Wyck House & Gardens
Philadelphia, PA: 1992
The Wyck House in Philadelphia's Germantown District includes parts of the original 1690s structure along within several 18th century additions, and a significant interior redesign by William Strickland in 1824. After nine generations in the home, remaining family members decided in 1989 to set up a trust for the conservation of the house and remaining two acres of urban garden. Walking out the door taking little with them the family left behind 10,000 artifacts and 100,000 documents to process, along with a mandate to preserve all of the eras of building construction and alteration with the highest quality of conservation practice.
The Wyck Association Mission
Marigene Butler, the long-time head of paintings conservation at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, was chosen to pull together a "dream team" of preservation professionals to study the building, determine the best treatments for repair of each element of the site, and, when no good solutions existed, do the research necessary to develop new conservation techniques. Twenty years into the modern preservation movement, this project would be the first time that the stated goals would be put to the test: were the treatments truly predictable, compatible and reversible? Or could we do better?
In the process of searching for and developing new conservation techniques, the team realized that the way preservation projects were normally approached also need to be changed. As a result, many of the lessons learned in the early years of Wyck's preservation are still influencing projects around the country and causing the initial participants to push for yet more improvements in our handling of historic fabric.
Investigation and Discoveries
The early investigation was wide ranging and focused on securing the exterior of the building. We began by trying to verify archival data against the physical evidence. The exterior of the building is stuccoed and there were 150 years of stucco repair history to understand. The twentieth century repairs using portland cement and acrylic-modified mortars were particularly unsightly and were trapping water leading to deterioration in the surrounding early lime stuccoes.
Since it is usually best to carry out repairs from the top and work down so that repairs need only be done once, an early priority was to understand the condition of the roof. The 1963 box gutter had caused a great deal of damage to the cornice and lower sheathing. Before the roof was closed up, we had repaired and consolidated most of the woodwork in the cornice. Where wood on the building was in generally good condition, it was strengthened with kyanoil. Most of the paint films on the building had failed, but we saved at least a 6" square of the entire paint history on some portion of each exterior element, including individual shutters. With all of the repairs, aesthetics was considered secondary to maintaining the building's patina.
The Historic Structures File is Born
The investigation concentrated first on placing all of the building elements into a timeline of construction, addition, and repair in order to understand how the building - top to bottom from chimney pots to hot water heaters in the basement - had evolved to its current state. The scope of the project soon proved that the standard format of an Historic Structures Report would be inadequate for the task of making the growing body of information easily accessible. HSR's are by their nature a report of all information known at a given point in time, but they are not organized to accommodate subsequent scholarship or even to file the receipts for work accomplished and materials purchased in such a manner that they could be easily cross-referenced.
This weakness of HSRs lead Project Architect Charles Phillips to implement a new cataloguing system that drew from his experiences at Old Salem, in which Founder Frank Horton's filing system contained loose snippets of every possible bit of information known about each building. Converting this system to three-ring binders (remember computers were still in their infancy), Charles ensured that every line in every document and every bit of information gained during the investigation was copied and pasted by material, era of construction and repair, building system, elevation, and so on to guarantee it would be quickly found regardless of a researcher's sophistication. In short, the Historic Structures File could grow as new information was gained, but still provide the information in an unprocessed manner that allowed the reader to quickly sort the disparate bits of information in a binder to meet his own search criteria, rather than one determined by someone decades before who had other priorities or interests. Within a decade, what started out as an HSF that consisted of three binders had grown to 30' of bookshelf space with new discoveries and connections being made each year.
Project Management Gets a Makeover
The collaboration of the Wyck project's lead conservator Morgan Phillips and Marigene Butler with Ian Bristow a few years earlier in the restoration of the Landsdowne Room at the Philadelphia Museum of Art played a significant role in guiding the design of this project's repair phase. When the museum decided to clean the dirt and tobacco stains from the walls, the conservators recommended they first do a ceiling-to-floor "reveal" as though a swing stage had been lowered down through the room carrying out all of the repairs. The resulting "drop" presented a compelling but surprising appearance that caught the museum community off guard: what had once seemed an elaborately carved but demure room revealed itself to be quite colorful with a palette of pink and baby blue. Although the room was ultimately restored, this Drop prepared both the museum's fundraisers and the public with a sneak peak of what was to come. This swing stage concept seemed a good fit for Wyck as well. It would be a proving ground from cornice to grade of all the proposed repairs and finishes as well as a means to generate support and funding for the restoration of the full building.
Not only was the Drop at Wyck helpful in generating support for the project, it also proved to have many other benefits. Producing the Drop required the conservation team to scale up their tests from the laboratory to a process that contractors could carry out on the building, but in doing the repairs, it also meant the conservators learned the materials, tools, time and budget necessary to do the work. This approach eliminated all of the surprises that are normally uncovered after a project is bid. The Drop process has evolved some since Wyck, but it continues to prove itself on projects large and small because of its ability to remove much of the uncertainty that accrues to working on buildings whose lifespan incorporates many eras of construction, hidden deterioration, and other surprises that can derail a project when discovered too late.
Masonry Repair Joins the Preservation Movement
Wyck was the first project to admit that neither portland-lime mixes nor acrylic admixtures held the answer for repairing lime mortars and stuccoes. Although much of the most deteriorated stucco was not able to be repaired at the time, the conservation team learned a great deal and embarked on another decade's worth of research that uncovered many new techniques for masonry conservation. The project did succeed however, in recognizing the value of local aggregates to providing visually compatible mortar matches and in carrying out the first in-place realignment of historic masonry with the straightening and grouting of a leaning chimney.
By the 1960s and 70s there was increased interest in preserving rather than replacing stucco, but the repairs were always made using portland cement, sometimes with acrylic admixtures. We have since come to realize these mortar formulations are not appropriate in conjunction with historic mortars. At the time, very little was understood about lime renders and finishes, but at Wyck everyone was interested in trying to work exclusively with lime and local aggregates.
In the end we were not very successful in our attempts to save damaged and friable stucco. There were no lime-only repair methods in use in preservation at the time and the learning curve for tackling lime chemistry and its manipulation was too steep for this project to benefit. Although little friable stucco could be saved, at least all of the repair patches were done with lime-sand mortars without the addition of portland cement.
Rob Fitzgerald's aggregate analysis of the early stucco determined that the sand came from the nearby Schuylkill River. Unfortunately the city rejected his attempts to get truckloads of sand from public waterfronts for use in replicating the mortar. Undetered, Rob sorted through the commercially-available sands until he made a match from varying proportions of three of local sands.
Another huge leap forward on this project came in straightening in place rather tearing down the chimney and rebuilding it as is the norm once a chimney is significantly out of alignment. In-place realignment of masonry had been simmering in the recesses of Architect Charles Phillips' mind for years. He was sure it was possible and with the scaffolding in place everyone decided he should be allowed to try it.
It turns out masonry units lend themselves to being pushed back into alignment once previous repairs are removed. In fact it is fairly easy to push everything back in position. Using a system of wedges placed where damaged or inappropriate mortar has been removed, wedges on the long or expanded side are slowly inched out while wedges on the shorter side are driven in until the joints are leveled side to side. Conservator Morgan Phillips then developed pumpable lime grouts that could fill deep or inaccessible joints that were difficult or time-consuming to point. The techniques developed on the Wyck chimney were useful just a few months later on the pediment repairs at the Hammond Harwood House.
Window Repair Using Formalized Methods for Tracking Repair Progress The windows at Wyck were generally in better than expected shape, probably because the solid shutters were regularly kept closed both for security and to block UV to the furniture and paintings inside. Nevertheless, there was a lot of failing glazing and paint. Window sash were cycled through a window repair shop where the exterior paint and glazing compound was replaced.
We constructed a temporary addition on the carriage house to function as an all-purpose shop for the project with much of the space tooled up for sash repair. We had some large worktables with shelving and storage areas underneath so every tool and supply was at hand for glass removal, sash repair, priming, glazing and painting.
Training new individuals in preservation practice through the window repair shop started with Miles Brewton in the 1980s, but I had recognized we were still having trouble keeping track of workflow. Ideally there are always sash going back in the house at the same time there are sash with paint drying, others glazed and waiting to cure, sash in process of being repaired, and sash being stripped. The problem is that with dozens of units in process, efficiency is sometimes lost. Worse yet, sometimes parts or even whole sash are mislaid, and some sash don't get their second coat of paint while others get painted three times, etc.
In other words, in order to keep the process efficient the sash need to be worked in a precise sequence. At Wyck we painted a chart on a piece of 4x8 plywood to monitor the progress of each sash through the necessary repair steps. We marked the chart with colored adhesive dots to signify completion of each phase. At a glance anyone, including Board members, could tell the status of each individual window and percentage completion across all of the windows.
Epilogue
The 1990s preservation work at Wyck was a watershed event in the development of conservation theory and practice. By pulling together scientists, historians, conservators, and craftsmen to work together as a team, Wyck contributed to the development of a building-focused approach to the repair of historic buildings that set the bar much higher for preservation projects to follow. This was the beginning of the Drop as a key component in developing project-specific repair procedures that were tested by conservators before the contractor began work.