and Wiggins are doing a great job putting it back together – with full respect for the original genius of the place. Now if we only had that $50 million….

Lead Paint, Asbestos, and other excuses

There was an article the other day about the demolition of the Clow Stephens House, an 1870 farmhouse in Plainfield Park. Among the comments from the Park District that owns it was: “The windows have lead in them and some of the flooring and shingles have asbestos.”

People who cannot fathom how an historic building might be reused and rehabilitated often conclude it must be demolished. Sometimes it is simply a failure of vision. Sometimes decision-makers have no experience with historic buildings: sort of like the contractors who offer to replace your windows because they have never fixed one and don’t know how. Sometimes it involves bean counters who only know how to finance something new (developers are usually better at historic buildings than bankers, BTW.)

But once they decide on demolition, they start loading up on excuses. The most popular excuses seem like “trump cards” because they invoke scary and unknown risks to health and safety, like lead paint and asbestos. The demolishers brandish these excuses like revelatory weapons never before seen by innocent little preservationists.

WRONG. One of the first things you find on the National Trust website is a guide to the new lead paint regulations that just went into effect. Most preservationists – contractors, developers, architects and advocates – know quite a lot about lead paint. We have been educating our students about lead-safe practices since we started our program in the 1990s.

I bet they didn’t even test the Clow Stephens House for lead paint – didn’t feel a need to. Probably recognized the asbestos shingles by the makers mark.

this is another old house in Plainfield
Lead paint went off the market 32 years ago, which means you can accuse any building built before 1978 of probably maybe having lead paint in it. So what if it does? Follow the rules. It isn’ t that hard.

Asbestos is another demolition “trump card,” but like lead paint the only time you have to worry – or spend a lot of money – is when you are disturbing the stuff or otherwise getting into a friable situation. Like the lead paint. Abatement can be expensive, but you may not have to abate depending on what you are doing. The more you preserve, the less you disturb and the less you must abate.

Which brings us to the BIG DUMB. If I am preserving my house or apartment building or whatever, I only have to abate lead and asbestos if I am disturbing them. Guess what disturbs them? DEMOLITION. Nothing kicks lead and asbestos into the air more than demolition. When they demolished the US Gypsum building in downtown Chicago in 1994, they spent about $1 million on the demolition and about $4 million on asbestos abatement. Yes, a rehab may require some abatement, but you can only achieve the maximum cost of abatement when you demolish the whole thing.

The Plainfield Park Board has $30,000 to demolish the house. Which might have been enough if they didn’t have to abate the lead paint and asbestos. How you gonna pay for that? Aren’t you glad you brought these issues up?

FOLLOW-UP September 16: Two WIll County preservationists I respect very much have indicated that they have been unable to come up with a re-use scenario for the Clow Stephens house due to its location, condition and Park District needs and uses, despite trying for many years. The best scenario would be a new owner who would move it. This of course, does not negate the point above – that lead and asbestos are bad excuses for demolition.

Switch to Lincoln Park in Chicago. Nice apartment buildings on Lincoln Park West, co-ops and condos built in the 1910s and 1920s. They are ripping up the lobby of one and the big excuse here is ADA of course.

So they pull out a paneled wall, rebuild one section of the lobby and put a big ramp in the north entrance. Revamping a formerly closed south entrance would have been simpler and involved less disruption to both the design and all of that paint and stuff, but they didn’t. I guess part of the appeal of conforming to ADA is making it really obvious so no one can miss the fact that you are conforming to ADA.

I did get to see the new paint rules in effect. Here is your secure tube for disturbing old paint:

The Reality of Window Replacement

Ugh. There it is again. A newspaper article in the home section advising you to replace your windows: “The days of painting exterior wood windows are gone. Look for low-maintenance vinyl or aluminum windows that come with a factory finish that should last for years.” Heck, they might even last for 10 whole years.

they could even last for twenty if you don’t mind fog

The article does not address the issue of energy savings, since the article is about low maintenance, but it is worthwhile to review the four pillars of replacement window mythology:

Energy Savings: Heat rises, it doesn’t go sideways. Insulate your roof and you have saved 80% of all the possible energy savings. Replace your windows with brick walls and you only have 20% to play with.

Oh, but they are double-glazed, you say. LIKE EVERY WINDOW DESIGNED FROM 1860 to 1928. Every Victorian and early modern building constructed in a climate that includes winter was double-glazed. We just got rid of a lot of those storm windows because we didn’t like the maintenance.

Cost: Yes, a vinyl or aluminum replacement window costs less. So it lasts less and performs more poorly over time. A repaired original wood window will last another 75 years. Most replacement windows have a 10-15 year warranty: the max is 25, which means they need to be 3 times cheaper than restoring your original wood window to compete over time.

Installation: A tight new window will do NOTHING for heat and AC loss if it is improperly installed. Most air infiltration goes through the frame, not the sash. About a quarter of new windows are improperly installed. Conversely, caulking the exterior brickmold on an existing window, installing jamb liners and fixing putty lines can often save as much as a new window.

Ease of use. My knees will rebel against my staircase LONG before my elbows and shoulders will have any trouble opening and closing my 112-year old wood windows (each sash is 3 feet wide and 3 feet high). If they get sticky, I rub some candle wax in the jamb and put a drop of oil on the metal sash cords.

Maintenance. The context of the article is keeping home maintenance from ruining your weekends. Yes, a real window will require some painting and maintenance now and again. But it CAN BE FIXED. In an hour or two.

A replacement window can’t. It needs to be replaced. That is why they call them REPLACEMENT WINDOWS – because you have to KEEP ON REPLACING THEM. It is a FANTASTIC business model because of this planned obsolescence. These guys will be in business eternally because you have to come back to them every 15 to 20 years.

The article also talks about other low-maintenance home improvements. It notes that cement fiber siding panels “are all the rage, ” come in 20 colors and is competitively priced against vinyl siding. This is like saying that pleather trousers come in 20 colors and are competitively priced against polyester. The real angle is “the panels will last 25 years or more,” but the reality is that goes double and triple for the wood siding and stucco they want you to replace. They can last over 100 years if you aren’t allergic to maintenance.

nice pants, dude

SPOILER ALERT: EVERYTHING REQUIRES MAINTENANCE. If you want a home that DOESN’T require maintenance, well, start emptying your bank account because I also want to sell you hair-loss products and eat-what-you-want diets THAT REALLY WORK.

You can shovel this stuff into any kind of pile you want, but it still smells.

Check previous posts on this issue here. and here. and here.

Maintenance

My children come into the house and throw their bags, coats and shoes on the floor and proceed to tread upon them. They go running around outside with their socks on, quickly ruining said socks. They lean back on chairs and ottomans and I have had to repair the ottomans four times in the last year. They leave doors and windows open, lights on and leave candy wrappers on bookshelves. This is what kids do, and we try our best to correct these habits.

But we have bad habits of our own. It is cold today, and I need to close the storm windows, and that attic window I meant to repair this summer is still loose. I shoveled the front steps but I didn’t shovel the back steps. I need to call someone about the right front burner on the range and perhaps I need to change a water filter and I definitely should get someone to check on the furnace and radiators. Another summer project left undone – painting the outside of the attic windows. At least we got those chimney caps on last year.

The point of this exceedingly boring rundown is one of the most important aspects of conserving historic buildings: maintenance. I have to thank my high school friend Jenny Brezon Fluteau, who emailed from the south of France, where she and her husband make wine and champagne. She said she had a big old house that had been poorly maintained and could use help. I replied that I had the same house. When people complain about the expense of historic preservation, what they are usually talking about, in fact, is the expense of deferred maintenance. The $100 problem ignored until it becomes a $1,000 problem. Or a $100,000 problem.

My favorite $1,000,000 problem was one I encountered during the effort to save St. Mary of the Angels church in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The massive brick walls were cracking and the interior of the dome was flaking paint and plaster. It was water damage, and everyone knew it was because the building was old.

No, it wasn’t. It was because the building had not been maintained. This is a pandemic problem with houses of worship, usually operated by people NOT trained in the management and maintenance of buildings. And they are very big, very complicated buildings. At St. Mary’s, a variety of roof patches over the years – perhaps done by well-meaning parishioners – had led to a buildup of roofing tar in the gutters, which were blocked. So the water was running through the walls.

It was a million-dollar problem caused by the poor – and repetitive – application of a $100 solution. It was not because the building was old. In fact, it was still standing BECAUSE IT WAS OLD. They built things very well in the 1910s and many of those buildings can stand an incredible amount of abuse. They can stand much more abuse than my recently purchased ottomans, or the kids’ snowboots, or their socks.

In reality, a well-maintained house built in the 19th or early 20th centuries (and even many well-crafted homes from the later 20th century) is less expensive than a new vernacular house IF IT IS MAINTAINED. That is a big “if” because it almost never is.

We live in the ether of the myth of maintenance-free. NOTHING, nowhere, ever, is maintenance-free. Our myth of maintenance-free is a byproduct of the consumer culture that encourages replacement. New replacement windows are maintenance-free because when they break, you throw them out and buy new ones. A new boiler is maintenance-free until it gets old. Same with a new fridge or a new door or a new floor or a new paint job or the Mount Olympus of maintenance-free mythology; artificial siding. You will never paint again because the siding will disguise the disintegration of your walls until it is time to replace EVERYTHING.

There is a design issue here as well. Prior to 1930, almost every building was designed to be repaired, and its components were designed to be repaired. IN the postwar consumer culture, our economy depended on REPLACEMENT rather than REPAIR. It was economically advantageous to buy things that needed replacement, and those things included houses.

I have spent two decades telling anyone who would listen that most new houses are not built to last as long as their 30-year mortgages. NO ONE has ever told me this is wrong. It is an economic and technological fact, by and large. You can’t sand and refinish a floor that is studs, layers of plywood and carpet.

Good stuff can be repaired. Good clothes can be mended, and shouldn’t be thrown on the floor and trod upon, as I try to tell my children. Good appliances can be repaired. Good houses can be fixed as well. And they shouldn’t be neglected for years.

Historic houses are often so darn good that they can still be fixed feasibly EVEN after years of neglect. But that is usually what makes them expensive – the years of neglect. If I get to all my projects on my house, and bring it back from the neglect it has suffered, I will still need to remain vigilant and spend money and time on it every season of every year. Buildings, like cities and like people, need constant care, feeding and attention. Especially if you are worried about spending a ton of money.

Chicago photographer and preservationist Richard Nickel once said that the only enemies of historic buildings were water and stupid men. If you let the water in, the building quickly deteriorates. If you keep the water out (that is why you always fix the roof first) you have time to address other issues. But the best thing is to MAINTAIN the building over time, like the auto enthusiast who worries about changing the oil and the brake fluid and the transmission fluid and rotating the tires. Most massive building problems start out as little leaks and flakes and tiny failures that are ignored – usually for frightfully long times. Building conservation is not inherently expensive if it is approached as an ongoing task of maintenance. If it is a rescue operation after the passage of a catastrophic amount of time, then it can be.

What I learned in Independence

I had the opportunity to be the keynote speaker for the Missouri state preservation conference yesterday, in the Truman Memorial Building in Independence, Missouri. Last night we saw the Truman museum which included a fabulous replica of the Oval Office and of course Truman’s “The Buck stops here” desk sign.

I attended two sessions yesterday, one that taught me about the three major western trails that went through Independence (Santa Fe, California and Oregon) and another that dealt with BIMs, which are used for energy audits for historic buildings. Fascinating stuff. They model some of these historic buildings and find amazing things – like there is no sense insulating 3-foot thick walls or even double-glazing clerestories in lightly used space (You save more energy zoning the heating and cooling). It is nice that the metrics are finally here to demonstrate the energy efficiency of historic buildings.

I also learned that Independence was where Joseph Smith and the Mormons came before they went to Nauvoo, and there is a cool church built 17 years ago by the RLDS, one of several Mormon groups now separate from the Salt Lake Church.

I also learned about the Truman historic district, an NHL designated in the 1970s and then followed by a locally-supported local district in the 1970s. President Harry S. Truman lived 64 of his 84 years in Independence, and walked around town every day he was there. This has become a symbol of the city’s heritage and historic district.

Sadly, the district got eviscerated by local churches throwing elbows in the 1980s and is now a slender not quite sensical protected area within the larger NHL. I chatted with Jon Taylor, who has written a book about the three heritages (Truman, Mormons, Trails) of Independence. This is a nice place, and we also heard from Ken McLain, who has singlehandedly saved much of the courthouse square, despite the fact that it is outside the NHL and thus not eligible for tax credits. He even saved the Clinton drugstore where Truman worked as a teen.

Had a good time here- lots of challenges and history, and a lot of nice compliments about my talk. Now, a final image of the McCoy-Owens House.

Thanks to Karen Bode Baxter, Trudy Faulkner, Kristen McSparren Otteson and all my other friends new and old in the KC – Independence area.

Green Preservation

Preservation is green. It retains the carbon footprint of structures that are already there, requires less materials, less expense of energy to construct – because it is already constructed. It is true that some older buildings (more likely those built 1940-2000) USE more energy than new “green” buildings, but the greenest new building will still take 30-40 years to pay off its carbon debt.

Two years ago, National Trust President Dick Moe made a speech at the National Building Museum about preservation and sustainability. It was epochal. He had the statistics that proved that “the greenest building is the one already built” but he wasn’t just preaching to the choir. He was making it known that there was a vibrant, multifaceted preservation movement, and that this movement was staking its claim to sustainability and moving even further in that direction.

The results are out there. Two sites you HAVE TO SEE are blogs linked at right: Barbara Campagna’s green preservation blog (Barbara is the Graham Gund architect of the National Trust) and Carla Bruni’s greenpreservationist.org blog. Carla is a graduate of our Master’s program in Historic Preservation and she has already made a mark. We had her speaking on her work in New Orleans and now she is teaching a preservation class at the Center for Green Technology.

You can’t consume your way to sustainability, folks.

Back to Dick Moe. He announced his retirement this week, and it reminded me of that epochal speech two years ago and how excited I was that he was leading the National Trust and the preservation movement into the future. And it wasn’t the first time he had done it. During his 17 years at the helm, the National Trust reinvented itself from top to bottom. The Trust, founded 60 years ago to save historic houses, nearly doubled its collection of historic properties, but much more significantly, it broadened that collection to more nearly represent the American experience and American architecture. From the commercial Gaylord Building to Philip Johnson’s modernist Glass House to the Acoma Sky City Pueblo, the National Trust’s collection of historic sites has been revolutionized. Not only do we own the two most famous modern glass houses, we also have a new Modern and Recent Past Initiative, a new Preservation Green Lab in Seattle, a more vigorous series of regional offices and a robust collection of statewide and local partners. There are three times as many statewide preservation organizations today than there were in 1992. Dick Moe didn’t simply grow the Trust, he expanded its relevance and helped make it the leader of an expanding nationwide movement. His leadership will be missed but his impact is visible everywhere you look.

Window replacement numbers

Pharmaceutical use in the United States has increased threefold in the last ten years, not because there has been a threefold increase in disease or diagnoses but simply because in 1999 pharmaceutical advertising was deregulated.

I don’t know the exact numbers, but window replacement has gone up dramatically in the same period, and for the same reason. Advertising.

When my wife and I bought a single-family home in 1996 I received AT LEAST three mailers and one phone call each week urging me to buy replacement windows and siding. I always responded “I don’t believe in that” which threw the telemarketers right off their script. But just as countless television ads for drugs have convinced people that they need them, today every American gets out of bed in the morning convinced that they must replace their windows.

The recent economic stimulus that gave tax breaks for replacement windows along with other, more sustainable things didn’t help. It followed the marketing bandwagon, which promotes waste.

The irony here is MASSIVE. I am concerned about global warming so I throw out all of my windows and put in plastic ones that will be in a landfill in 15 years. Do you know how PVC is manufactured? Do you know how it burns in case of fire? Do you know how it degrades in landfills? The landfills you already stuffed with your historic windows?

Let’s look at some numbers. First, a radical thermodynamic principle as it applies to the planet Earth:
HEAT RISES. Sure, it is obvious, but you would think heat goes sideways with all the concern for replacement windows. Once you have insulated your attic, you have saved 80% of all the energy bills you are going to save. Thoroughly caulk your window and door frames and you save the next 10%. Replace your windows with brick walls and you still only have a 10% savings possibility. Besides, many new windows – tight as they are – are not installed properly, so the heating or cooling just squirts around the window FRAME. The homebuilders themselves admit that over 20% of windows and doors in NEW houses are installed in such a way that air infiltration still happens through the FRAME.

Now, let’s look at cost, which is another reason people choose plastic replacement windows. Some joker in Geneva sued the city for his right to put in vinyl-clad replacement windows in the historic district. He spent $70,000 on the lawsuit, but more importantly he spent $18,000 on replacement windows. I can guarantee you those windows will not last long enough to save $18,000 on heating and cooling.

The cost differential between a cheap plastic window and a rehabbed window (with insulated glass installed) can be a factor of 3. So, if you are DITCHING your house soon to another buyer or whatever, it is cheaper. If a retrofitted window costs $1500 and a replacement costs $500, well, replacements SEEM cheaper. But in the long run, it isn’t. Those replacements will be funky in 10 years and likely need to be replaced (why do you think they call them REPLACEMENT windows?) in 15, which is when the warranty for the glass unit (forget the sash) runs out. So they cost $33.34 per year. My retrofitted windows will be good for 50-75 years, which means that they cost $20-$30 per year. Plus no hassle of replacement every 15 years.

Now, the guy in Geneva with the lawsuit hobby is 79, so he will be about 94 when he has to worry about re-replacement. He won his suit, simply because Geneva’s Building Department – like a lot of Building Departments across the country inundated with requests for replacement windows – wasn’t requiring building permits for replacement windows.

It is like the doctors being lobbied by their patients for drugs – it is hard to say NO when a trickle becomes a flood. Geneva – like the doctor who learned to JUST SAY NO – has fixed its problem, but Mr. Nothing-Else-To-Do is trying to get the whole landmarks ordinance thrown out, just like that lawsuit enthusiast in Chicago. Given that landmarks laws like zoning laws have been upheld by conservatives who recognized their importance in maintaining property values, I am confident the enthusiasts will lose and have to find a new hobby, but these things take their time getting through the court system.

Heck, it could drag out for years – years measured by the warping, yellowing and offgassing of plastic windows.

the greenest building is the one already built

Guess who is finally saying what I and others in preservation have been saying for a while – LEED certification is not a great measure of environmental impact? Actually, it is coming from the horse’s mouth – the certifiers themselves, who found – shockingly – that many of the new green designs did not PERFORM as they were designed. From the New York Times a few days ago:

“But in its own study last year of 121 new buildings certified through 2006, the Green Building Council found that more than half — 53 percent — did not qualify for the Energy Star label and 15 percent scored below 30 in that program, meaning they used more energy per square foot than at least 70 percent of comparable buildings in the existing national stock.”

One of the disadvantages of the LEED system compared to the other systems is that it is a voluntary program that – until now – had no certification process. If your architect or engineer said your system would use 50% less electricity, then you wrote that down and got credit for it. You got credit and you advertised it as a LEED certified building whether or not you ever remembered to turn out the lights. Or look at the electric bill.

There are other systems out there. Canada uses Green Globes, which is more focused on energy use, and both Green Globes and LEED are based on the earlier British BREEAM system. Dunno why, but like television, we get all our good ideas from the Brits. At any rate, LEED focused initially on materials and production, not operations. Which is of course where all the action – pollution and waste – is.

But there is a problem in the focus on use, too. I have often written about the irrationality of the replacement window. I first addressed this issue back in 2001 and have presented on it in numerous venues (Chicago, Joliet, Plainfield, Elgin, to name a few). My conclusion for the last eight years has been the same: window replacement is driven by marketing, not energy efficiency.

It is ironic that the “green” and “sustainable” concern of the last decade has been used primarily to sell tons and tons of mostly plastic products. Energy efficiency in individual products and buildings has improved dramatically, but buildings also got bigger and one is tempted to believe we got a whole lot of Jevon’s paradox – increased fuel efficiency at the micro level leads to increased use at the macro level. Like highways – more lanes means more use and congestion, not less. Jevon figured this out over a century and a half ago.

Plus the hegemony of green marketing has created a massive disconnect between data and interpretation. I was struck by the March issue of National Geographic, which featured a thermographic image of “an older house in Connecticut.” The roof and eaves were red and orange, indicating heat loss. The window panes were blue, indicating little heat loss, and the caption announced the installation of new double-paned windows. The walls were green, indicating some thermal loss, and they were yellow-orange just outside of the window panes – on the window frames.

How was this data interpreted? The caption indicates that the new windows were blue and noted that heating could account for half the energy costs for a house. This is wrong on a whole bunch of levels. First, the thermographic image with the glowing red roof shows the obvious: HEAT RISES. It doesn’t travel sideways. 80% of it goes up, regardless of your windows. There is no way window replacement can save more than 20% of heating costs. What the image showed was that the owners of the house didn’t insulate the attic properly.

Second, the image actually illustrates the biggest fault of window replacement: poor installation. The window frames were glowing yellow and even RED in one portion. This meant that the new tight replacement windows were not preventing thermal loss but pushing it away from the pane and into the frame. Exactly what I said in 2001 and every year since – unless you address the window frame, a super tight window may simply push the thermal loss AROUND the window pane and through the frame. Did they caulk???

What would have been useful would have been a thermographic image of the same house BEFORE they changed the windows. Then we could understand the impact – and skill – of the installation. Why didn’t they address the big issue, the roof?? I’m not surprised that a big time mag like NG goofed this up, because the marketing of replacement windows has inoculated us against a lot of common sense facts we learned about thermodynamics back in grade school. But come on – how can you draw conclusions without a baseline?

The government noted that the peformance of its pre-1930 buildings exceeded the energy efficiency of their buildings built 1930-2000. And those older buildings can be made even more efficient with a little insulation and caulk.

I am glad that LEED is improving – it is coming up with a better list of criteria to account for the embodied energy of existing buildings and fabric. It is now starting to look at performance rather than design. But we all have a ways to go.

HISTORICAL NOTE: I am now in the 4th year of this blog. 248 posts. Read them all here.