Some Pretty Homes of Boulder

Daily Herald house 01

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.

Moorhead house 2

"Boulder is not a manufacturing  town - it's  just the place to live, a deslightful city with admirable schools, several sanitaria, a great university, a fine theatre, admirable sewer system, fine churches representing all denominations, a Carnegie Library, a $40,000 YMCA building and $125,000 hotel, provided with the purest water known, a most equable climate, an electric street car and lighting system and five newspapers (two of which are dailies having their batteries of linotypes) and several college publications to tell the story of her wonderful prosperity and to give that publicity without which no community can prosper.  Boulder has six trains each way to and from Denver and is in close touch with her neighbor towns of the north."

As most current local know, the regional transportation provider, RTD, has promised a Boulder-Denver train over the years and taxed the residents mightly for its eventual construction.  That date of completion is now something like 2035, where we will be back to the original route of 1908.

Daily Herald house 02

Fonda house 2

"The city is not only building rapidly, but it is building well. Many beautiful residences are being erected. Retired capitalists are choosing this ideal little city and building magnificent homes with the intention of enjoying the remainder of their lives in this ideal garden spot."

"...settle here to enjoy the superb school and health advantages of a modern up-to-date, beautiful little city, whose boast that it is "The Place to Live" seems to be accredited by a never ending tide of immigration from the great West. The say the county could be walled in and become a self sustaining community with all the creature comforts."

The above quote is as true today as when it was written in 1908.  Boulder has indeed become a beautiful spot where retired capitalists choose to enjoy their remaining years. And our "wall" is an expansive green space ring around the city, making an ideal natural setting, but also limiting the housing supply and driving up the costs to lofty heights only retired capitalist can climb.

Daily Herald real estate office

Realtors in Boulder no longer sit around in smoky offices, in fact they are more likely to be seen pedaling around the city with their prospective clients.

As you can see from the images above, many of Boulder's older homes have been wonderfully preserved and at least from the outside, seem remarkably unchanged. That is certainly the case for the two houses shown and undoubtedly have benefited from a robust preservation code and historic district designation.  For as much change as Boulder and every town has seen over the last 100 years, so many things remain the same - the marketing of the city's real estate and the endless attraction of a beautiful home on the hill.

by Boulder architects M. Gerwing Architects

Preservation worth preserving

MTG328

I recently attending some sessions of the Colorado Preservation Inc.'s Saving Places 2012 Conference.  As usual with these things there are plenty of educational sessions that you can geek-out on various preservation topics, from process-heavy advice for preservation commissions to very technical analysis of window retrofitting techniques.

For me the most interesting event was the Saving Places luncheon.  (Mind you not the food.)  The keynote speaker was James Loewen, sociologist and author.  He gave an impassioned plea for inclusion and precision in the presentation of historic places, especially the painful omissions and/or outright misrepresentations of Native Americans and women in historical markers and interpretations.  A read through his Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong will be an interesting read.

The other event of the luncheon was the video presentation of the yearly "most endangered places" designated projects across Colorado.  These brief presentations  highlight more the stories of the people attempting to save the featured building or structure than concentrating on only the physical aspects of the resource itself.

What I was left with was how interesting and frankly touching are the stories of the people for whom an effort of preservation has become a meaningful aspect of their lives.  As an architect I think it is very easy for me to concentrate on the physical building and its character and details rather than the human aspects of the history of the place.  What is surprising here however is that I am not as interested in the story of the historical persons who might have lived in the building but rather the stories of the people for whom the effort of saving the building has become an important part of their lives.  The inclusion that James Loewen makes such an elegant plea for should include the second story of the place or building - the effort of the people to save or at least somehow mark the place.

Como roundhouse

Preservation, at least at these kind of gatherings and conferences, has become such an institutionalized and professional pursuit that it is easy to forget that its genesis was, and often continues to be, a grassroots, activist-lead endeavor.  I have written about Richard Nickel's pioneering efforts in Chicago and at the conference I heard touching stories of some folks down in Pueblo who have embraced the preservation of their down-at-the-heels neighborhood for whom  this effort has become the catalyst of self-discovery and community pride.

Richard Nickel -01

As a board member of my local preservation commission in a wealthy community, the projects I see are largely opulent proposed additions to fabulous, and fabulously expensive, large and expansive Victorian houses.  Our role is more often that of the preservation police, guarding and protecting historic districts from misguided contractors and careless homeowners.  Preservation as an aspect of positive community activism seems like a distant planet.

For some, preservation is rooted in identity and feels like a life and death struggle, a small cry against the erasure of self and place.  That is a kind of preservation worth preserving.

New technology and the richness of history

I have been thinking a lot about how to better harness new technology and new media resources to bolster interest in historic preservation and the changing architectural faces of our cities.  I have written before about the potential of posting QR codes that allow visitors to easily access a rich and deep array of information that a typical sign can not accommodate.  This has now been taken into the real world application of a building in Tokyo that displays QR codes on its facade that can be read by a smartphone and that accesses the building users Twitter feeds in  real-time.

I have been very impressed with some recent augmented reality apps, like Sara,  that allow you to use your smartphone and its camera and gps technologies to envision a proposed building on a site.  By downloading the app you can simply point your smartphone like a camera at a specific location and along with the actual building or site that you are seeing, an image of a future project from the same vantage point will appear on your phone's screen.

I have yet to find someone that has applied this technology to envisioning the history of a city.  You may have seen the history slider in Google Earth's satellite imagery that lets you scroll through historical aerial images of a city and gives a great understanding of the incremental development of a given place.  If the 3D buildings in Google Earth were tagged with their date of construction, you could do the same with the 3d imagery, scrolling through the decades, watching buildings rise and fall and new construction rise again.  I think this would be an amazing resource and break the veil of history that often impedes our understanding of time and place.  It is so very difficult for folks to believe that the buildings and spaces around them have not always been that way.  We all know this intellectually, but without visible evidence of previous eras it is impossible to really inhabit the city through time.

Beyond this capability in Google Earth, I would like a developed app that would integrate all those freely sourced 3D buildings built online and place them within an augmented reality app.  Anywhere you walk through the city you could enable the app and hold up the phone and from the same vantage point, be able to scroll through hundreds of years of urban growth and transformation.  The perspective on current projects that that kind of a technology would engender would radically change both architects and the public view of what our places have been and will be.

Locally there are two programs that begin to approach this kind of real time/place historical understanding using current tools.  Historic Denver's Denver Story Trek allows people to choose from a range of designed tours or the ability to create your own.  As you walk, bike or drive around the city, a text message prompts you to information about a given site, both its architecture and social history.  Free audio files can accompany your tour and help bring to life each site.

Another program, run by the Denver Public Library's Western History & Genealogy folks, called Creating Communities, harnesses a vast digitized archive of images and information to map neighborhood histories.  Their work consists of a Google map containing building histories and an iPhone app, Creating Communities, that allow you to search your neighborhood and access information about its city while also on the move.

Can we expect to see my proposed app some time soon?  Well, there's not much money to be made in preservation, so unless there's so nice grant out there for a pilot project, probably not.  If you know of such a thing, let me know.  If you have further thoughts on how to apply this technology to architecture and preservation issues, I would love to hear that as well.