Cameron Logan

Mrs. McCain’s Parlor House and Garden Tours and the Inner-City Restoration Trend in Washington, D.C.

A housing restoration trend—called “brownstoning” in New York, and urban pioneering or the back-to-the-city trend in other cities—had a noticeable impact in several major U.S. cities from the late 1950s onwards. Nowhere was the trend more influential than Washington, D.C. In key “intown” residential areas such as Georgetown, Capitol Hill, and Dupont Circle, the popularity of housing restoration was catalyzed by a very active set of neighborhood preservation and restoration groups. Focusing on the Capitol Hill area, this paper explores the organizational and publicity apparatus that drove the restoration process as well as the cultural politics and racial tension that accompanied it.

The Modern Hospital as Dream and Machine: Modernism, Publicity and the Transformation of Hospitals, 1932-1952

Ever since Robin Boyd highlighted the hospital work of Leighton Irwin and Arthur Stephenson in Victorian Modern in 1947, architectural historians have recognized the significance of hospital design for the development of modernist architecture in Australia. For the most part, however, that significance has been understood within a narrow framework: the pathways by which the expressive architectural language of European modernism was adopted by Australian architects. In this article I argue that modernization in Australian architecture was not simply a matter of embracing new directions in design. It was also deeply intertwined with visual representation and publicity. Visual depictions of modern hospitals in particular came to occupy a central place within the imagination of social progress in Australia. European and North American innovations of the 1920s and 1930s influenced this process. Nevertheless, the ways in which Australian architects promoted the importance of hospital building in the 1930s and 1940s were quite specific to the Australian situation. Such promotional efforts prefigured changes in the architectural profession in subsequent decades and helped establish a link between advanced architecture and historical progress.

Conserving the socks: Diagnosing and treating deterioration of the Sydney opera house roof pedestals

In 2014 Getty Foundation announced that the Sydney Opera House was among the first group of recipients of their ‘Keeping It Modern’ grant initiative. The Sydney Opera House Trust is utilizing the grant to support the development of a concrete conservation strategy. The strategy, which will directly inform a preventative and remedial maintenance schedule, is to be supported by research that is now being carried out by a University of Sydney team from Civil and Chemical Engineering as well as Architectural Science and Heritage Conservation. The research investigations are focused on three discrete elements of the building: the tile lids, a crucial structural component of the highly distinctive Opera House sails; the broadwalk undercarriage, which supports the concourse around the building; and the roof pedestals, sometimes referred to as the “concrete socks.” This paper is a systematic review of available information on testing, preventative treatments and remedial work that has been carried out on the concrete socks over the life of the Sydney Opera House. There are twentyfour pedestals located at the base of each triangular roof section where precast concrete ribs coalesce into a reinforced spring point. The exposed raw concrete pedestals are a highly visible and publicly accessible element of the building. As such they have been subject to depredations of nature and human interaction primarily surface erosion caused by rainwater runoff and to a lesser extent chloride, sulfate and carbon ingress. The paper assesses the efficacy of the different diagnostic tools and applied therapies that consultants have utilised on the pedestals and identifies knowledge gaps that need to be addressed as part of the Opera House’s concrete conservation strategy. A key question raised by this investigation is how to balance the quality and consistency of the visual appearance of this element with the conservation of its underlying materiality. In building conservation, just as in medicine, it is generally regarded as prudent to anticipate threats to health, to monitor conditions and to gather evidence. Even in the absence of obvious symptoms of deterioration, sickness or decay it is only human to worry about hidden threats that could potentially undermine our health or the stability and integrity of our built environment. Current advice from public health agencies around the world has highlighted that there are considerable dangers associated with preventative screening in healthcare. In medical testing false positives and false negatives are connected with serious risks to health and wellbeing. Even accurate diagnoses, when made in the absence of effective treatment options, are sometimes a threat to health.As we take up the medical analogy in building conservation at this conference, it is worthwhile considering the effects of both diagnostic tools and the patches and surface treatments that are often needed to cover the marks left by such testing. In this paper we highlight how approaches to diagnosis and treatment evolve as asset managers and their consultants move from a building repair framework to a conservation framework. When the building is a high value icon such at the Sydney Opera House (1957–1973), the consequence of that shift are highly significant. Building managers will at times be placed in an unenviable position of choosing between directing testing that may impact on the authenticity of the building or potentially not discovering subsurface deterioration that may ultimately impact on the longevity of that building. Just as asset managers, architects and consultants who are charged with maintaining buildings must live with the unanticipated consequences of design and construction decisions, so they must deal with earlier waves of building investigation, maintenance and repair. In the case of a relatively new building it is important to acknowledge that most decisions made about it up until this point happened before its managers were explicitly addressing conservation questions. In most cases they were simply maintaining or repairing the building. But of course every decision has some unintended consequences even if its overall purpose and impact are salutary. In this paper we explore some of the difficult trade-offs that arise between surface integrity and appearance and examining the underlying structural condition by reviewing the efforts to investigate and repair one component of the Sydney Opera House. In 2014 the Sydney Opera House Trust invited a team of researchers in Civil Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Architectural Science and Heritage Conservation at the University of Sydney to join them as research partners and assist in the development