AUGUST 2009 » book review

Evolutionary Studies

Living Buildings: Architectural Conservation: Philosophy, Principles and Practice
by Donald Insall
Images Publishing Group, Australia; 2008
272 pp; 400 color illustrations; $60
ISBN 978-1-864-701920

Reviewed by Eve M. Kahn

Preservation architects can be swashbucklers. They rush to the scene when a building is in distress, whether because a long-simmering problem has reached a boiling point – roof slates are raining on the lawn, stone pinnacles are detaching from rusted frames, or because disaster has struck in the form of fire or a devastating storm.

Yet for all the profession’s dramatic moments, few books have explored its split-second decisions, exhausting hours spent clambering on scaffolding and exhilarating rewards on reopening day. Volumes about preservation these days seem to come mainly from academic presses, have meager black-and-white illustrations, and focus on the history of the field’s attitudes and strategies. Recent titles have covered, for instance, how Manhattanites learned to save buildings (Anthony Wood’s Preserving New York: Winning the Right to Protect a City’s Landmarks, from Routledge) or how the practice of replicating lost historic buildings evolved (Wim Denslagen’s Architectural Imitations: Reproductions and Pastiches in East and West, from Shaker Publishing).

Preservation architecture firms, meanwhile, rarely tout themselves in monographs, perhaps because they specialize in bringing out the best in existing architecture rather than making egotistical statements. Who would want to flip through a book about a huge range of styles saved? Donald Insall makes a convincing case, though, that this material can be a page-turner.

His London-based practice, Donald Insall Associates, employs some 40 architects and runs half-a-dozen branches around the U.K. The firm celebrated its 50th birthday by publishing this portfolio, with dozens of case histories that read like lively detective investigations.

Insall staffers are especially adept at sifting through the wreckage after fires. When 1820s staterooms and a 1350s kitchen burned at Windsor Castle in 1992, the Insall team tweezed plaster fragments out of the soggy ruins, so that there would be something to copy when new steel-backed walls went up. The firm also figured out where to reinforce surviving beams with steel trusses, and reconfigured hallways to leave exposed some long-hidden medieval windows and stone undercrofts that the fire had unexpectedly revealed.

Insall in fact often improves on buildings while rebuilding them. After just a few exterior wall fragments survived a 1999 fire at Eardisley Park – a Queen Anne house in Herefordshire – the architects cleaned and recycled singed bricks for new walls in English or header-bond patterns. Before the house burned, these textured-brick surfaces had been concealed under gray roughcast. The pre-1999 house also suffered from an awkward 18th-century attic story; the new roof, covered in vintage Cornwall slate, flares into a graceful hip amid arched dormers.

When not intervening in disaster zones, Insall can usually be found preventing them. The book is full of wonderful terminology for messy situations. He describes fungi forming on roof timbers at a 12th-century church in Norfolk: "An alarming fruiting-body appeared above the nave arcade, warning of likely dry rot in the aisle wall-plates." When a heavy wooden pendant fell from the ceiling of A.W.N. Pugin’s 1847 House of Lords chamber in the Palace of Westminster, the structural beams turned out to be dangerously friable: "When crushed in the hand, they reduced to powder." At a Victorian compound on Trinity College’s campus, Insall found a drainage system that he calls "all but crippled by a nightmare spaghetti of buried internal rainwater pipes, charged with the hopeless task of discharging rainwater safely from the internal valleys between continuous double-pile roofs." He also explains how he creatively solved each structure’s dire problems by strategizing for long-term stone repairs, injecting timbers with lightweight epoxy, or re-raking roof planes to drain between steeply gabled dormers.

Not all of his observations are so rarefied and site-specific; he also explores how the firm orchestrates the big preservation picture. They only finalize programs after listening carefully to local constituents, "taking endless notes," and "opening ourselves to whatever the place had to say." During construction, too, Insall recommends remaining modest and flexible. While rebuilding an 18th-century brick house in Kent that the Prince of Wales ended up using as a country retreat, Insall reports, "We were alarmed when the contractors arrived on site with a vast crane to deliver the new stone chimney cappings, but that was their choice." (His tolerance does not extend, however, to uninformed subcontractors: he warns that historic flooring is "especially vulnerable to attack by plumbers and electricians.")

A few too many of his suggestions will not be informative to a professional audience. (Most readers will already know that "the life span of materials may be long or short" and "adequate safety measures are essential to avoid accidents.") But the book could nonetheless set off a trend of preservation firms branding themselves with colorful volumes like this. It shows how these architects subtly shape the built environment, saving buildings of all ages without prejudice, deeming none too strange or too humble or too far gone to rescue. TB

WEB EXTRA: Click here for additional photos from Evolutionary Studies.

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