by Heather Livingston
Contributing Editor

Summary: Tina Roach, AIA, has been selected by the French Heritage Society and the American Architectural Foundation as the 2009 Richard Morris Hunt Fellow. Awarded alternately to French and American architects, the Hunt Fellowship provides $25,000 for a six-month immersion work/study program that enables architects to observe and practice the latest historic preservation techniques and visit sites of significance in the host country. Roach, an associate in the Washington, D.C., office of Quinn Evans Architects, will be the first Hunt Fellow to combine the study of historic preservation with sustainability.

Education
I have a bachelor of arts in art history from the University of Chicago and I specialized in architecture within that. After working for four years, I went back to the University of Texas at Austin to get a master of architecture, my first professional degree, and also a certificate in historic preservation.

What are you working on at Quinn Evans?
I’m currently working on Eastern Market. It’s the longest-running public market within Washington, D.C. The concept of the market was started by Thomas Jefferson. It’s sited on Capitol Hill, about 10 blocks from the Capitol building. It is part of the concept laid out in L’Enfant’s plan for the city to have neighborhood markets. I’ve been working on designs for the building for about three or four years.

The building has a long, complex constituency, and there are a lot of competing interests. It’s owned by the District of Columbia and there’s a market manager and a whole bunch of different tenants within the building, so it’s a very complicated structure. As a result of that, there’s been a lot of need for work at the building over the last 20 years, but not the ability for the work to happen.

There was a devastating fire there in April 2007. We had actually been working on a design for restoration of the building, dealing with things like handicapped accessibility, putting more toilets in the building on the first floor, some of the standard modernization issues you have in historic buildings, and so there was a fairly small scope of about two or three million dollars. When the fire happened, the scope increased, and that’s what we’ve been working on in a multi-phased fashion since. The project is under construction now.

Favorite historic building?
There are too many. It’s funny because at Thanksgiving my brother-in-law asked me my favorite top three buildings in Washington. The FDR memorial here in Washington isn’t a building, but there’s a lot to that space that I really love. And the U.S. Capitol building and the Jefferson Building at the Library of Congress I also love. I studied in France when I was in college and have good memories of Notre Dame and other buildings over there. I also went to Spain and the Sagrada Familia is amazing.

How did you become interested in combining historic preservation and sustainability?
The University of Texas at Austin has a very strong sustainability interest. It goes back probably 30 years if not more, so in many ways it’s a part of my education there. While I was working on my MArch, I was getting my certificate in historic preservation at the same time. But de facto I was also learning about sustainability because it was incorporated into all of our core classes. When I went looking for a job when I graduated, I stumbled on the firm of Quinn Evans. We have two offices, one in Washington, D.C., and the other in Ann Arbor, Mich. In the D.C. office there are two directors: one of historic preservation and the other of sustainability. I was excited by it because I was really interested in how these two things might come together. While I’ve been here, the leadership of the firm has definitely been pursuing that within our practice, and it’s a part of almost every project in some fashion or another.

Whose work has inspired you?
Well, honestly, the work of my bosses, Carl Elefante, who’s the director of sustainability, and Baird Smith, the director of historic preservation here in the D.C. office, as well as other members of the Association of Preservation Technology International Technical Committee on Sustainable Preservation.

There are some landmark projects out there to learn from, but the biggest project where I got a chance to work on the two things together was at the University of Michigan. Their School of Natural Resources and Environment, which is also called the Dana Building, is a 100-year-old academic building, so we were able to deal with restoration issues as well as try to work with the faculty and the student populations, the university, and administrative members while pursuing LEED® Gold for that.

Why did you apply for the Hunt Fellowship?
I met a woman named Mary Brush a couple of years ago at an APT conference. She was a recipient of the fellowship. I had heard about it over the years and always thought it was something that might be a good fit for me, given my interest in historic preservation as well as my knowledge of French, but I told her that the only way I would do it was if I could explore this idea of sustainability and preservation at the same time. She encouraged me to apply and so here I am.

What do you plan to study while there?
Beyond the normal or the routine aspects of the fellowship—which is an exchange where you’re learning about how the French policies work—I’m interested in seeing how France as well as Europe are dealing with some of the same issues that we are in terms of the tradition of historic preservation, the climate crisis we’re facing, and how it might impact our design decisions and policies as we move forward. It seems like there are some pretty interesting people over there starting to ask some of the same questions that we are here.

What do you hope to come away with from the experience?
In addition to being exposed to new ideas and new places, which always inform your work, as well as learning about new technologies and procedures, I think I’m really interested in the cross-pollenization. There’s so much work to be done in figuring out how we can improve both our sustainable practice in dealing with existing buildings and our practice of historic preservation. I think that as much cross-pollenization between countries as we can do is important to coming to a solution on a project-by-project basis.