“Sustainable Design” versus Sustaining a Culture: No Excuses.

The catalog of cultural properties eligible for the National Register of Historic Places and the Virginia Landmarks Register includes the category “structures.” It’s a broad one, but boils down to something made by a human being and bent to a human purpose other than providing human shelter. Examples could be: A lighthouse. A bridge. A cable car, or ship, or even airplane (such as Howard Hughes’ Spruce Goose–yes, a structure can be a movable beast).

Until coal power and coal-fueled railroads respectively displaced them, water-powered manufacture and livestock-drawn water-borne transportation were the keys to American industrial expansion. River power was a cost-competitive energy source for milling of all types well into the twentieth century. So, old mills, canals, locks, sluices, wharves, and dams figure in the general Eastern American riverscape (as they do specifically along the Rivanna River downstream from Woolen Mills until at least Palmyra) and, thus, in National and State register nominations. To steal a phrase from Henry Petroski, To Engineer is Human. Since it’s a human undertaking, it produces evidence of culture, the stuff of cultural resources.

But, bad engineering has toxic effects. No historian argues for the preservation of the heavy-metal tailings trapped in ponds outside the mines of Leadville, Colorado, or wants an unsafe railroad trestle to remain un-shored or un-repaired. River works, especially dams, can make a waterway inviable to aquatic species of all types, and can devastate an ecosystem. Where’s the balance point when ecologically-sensitive design and keeping and holding culturally-sustaining artifacts come into conflict with one another? Doesn’t ripping down that big old 1913 house for a “green” building always make sense? Don’t the benefits of visually-prominent rooftop-mounted solarvoltaic arrays always outweigh the jarring intrusion they’d make when set on buildings in, say, an historic district of Charleston, South Carolina, one that’s dominated by 18th century and early 19th century townhouses?

Finding that point is not a new challenge for historians, archaeologists, or historic preservationists. They locate it all the time. The National Park Service even publishes a National Register Bulletin to help them along. How significant is the cultural property? Is it associated with the life of at least one important person? An event or series of events in American history? Is it a great work of art or craft, or one of the last examples of something of which there used to be a multitude in American life? Does the property conceal knowledge that might be mined by archaeologists or other kinds of historians? And, is there still enough of it left together, what ever it might be, even a historic district, so that it can tell its story? Does it have integrity?

The Woolen Mills Dam was clearly a cultural resource. Had the Mill itself (the red brick building prominent in the postcard-view masthead of this blog, with the Rivanna roaring over the dam visible through the steel truss members of the railroad trestle to the right of the tower) remained, along with the raceway that channeled water to the mill wheels, then the ensemble could have narrated the history of cloth manufacture and commerce in Central Virginia, and made even more clear how mill workers formed a community around the factory. As the dam stood last year, better to remove the stones and the wood cribbing foundation, leave traces of its abutments in place to mark the dam’s former location, and let the shad run miles further upstream and the Rivanna take on the appearance it had in Jefferson’s time, when the end of Market Street formed Secretary’s Ford. Historians and historic preservationists found it easy to accommodate environmental and ecological concerns about the toxic effects of the dam. The result was a pile of old growth wood cribbing ready to be milled into new high-priced flooring and a pile of stone block ready to be dressed into new high-priced stone to veneer a new building (see photos above), all without public controversy or any protest from engineering preservationists or industrial archaeologists.

The most prominent organization in “sustainable design” is the United States Green Building Council, which currently publishes its guidelines for new construction and major renovations under the LEED 2.2 standard. That rating system makes little accommodation for the tangible and reusable energy and material resources embedded in whatever might stand in the way of an entirely new “sustainable” building, and acknowledges the cultural resource value of a building, structure, object, site, or district in only the most oblique fashion. There is no novelty in choosing between environmental benefits and cultural importance, or reconciling conflicts surrounding these matters, and thus not much excuse for the USGBC’s tardiness in addressing the interests of preservationists.