True Green Cities / Greening What’s Already Here – What Would Betty White Think?!

This week I find myself back home in Washington, DC for the AIA Convention. And I’m happy to report that more and more, sessions on sustainable preservation can be found.  The United Nations team will be presenting a panel on their $2 billion green rehabilitation, and I will be moderating a session entitled “From House Museums to the Empire State Building: Greening What’s Already Here with LEED EB.”  Unfortunately both the UN session and ours are scheduled at the same time, Friday at 2:00, but the AIA assured us that both panels can be found on their “virtual conference” website.

Our session will examine how LEED EB: Operations & Maintenance might be one of the best tools available (certainly in the LEED family of products) for integrating historic preservation and green building practices.  We’ll be discussing the thinking behind using LEED EB to “rethink” a classic Victorian house museum in San Francisco and the recent LEED Gold certification of the iconic Empire State Building.

My colleague and co-panelist, Christopher Davis, Team Lead for Existing Buildings at GBCI, posted a terrific blog yesterday entitled “If Betty White Were A Green Building…”, as a way to get people thinking about whether the “greenest building is the one that’s already built”.  Read it and enjoy!! And hope to see you Friday at Room 145A in the DC Convention Center!

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True Green Cities/If We Can Recycle Cans, Why Can’t We Reuse the Fergus Falls Kirkbride Hospital?!

This past week I wrote a blog that many people seemed to relate to – it turns out it is my most read blog ever.  It was the story of an 800 year old hospital that has been sensitively reused and remains a significant part of Bruges, Belgium’s historic downtown while questioning why we in the US believe everything is so disposable.  Since last week, the outcry regarding the potential upcoming demolition of large parts of a historic Kirkbride hospital in Fergus Falls, Minnesota, which I referenced in that blog, caused me to send a letter to the City Council, Mayor, State Senator and Representative – something I rarely do.  Today’s blog is that letter. The City Council is considering a vote on its demolition this week so please sign the petition to save it from the wrecking ball, everyone’s voice needs to be heard. For more information please read the articles in the Fergus Falls Journal and the Chicago Tribune.

Fergus Falls Regional Treatment Center

The news that many historic buildings and large portions of the Fergus Falls Regional Treatment Center face imminent demolition is resonating across the preservation and Kirkbride Hospital communities.  As a preservation architect and green building professional who has spent 30 years working on preserving and adapting historic asylums, I believe it is important that I share the positive stories of reuse that I have been involved with and urge you to take a deep breath before taking actions that can never be recalled.

Why the Fergus Falls Regional Treatment Center Matters

The Minnesota Historical Society invited me to be the keynote speaker at their annual statewide conference this September in Fergus Falls and I instantly said “yes”, knowing that one of the largest and most intact Kirkbride-plan hospitals remains there.  I was asked to speak about the integration of historic preservation values and green building practices and how using my expertise in this emerging field has helped us to develop a strategic plan for the reuse of the former Buffalo State Asylum for the Insane, now the Richardson Olmsted Complex.  The Richardson Olmsted Complex is probably the most famous and perhaps most spectacular of the Kirkbrides because it was designed by the towering architectural and landscape design figures of the time – H. H. Richardson and Olmsted & Vaux.  Designated a National Historic Landmark in 1986, the same year that Fergus Falls was listed in the National Register of Historic Places, its 30 year abandonment was a preservation rallying call for citizens and professionals across the country.  Our story has a very happy ending, but it was not easy getting here.  And what Fergus Falls has that even the Richardson does not, is an almost intact floor plan – three of the original ward buildings at the Richardson were demolished in 1969, leaving a non-symmetrical site plan and removing a part of the story which can never be replaced.

The Fergus Falls Regional Treatment Center is also one of the last of the Kirkbride hospitals.  The Richardson was designed in 1870, the cornerstone laid in 1872 and it wasn’t until 1896, 10 years after Richardson’s death, that the 750,000 square foot complex was completed.  Fergus Falls was begun in 1888, accepted its first patients in 1906 and represents some of the most significant architecture in Minnesota with unique architectural character, designed by important architects such as Warren B. Dunnell.

Much of the Richardson (almost 500,000 remaining square feet) had been abandoned and deteriorating since 1974, but the community never gave up and the political and financial stars finally aligned in 2006 when New York’s then governor, Governor Pataki, allocated $100 million as seed money to stabilize and reuse it.  But what made the difference here, was that the State who still owned the site, gave up management and ultimately ownership of the site to a new nonprofit formed specifically to find a reuse for the complex.  The $100 million ultimately ended up being $76 million which has been used to stabilize the buildings and landscape (about $10 million), fund one of the best preservation and development processes I have ever been involved with and leverage the project to bring in more funding through Rehabilitation Tax Credits and New Market Tax Credits.  But here’s the even bigger difference – we did not just put out a Request for Proposal to developers and sit back and wait to see what others thought should be done with the complex.  Our nonprofit, the Richardson Center Corporation and the Richardson Architecture Center, led the development strategy ourselves.  Through diligent state-mandated RFP processes, we conducted a Historic Structures Report, Cultural Landscape Report, EIS, economic feasibility studies, master plan and institutional development plan – all led by our board and one amazing staff person.  Each study informed the next.  We took the time needed – six years – to establish our plan, agree on a development approach, and involve the community extensively.  We weathered the recession and uncertainty and today have actual restoration work to show for it.  We restored part of the first floor of our main administration building (the towers) to welcome the National Preservation Conference to Buffalo last October.  We started construction this week on the rehabilitation of our Olmsted & Vaux-designed landscape and by the end of this month, we will have chosen a boutique hotel developer and an architectural team to work with us to create the next phase of the complex – a boutique hotel, conference center and architecture center.

Don’t Bite Off More Than You Can Chew

Even the Richardson Center Corporation which has been fortunate to have been created with a large seed-money fund, knew that we could not rehabilitate the entire complex at once (nine hospital buildings and various out buildings on 42 acres).  With the assistance of our expert consultants we developed a master plan that phases the work over many years.  Our hope and intent is that once the core three buildings are successfully reopened, uses and users for the remaining buildings will be found.  This is why stabilization of all the buildings, which have all been identified as equally significant, was our first phase of construction.

Greening What’s Already Here

Historic preservation values equal the best of green building practices and historic, traditional buildings like these can be leading voices to demonstrate the integration of historic preservation and green building practices.  The construction and operation of buildings accounts for almost 50% of the United States’ greenhouse gas emissions. But reusing and retrofitting our existing buildings can reduce these emissions dramatically.  These are all green building practices because they help keep what’s here and in doing so, avoid new impacts.  In many respects, historic preservation methodologies are just sound, common-sense approaches to protecting our resources, culture and heritage, and that is inherently sustainable development.

What our plans for the Richardson show is that the root of an asylum’s history can be respected by reactivating the strength of its architecture and extending the Olmsted principles to the heavily altered landscape.  We can show, and Fergus Falls can too, that by reusing the buildings and landscapes we have, we can restore the dignity to these important places and its architecture in a way that reopens the site to the community in the most responsible way possible.

Durability of historic and traditional materials, plus the social and cultural sustainability of a historic complex of this scale reminds us that “the greenest building is often the one that’s already here,” and it doesn’t get much greener than this.

The Next Steps in Fergus Falls

I know that Fergus Falls is not Buffalo.  Yet, while Buffalo is a larger city than Fergus Falls, like Fergus Falls, Buffalo has been mired in a poor economy for decades.  Decades of inaction and little construction have saved many of our historic places like the Richardson Olmsted Complex. Without the development pressure for the land, they have been saved instead by abandonment and neglect.   The durability of these historic places has kept them standing.  In many respects, what they do have is time.  And Fergus Falls has that time too.  From my understanding, there is little real development pressure on the site.  Potential funds apparently earmarked for demolition could be repurposed for stabilization and mothballing.  A nonprofit development corporation could be set up like Buffalo’s to take on the phased rethinking of this significant piece of Minnesota and Fergus Falls heritage.  But this is just one approach and every community and place is different.  I developed a preservation management plan for the Kirkbride planned Bloomingdale Aslyum in White Plains, NY which remains in use as a hospital, and served on the Urban Land Institute team that first developed plans for the Kirkbride planned St. Elizabeths in Washington, DC.  Both Traverse City, MI and Weston, WV are great examples of hospitals that have been revived.  And these are just some examples of Kirkbride hospitals that remain in use.

Moving Forward

I grew up in Buffalo and believe that driving by the former asylum every week on our way to my grandmother’s for Sunday dinner, is what inspired me to become an architect.  My first architectural history paper was on an evaluation of the Medina sandstone at the Richardson.  I wrote my thesis for a Master’s in Historic Preservation from Columbia University on a reuse for the Richardson complex.  I went on to become the first executive director of the Landmark Society of the Niagara Frontier (in Buffalo) leading an effort to find a reuse for the complex in the late 1980s which resulted in a book entitled “Changing Places: Remaking Institutional Buildings,” was the project architect for the adaptive use of one of the Richardson hospital ward buildings into offices in 1989, served on various development teams over the years until I was appointed to the newly created Richardson Architecture Center board in2006.  I stepped off the board this past year to help establish the new Buffalo Architecture Center as a consultant and am returning to the board to continue guiding these efforts.  But I am not unique on our board.  Each person, all of whom are both experts in their field and community giants, has a personal story about this place. And I bet that there are many people in Fergus Falls or from Fergus Falls who can bring their personal story and rich knowledge and love of the hospital to bear in a new organization to guide the efforts to reuse the Fergus Falls Regional Treatment Center.

What you do have is time.  The durability of these traditional, historic buildings gives you that.  Please take the time to create a phased approach to preserving this important and irreplaceable part of your history.  It has been done around the country.  It can be done here.

Letter from Barbara Campagna to the Fergus Falls City Council and Mayor, Friday, May 4th, 2012

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True Green Cities / Remaking an Eight Hundred Year Old Hospital

The West Tower of the historic "horseshoe" at the Fergus Falls Regional Treatment Center (Fergus Falls, MN). Much of this historic Kirkbride plan hospital is threatened with demolition. Photo courtesy Fergus Falls Journal.

Remaking an Eight Hundred Year Old Hospital – And We Can’t Deal with a Hundred Year Old One?!

As someone who has spent her entire career working on existing buildings, I can attest to the fact that many of my projects have been due to lack of maintenance or stewardship by owners.  We all know how challenging it can be to keep up with our own homes so while I can be empathetic to a certain extent, we all need to take responsibility for our actions and sadly some of the worst owners are the largest landowners and those who should know better.  I think of municipal governments and religious institutions.  I bring this up because in my own world, two large historic places are currently threatened with abandonment and potential demolition – St. Ann’s Church in Buffalo and the Fergus Falls Regional Treatment Center in Minnesota.

We Need To Become a Culture of Reuse

Do you remember when you started consistently recycling your aluminum cans and plastic bottles?  It wouldn’t occur to most people to NOT recycle their cans anymore, so why can’t this mentality extend to buildings?  Are they too big?  Is it just too much to handle?  Is it because we as Americans have become used to a culture of disposal?  Someone else will take care of it?  Is it because we have so much space here compared to other industrialized nations like those in Europe for example?  If St. Ann’s is crumbling, oh well, let’s just move across town and build another church.  By the time that one starts to crumble none of us will be here and it will be someone else’s responsibility.  My recent trip to Europe continues to resonate as I ponder these issues and challenges.

Remaking an Eight Hundred Year Old Hospital

The oldest part of St. John’s Hospital in Bruges, Belgium dates from 1270.  Subsequent buildings date from the 14^th through 17^th centuries. Today the complex of at least 10 buildings houses a hospital museum, a historic dispensary museum, an art and community center, a Picasso gallery and a restaurant.  It was actually a hospital until 1976.  It occupies a large piece of land overlooking one of the main canals and opposite the Church of Our Lady, which contains one of the only Michelangelo sculptures outside of Italy.  It could be location, location, location but add to that the European ethic of reuse, and this hospital has found new uses that keeps it even more active than it’s ever been.

What I particularly appreciated was that very little was changed.  They seemed to find uses that fit well within the existing envelope and were able to use the various courtyard and garden spaces as entries to the new uses.  It was a joyous place to visit and made me think that what we’re doing at the Richardson Olmsted Complex will be equally wonderful – that if you’re respecting the original use and design in such a way that the new use is also fresh enough to keep it alive, then the place could last another 800 (or in Buffalo’s case, 150) years.   Durability of historic and traditional materials, plus the social and cultural sustainability of a dense historic city reminds us that “the greenest building is often the one that’s already here”, and my friends, it doesn’t get much greener than this.

A permanent Picasso exhibit extends through several buildings and two floors.  The hospital museum displays archaeology of an earlier building, stories about staff and patients and a wall of medical implements.  The one criticism I would make is that while each of the new uses seems to fit well in its location, it is hard to get a sense of the overall historic plan of the hospital.  We had been walking through it for a while before I realized we were there.  Maybe it was just me, as someone who does this for a living, but I wanted to understand how the hospital had functioned and what each new use was occupying.  But if this is the worst or only criticism I have, that’s something I can accept as long as this historic place has found a successful reuse and continues to contribute to its community as a place of culture and even an economic generator.

Why Do They Always Say That Preservation Has No Economic Value?

It’s really interesting when politicians or owners claim that a building is too deteriorated to be repaired when it is often their lack of action that led to that deterioration. It’s called “demolition by neglect.”  Several articles I’ve read about the Fergus Falls Regional Treatment Center quote local politicians with saying that preservation of the place has no economic value.  Who are these people being voted into office?  Are they living in a vacuum?  Study after study shows that the value of economic development of existing buildings is often the creation of jobs, and the value of historic preservation is the creation of well-paying local jobs and the retention of place and memory.

I care about Fergus Falls because it’s one of the truly terrific Kirkbride-plan hospitals remaining in the US and as someone who has spent 30 years working on and being concerned about the Richardson Olmsted Complex in Buffalo (probably the most spectacular of all the Kirkbrides), a threat to another one is a threat to them all.  Nearly 70 Kirkbrides were built in the US and less than half remain.  Most are in a state of abandonment or deterioration.

Much of the Richardson (almost 500,000 remaining square feet) had been abandoned and deteriorating since 1974, but the community never gave up and the political and financial stars finally aligned in 2006 when New York’s then governor allocated $100 M as seed money to stabilize and reuse it.  Of course, the story is very complex and please review our website and this short film we made for more information.

Are Americans so quick to abandon and demolish because we have so much?  Do places like Bruges reuse and save without thinking about it because it’s in their cultural DNA, or because they have less space and square footage and therefore it’s all sacred, or because access to landfills is more difficult?   If landfills charged more here, charged what the real cost of demolition is to our planet, no one would be so quick to suggest that it’s easier and less expensive to demolish than reuse.

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