Miscellaneous

[JNO1]

See... this is the kind of house that should be protected.

If that house is 10742 (I can't see the address clearly but the address of its partly torn down neighbor to the right is 10738), then it is on the CoE's Inventory of Historic Resources. Klyft Residence, built in 1933. Being on the Inventory means it is a building of significant interest (in terms of heritage resource status) but not on the protected list. Another little gem lost, unfortunately.

 

[Out of Towner]

Most of the private residences on the protected or designated list predate 1933. There are only a couple on the protected that don't. Funding for a designation very likely plays into the decision making process as designation also make the "building" eligible for public funding to preserve it. Obviously as the designation grows so to does the amount of public funding needed.

 

[constance_chlore]

My understanding is that the greatest barrier to expanding heritage protections is the property owners' choices. The city can decree that a certain property is a Municipal Historic Resource against the owner's will, but what I've heard is that they then have to compensate the owner for any potential lost value. In this sense, the budget is a constraint, but I think the expenses for contributing to keeping up the historic character of voluntarily designated properties are relatively modest.

I'm all for expanding heritage protections, but we should be careful about what we advocate for. Just because a house is old and it's a 'named' house (i.e. we know who lived there in like, 1920), doesn't mean it's historically or architecturally important. I don't think our goal should be to keep entire neighborhoods frozen in time.

 

[archited]

^ I agree -- we don't want to keep entire neighborhoods frozen in time; on the other hand when something substantial is subjectively superseded by a retrograde then both the neighborhood and the social fabric are tattered.

 

[Out of Towner]

My understanding is that the greatest barrier to expanding heritage protections is the property owners' choices. The city can decree that a certain property is a Municipal Historic Resource against the owner's will, but what I've heard is that they then have to compensate the owner for any potential lost value. In this sense, the budget is a constraint, but I think the expenses for contributing to keeping up the historic character of voluntarily designated properties are relatively modest.

I'm all for expanding heritage protections, but we should be careful about what we advocate for. Just because a house is old and it's a 'named' house (i.e. we know who lived there in like, 1920), doesn't mean it's historically or architecturally important. I don't think our goal should be to keep entire neighborhoods frozen in time.

A building must demonstrate that it has historic value before its designated as a historic resource. Anybody can fill out an application to have a property considered a historic resource and be eligible for rehabilitation or maintenance funding but the standards and guidelines of historic building still applies and if the governing criteria cannot be established then no funding is forthcoming. So in that sense you are correct but don't forget that the cost of rehabilitating or maintaining a historic building is more than the cost for buildings without a designation. Consider the arts and craft style windows in the house being discussed. If those windows needed to be replaced at some point in time, unlike a building without a designation, you can't just walk into All Weather Windows showroom and say I'll take those because those windows won't be in the showroom. They perhaps need to been made from scratch which is expensive and you can go down the line of things in a historic building that are no longer readily available

 

[archited]

^ With rapid prototyping on the table (granted builders and suppliers need to catch up) reproducing historic elements isn't the challenge that it once was.

 

[constance_chlore]

A building must demonstrate that it has historic value before its designated as a historic resource. Anybody can fill out an application to have a property considered a historic resource and be eligible for rehabilitation or maintenance funding but the standards and guidelines of historic building still applies and if the governing criteria cannot be established then no funding is forthcoming. So in that sense you are correct but don't forget that the cost of rehabilitating or maintaining a historic building is more than the cost for buildings without a designation. Consider the arts and craft style windows in the house being discussed. If those windows needed to be replaced at some point in time, unlike a building without a designation, you can't just walk into All Weather Windows showroom and say I'll take those because those windows won't be in the showroom. They perhaps need to been made from scratch which is expensive and you can go down the line of things in a historic building that are no longer readily available

Right, although I would include all of that in the broad category of "things that influence property owners' decisions about designation." Probably as important as the additional costs for some people, this also reduces their freedom to do what they want with their property. From what I've heard from a friend who's a CoE heritage planner, the city is loosening some of these restrictions about how perfectly the house has to maintain all of its historic elements.

 

[constance_chlore]

^ I agree -- we don't want to keep entire neighborhoods frozen in time; on the other hand when something substantial is subjectively superseded by a retrograde then both the neighborhood and the social fabric are tattered.

I'm obviously sympathetic to this sort of concern, and for some reason Garneau and Strathcona are getting hit particularly hard with ugly infill. (Maybe developers assume students are less discerning? I don't think things are nearly so dire on the north side.) But I'm not sure there's any actual policy mechanism to deal with this specific problem. We can demand higher design standards as a whole, but I'm not sure the city currently has a way to say "if you tear down this specific house, you have to build something that looks good."

 

[archited]

^ No but there could be a way where the Design Committee Review group uses their leverage to say "you have to show some exceptional design if you want to remove this house from the Historical Record" -- it would certainly need more teeth to effectuate that scenario.

 

[David A]

^ No but there could be a way where the Design Committee Review group uses their leverage to say "you have to show some exceptional design if you want to remove this house from the Historical Record" -- it would certainly need more teeth to effectuate that scenario.

Yes, the default to tearing something with historical significance should probably generally be no, with only exceptional circumstances. It is not like we have a huge number of such properties and there are many alternative sites.

 

[Out of Towner]

^ With rapid prototyping on the table (granted builders and suppliers need to catch up) reproducing historic elements isn't the challenge that it once was.

You got me on how rapid prototyping is beneficial because it's not necessary to develop a prototype. There shouldn't be any significant development costs associated to historic building elements. It's the actual manufacturing cost of historic elements that's costly. For example, the position of the window muntins on the house under discussion is not a style that a manufacturer inventories today. So if the the house is to remain an accurate architectural representation of the period, then those windows need to be specially manufactured, which ultimately drives up the cost. From what constance just said, it sounds like the heritage people are compromising on some representations and I'm guessing that its because of cost. I don't believe that there's any other reason to compromise.

 

[archited]

^ In my (extensive) architectural work history I have never once used "off the shelf" windows for any project. Sealed units can be developed for any size window quite readily and with strict energy codes and use codes requiring inclusive elements such as low-e glass, subjective tinting, bird-safe fritting and triple-pane structure with argon interlayers (say to achieve an R-rating of 6, 7, or 8 for glazing) they are often project mandated. I would question whether or not cost is the sole driving factor in window selection (or more specifically specification) when design concept and imagination are also deemed significant. Even then functional Capital cost from the financial side has also to be considered along with building energy savings over time (operational costs) -- typically you will find that so-called "expensive" windows actually pay for themselves in energy savings in a fairly short time frame. Windows are just one line in the budget matrix; there is justification for many other items as well that align with historic preservation or, when needed, historic "imitation".

 

[Out of Towner]

A sales rep for a national window manufacturer once told me that they were finding it increasing difficult to source material for wooden windows. He said that they couldn't simply pick up the phone and place an order but instead needed to wine and dine the mill owner before their order was accepted. So out of necessity and innovation there's been a migration away from the materials once used in historic buildings to the more ubiquitous building materials like vinyl used in residential windows today. The question then becomes one of how true to a original historic building standard "is good enough." Is a vinyl grill on the windows on the subject house good enough or do the muntins need to be wooden to be truly representative of the arts and craft standard. Or in other words, how much should a standard be compromised to save money. My guess is that it will vary on every historic building and be dependent on its historical value. Some historic building are more valuable than others and even though the subject house is nice, unfortunately is seems that it didn't make the grade.

 

[wormwood]

BP for ATB Place:

2025-11-28
Commercial Final
To construct exterior and interior alterations to an existing commercial building (concourse, main and second floors) - ATB Place revitalization.
10020 - 100 STREET NW
$30,000,000

 

[archited]

^^ I wouldn't draw those conclusions any more in the present day. It must be more than a dozen years ago that I had a favorite millworker/finishing carpenter friend of mine show me how his then new CNC machine worked. With a computer generated program (which I provided) he laid out piece by piece strips of oak on his pressure-fixed CNC table and with a router guided by the computer program formed every piece of a full set of cabinet doors. He had one of his employees on hand to shut the machine off if something went amiss and he and I went to the corner pub for a pint. When we got back an hour or so later all of the ornate door pieces were cut and rough-sanded ready to be assembled and stained. Now this was a set of cabinet doors and not a window but it still illustrates the process. CNC machines have just gotten better and more specialized over the years. I could lay out the most sophisticated filigreed Gothic church window on the computer and give it to any carpenter with a CNC machine and the whole window could be cut, router-shaped and assembled in an hour or two (including the time I would spend on computer). Even stained-glass pieces could be so designed on computer and cut from antique glass via CNC -- the time here would be assembling the glass pieces and fitting them with lead or copper came and then placing those pieces in the filigreed openings. The broad point is that it is possible to re-create any historical piece in minutes not days and have it ready to retrofit an historical subject.
For reference I have attached a couple of projects that I designed using ArchiCAD where CNC played a major role:
The first is a retail/residential project in Santa Barbara -- that city loves conformity to Spanish Mission-style architecture. Though the windows are not close-up in this rendering I think you can see that they are fairly ornate and detail intense -- CNC milled units with R-6 triple-paned glazing (thanks to the California Energy Code going back 8 or 9 years).

In the area of furniture design here is a custom convertible daybed/sleeper/sofa that I designed -- the headboard is the CNC part. I drew this on the computer (again ArchiCAD) and the pieces were CNC laser cut in about 20 minutes from 1/4" thick Corten steel. The point of these two illustrations is that anything can be manufactured in the present day without the lost art of human craftsman-like cutting, shaping and polishing (snapzed off of a sales brochure promoting our furniture designs). The two units have multi-directional casters and the back-support pieces can be removed and the two sofa pieces then rotated together to form a queen-size bed.