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Builder finds niche fixing shoddy work
By Jennifer Heldt-Powell / Small Business Matters | Sunday, August 16, 2009 | http://www.bostonherald.com | Real Estate
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Photo by Angela Rowlings

No one is calling Von Salmi a rat, but he did hop off the ship before it sank. Then he started building his own boat.

Salmi was working in the construction industry when the economy started to head south. Instead of grabbing onto his job for dear life, he decided to launch out on his own.

“This is how I viewed it,” he explained. “The big organizations have 30 to 40 people working for them and they need to bring in $10-$20 million just to break even. What insurance is there that there is going to be that amount of business coming through?”

He considered his decades in the business and his pool of assets and figured he was better off going out on his own. His dream was to create a company to build really nice homes.

“I love building homes, particularly high-end residential homes because of the level of details and the intensity of the process,” Salmi said.

He launched the company in January, planning to keep costs low by bringing on experts as needed, rather than hiring them full time. After years in the industry, he’s worked with some top performers and many of them have become more interested in working for themselves rather than a large company.

Salmi discovered, however, that it can be pretty tricky to build a boat in the middle of a storm.

Even with his ideas on keeping costs down, there were too many competitors to gain much traction. Rather than give up, however, he changed the design. It was almost by accident.

When he launched the business, he began calling his network looking for opportunities. A call came in from a former client who was so stressed out about what was happening to his home he was losing sleep and dropping pounds.

He had a home theater in the basement of his newer, 6,000-square-foot home that was inexplicably flooded three times.

Salmi was called in to figure out what the problem was.

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OXON HILL, Md. — For decades, a manmade cove on the eastern bank of the Potomac River just downstream from the nation’s capital was the focus of ambitious development plans, but repeatedly the dreams ran aground. Now, however, despite a deep recession, a mini-city with the hopeful name National Harbor is rising at the site.
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Milton V. Peterson, the developer of National Harbor, next to “The Awakening,” a sculpture by J. Seward Johnson that has been brought to the resort.

The initial phase of the project, which sits on 300 sloping acres, includes the $1.1 billion Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center, a 2,000-room property that had its first anniversary in April. Four hotels are clustered nearby, along with about two dozen restaurants and shops, a marina, condos, office buildings and parking for 6,000 cars.

The project already fills several square city blocks of low to midrise buildings, many with water views. Only the Gaylord soars — by Washington standards — with an 18-story glass atrium. Slicing through the property toward the waterfront, the American Way is a grand pedestrian boulevard modeled after Las Ramblas in Barcelona, Spain, with shops, a wide median and 96 London plane trees.

On weekends, National Harbor draws tens of thousands of visitors — a mix of convention-goers, business people, tourists and local residents. National Harbor officials expect the crowds to swell as the development grows.

Last month, the Peterson Companies, National Harbor’s developer, announced that Disney had paid $11 million to acquire 15 acres of prime real estate there for what is expected to be a family-themed resort hotel. Disney is already building a themed resort in Hawaii, its first, for a reported $800 million and has not disclosed a timetable or cost estimate for the resort at National Harbor.

“For us to get them now, in this economy, is almost like

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architecture

Long Island Laboratory’s Expansion Hides in (and Under) Six Buildings

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By J. ALEX TARQUINIO
Published: June 23, 2009

LAUREL HOLLOW, N.Y. — Visitors to the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory looking for the new state-of-the-art 100,000-square-foot science lab might be excused for asking, “Where is it?”

An architectural sleight of hand has disguised the new lab as a miniature Bavarian hilltop village. Six multicolored buildings — in hues including sky blue and forest green — are clustered around a brick plaza near the highest point of this 120-acre research campus. Beneath the courtyard, though, a warren of underground passageways connects the labs and offices so that the scientists will feel as if they are working in one building.

“This is by far the largest building in the research laboratory, so we wanted to make it look like a number of smaller buildings,” said Bill Grover, a founding partner of Centerbrook Architects and Planners, who has designed dozens of projects at the laboratory since 1973. “We didn’t want to build something that would make it no longer look like a small whaling village.”

Compared with the big, glassy boxes that many science labs resemble, the new facility is almost as improbable as Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory itself — a private research institution that has evolved over the last century on the site of a former whaling village on the north shore of Long Island, an hour away from New York City.

Serious biological research is done here into the genetic origins of cancer and neurological diseases.

The hillside complex, as the architects are calling the new six-in-one building, increases the research space at Cold Spring Harbor by 40 percent. This will allow the lab to focus more on genomics.

“We started plannin

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architecture

Libeskind Designs a Prefab Home
Courtesy of Daniel Libeskind

The villa designed by architect Daniel Libeskind can be shipped and assembled anywhere.

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By KEVIN BRASS
Published: June 15, 2009

Daniel Libeskind, an architect who rarely shies away from the opportunity to make a bold statement, describes his latest project as “unprecedented around the world.”
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Courtesy of Daniel Libeskind

The villa includes a solar thermal system and a sauna in the basement.

It is Libeskind’s way of saying that as the designer of such headline projects as the Jewish Museum Berlin and the master plan for the reconstruction of the World Trade Center site in New York, he is the highest-profile architect to venture into the market for prefabricated homes.

He has created a 515-square-meter, or 5,500-square-foot, two-story villa that resembles a crystal with sharp angles and towering windows bursting from the ground. The villa, which can be shipped and assembled anywhere, includes a solar thermal system and a sauna in the basement.

“This is really the first time I’ve taken on the issue of doing something which is a limited artistic edition of a new space, of a new way of living,” said Mr. Libeskind, 63.

While many architects have dabbled in prefab concepts, most focused on mass production techniques and inexpensive designs. Mr. Libeskind’s villa will carry a price tag of €2 million to €3 million, or $2.8 million to $4.2 million, depending on the destination. (The price includes shipping within Europe and construction.)

“Maybe one of the things he will do is change the idea of prefab, or enhance the idea of what prefab is,” said Jill Herbers, author of the 2004 book “Prefab Modern.”

Mr. Libeskind specializes in large-scale projects

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architecture

Rethinking the Mall

One doesn’t pop in to make a quick purchase at the Forum Shops at Caesar’s. Once inside this pseudo-palatial labyrinth, your path is blocked, er, directed by faux-marble benches, enormous planters and ill-placed concierge desks. You may see the store you need to get to in your line of sight, but access to it is, fittingly for Las Vegas, a mirage. There are no short cuts allowed, no direct paths. Your leisurely stroll is in fact carefully choreographed, and ensures that you will come into contact, however briefly, with every single store in the mall.
Photo by Peter Leonard. The Forum Shops at Caesars thegogglesdonothing.com).

Ah, if only the designers and developers of shopping malls paid as much attention to the foot traffic outside the mall as they do to the orchestrated promenade within it.
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At the 2009 International Council on Shopping Centers convention held in Las Vegas last month, pedestrian-oriented development was not top of mind (though in a 3.2 million-square-foot convention center, walking was a defining part of the experience). Despite a nearly 50 percent drop in attendance from prior years, most talk at ICSC was of how business as usual could resume once “things came back.”

Las Vegas was, of course, the perfect setting for this sort of optimism. Bad economy? What bad economy? When I stuck my card into an ATM, the screen instantly invited me to withdraw $1,000 from my account. (And when I opted instead for $100, I didn’t get five $20s but one single, crisp bill.)

I was brought to ICSC as a juror for the organization’s inaugural Future Image Architecture Competition, which asked entrants to imagine the shopping mall of the future. My expectations for
INSERT DESCRIPTIONAllison Arieff The new farmer’s market at the Metreon, San Francisco.

the entries were high — and probably too preconceived. This seems like a watershed moment for malls, much as it does for housing. Surely, I thought, the entries will reflect the extent

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The only example of anything like that in the show is a wonderful Wright-designed theater curtain, which was included at the special insistence of Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, the Wright archivist who also supplied all the drawings. The curtain has nothing to do with the rest of the show, but it's the one item that works with the Guggenheim's space. Everything about this exhibit feels thrown together. Nothing about it suggests the presence of a critical intelligence. The in-house principal curator, David van der Leer, joined the project midway in its development, and admits he had little previous background on Wright. The cosponsoring group, the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, certainly knows its man but it tends to ignore his numerous faults. You'd never guess from the show, or the catalogue that accompanies it, that Wright's buildings, however wonderful, were usually over budget and often plagued by construction flaws.
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FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT: From Within Outward At the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Av., New York, through Aug. 23. 212-423-3500, www.guggenheim.org/new-york

All that said, there's still a lot to like. No show about a figure as fascinating as Wright can fail to be interesting. Those 200 drawings, for example. Most are in Wright's own hand. Some are formal presentation drawings, some are quick and even sloppy sketches. You can follow some of the designs - that of the Guggenheim itself, for instance - as they developed over time. (In several early renderings, the entire Guggenheim exterior is bright red.) Fans will want to pore over these drawings, many rarely seen. There's a welcome emphasis, too, on Wright's larger, lesser-known works, most of which never got built, such as his amazing sci-fi-like proposals for Baghdad in the 1950s. Among his many other sources, Wright was an admirer of Islamic art and architecture.

Besides the main show I'd recommend a trip to the Sackler Center in the Guggenheim basement. Wright started a school for young architects, the Taliesin Fellowshi

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Arthur Erickson, Canadian Architect Who Mirrored Landscapes, Dies at 84
By IAN AUSTEN

OTTAWA — Arthur Erickson, who was widely viewed as Canada’s pre-eminent Modernist architect, died in Vancouver, British Columbia, on Wednesday. He was 84.

Phyllis Lambert, the chairwoman of the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal, said Mr. Erickson, a friend, had been suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.

Mr. Erickson established an international reputation for designing innovative complexes and buildings, often to critical acclaim. Among them are the San Diego Convention Center; Napp Laboratories in Cambridge, England; the Kuwait Oil Sector Complex in Kuwait City; and Kunlun Apartment Hotel Development in Beijing.

He designed the Canadian pavilion, an inverted pyramid, at Expo 67, the world’s fair in Montreal; Canada’s embassy in Washington; and, with the firm of Mathers and Haldenby, the Roy Thomson Hall, Toronto’s main concert hall, a circular, futuristic building that tapers to a flat top.

But Mr. Erickson is perhaps best known for providing Vancouver, his hometown, with many of its architectural signatures, the most successful of which he integrated with their surrounding landscapes, avoiding ornamentation and favoring concrete (which he called “the marble of our time”). Among his notable buildings there is the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia.

“His work always came out of the earth,” Ms. Lambert said. “He didn’t start the way most architects started. He actually started off with the earth, the landscape, and made something that inhabited the land.”

Mr. Erickson also campaigned for buildings that strove to maintain a human scale. In 1972 he persuaded the province of British Columbia to abandon plans for a 55-story office and court complex in downtown Vancouver.

Mr. Erickson’s replacement design effectively turned the tower on its side. He created a relatively low, three-block-long complex with a steel and glass truss roof and a complex concrete structure softened with trees, garden

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architecture

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In the Future, the City’s Streets Are to Behave

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By DAVID W. CHEN
Published: May 19, 2009

Imagine narrow European-style roadways shared by pedestrians, cyclists and cars, all traveling at low speeds. Sidewalks made of recycled rubber in different colors under sleek energy-efficient lamps. Mini-islands jutting into the street, topped by trees and landscaping, designed to further slow traffic and add a dash of green.
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WALKING Fordham Plaza in the Bronx, once home to unlicensed vendors and metered parking, is considered a prototypical “pedestrian-priority zone.” In such an area, the emphasis is on accommodating people, while allowing buses and cars access.
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Parts of Broadway to Close to Traffic (May 20, 2009)

This is what New York City streets could look like, according to the Bloomberg administration, which has issued the city’s first street design manual in an effort to make over the utilitarian 1970s-style streetscape that dominates the city.

The Department of Transportation will begin reviewing development plans to see whether they align with the 232-page manual’s guidelines, and promises that projects with these features will win approval quickly.

“Lots of things have changed in 40 years, but this part of our infrastructure hasn’t,” said Janette Sadik-Khan, the city’s transportation commissioner. “If we’re going to be a world-class city, we need guidelines that lay out the operating instructions of how we get there.”

The manual, to be released on Wednesday, culminates nearly two years of work involving more than a dozen agencies led by the Department of Transportation. By offering “a single framework and playbook,” as Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg says in the

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urban architecture

At BRA, pair got extra $52,300 to do odd jobs
Officials are vague on staffers' duties

By Donovan Slack, Globe Staff | May 20, 2009

It had been an irritant for far too long at Boston City Hall: when employees at the Boston Redevelopment Authority used a microwave in a ninth-floor hallway to heat their lunches, the smell of warming food wafted into nearby offices, creating a distraction for city planning officials.

So last fall, the agency decided to pay two of its staffers - both architectural model builders, who have few regular responsibilities - to construct a lunchroom where employees can heat and eat their food without disturbing others. The model builders, whose combined annual salary is $133,000, performed the work during off hours to avoid disruptions, collecting $4,400.

It was only one of several odd jobs they performed last year while collecting overtime, according to a Globe review of payroll records.

The records show the BRA paid them a total of $52,300 for after-hours work, including completing the lunchroom project, installing office shelving, creating displays for conventions, and even putting up a city-sponsored Christmas display at Downtown Crossing.

Now, as the agency is contemplating layoffs to help shrink a $300,000 budget deficit in the current fiscal year and another $3 million shortfall predicted next year, a top BRA official conceded he wished he had been more thrifty with the overtime.

"In hindsight, it is a larger number than we would prefer," said Kairos Shen, the city's chief planner, who tapped the builders last year to work evenings installing a door on his office.

One city watchdog, Jeffrey W. Conley, executive director of the Boston Finance Commission, said the large amount of overtime, nearly 40 percent more than the model makers' regular pay, is a questionable expense. He also questioned why the BRA needs two full-time model builders - particularly since developers typically produce their own mockups of proposed projects for planning officials.

Conley said the overtime

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architecture

Residential units, medical center envisioned for Mission Hill area
Hospital plan seeks to demolish buildings at Mass. Mental site

By Casey Ross, Globe Staff | May 20, 2009

The Massachusetts Mental Health Center in Mission Hill would be demolished and in its place Brigham and Women's Hospital would build a residential and medical complex on some of the last underdeveloped land in the Longwood Medical Area.

The hospital submitted to the city a proposal for a multibuilding development of more than 600,000 square feet that would also include an adjacent parcel on Binney Street. That latter location would be the first built under Brigham and Women's plans -a 57,000-square-foot laboratory and office building that would also include outpatient services, according to documents filed with the Boston Redevelopment Authority.

Depending on its ability to raise funds, the hospital would next demolish the five buildings formerly occupied by the state-owned Mass. Mental health center. The clinic had relocated to the Lemuel Shattuck Hospital in Jamaica Plain in 2003.

Brigham and Women's would build a 180,000-square-foot residential building with 136 apartments and condominiums, a 359,000-square-foot medical center, and a 21,000-square-foot clinic for state mental health programs, with inpatient and outpatient services.

Mass. Mental, a pioneering center for psychiatric teaching founded in 1912, would move back to Longwood when construction is complete.

An official with the BRA, which released the plans last night, said continued development in the Longwood Medical Area would help revive the neighborhood and realize Mayor Thomas M. Menino's vision for the area and surrounding Mission Hill neighborhood.

"The mayor supports institutional development and smart growth, and this development is consistent with the growth of an important sector," BRA director John Palmieri said.

Officials with Brigham and Women's Hospital could not be reached for comment last night. The hospital is in partnership with the nonprofit Roxbury Ten

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health architecture brookline

Architect Without Limits
By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF

Frank Lloyd Wright died half a century ago, but people are still fighting over him.

The extraordinary scope of his genius, which touched on every aspect of American life, makes him one of the most daunting figures of the 20th century. But to many he is still the vain, megalomaniacal architect, someone who trampled over his clients’ wishes, drained their bank accounts and left them with leaky roofs.

So “Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward,” which opens on Friday at the Guggenheim Museum, will be a disappointment to some. The show offers no new insight into his life’s work. Nor is there any real sense of what makes him so controversial. It’s a chaste show, as if the Guggenheim, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary, was determined to make Wright fit for civilized company.

The advantage of this low-key approach is that it puts the emphasis back where it belongs: on the work. There are more than 200 drawings, many never exhibited publicly before. More than a dozen scale models, some commissioned for the show, give a strong sense of the lucidity of his designs and the intimate relationship between building and landscape that was such a central theme of his art.

Taken as a whole, the exhibition conveys not only the remarkable scope of his interests, which ranged from affordable housing to reimagining the American city, but also the astonishing cohesiveness of that vision

— an achievement that has been matched by only one or two other architects in the 20th century.

One way to experience the show is as a straightforward tour of Wright’s masterpieces. Organized by Thomas Krens and David van der Leer, it is arranged in roughly chronological order, so that you can spiral up through the highlights of his career: the reinvention of the suburban home and the office block, the obsession with car culture, the increasingly outlandish urban projects.

There is a stunning plaster model of the vaultlike interior of Unity Temple, built in Oak Park between 1905 and 1908. J

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architecture

ndustry Looks to LED Bulbs for the Home
By ERIC A. TAUB

Walk around the floor of Lightfair International, the lighting industry’s annual trade show at the Javits Center in New York last week, and you would be forgiven for thinking that lamps based on light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, had already filled our homes and workplaces.

LED bulbs and fixtures dominated nearly every booth on the show floor.

Now all the world has to do is catch up. Most people think of LEDs as the lights blinking from inside electronic devices. They are being used increasingly to light rooms, though few people have ever bought them.

“In the U.S., 78 percent of the public is completely unaware that traditional light bulbs will be phased out in 2012,” said Charles F. Jerabek, president and chief executive of Osram Sylvania, a unit of Siemens. By law, bulbs must be 30 percent more efficient than current incandescent versions beginning that year.

While the current crop of compact fluorescents could do the job, the industry is rallying around LED lamps for many applications. They say LEDs last longer than current bulbs and compact fluorescent ones and their energy consumption could eventually be less than fluorescent lights’. They can also be made in many shapes and sizes, which was evident at the trade show. Unlike compact fluorescents bulbs, they contain no mercury and they work well in cold weather. They provide a more pleasing light than fluorescents.

Manufacturers displayed LEDs incorporated into large warehouse, garage and street-lighting fixtures, flexible light ribbons, and replacements for the halogen reflector lamps used in kitchens and offices. Strips of flexible LEDs from Osram Sylvania put light in places where it could not otherwise fit. Later this year, the company will market tiny LED chandelier lights that use 6 watts instead of the 15 watts typical of an incandescent version. It says they will last 25,000 hours instead of 1,500 for an incandescent bulb. Also this fall, Osram, Lighting Science and Philips will introduce 25,0

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energy architecture

what is property address next door?

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library architecture

Offices That Match the Product Lines
By CLAIRE WILSON

THE medium is often the message in interior design, a notion that Procter & Gamble had in mind when it commissioned the design for the New York headquarters of the P.& G. Global Prestige Products group, part of its beauty and grooming division. The new space had to communicate the luxury that the company sells in high-end fashion fragrances like Lanvin, Gucci and Jean Patou, and reflect the radiance promised by hair and skin care products like Frédéric Fekkai and SK-II.

“It needed to delight all the senses,” said Carol Denison, creative director of beauty environments and culture at P.& G., which is based in Cincinnati.

The finished space delivers with an airy, sunlit labyrinth of glass partitions, mother-of-pearl finishes and romantic air-brushed photographs juxtaposed with views of the city skyline from its perch on the 20th and 21st floors at 909 Third Avenue, at East 54th Street.

Designed by Christopher Blackadder, principal with the New York office of IA Interior Architects, in conjunction with Landor Associates, a marketing and branding company based in New York, the offices occupy 30,000 square feet spread over the two floors — the entire 21st and half of the 20th. The division was concentrated on the 20th floor before the renovation; it took additional space on the 21st that was formerly occupied by offices of Citibank.

P.& G. employees began moving into the renovated space in stages a year ago. Work was completed in January.

A departure from P.& G.’s corporate style of design, the new approach starts with the elevator lobby. Sustainable oak lines the walls, and the elevator doors are painted a shimmering abalone gray, framed in cream-colored lacquer. The white terrazzo floor is inset with a darker rectangle, distinguishing it from the main reception area visible through glass doors, where the terrazzo floor is all white.

The doors open onto a long, wide corridor created by the glass walls of four large conference rooms. The architects placed th

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architecture

As Rain Falls at New Parks, No Second Thoughts About Roofs
By JOE LAPOINTE

The Yankees paid $1.5 billion to build their new stadium, and the Mets paid $800 million to build theirs. Although both places have opulent touches, neither team chose to spend extra money for a retractable roof.

That puts the Yankees and the Mets behind franchises like Seattle, Milwaukee, Houston and Toronto. And the absence of a roof was relevant Monday as rain fell at Yankee Stadium and delayed the start of a game against the Boston Red Sox.

With Sunday’s game against the Los Angeles Angels also having been postponed because of rain, Joe Girardi, the Yankees’ manager, was asked Monday if he would have liked to have seen a retractable roof on the team’s new home.

“Tonight I do,” Girardi said. “But I do like open-air stadiums. Now, the retractable-roof stadiums we play at are all really nice.”

The Yankees and the Mets considered installing such technology, which can eliminate postponements and control temperatures on hot or cold days while allowing grass to grow.

Randy Levine, the Yankees’ president, said a retractable roof could have added as much as $250 million to the new stadium’s cost. More important, Levine said, was the owner George Steinbrenner’s desire to build a stadium reminiscent of the original, which opened in 1923.

With a roof, Levine said: “No way you could ever make it appear like Yankee Stadium. It would look like an airplane hanger.” Levine said rainouts were not much of a problem for the Yankees in most seasons.

Jeff Wilpon, the Mets’ chief operating officer, said his team studied retractable roof ideas for Citi Field that might have cost $150 million. Moreover, he said, “the look and feel of the place would have changed dramatically.”

Wilpon also said that the support system for a retractable roof would have eliminated too many parking spaces and that the high-water table in Flushing would have been a complicating factor.

But what if the Yankees and the Mets had shared a new stadium at a location between the

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sports architecture

Plan for Easton complex is opposed
Site listed as endangered

By Stewart Bishop, Globe Correspondent | April 29, 2009

It's enough to make Oliver Ames dig out from down under.

Developers are trying to make over Easton complex, which the late manufacturer built into the world's premier provider of shovels.

Developers' plans to turn the 8-acre site into housing have drawn stiff opposition. And now the campaign to save the structure, which produced tools used during the California Gold Rush, the Civil War, and the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad, has the weight of a national preservation machine behind it.

The Ames Shovel Shops complex has been named one of the 11 most endangered historic sites in the country for 2009, by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The designation, which is nonbinding, is made annually for historic places the trust believes are about to be compromised by development.

The Easton complex, comprising several granite and wood buildings dating from 1852 through 1928, was originally the home of the Ames Shovel Works, which Oliver Ames established in 1803.

It became one of the world's largest manufacturers of iron-bladed shovels, at one point contributing about 60 percent of the world's supply, trust officials say.

The buildings are situated in North Easton's Historic District, which is surrounded by the North Easton Landmark District.

The complex owners, George and Robert Turner, both of Easton, plan to convert the site into a 182-unit apartment complex and about 30,000 feet of office space. They filed the plan under Chapter 40B, a state law that offers financial incentives for the construction of affordable housing.

David Ames, president of the Friends of Historic Ames Shovel Works at North Easton and a descendant of Oliver Ames, said his group had completed an analysis of the site and had put together a design alternative for the Turners.

"We're committed to preserving the buildings, because of all they mean to the town," Ames said. "We put together an analysi

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architecture history

Preservation Group Lists Most Endangered Places
By ROBIN POGREBIN

When composing a list of the country’s buildings that are most worth saving, the hangar for the Enola Gay at Wendover Airfield in Utah might not come immediately to mind.

But when the National Trust for Historic Preservation assembles its annual roster of America’s most endangered historic places, it looks for more than aesthetic distinction. Each year the trust selects what it considers important examples of the nation’s architectural, cultural and natural heritage that are at risk of being destroyed or irreparably damaged.

So when the trust unveils its 2009 sites on Tuesday, the hangar will be among them. It housed the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the world’s first atomic bomb used in war, on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945, and is in critical disrepair. Other similarly less-than-glamorous locations on the list are Memorial Bridge, which for more than 85 years has connected the coastal towns of Portsmouth, N.H., and Kittery, Maine, and is now in danger of removal, and the Human Services Center in Yankton, S.D. Founded in 1879 as the South Dakota Hospital for the Insane, the institution’s collection of neo-Classical, Art Deco and Italianate buildings have long stood vacant, and the state plans to tear down 11 of them.

“Buildings like that can be adaptively reused for new community purposes,” said Richard Moe, president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. “It’s a mistake to allow structures to fall into disrepair or to be demolished.”

The current economic downturn is a mixed blessing for endangered buildings, Mr. Moe said. Although more buildings are being neglected, fewer are threatened with demolition because development has slowed. In 22 years the trust has selected 211 sites worth saving and lost just 6 of them.

“It focuses not only local attention but national,” Mr. Moe said of the list, “and helps to mobilize both human and financial resources.”

The 2009 roster of buildings, 11 in all, includes Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unity Te

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architecture

NORTH EASTON - Raccoons have eaten holes into the plaster ceiling and bats have taken to nesting in the walls of the Borderland State Park's Smith Farmhouse, a historic two-story Cape Cod-style home built around 1880.
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But beyond the ripped ceilings, peeling white paint, and cracking linoleum floors, Paul Folkman and Carrie Crisman see a holistic learning center and retreat where visitors can do yoga, stargaze, or even hold weddings.

"This is where my hammock's going," Folkman said with a laugh, pointing to a porch that is currently missing its screen.

The state has handed over the property to Folkman and Crisman - for free - with one big catch. They must renovate the home and open it to the public.

The "historic curatorship" program of the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation aims to help the state preserve historic homes, without spending money. Similar programs operate in Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Delaware.

In Massachusetts, those who have committed to renovating the homes have construction or historic restoration experience. They say the economic downturn provides good timing to use their skills as work diminishes in the hard-hit construction industry and gives them a chance to explore other interests. The state allows them to open businesses within the buildings, so long as the business is compatible with the park and the property.

"One of the pluses of a down economy is I have more time to think and be creative," said Folkman, a real estate developer and home builder who plans to put $200,000 to $300,000 into renovating the farmhouse with Crisman. The program has been welcomed by officials who would otherwise have trouble finding money for such projects.

"Especially in these tough times, when you have competing interests, this is an issue and historic renovation would be in jeopardy of not being funded," said Massachusetts Commissioner Rick Sullivan.

Applications to the Massachusetts program have remained flat with the downturn, Sullivan said, because those

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