On the Job with Michael Jackson, FAIA:
Integrating Preservation and Sustainability

By Meghan Dufresne, News Editor

Professor Michael "Mike" Jackson, a visiting professor in History and Preservation and the chief architect at the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, combines preservation and sustainability in his career and in the graduate course he is teaching this semester, ARCH 519: Building Conservation and Sustainability. Professor Jackson explains that sustainability is a natural outgrowth of preservation since both movements seek to produce buildings with enduring qualities.

The main goal of “Building Conservation and Sustainability” is to teach students ways to make a building last through time. The course gives students a chance to concentrate on materials, repair, and maintenance. For his course, Professor Jackson chooses an existing building in Illinois (this year the focus is on Lincoln Hall on the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana campus). Students then assess the building, look at special features, and break the building down by materials. Each student gets to be an expert on a specific material and the information is compiled in a booklet that is given to the building owner. Professor Jackson also often integrates green building materials into existing buildings.

Expert guest lecturers visit the class and students go on field trips to preservation conferences, restoration trade shows, and see buildings around the state that are undergoing renovation. Some of the things that the class looks at are repair processes, duplication and/or substitute materials and ecological analysis. The course promotes the use of a historic building assessment and treatment protocol used by the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) for the large collection of historic buildings they manage. Past class participants have also included civil engineering students in the U.S. Navy who saw the class as having direct benefit to their future work on the many historic buildings under the control of the Navy.

According to Professor Jackson architectural work today, except in the residential sector, is increasingly focused on restoration and adaptive reuse of older buildings. In the commercial and institutional marketplace more than half of the fees are now in repair and renovation projects. Professor Jackson advocates reuse of buildings because often their architectural, cultural, ecological and economic value—and the process of revitalization—is more satisfying than rebuilding from scratch. He explained that he still draws from the pioneering research on embodied energy that was done at the U of I in the 1960s and 1970s studying the ecological value of existing buildings.

Professor Jackson’s love of older buildings intensified when he was a University of Illinois student in the first Versailles study abroad program in 1970-71. His thesis project at Illinois was a restoration plan for the buildings of Galena Illinois’ Main Street. After graduation, he worked in southern Illinois for four years, and then went on to get a master’s degree in preservation at Columbia University. In his career, Professor Jackson worked on projects from New York to New Orleans, and then came back to Illinois to work for the State Preservation Office. In 1993 Professor Jackson became an Adjunct Professor at the School of Architecture. Recently Professor Jackson has been doing work with the Illinois Main Street program and he has managed the highly successful six-year restoration of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Dana-Thomas House in Springfield, Illinois.

So what’s new in the field of preservation? Professor Jackson mentioned a few interesting shifts that have taken place. First of all, he is pleased that many more reproduction materials and preservation treatments are available than there have been in the past. Many older building materials, such as terra cotta, are coming back into vogue. Linoleum is currently being heralded as a green alternative to PVC products. Finally, Professor Jackson discussed new problems the preservation world is facing with post-World War II buildings. With some modern construction techniques and materials, such as the aluminum curtain wall, there are no easy repair methods for materials. One interesting modern project that is currently taking place is the restoration of Buckminster Fuller’s 1960s geodesic dome house in Carbondale, Illinois.