How preserving architecture preserves crafts and trade skills from the past.

Katherine Walton-Myers

Why Preserve The Past?

Fall 2011

How preserving architecture preserves crafts and trade skills from the past.

Often times laws that dictated to care and maintenance of historical homes and districts dictate many constraints on both material usage in keeping with the “quality” and “authenticity” or a building or area. This integrity is often kept intact by the skilled tradespersons that have continued to learn and preserve antiquated technologies when possibly faster or more efficient means could be used to come by a similar end.

Whilst growing up, I lived in a re-done and preserved Victorian home in a historical district in Chicago. It was required that the exteriors and portions of the interiors be maintained in the proper historical state. This meant that many extra steps needed to be taken when doing decorating and or repairs. The wallpaper my parents ordered had to come from a manufacturer overseas, at a greatly exponential cost, simply because they created wallpapers with the proper patterns, colors and materials authentic to the Victorian period.

Same would go for repairs to say, the stained glass windows in our house. The frames had to be painstakingly removed, packaged and shipped to a local glassworks when only the master of all things stained glass was allowed to touch and maintain the beautiful works of art. It was something I found to fascinating. When all other kids needed to buy a new carpet, they would call Empire, however we had to go shopping at the oriental rug mart to find the most authentic one to suite our home’s aesthetic.

As time has gone on, and as an artist, I have found an appreciation for craftsmanship and the beauty in the handmade and the antiquated processes. Typesetting is an art, something that InDesign can never hold a candle to. Printmaking, where you, yourself, run the four layers of a CMYK print over a screen sure do beat the ease of a Xerox printer. The same can be said for the architectural crafts of old. A stonemason who used his hand, in my opinion is far more respectable and awe inspiring than one who uses a wet saw. The fact that the technologies exist that allow for ease and yet some still hold onto the skill-based and technique driven means of the old show that there is something to be said with preserving not only our great architecture, but the means by which they came to be.

I want to make a case for the a people who hold onto not only a slice of history, but keep it alive through the work done to and for areas and spaces that are of historical merit. As an artist I think too often we slip into the desire to find the ease of technologies, and are too quick to jump onto the idea of the “next best thing” when really, possibly the better quality and the more beautiful has been around for longer than the building your computer sits within.