HPLO
Oregon’s Most Endangered Places
Astoria Marine Construction Company Courtesy of ODEQ
I often write about the dangers of a Cascadia earthquake since it will, among other things, damage the historic buildings I have come to know and love. I also help with preserving these historic buildings from more prosaic risks. As a regional advisor for the Historic League of Oregon I participate in the review of applications for projects seeking to be listed on HPLO’s list of Oregon’s Most Endangered Places. This effort seeks to identify those historic buildings or places that are particularly at risk and could use help to turn things around.
The coast is well represented on this years list, with the Astoria Marine Construction Company and the Tillamook Air Museum. The Astoria Marine Construction Company is still a working boat yard and an integral part of the Astoria’s economy and … Read More »
Trinity Place Apartments Seismic Upgrade
Street View ecolaarchitects
I had the pleasure of touring the Trinity Place Apartments the other day with members of HPLO who had worked on the Resilient Masonry Buildings Roundtable. The owner of the Trinity Apartments is both an aficionado of Portland’s masonry apartment buildings and very committed to seismically upgrading them. Motivated not only to protect his tenants, he also wants to give the buildings a fighting chance to survive an earthquake.
The Trinity Apartments were built in 1910 and are the work of Knighton and Root. Knighton was the architect of such buildings as the Oregon Supreme Court, the Governor Hotel, and Johnson Hall at UO, to name a few. The apartments are well built, with much of their historic detail intact. A courtyard building, it actually two buildings joined in the middle with separate stairs and elevators on … Read More »
Preserving America’s Historic Barns
Preserving America’s Historic Barns
Limeworks, an organization that “is committed to providing the resources needed for performing professional masonry restoration and building sustainable structures in an environmentally conscious and sustainable way” produced this video on preserving historic barns. The video shows photos of barns throughout the Country, with a narration by barn historian Jeff Marshall talking about why preserving these barns is important. Oregon is a bit behind in preserving its historic barns, but is catching up with the Historic Barn’s Taskforce, formed by Historic Preservation League of Oregon.
Old is New
The Cool Hunter website has some beautiful photos of modern additions and insertions of new buildings and elements into old historic buildings. In all of them, the new is juxtaposed to the old rather than trying to restore the building to an original state, or reuse a traditional or classical architectural vocabulary. This approach is actually supported in the Secretary of Interior standards, where new additions are suppose to be “of the their time” and not give an appearance that they were original when they are not.
This is the approach I took with adding the entry canopies to the Depot project in Astoria. Taking a cue from the recent addition of the Columbia River Maritime Museums, I used the curved roof form, wood roof structure, and galvanized metal posts to create the entries. This approach … Read More »