Twisted Preservation Blog

  • One-night Stand: Preserving the Pieces

    One-night Stand: Preserving the Pieces

    This “One Night Stand” almost didn’t happen.  As I sat across the table from Fabrice Duffand, International Delegate for the French preservation organization REMPART, and Pierre Housieaux, Director of Paris Historique, all I could understand was that the wonderfully French animated facial and body expressions and gesticulations meant that things were not going well.  It Read more

  • The Allusion of Answers

    The Allusion of Answers

    One of my most difficult memories as a student of architecture is when I presented a project to a room full of people and one of the critics stood up, walked over to my meticulously drawn images and ripped them off the wall and crumpled them into small balls of waste paper.  I cried.  It Read more

  • First Kiss

    First Kiss

    Eastland Mall was the core of my adolescent social life. The enormous regional, retail complex was, at the time, the largest mall of its type in the state of North Carolina. Its parking lot was so vast that shuttles were needed to transport Christmas shoppers from their cars to the mall entrance and back. For Read more

  • The Life Of Obsolete Actions

    The Life Of Obsolete Actions

    Who cares if I can make a chair without electric machinery?  Oddly, I ask myself this question all of the time.  As a member of the team at a living history site, where among other things, we do show people how to make things by hand and without machinery, other than as a novelty, what Read more

  • One-Night Stand: Poetry of Four Pears

    One-Night Stand: Poetry of Four Pears

    I locked the door to my stone-walled, tower office. The office was accessed through a lone, tight set of spiral stairs.  It was a beautiful space, but at times I felt like I was sitting in the middle of a big bullseye target.   I rushed over to a corner of my large office and lay… Read more

  • One-Night Stand: A Complicated Tango

    One-Night Stand: A Complicated Tango

    As we left the Overground transport train and entered into the Hackney area of London, I became utterly confused. Spending the last decade in New York City, I was used to a regular grid and quickly gaining my orientation within the urban landscape.  Not so easy in London.  I followed my friends, who had visited Read more