Bradenton architect Linda Stevenson has received the 2016 Roy E. Graham Award for Excellence in Historic Preservation Education from the Florida Trust for Historic Preservation. Courtesy photo.
Bradenton architect Linda Stevenson has been teaching preservation classes at the University of Florida since 2012 after receiving her Ph.D. in 2011. She also is co-director of the Preservation Institute: Nantucket, which is the signature field school of the University of Florida’s Center for World Heritage & Stewardship.
As a preservation architect, Stevenson worked on the Ca’ d’Zan and Venice Train Depot restoration projects. She currently is working on the Patten House at Gamble Plantation for Florida Park Services. The Cortez School House restoration is another of her projects; it now serves as a community center/museum.
While Ca’ d’Zan is a house museum, the other projects are “adaptive use, or reuse, depending on who you speak to,” Stevenson said. “It’s an entertaining debate we have within the preservation community. The National Trust went back to using ‘adapative reuse.’ ”
Lorrie Muldowney received an Individual Distinguished Service Award for 2016 from the Florida Trust for Historic Preservation. Courtesy photo.
Lorrie Muldowney worked for 23 years with Sarasota County, and was manager of historical resources when she left the county's employ in August 2015. As a preservationist, she is concerned with "the built environment and evaluating the significance and integrity of resources. My background is in urban planning and architecture."
She was able to build a collaboration among diverse groups, such as the Sarasota Alliance for Historic Preservation, Sarasota County Historical Society, Sarasota Architectural Foundation and Center for Architecture Sarasota. She also taught at Eckerd College and the University of Florida.
"We are talking a lot in preservation about engaging younger people," she said. "We all understand that is what we need to do in order to perpetuate the missions of our organizations."
Stevenson and Muldowney recently shared her views on preservation in interviews with the Herald-Tribune’s Harold Bubil:
Q. What is the scope of your work as a restoration architect?
Linda Stevenson: Some restoration work is conserving the building as it is and trying to repair it such that it retains its original character. The adaptive reuse is really interesting. It is so important we adapt our buildings for new uses and give them new life.
Q. Does this mean researching original uses, assembly, finishings and coatings?
Linda Stevenson: Yes. Also, if it is adaptive reuse, there are codes that have to be met, energy considerations, sustainable design that we want to think about.
Q. Do you have to make new blueprints of the building being reused?
Linda Stevenson: Yes. We would have a team of architects and engineers that produce a set of drawings that would document it, and what the proposed project would be, as well. It is like a conventional construction project at that point.
Architect Linda Stevenson was the architect who directed the restoration of Ca' d'Zan. She is seen her at the mansion in 2002. Herald-Tribune archive.
Q. Do you change the interior layout?
Linda Stevenson: It depends. If it is a house museum, like the Patten House, probably not. The Cortez School House, we made minimal changes, just to add handicap-accessible facilities. We added a new bathroom wing away from the building to meet regulations.
Q. Some people like development for the economic benefits, but there is another faction of society that wants to preserve the old. How should the competing interests be balanced?
Linda Stevenson: I am fascinated by the whole issue of how places change over time. In preservation, we can’t really say that we want to arrest things in time, because that is not how human beings evolve. We need to accommodate the world as it changes, so sometimes we define historic preservation as the “art of managing change over time.”
Q. How do you do that?
Linda Stevenson: The focus of preservation has changed in the time I have been involved in it, 30 years or so. In the beginning, we were really interested in conserving our communities and that specific heritage, and were much more interested in the material aspects of that conservation, meaning the materials themselves.
But preservation has evolved to such a great place now in terms of, the social fabric of the community is equally worthy of preservation. Sometimes you can’t be quite the purist that you might have tried to be 30 years ago. Sometimes the fabric isn’t there, but the life of the community is there. So how do you preserve that?
That is the issue with gentrification, too. How do you make your historic community economically viable and to accommodate the community that was there and preserve that aspect of the place.
Q. In Sarasota, there is so much change going on, and historian Jeff LaHurd wrote a few weeks ago that Sarasota had lost its charm. What was your reaction when you heard him say that?
Linda Stevenson: I can understand his feelings. What he was tapping into was the fact that there was a longtime established community here that has a certain vision of this place, and as that vision has changed quite remarkably in the past decade, certainly since the recession ended, that people feel displaced and perhaps a bit disoriented.
It is always the hardest thing: How much development do you encourage in the community, particularly when the scale suddenly changes dramatically. Perhaps that is the biggest struggle.
Being an architect, I do have some training in design, and I do think about design of new things, as well. For me, that is the hardest battle, when you have these wonderful historic places that have grown up over time — and the U.S. is so new, particularly in Florida, compared to Europe, where you have this tradition of construction that didn’t change much until the late 19th century. So all of a sudden, this 20th century and 21st century are centuries of destruction and change, radical change. I think people find that disorienting.
Lorrie Muldowney: I see growth everywhere, and we are back to another boom period. There are communities that do better jobs of preserving their community resources. Here, there has to be community discussion about these things. The Preservation Board meetings, you can go to them, and very rarely are members of the public there, and there are forums for public discussion. The county is concluding, or in the process of updating the comprehensive plan. There were some surveys put out and community meetings conducted, and the preservation community was well represented.
You have to really step back and long-range talk about what the community vision is and then how are we going to put the proper pieces together to achieve that.
In my experience, people have one opinion about their own property, and they have another opinion about other people's property. Everybody has to personalize it; what does it really mean to you? People are quick to give opinions but sometimes it is worthwhile to step back, be more thoughtful and ask, "What is my commitment to this? What am I willing to do?"
Q. Of course, many Sarasotans are upset about the construction of the Vue condominium on Gulf Stream Avenue at U.S. 41. Is the debate more about preservation or urban design?
Lorrie Muldowney: Nobody is arguing that the beautiful single-family home that existed there in the day of Lillian Burns should still exist on that corner; it was actually the other corner. This is more a talk about scale and massing and frontage. It is not specifically a preservation conversation. It is more of an urban design conversation.
Q. Is the preservation movement gaining ground or losing ground?
Linda Stevenson: I have hope in many parts of the world that it is gaining ground. Two things are happening: One is that we are becoming more sophisticated in understanding the economic benefits of preservation. There are some great studies in the last decade on this subject. One the other hand, it is really tough, particularly in our resort communities in Florida. Given all that growth pressure, Florida is a unique case in this regard. There are so many people moving here — how are we going to accommodate all these people. In other places, where there isn’t this same development pressure, I do think preservation is gaining ground.
Also, the link between sustainability and preservation is becoming more understood. “This can be a piece of a sustainable development” type of approach.
The other issue that gives me hope — and this is why I love teaching — is that our students, millennials by and large, love preservation and understand it is part of the whole sustainability movement. They really frame the argument in that regard first. That gives me hope. Some of them don’t necessarily call it preservation and don’t identify as a preservationist per se.
