September 27, 2011

The CIVITAS Chronicles
Clem Labine

Seven Tips for Winning a 2012 Palladio Award
The deadline for entering the 2012 Palladio Awards competition is fast approaching. Having been a Palladio juror on a number of occasions, I've noted that all winning entries have several elements in common. So I'm passing some of these observations along, tips, really, that can enhance your chances of winning one of these coveted awards.

The benefits that flow from winning a Palladio are obvious. First are the bragging rights; the Palladio Awards are still the only national architectural competition that honors projects for excellence in traditional design. So winning one is a big deal, with a lot of prestige and publicity spinoff potential. The handsome bronze Palladio trophy on your office awards shelf proclaims your achievement for years to come. And even if you don't win one of the top awards, there's a good chance your project will be published in Traditional Building or Period Homes magazine sometime during the next 12 months. Because Palladio Award submissions represent the best of today's traditional design, when the editors of Traditional Building and Period Homes are looking for projects to feature throughout the year, they often turn first to Palladio entries that were excellent – but didn't happen to walk off with a top prize.

Here are seven things you can do to improve your chances of winning.
Read more.

For Pete's Sake
Peter H. Miller

Don't Be Caught in the Middle; Take Control
If you have been following my blog, you'll know this is the fourth "C" word in a series of 10 that encapsulate my observations of the traditional building industry.

Control.

How many middlemen stand between you and your client? All those predictions in the 1990s about their destruction are turning out to be true. Poor bandwidth only temporarily delayed this inevitability.

Business is too competitive for us to put our destiny in someone else's hands. If you are selling through distribution or communicating with clients via an "allied professional," too much gets lost in the translation. And alliances, however strong when business is good, are fraying now, under the pressure of a challenging economy. Read more.

Sticks and Stones
Gordon Bock

Show and Tell: The Maine Antiques Festival
When the weather gets warm, my instincts draw me north, and this mid-August I made a weekend migration Down East to check out the Maine Antiques Festival and its new "Traditions" pavilion devoted to building restoration and preservation. With exhibitors from as far away as Indiana offering everything from hat pins to player pianos, the festival is the largest such event in the state - some call it the Brimfield of the North – and for this 30th anniversary year, producer Paul Davis decided to expand the scope into antique buildings. It's a natural extension for a show that consistently draws old-house lovers from all over New England, as well as from the rich historic building stock of the local Mid-Coast area, and like-minded company is, indeed, what I found as we set up booth camp on Friday. Read more.

The View From Rome
Steven W. Semes

The View from . . . Not Rome, Part III:
Changing the Secretary's Mind
Readers of this blog are familiar with the debate about current preservation policies that privilege contrasting Modernist additions and infill construction in historic settings. New attention is being paid to the contradictions inherent in a design philosophy based on the concept of "differentiation." A dissenting viewpoint is ruffling the preservation establishment, as evidenced by the symposium in Washington, DC, earlier this summer sponsored by US/ICOMOS. Clem Labine and I, together with several other speakers, made the case that the current ICOMOS Charters and the Secretary's Standards should be modified to remove the implication that contrasting new construction is good and conforming new traditional construction is bad. While the National Park Service correctly points out that this is not what the Standards actually say, this interpretation has become so widespread in the field that a change in language is perhaps the only way to break architects and preservation authorities out of their bad mental habits. Read more.

A Place for Trades
Rudy Christian

Do Tools Make the Man?
Or does the man make the tools? An interesting discussion titled "The tools we get attached to" is taking place on LinkedIn in the Preservation Trades Network Group. Folks are talking about their favorite tools, like the hammer they have had since they started working. One individual told the story of dropping his favorite trowel into a hollow-cavity brick wall he was working on and, realizing he couldn't get it back, recorded the exact spot in the wall the trowel resided. Years later, he discovered the building was scheduled for demolition, so he returned to the site and talked to the crew doing the work. When they got to the right place, they allowed him to recover his favorite trowel.

I know I have certain tools that mean a lot more to me than others, including the first framing square I bought when I was doing odd jobs in college to make some extra money. I bought it on the recommendation of a friend's father who was a carpenter. It is a really good square and actually has 16ths of an inch delineated on the scales and a 1-in. rule divided into 100ths. Years later, I learned that my square had a brace length chart on it for laying out braces for timber frame buildings. The length in inches is given to two decimal places. The hundredth scale is there so you can convert to 16ths using a folding rule.

It even has scales on it in 10ths and 12ths of an inch, which I have always referred to as "Stanleys." I never could figure out a good use for them until a few weeks ago when I was asked to grade some Southern Yellow Pine floor joists in a 1916 department store. The joists were 16 feet off the floor, so I photographed them. I had measured the height of some I could reach from a stairwell, which allowed me to measure how tall they appeared on my monitor and then use the 12ths scale to create a proportion I could use to determine the knot diameters. I'm sure that's not what the "Stanley scale" was meant for, but it sure came in handy. Read more.