This summer I interned at The Preservation Design Partnership, LLC (PDP) located in Manayunk, Philadelphia. PDP specialized in planning and design services for historic sites and buildings. Since its inception, the firm has selected its projects and clients carefully and collaborated closely with the country's foremost experts in the field, providing excellence in preservation planning, design and architecture. PDP is a small-sized firm with an office capacity of 10-12 employees. The firm is run by a husband-wife duo who are Alumni’s of the Design School at Penn. The team includes full-time preservation architects, a managing architect, the principal architect and the interns. The office culture is friendly and encourages the interns to ask questions and voice suggestions while undertaking project-related decisions. During my internship duration, I was assigned under a preservation architect to work on the comprehensive restoration of the Kentucky State Capitol Complex - the Schematic Design phase which included the Capitol, the Annex building and the surrounding landscape. My responsibility, initially, was to thoroughly analyze all the available archival data and prepare a historical narrative of the structures and the construction and renovations history. The research techniques and tools taught in Documentation (HSPV 600) aided me researching and writing the historical narrative. The historical and descriptive data report would form a part of the schematic design narrative report in the later stages. The data collected was later used to formulate a timeline of events. I applied the technical skills gained in Digital Media (HSPV 624) for this task. While the architecture team was working on the BIM base model of the Capitol, my next task was to generate detailed drawings of the Monumental/ Historic Spaces within the Capitol that fall under Preservation Zone 1. The office had previously scanned the Capitol Complex thoroughly and importing the point cloud into the Revit model and reading the real-time view of the rooms’ side-by-side in Autodesk ReCap, we generated detailed two-dimensional drawings of the monumental spaces that contained the detailed column capitals, ornamented cornices and so on. On-site photos and the archival data were used to prepare a schedule of finishes. The highlight of the internship was the site visit to the Kentucky State Capitol in the first week of August. As most of the drawings generated were based of the photographs and the point-cloud data, we carried out detailed documentation of monumental spaces while also noting the conditions of the
rooms and finishes. The knowledge gained in the Documentation II class (HSPV 601) was very helpful while undertaking site documentation and also in preparing the preliminary condition assessment drawings of the spaces which would be used to recommend repair/ treatments methods for their stabilization. Through the summer, I joined various meetings with PDP staff and also acted as a liaison between the preservation and architecture, structural and MEP team on various occasions. This internship helped me refine my skills and expand my knowledge in the preservation field as it enabled me to participate in an on-going preservation design project. I am grateful to all the members of PDP for their help and patience and all the knowledge imparted during the course of the internship and will thoroughly cherish this experience.
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