Sharon C. Park, FAIA

by Heather Livingston
Contributing Editor

Summary: Sharon Park, FAIA, is the associate director for architectural history and historic preservation at the Smithsonian Institution. She previously spent 27 years with the National Park Service (NPS), and from 1997 to 2007 served as its chief of technical preservation services for the Heritage Preservation Services Programs. In that position, Park managed the Federal Historic Rehabilitation Tax Credit Program and wrote extensively on historic preservation issues, most notably in the nationally recognized Preservation Briefs series. She is the current chair of the AIA Historic Resources Committee and a member of the Association for Preservation Technology (APT) Technical Committee on Sustainable Preservation. On November 6, the APT bestowed on Park the Harley J. McKee Award, which recognizes individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the field of preservation technology.

Education: For my architecture education, I took the five-year BArch program at Catholic University in Washington, D.C. I went right from high school, so I knew what I wanted to do. I worked for three years on my apprenticeship here in Washington. Then, later I went back and took a master’s in American studies with an emphasis on historic preservation. I was already a licensed architect, and in 1980 I received my M.A. at George Washington University.

Early career: While I was in school, I worked for my professors during vacations and summers and learned how to draw. I never learned how to do CAD. I’ve always done hand drawing. My first real job was with the firm Faulkner, Fryer & Vanderpool Architects, which was here in Washington, D.C., working on the master plan of the National Zoo. That was from about 1972-74. I then had an opportunity to go with J. Everett Fauber Jr.’s firm, which was doing work on the Bicentennial. He was a preservation architect and was doing restoration work for the Bicentennial in Old Town Alexandria, Va. That’s where I got the preservation bug.

Working on Gadsby’s Tavern, Carlysle House, and some of the courthouses in Virginia, was such hands-on work. You’re doing a lot of investigative work on what was there before, what’s been changed, color studies, technology changes, and working with a team of museum people and archaeologists. It was really great. When I was in architecture school, I spent a summer in England working with the University of Southampton on an archaeological dig, but I didn’t think about going into preservation. It really wasn’t a field when I went to school. Urban planning was the big movement in the ‘70s, so I think this preliminary taste of archaeology blossomed a little bit when I was working on projects for the Bicentennial. It came to light that archaeology was a very interesting component of historic preservation.

School, family, work: I really wanted to go into historic preservation, so I went back to school and took a master’s in American studies. I also married and was having children, so going back to school then worked well. I was working 20 hours a week, going to school, and having children. The main person in my life has been my husband, Bob, who has helped me keep my hand in my career and do all these other things.

It took me about three years to do the master’s program because I wasn’t going to school full time. I was trying to work and make a little income and keep professional. A very important part of my career is that I always stayed in it, even tangentially. When I was working 20 hours a week, I was doing construction management for J. Everett Fauber’s firm. After the Bicentennial, he continued to do preservation work and he needed somebody to do the monthly requisition inspections with the contractor and to do shop drawings and site visits. His firm is in Lynchburg, Va., which is about five hours away, but he had projects up in the Northern Virginia area, so I did a lot of construction management, which is interesting when you’re eight months pregnant.

At the NPS: After I got my master’s, I went to work for the National Park Service. I had a call from a friend of mine who was with the Park Service. They were looking for an architect to work on a fairly new federal program of historic tax credits where if you renovated a historic building for commercial purposes, you could get a 20 percent break on the taxes for that business. It helped give a financial incentive to renovate a building to pretty high standards of preservation. I took a leave of absence from Mr. Fauber’s office and went to work for three months to cover an architect who was on leave. He never came back, so his position was opened up and I stayed with the Park Service for 27 years, which is just amazing. I started as a junior architect at one end of the Park Service’s program for getting technical assistance, compliance reviews, and technical information on best practices for how to preserve historic buildings. When I left in 2007, for the last 10 years I’d been the manager of that program. It was an interesting ride at the Park Service, but it didn’t deal with any of the Park Service buildings. It was all outreach.

Congress authorized a long, long time ago that the NPS, through the Department of the Interior, would be the lead agency for setting standards and guidelines for historic preservation. Those are known as the Secretary of the Interior Standards for Historic Preservation Projects. My office was called the Technical Preservation Services, and it administered those standards through a variety of programs. I had a wonderful opportunity in that office to write a lot of the technical bulletins known as Preservation Briefs. They’re government printing office publications on how to take care of buildings, and I was the primary author.

The last brief, Number 47, came out in 2007, and it was sort of my swan song at the Park Service. It was on maintaining the small to midsize property and how to approach maintenance, which is such a critical part of preservation. It probably should’ve been the first brief I wrote, but, over the years, I wrote on how to care for steel sash windows, wood shingled roofs, incorporating substitute materials, handling HVAC in historic buildings, mothballing a building that’s not going to be used, and adapting a building for ADA access: the whole nine yards of how to take care of historic buildings and how to renovate and rehabilitate them for contemporary use. I think that’s one of the things that appealed to the Smithsonian about my background. Of the 200 buildings that the Smithsonian owns or manages, 44 of them are historic and six of them are National Historic Landmarks, so they really wanted someone in their office of planning and project management who was sensitive to the needs of historic buildings, so that’s my charge.

I’ve only just come to the Smithsonian in 2007. I’m the associate director of architectural history and historic preservation for the Smithsonian. Now, I get to do much more hands-on work of real buildings, which is something I wanted to get back to.

Changes in the field: It’s become big business. Before, back in the ‘70s, it was precious house museums. In the ‘80s it was the expansion and development of the historic tax credits and federal grants, the White House’s interest in Save America’s Treasures grants, and trying to recognize that whole communities are important as well as individual buildings; that the fabric of everyday life on Main Street in small towns and the variety of buildings give neighborhoods their character. There has been a huge shift from individual building to whole communities, so that’s where I think historic preservation has really made a difference.

I believe that the historic tax credit program has had a big influence on rebuilding and brought a lot of vitality and new uses to communities that needed an extra little boost. Now, a lot of zoning ordinances have changed, which allows mixed-use in urban areas, and we have a lot more housing in downtown areas. I think people are tired of the long commute to get to work and that preservation has had a lot to do with rebuilding our communities in a way that respects their heritage. There’s a lot of new construction, too, which is exciting, but there’s a huge amount of renovation and rehabilitation going on, and I think that’s been a big part of the preservation movement.

Are we preserving enough, too much, or not enough? That’s a tough one. I think it depends on what the city managers are looking for in their communities. A lot of communities—Charleston and Savannah, for example—have felt that their historic districts are critical for a variety of reasons and have worked very hard to keep their historic buildings intact. There are other areas that are still doing a lot of wholesale demolition and gentrification, which is a problem, but I think there’s a good mix. I don’t think one overshadows the other.

I think certainly with the sustainability movement that historic buildings are seen as inherently green. I would like to see historic buildings get more points through a special LEED® program or another way of looking at how we are keeping our existing buildings in place and modernizing them. But I think the green movement is good for historic buildings and existing buildings. People are beginning to understand that we don’t want to put all of this in the landfill when we’ve already expended a lot of energy to build these buildings and manufacture the materials in them. I think that’s a very positive aspect of historic preservation.

Neglected era of architectural preservation: I am totally interested in Mid-Century Modern and the issues that are being brought forward because the whole premise of the Secretary of the Interior Standards for Historic Preservation is to preserve the historic character of a building and its historic materials. It goes hand in hand. Although there certainly is room to bring in new materials, upgrade materials, and renovate historic buildings, for the most part up until post-war, materials were load bearing or pretty substantial. Post-war, there is so much more in terms of curtain walls and thin veneer materials that tend to go into thermal shock. The connections on curtain walls tend to be fragile.

You look at Lever House, which was so beautifully redone, but in fact the extreme care in reproducing the curtain wall was not able to save the materials because they were so fragile. I think we’ve got a real philosophical challenge to determine what it is that’s significant about Mid-Century buildings. Is it the engineering of the structures? Is it the precision detailing that needs to be replicated, or is there some way to save the materials and upgrade them? I think Mid-Century Modern has two challenges. One is keeping the buildings and renovating them, and the other is appreciating them because I think there’s still a feeling by many that some of the Mid-Century Modern buildings really weren’t very well designed or built.

Somebody has to decide what sets the standards for a building that should be listed on the National Register of Historic Places, a building that should be given respect as a piece of architecture that’s important for its period and time. The Historic Resources Committee that I will chair this year is partnering with the AIA Committee on Design and going to Denmark to look at Danish Modern, then and now. We’re looking at both Mid-Century Modern and very contemporary design specifically because the next generation of historic buildings is the Mid-Century Modern, so it’s a huge interest of mine.

On receiving the Harley J. McKee Award: I was stunned. I had not a clue that I was even being considered for an award. I think they wanted to acknowledge a lot of the work that I had done at the Park Service because, now that I’m at the Smithsonian, I’ll be doing different things. I will continue to research and write about building performance and building technologies, but it’ll be in a different format than the Preservation Briefs and the Preservation Tech Notes and the articles that I had done for the Park Service, so I think it really was to recognize 27 years of work at the Park Service, which I’m very proud of.

Reading material: I’m actually reading Hodding Carter’s Flushed: How the Plumber Saved Civilization, about the history of the toilet. When I was working on the dig with the University of Southampton, I was excavating Norman ruins in Southampton and was fascinated by the internal plumbing systems that they had in tenth to twelfth century called garderobes, stone-lined shafts in buildings that emptied out into stone sluits that worked with the tidal waters at Southampton. They had these little guillotine reservoirs where the tidal waters came up the stone sluits and was stopped and trapped by a little closure device, and then excrement was flushed out to sea, which I thought was pretty sophisticated. So, I’ve always been interested in early plumbing systems and how they work. Working in Southampton on early drainage systems piqued my interest in how all of that was incorporated into buildings.

But the last book I read, the one that is my favorite book, is Witold Rybczynski’s One Good Turn: A Natural History of the Screwdriver and the Screw. He wrote the book out of an article that he had done for The New York Times Magazine at the millennium. They asked him to write an article on a single tool or apparatus from 1000 to 2000 that had been critical and he realized that it was the screw and the screwdriver. The screwdriver [to a lesser degree], but the screw had been an amazing and very sophisticated tool to bring items together. He took it back to about 1400 and looked at armament, weaponry, and clocks, [etc.]. It has absolutely changed the way I look at museum artifacts.