Tag Archives: research

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Battle Hall Conservation Study

 

Sample_Izabella and Sarah
GRA’s Izabella Dennis (left) and Sarah Hunter (right)

The Battle Hall Architecture and Planning Library at the University of Texas at Austin was designed by architect Cass Gilbert in 1911, setting the stylistic tone for future academic architecture and shaping the distinguished Texas university campus. In preparation for a preservation and improvement campaign of the University of Texas’ first architectural masterpiece and its later extension, West Mall Building, a Facilities Condition Report was produced by an outside consultant in 2011 to identify measures to restore the building. Several building elements required further investigation to determine original finishes, best methods for cleaning and treating historic materials, and recommendations for restoration. The UT Office for Campus Planning and Facilities Management provided support and funding for the remaining studies to be carried out through the UT Architectural Conservation Lab under the supervision of Senior Lecturer and Conservation Scientist Frances Gale.

Masonry Testing in the UTSOA Architectural Conservation Lab
Masonry Testing in the UTSOA Architectural Conservation Lab
Marble Cleaning
Marble Cleaning Tests on the Battle Hall Staircase

Graduate Research Assistants Izabella Z. Dennis and Sarah B. Hunter from the UT School of Architecture Historic Preservation program had the opportunity to participate in this materials conservation study. The work included laboratory analysis of finish samples from ornamental metals, exterior wood building components, the interior wood reading room ceiling and interior plaster finishes. Cleaning tests were performed on interior marble, and protective treatments were evaluated for the exterior limestone veneer. The study involved archival research of the original construction documents and subsequent renovations of Battle Hall, on-site condition assessments and sample collection, and both laboratory and on-site testing. Based on the findings, recommendations were made to help restore original finishes to metal, wood and plaster elements of Battle Hall during its proposed renovation.

Finish Sample Statigraphy
Finish Sample Statigraphy

After documenting original finishes, including linseed oil paints and lead pigments, practical recommendations were developed using contemporary materials. This project involved close collaboration with Facilities Services in accessing hard-to-reach building components, conducting interior marble cleaning tests and exploring practical preservation solutions.

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Upcoming Event: Nature in Balance

Join us on Wednesday, April 2nd for this great Research + Pizza event! Research + Pizza is a lunchtime lecture series featuring research presentations by faculty from across the university.

Here’s the overview:

What: Research + Pizza: Dr. Damon Waitt talks about native Texas plants and invasive species. This event is free and open to the public!

When: Noon, Wednesday, April 2.

Where: Perry-Castañeda Library, UFCU Student Learning Commons (PCL 2.500), The University of Texas at Austin.

Just in time for the spring riot of color that is wildflower season, Dr. Damon Waitt, Senior Director and Botanist at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, discusses his efforts helping to maintain an ecological balance between native plants and invasive species in the Texas wild.

Waitt is responsible for developing the 279 acres of gardens and natural areas at the Wildflower Center, and is the author of the Center’s Native Plant Information Network — the largest online database about native plants in North America. He also serves as the principal investigator on several projects related to the Wildflower Center’s Pulling Together Invasive Species Initiative and is a member of the Invasive Species Advisory Committee for the National Invasive Species Council.

The program will also include a plant ID session, so interested participants can send pictures of mystery vegetation to roxanne.bogucka@austin.utexas.edu for identification by Waitt during the program.

BONUS: Free Pizza (while it lasts) from Austin Pizza — we hope to see you there!

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Inside Modern Texas: Behind the Scenes with Emily Ardoin

Last semester, Graduate Research Assistant Emily Ardoin, a Masters candidate in Historic Preservation within the School of Architecture, introduced us to her process behind developing a curated exhibit – from scratch! Very few have this incredibly unique and rewarding opportunity, and, needless to say, those of us in the library were beyond thrilled for her. As the Society of Architectural Historians Conference swiftly approaches, which coincides with the official opening reception of the exhibition, we decided to check in with Emily and get more details from the curator herself.

To recap, Emily was tasked with developing a display for the Reading Room in Battle Hall for the Spring 2014 semester. During her brainstorming phase, she sifted through myriad issues of Interiors magazine, Texas Architect, and more journals from the Architecture and Planning Library as not only a source for inspiration, but as a gauge for what materials were available to her within the walls of Battle Hall. As most of our library users can attest to, the Architecture and Planning Library is full of information (we’re lucky to say that!), so Emily utilized her Interior Design background, current Historic Preservation studies, and a time range from World War II to approximately 1975 to help narrow her foci and eventually land on a exhibition topic that was specific enough to pin down a clear focus, yet broad enough to encapsulate a spectrum of available archival materials.

Emily also noted that The Society of Architectural Historians Annual Conference, held this year in Austin from April 9th-13th, could also serve as a source of inspiration for unearthing an exhibition focus. While perusing the paper topics for the upcoming conference, Emily noticed one in particular: Placing the Profession: Early Contexts for Interior Design Practice in the US. This, in conjunction with her educational studies, helped Emily land on her topic of “Inside Modern Texas: The Case For Preserving Interiors.” Says Emily of the topic:

“The idea behind it is that, as much as modern architecture is gaining momentum in historic preservation [nowadays], interiors aren’t always considered. This is also true of buildings of other periods, but with modern interiors, significant characteristics like spatial relationships or lack of ornament can be especially difficult to recognize.  And commercial interiors are a challenge. There can be more pressure to update constantly when a forward-thinking image is considered important for the success of a business.”

To articulate her thought process visually, Emily divided her exhibition into three main parts, the first being a brief overview of modern interior design and its principles. As interior designers or architectural history buffs may know, interior design was still in the process of growing into its own profession during the mid twentieth century. Emily, in the first third of her exhibition, lays out the several factors that contributed to the profession of interior design in Texas, focusing on major influences, including the contributions of the Dallas Market Center. Harwell Hamilton Harris created the drawings for the Trade Mart within the Center, which the Alexander Archive possesses – a key example of the types of resources available!

The second part of the exhibition transitions to a chronological overview of interiors, sourced from the Archive and images from the library’s journals. These sections serve as an excellent primer for the final third of Emily’s exhibition: the challenges behind preserving modern historic interiors. To articulate her thought process, emily utilizes three case study examples in Texas: The Wilson House in Temple, former home and showroom of the founder of Wilsonart Laminate Company and current house museum for the same company; the famous Inwood Theatre in Dallas, which features a 1980’s bar addition to its 1947 lobby interior; and the Austin National Bank Building, now McGarrah Jessee Advertising on East 6th Street, a key feature in Austin’s adaptive reuse scene.

By doing exhaustive research and spending her working days fawning over the Archive’s incredible depth of modern architectural drawings, photographs, prints, and more (it was one of her favorite parts!), Emily has created a beautiful and thoughtful exhibition that draws attention to a highly relevant topic in preservation: the retention of historic interiors. Says Emily:

The interior of a building is what its users interact with directly, so it can serve as an especially informative historic record. That same direct interaction can be a challenge for continued use of the building. Adaptive reuse can be a very useful and practical preservation strategy, but it can result in quite a bit of change particularly to the interior. At the same time, not every historic building can be a house museum. You have to balance those priorities. It’s an interesting problem that historic preservation principles do address already, but whether the focus should be stronger is worth considering.

Emily, in the process of her curation, has uncovered so many provocative topics that could benefit researchers in the future. She has made sure to note when specific interior designers are referenced in projects she comes across, providing them to the archive staff to help with future collection. Interior design as it is today is a relatively young profession, so archival material can be more difficult to find. Though it may not seem like it for her now, Emily’s exhibition will go far beyond its display dates of late March to September 2014 – at least in terms of its research!

We are so excited for her work to be displayed concurrently with the Society of Architectural Historians Annual Conference. Please join us on April 10th for the opening reception!

library

Why Digital Research Matters: An Insight into Open Access

When I arrived at work on Monday, I performed tasks as usual, including monitoring our Twitter feed to promote any articles that were pertinent to the clientele that we serve here at the Architecture & Planning Library. However, with the commencement of Open Access Week 2013, I was particularly searching for commentary that reflected the importance of open access in research. That’s why when my eyes skimmed over the following 140-character headline, I couldn’t click the associated link fast enough:

Hours of research went into this one — UT is naming more buildings after donors, less after faculty than ever before: http://bit.ly/1azwbsh

The above is a feature by The Daily Texan‘s Bobby Blanchard, and one that was immediately captivating, largely because of its relevance to architecture as a viable tool for marketing and promotion.

Though the topic is certainly contentious, Bobby’s article highlights just how much information can be extracted from sources that are openly accessible to the public. I briefly messaged Bobby to see where he obtained most of his information, and he referred to the Texas Exes website and subsets of the University of Texas at Austin site. He also checked out a book from PCL – Brick by Golden Brick by Margaret C. Berry (also available in our Reference Collection here at the Architecture & Planning Library) – to piece each building together into a cohesive collection. It’s incredible that the digital connectivity in our world – a connectivity that is almost passive because of its prolific nature – can give us the ability to gather a conclusive set of information and, in turn, create a new set of data that becomes readily accessible as well.

A screen grab from Bobby’s article shows how his research was translated into a visual form of communication.

Though most of Bobby’s digital resources were not scholarly publications on an open access platform, his findings give insight into how digitally accessible information has the potential to be monumentally influential in the field of research. Bobby’s article could easily serve as an excellent base for an intensive research venture focused on how philanthropy affects college campuses across the nation, and lead into comparative studies between public and private institutions. The ability for this information to be presented in an online article that can be accessed with the click of a mouse across the world is a staggering thought, a modern-day ability that would have only existed in a dream world no more than a few decades ago.

I firmly believe that the library in its most historic form will never become obsolete. And I fully recognize the inherent credibility issues with open-access platforms, which are displayed and discussed in another article by The Daily Texan. However, the overarching goal of open access research – “the practice of providing unrestricted access via the Internet to peer-reviewed scholarly research” (via Wikipedia) – is one that keeps up with our fast-paced, time-restrictive, and increasingly digital world. With Bobby’s article as a student example, information that’s a click away has the potential to spur research that affects myriad disciplines across the world.

You can access Bobby’s original article here.
If you’re a Twitter-a-holic like the rest of us, you can follow Bobby at @bobbycblanchard and The Daily Texan at @thedailytexan. 

The University of Texas Libraries are only halfway through their week-long celebration of Open Access! Find out which campus events you can still attend here.

Interested in learning more about the history of the UT campus? Titles with content similar to Brick by Golden Brick include The Texas Book, The Texas Book Two, and The University of Texas at Austin: An Architectural Tour.

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Interior Design Research Tools: InformeDesign

The 101 Years of Interior Design celebration at UTSOA is only a week away! To keep up with our October interior design focus here on our blog, we’ve selected InformeDesign as another research tool to showcase the importance of research in the design world.

Last week we featured IIDA’s Knowledge Center, a phenomenal tool to quickly access case studies, conference papers, theses, and more. InformeDesign is a similar format, and is also FREE!

InformeDesign, developed by the College of Design at the University of Minnesota, has a clear-stated mission statement to facilitate the integration of research and design practice through an easy-to-access, easy-to-read website. Here at the library, we think that’s an essentiality, which is why we’re so thrilled about this database!

Although the website is currently idle and unable to add new content, a wealth of previously uploaded scholarly journals are accessible. The search box is simple, and accommodates various terms and of levels of complexity. I started with a generic search in ‘sustainability’ and moved to ‘sustainable lighting’ – both with results that were both broad and specific, but all within relevancy.

When you click on a link of interest, InformeDesign offers a clear, organized, and concise page highlighting the essential elements of an article. Perhaps the most useful are the Design Criteria and Key Concepts categories, which outline the purpose of the study and the factual results. Though the results do not link you directly to an article, they give you all of the bibliographic information at the bottom if you choose to access the research in its entirety. For those that are seeking quick results with actual data and conclusive summaries, InformeDesign is perfect for you!

You can also create a free InformeDesign account to save articles and add commentary. All things considered, InformeDesign is a wonderful research tool for quick access to a staggering amount of useful design studies.

Happy researching, designers!

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Upcoming Event: Open Access Week

From October 21-25, The UT Libraries are participating in the national celebration of Open Access (OA) Week. “Open Access” refers to the free, immediate, and online access to scholarly research, as well as the right to use the information as needed. OA Week was initially created to “promote Open Access as a new norm in scholarship and research”, and is now in its sixth year.

The Libraries will sponsor an event each day of OA Week that reaches out to different campus communities. This is your chance to learn about Open Access and how it may affect any research you pursue!

Here’s a brief look at the daily schedule:

Monday, October 21: Wikipedia Edit-a-thon
Tuesday, October 22: Open Access Panel Discussion
Wednesday, October 23: Open Educational Resources: Past, Present, Future?
Thursday, October 24: RIP: A Remix Manifesto Movie Screening
Friday, October 25: Open Access Scholarly Publishing with Texas Digital Library

Follow UT Libraries’ blog for the most up-to-date information on this special week! A full lineup of events can be found here. All events are free, open to the public, and food and drink will be available to attendees while they last.

As OA Week approaches, we encourage you to refer to a recent editorial by The Daily Texan for more information on Open Access.

We hope to see you all at these phenomenal events next week!

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Study Abroad in Oslo, Norway!

For those of you students that are considering studying abroad or are in search of the right program, a new partnership between UT and the University of Oslo in Norway has been finalized. Translation: students can spend a summer, semester, or year in Oslo and receive UT credit!

This opportunity caught our eye here at the Architecture & Planning Library due to some exciting research projects that the University of Oslo has pursued. Topics include Norwegian Architecture and Design from 1950-1970, Modern Architecture and Design, and more. We encourage you to follow the links of each topic to get a more in-depth description of each.

Interested in learning more about the programs available? An info session will be held Thursday, October 10th from 3:30-4:45pm at BUR 337. For more information, please email Peter Hess, Department Chair of Germanic Studies, at phess@austin.utexas.edu.

We hope this opportunity excites you as much as it does us!