Mary Brush, AIA, director of the Preservation Group at Klein and Hoffman, Chicago, spent six months in France as the 2005 laureate of the Richard Morris Hunt Fellowship, a professional honor for which one American architect is chosen every two years to meet and work with restoration architects and professionals throughout France. The $25,000 fellowship is an exchange of information, techniques, and professional practices of architects and practitioners in the preservation fields of each country. Brush focused her inquiries on building envelope restoration as practiced in France to study substantive differences between the professional practices in the U.S. and France.

Back in Chicago, Brush has worked on projects including the exterior walls of Louis Sullivan’s Gage Building and of Burnham and Root’s Rookery Building.

Fluency in French is one of the program requirements. How does language play a role in this fellowship?
Brush: I can’t imagine having this professional experience without the ability of language. The fellowship is funded equally between the American Architectural Foundation and the French Heritage Society, but the Americans in France are primarily organized by the French Historical Society. They established my itinerary and wrote all my letters of introduction. I would generally be with the lead architect, and I would shadow him or her for the two or three weeks I was in the office. I would go to all their job sites and meetings, and find out how they do their work, and by doing that, also found out more things about how the offices were run. Without language, I wouldn’t have been able to have those conversations. When I was on a job site, I could be talking to the architect, but a couple of times the contractors would pull me away and say, “I want to show you this sculpture I just finished over around the other side of the building.” I’d just go wandering off with other people because they were proud of their work and they wanted to show me what they had done, even though it wasn’t necessarily the architect’s focus. By having language, other people wanted to show me things, which was the biggest compliment.

How did your days/weeks play out?
Brush: There was nothing typical from one day to another; I’ve never moved so fast in my life. In the U.S. system of cataloguing our historic structures, we have significant buildings, which are our most important buildings, and then we have contributing buildings that are still considered very important, but maybe not the highest level of importance. France also has a two-tier system, but they have protections so that only architects who are specifically educated and trained and who have moved their way up the hierarchy are working on the most important buildings. There it’s very difficult to get to work on restoration jobs. That’s in contrast to this country, where I recently restored a Louis Sullivan building. The client was not required to take on an architect with my level of restoration experience.

From one day to another, I would never know where I was going to be. The architects would say, “Ok, meet me at the train station at 6 in the morning,” and sometimes that would be the first time I met them. I met my first host architect on my first Monday in Paris, and then Tuesday we were in Rome. The restoration architects are responsible not only for historic properties in France, but those the government still owns through strategic political marriages or her Colonial empire. They are divided up by country, so my first host architect lives in Lyon, and also has regions of Provence that he’s responsible for, but he also is responsible for the French historic monuments in Italy. So that second day I was in Rome where he was restoring the Villa Medici (purchased by Napoleon and today the home of the French Academy). From these travels, I would learn how they were doing their work, both from their values of preservation, which vary culturally from ours, and then also the techniques that are available to them. Some I can import, I hope, and apply them to thought processes here. It’s just an issue of finding the techniques and the right projects, and clients, and finding something that is competitive financially. Hopefully I can import some ideas to my next projects, and then find the right contractors and see if they can all be put together.

What is the difference in attitudes?
Brush: History in Europe seems to be so much more present and valued than it is here. For example, if a building there, say a church, has lost its congregation or a protected building has lost its ownership—and granted they have a different level of state financing and support for their preservation projects—their attitude is “well, we don’t know what to do with these buildings right now, but our generation, or two or three generations from now may have the idea to make this building functional. Just because we don’t know what to do with it, doesn’t mean we should take that opportunity from them and tear it down and make it go away forever.” To find here a beautiful building that has been abandoned and now all of a sudden has the funding to do a proper restoration is a challenge. My office is currently involved in some work with the Uptown Theater, which is a beautiful theater in Chicago that has been abandoned for 20 years. It would be fantastic to be able to put together the right financing package to find the right purpose to make the building not only look good after its restoration but to be functional and alive again with activities. But here it’s a different attitude—we have a lot of litigation, insurance issues, and financial reasonings that are different priorities than they are in France. We need to learn to value the mix of our important historic buildings. Architecture has to keep moving forward but we do need to keep the buildings that truly are important on our streets.

We have tax incentives, and several of my clients have taken advantage of them, but there just needs to be more support for us to really be able to say that preservation is financially attractive to ownership. In France, grants and other funding may account for between 15 percent to even 100 percent of construction costs, depending on the building, the value, and the extent of work. However, that system is changing because the country has to re-evaluate its finances. They have so many historic monuments they are running out of money. They can’t address everything they would want to address. I don’t know how long that system is going to last in France, but it’s certainly lovely while it exists.

What are some of the parallels you encountered?
Brush: Ultimately, the work of a restoration architect is the same in the two countries. The buildings exist, which means we can’t find out the extent of every problem before we do the work. It is typically not possible to dismantle the entire building in order to discover all the conditions prior to the restoration design. We can only look at it and take small pieces apart and look behind it and at other areas of the wall, and say, “from my experience, this is the design solution, and we’ll come up with the details and prepare the documents for the contractors.” That process is the same whether I’m doing it here in Chicago or they are doing it there in France. The difference is that there it is a 300-year-old building, and for me, I’m on the outside of a 50-story building.

From that standpoint, working as a restoration architect is very similar. In a similar limestone building, we both have to find the right cleaning technique because neither one of us wants to damage the stone with the wrong process. They employ different approaches to cleaning limestone that are starting to be popular here, but aren’t necessarily competitive yet. They clean a lot of sculpture with laser techniques, which is possible here, but it’s the rare project that can afford to do it. In Chicago, we have a lot of terra cotta, very popular in the buildings of the 1880s and onward, whereas France has very few terra-cotta buildings, so we have a material concept that is foreign to them, so some things can’t be applied to our work here. Masonry wall consolidation is very popular in France, and it’s starting to come here, but it’s not nearly as sophisticated. It’s a process of knowing it’s there, but that it’s not yet financially viable for a lot of my projects.

What are your lingering impressions from your RMH Fellowship?
Brush: It’s nice to be back in Chicago, and, thankfully, my firm, Klein and Hoffman, was very supportive and gave me a leave of absence while I was away. It’s nice to be back at my office and productive again. I hope there have been professional and social friendships and relationships that have been established while I was in France that I’ll enjoy for the rest of my life.

For as many differences as I expected to see—because their buildings are just at a different level than our buildings and our history is so much newer than it is in Europe—it’s clear that our history is equally valid; it just represents a different timeframe. I was surprised at finding how many similarities there are in the language of being an architect.

As the AIA works to raise its profile through the 150th-anniversary celebration as more than just a club of architects, but as a service to the community by working as a catalyst for livable communities, the fellowship helps crystallize the value of preservation and restoration toward the goal of creating livable communities. For example, the AIA Illinois Board of Directors is trying to recognize the architects and clients that inspire the projects that turned around a community through good architecture. A lot of times that’s new design, but it is also in preserving our heritage and how that affects our communities through recognizing preservation efforts.

The entire experience was so much more than I possibly imagined. The French people in general, the architects, and the contractors—everyone was just so wonderfully welcoming. It was walking around with people so inspired by restoration. It just came down to magic.

—Tracy Ostroff

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