THE GREENEST BUILDING – A DOCUMENTARY

“The greenest building is the one that is already built.” -Carl Elefante, architect.

The Greenest Building, a 60-minute documentary, will be shown on Wed. May 29th at 7pm at the Masonic Lodge at 225 W Oak Street. It is sponsored by the Protect Our Old Town Homes group in Old Town.

The film is based upon a report by the Preservation Green Lab of the National Trust for Historic Preservation and provides the most comprehensive analysis to date of the potential environmental benefit of building reuse.

The groundbreaking study, The Greenest Building: Quantifying the Environmental Value of Building Reuse, concludes that, when comparing buildings of equivalent size and function, building reuse almost always offers environmental savings over demolition and new construction.

Reusing existing buildings and retrofitting them for better energy efficiency is another tool to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and become more sustainable.

For information, contact Gina Janett, 970 222-5896 ginaciao@frii.com.

Free, Three Credit Class on Selling Historic Fort Collins Homes - December 7, 2015

Protect Our Old Town Homes is hosting a free, 3-credit class for Realtors on December 7th from 1 - 5pm. This class will provide local Realtors with three continuing education credits with the Colorado Division of Real Estate while exploring the unique issues related to selling historic homes in Fort Collins. Particular emphasis will be given to the processes and benefits of historic landmark designation so that Realtors will be able to clearly pass this information on to potential buyers.

 Topics to be covered include:
• The purpose behind historic designation and the related economic, environmental, and social benefits of designating properties
• The financial benefits of historic designation specific to the building owner
• An overview of Fort Collins’ historic neighborhoods
• Architectural styles in Fort Collins
• The review process for historic designation
• General maintenance for historic homes
• Researching historic homes

The class is free, but space is limited. This four-hour class will be held at First Bank, 100 S. College in the downstairs meeting room. Speakers include Historic Preservation staff with the City, a local building contractor who is familiar with working on older homes, and a local historian.

Sign up for the class through Eventbrite: SellingHistoricFoCoHomes.eventbrite.com

Still have questions? Feel free to contact Meg Dunn at meg@forgottenfortcollins.com

Preserving the Buildings that Make Our Community Unique

Wayne Wood, a preservationist from Riverside, Avondale in Jackson, Florida, gives this TED talk on why preservation is important. He gives a great overview not only of what preservation is and why it's worth doing (historically, culturally, and economically), but also why it can be controversial and how preservationists can make blunders that confuse matters even more.

We highly recommend this 16 minute video, but if you don't have time for the entire thing, scroll down past the video to see a few quotes below.


If you're receiving this post via email and can't see the video, click through directly to YouTube using this link: Historical Preservation - A Radical Conservative Liberal Concept: Wayne Wood at TEDxRiversideAvondale.

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"Architecture is the most public of all of our arts. These buildings are out there for us to see and to enjoy every day. They're not housed in a museum or a gallery or in a theater. But we get to interact with our buildings in our community and connect to our community in that way. If a building is beautiful, it uplifts our community. And buildings are visual works of art that connect us all. If you have a building like this in your city, it gives you a sense of place, a sense of importance. And it makes our town different from all those other towns."

"An ugly building is a scar that must be endured by all of us."

"If you're gonna spend my taxpayer money and build a building in the name of my city, make it something wonderful that expresses the joy and grandeur and culture of not just now in our city, but what it will be like in the future."

"If you tear down a historic building, you've not only lost the historic value and the cultural value, but you've lost the materials it was made of and the energy that went into consuming it.  Now our society has this big penchant for recycling our household wastes. And yet if you demolish an average 2,500 square foot American home, you have totally obliterated all the environmental and economic benefits you gave by recycling one million aluminum cans -- a neighborhood's generation's worth of recycling." 

Why Is Historic Preservation Important in America?

This beautiful video features historian Jeff Marshall who explains how historic preservation protects and values intangibles that are hard to measure, but that are critically important to forming a sense of community in an area. Though Marshall works primarily to preserve old barns, his words ring true for all types of historic building preservation.

(If you received this post via email and cannot see the video, view it on YouTube: http://youtu.be/0O8w5tU68wU)

At one point Marshall asks, what property, if it were changed, developed or destroyed, would change the character of our community? In Fort Collins I suspect there are two buildings that might immediately spring to people's minds -- the Old Firehouse and the Linden Hotel. Other's might include Saint Joe's Catholic Church, the Coopersmith's building (and especially the Coca-Cola ad on the side), and the old Carnegie Library. Are there other buildings that you would add to the list?

An Emotional Sense of Place

Spend any time in Old Town, Fort Collins, and you will build a relationship with the place. Somehow the combination of location, architecture, and history (not just ages-ago-history but our own history -- memories of times that we have walked through Old Town) blend to create something more than the sum of the parts. There's an emotional component to our relationship with this part of town that you might not notice until something changes. 

Rhonda Sincavage does a great job of explaining this intangible relationship in a TED talk that she gave in July of 2011. Here's a quote from her talk:

"...what really hasn't been studied until recently are the type of factors that keep and attract people to certain places. Recently a 3 year study was finished that looked at these attachment factors. They surveyed more than 43,000 people in 26 different cities and the results are a bit of a surprise. Things like safety, education, economy weren't the factors that ranked the highest. Instead, it was ascetics, it was openness, and social offerings that were all the leading drivers. And this was consistent across all of the cities. What was even more striking was that it was a really strong correlation between these emotional attachment factors and economic growth in the areas. Which really supports the theory that if you're attached to a place, you're going to spend more time there. You're going to spend money there. You're going to be more productive. And you're going to be more invested in that community. "