The two fields of historic preservation and sustainable design include many similar
values concerning conservation, yet produce buildings that ultimately look and perform
differently. Historic preservation relies on the maintenance of traditional materials to ensure
that historic buildings are preserved for future generations. Sustainable design typically
works with new construction to create buildings that have little negative impact on the
environment. The similarities yet separateness that exist between historic preservation and
sustainable design provide a compelling platform to ask how we can combine the two fields
within one building project. The combination of these two felds is currently being explored
in post-Katrina New Orleans, and I am asking how we can combine historic preservation
with aspects of sustainable design to create a sustainable preservation hybrid, or fusion
between technological aspects of “green” design with traditional methods of preservation,
that will allow historic buildings to maintain their integrity and achieve the values of
sustainability.
New Orleans provides a great opportunity to examine this question due to the
damage caused by Hurricane Katrina and the ensuing efforts to rebuild the city. One specific
area of New Orleans, the historic district of Holy Cross, plays home to two key
organizations involved in the rebuilding: the Preservation Resource Center, which preserves the existing historic housing stock, and Global Green, which builds new, sustainable design
projects. These two organizations work right down the street from one another, yet have yet
to combine their building methods or work together on a shared project. This relationship
between Global Green/sustainable design and the Preservation Resource Center/historic
preservation provides a good opportunity to examine how elements of new sustainable
design can be combined with the traditional methods of preservation in order to achieve a
sustainable preservation hybrid.
I examine the creation of a sustainable preservation hybrid by conducting a literature
review, interviews and site visits, and energy modeling. The literature review reveals that
preservationists and architects involved with sustainable design like the idea of creating a
hybrid, but still lack a thorough understanding of each other’s tacit values. The interviews
reveal how the organizations working in Holy Cross also embrace the idea of a sustainable
preservation hybrid, yet remain somewhat lost as to how to actually create such a building.
The energy modeling then demonstrates which combination of “green” materials from
sustainable design and “traditional” materials from historic preservation combine to create a
building that achieves both the values of sustainable design and historic preservation.
Whether or not we can combine preservation and sustainable design to make a
hybrid poses an original and relevant question in the context of post-Katrina New Orleans
and elsewhere. Since we are currently facing an energy crisis, the conclusions as to how we
can combine these two fields prove how a single, historic building can simultaneously
conserve both environmental and historic resources. / text
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UTEXAS/oai:repositories.lib.utexas.edu:2152/22319 |
| Date | 20 November 2013 |
| Creators | Stanard, Lorna Michelle |
| Source Sets | University of Texas |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | electronic |
| Rights | Copyright is held by the author. Presentation of this material on the Libraries' web site by University Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin was made possible under a limited license grant from the author who has retained all copyrights in the works. |
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