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Category Archive: historic preservation
Why do we preserve buildings? Why do we care about mute constructions, often old and unused, occasionally in the way or overlooked? We have all walked through great neighborhoods and parts of cities with magnificent old buildings and very few of us would show no concern at all if these places were simply ground down [...]
I have often written about my interest in regionally specific architecture, especially vernacular forms that derive from local climatic conditions or materials availability. I recently spent some time in the Florida Keys and in my typically geeky architecture fashion, spent almost as much time looking at the local historic buildings as I did relaxing on [...]
While doing some research for a new project, I ran into a these photos of some of Boulder’s older houses in a weekly newspaper called the Daily Herald. This article is from 1908 and is really more of an advertising/marketing piece for the local realtors than an actual act of journalism. “Boulder is not a [...]
I have written in the past about the efforts to save the Loveland Feed and Grain building. Novo Restoration, the group trying to save the building, sponsored some tours inside the building this last weekend and I took the opportunity to climb through this hulk, dragging my kids along for the ride. The building was [...]
In northeast Oklahoma, just west of the Osage Indian Reservation, lies Bartlesville, home of Phillips Petroleum and Frank Lloyd Wright’s only completed “skyscraper” building, the Price Tower. The history of the Price Tower is long and complex and Frank Lloyd Wright’s recycling of an earlier unbuilt tower design is well documented. It is all worth [...]
more than beauty and function, many rooms have a kind of atmosphere, a history, that makes them intriguing.
What is the fascination with abandoned buildings? There is certainly some attraction to the mystery and faint danger of these places, but I think there are darker forces at work as well. In abandoned industrial sites, much of mystery of the place has to do with the fearful contrast of the quiet stillness of the [...]