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Mud & Memory: A Systems Approach to Preservation of Climate Sensitive Historic Structures

Evan Oskierko-Jeznacki (Dissertation In Preparation)

Adobe wall collapse at Fort Union National Monument. Credit: National Park Service, Fort Union National Monument.
Adobe wall collapse at Fort Union National Monument. Credit: National Park Service, Fort Union National Monument.
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Adobe wall collapse at Fort Union National Monument. Credit: National Park Service, Fort Union National Monument.
Fort Union Hospital, Then and Now. Credit: National Park Service, Fort Union National Monument
Credit: National Park Service, Vanishing Treasures Program
Mud Dauber Granary, Bryce Canyon. Credit: National Park Service, Vanishing Treasures Program
Mud Dauber case study system network depicting average mutual information relationships among system components derived from hygrothermal flows into and among the system components.
System metrics derived for Mud Dauber case study system: Average Mutual Information (AMI), System Fitness (F), System Uncertainty (H), and System Resilience (L). Note the measurable decrease in system resilience between the two states: as-built (left of center line) and incipient deterioration due to roof damage and freeze-thaw masonry damage (right or center line).
Adobe wall collapse at Fort Union National Monument. Credit: National Park Service, Fort Union National Monument.
Fort Union Hospital, Then and Now. Credit: National Park Service, Fort Union National Monument
Mud Dauber Granary, Bryce Canyon. Credit: National Park Service, Vanishing Treasures Program
Mud Dauber Granary, Bryce Canyon. Credit: National Park Service, Vanishing Treasures Program
Mud Dauber case study system network depicting average mutual information relationships among system components derived from hygrothermal flows into and among the system components.
System metrics derived for Mud Dauber case study system: Average Mutual Information (AMI), System Fitness (F), System Uncertainty (H), and System Resilience (L). Note the measurable decrease in system resilience between the two states: as-built (left of center line) and incipient deterioration due to roof damage and freeze-thaw masonry damage (right or center line).

Areas

DISSERTATION

“We may compare it to reducing buildings to piles of bricks. Yet out of the same bricks we may construct a factory, a palace, or a cathedral. It is on the level of the building as a whole that we apprehend it as a creature of time, as a product of a culture, a society, a style.” 1

 

The field of historic preservation is, by definition, concerned with the in-between, the dynamic state between pencil sketch and dust. Historically, preservation has been preoccupied with counteracting entropy through the input of additional energy. However, it is easy to overlook the vast sums of energy embodied (EMergy) in our cultural heritage in the form of information and knowledge, technical, traditional, ecological, and in many cases indigenous. Through formulating climate-sensitive historic structures as metabolic system models, integrating the intimate relationship between tangible as much as the intangible flows of energy within, a proposed systems approach to preservation and vulnerability analysis finds greater parallel with the field of cybernetics than building science. By studying both the intrinsic as well as extrinsic network of flows of emergy for a structure, flows which contribute both to preservation (resources, labor, knowledge) and deterioration over time (heat, moisture, water), from structure to ruin and ultimately to preserved cultural resource, it is possible to establish an emergy hierarchy that relates the comparative benefit (or detriment) of preservation treatments. With the challenge of a changing climate ahead of us, a systems approach to preservation can help inform holistic vulnerability analysis, monitoring strategies, and preservation treatments. Although, despite best efforts, the energy embodied in the mud and mortar is ultimately lost and returned to the earth, the information stored within can be leveraged to better understand its preservation during its life and later be recovered to live on as memory, a form of energy that resists entropy.

1 Abel, Tom. "Complex Adaptive Systems, Evolutionism, and Ecology within Anthropology: Interdisciplinary Research for Understanding Cultural and Ecological Dynamics." Journal of Ecological Anthropology 2, no. 1 (1998): 6–29.

Evan Oskierko-Jeznacki