The Archi - November 2011 - Alpha Rho Chi

12
Preserving
America’s Best Idea
Metagenes alumnus Tom Vitanza instructing NPS maintenance
employees at one of HPTC’s in-house training courses.
to maintain the structures. “Basically HPTC is a training organization,”
Vitanza explains, “but we do most of our training hands-on,
in the field, working on projects for the parks, or for other agencies
that ask us to do work for them.”
HPTC’s mission is to safely preserve and maintain the national
parks historic facilities by demonstrating outstanding leadership,
delivering quality preservation services, and developing educational
courses and experiential learning opportunities that fulfill the
competency requirements of service employees in the career fields
of historic preservation skills; risk management; maintenance; and
planning, design, and construction.
The center is made up of five teams, defined by expertise: a
woodcrafting team; a carpentry team, which does heavy-timber
repair; a masonry team; an architecture team; and a project
management team. As a training facility, the center offers an
intensive, three-year program that brings employees of the
National Park Service to HPTC’s home office; a two-year series
of seminars and in-field training, again designed primarily for
Park Service employees, and an outreach program with partner
organizations.
Vitanza compares his office to an in-house design-build organization
within the National Park Service that provides training.
Although the bulk of their work is for the National Park Service,
individual parks are not required to use HTPC to complete their
projects, and the center must prepare proposals for each project
just as any private firm would. “We get some money from Washington
to pay our top three staff,” he says, “and all the rest of us—
the architects and the masons and the carpenters and the plasterers,
everyone else—we basically earn our keep by doing projects
for the parks.”
So why would a park hire HPTC as
opposed to a local firm? “We’re talking
about sensitive preservation work, like
conserving historic lath and plaster or
repairing historic windows or doors,” notes
Vitanza, “so for the parks, there’s a benefit
in dealing with us, in that… we’re very
flexible. For example, if unknown historic
graffiti is uncovered beneath wallpaper or
paint, instead of ripping out the plaster and
replacing it with gyp board, if that was the
original intent, HPTC would stabilize the
plaster and conserve the graffiti. For us it’s
a training opportunity, for a contractor it’s
probably a change order.
“Plus, clients also know that they’re getting
skilled artisans, experienced people
who specialize in historic preservation crafts
and trade work” he adds, “and there’s
always the training aspect too.” Even after
conducting technical review panels and
reviewing previous projects, with outside
contractors “there’s always the issue of ‘do
these people bidding on these jobs really
have the highest level of expertise to do
it?’”
Assessing
Historic Structures
The National Park Service maintains
nearly 400 parks across the country and in
US territories and possessions, so HPTC’s
artisans are often on the road. It’s not
unusual for some of HPTC’s folks to be in
the field 48 weeks any given year. “There
are historic structures in almost every park,”
Vitanza says, “Even parks that are mainly
natural areas will have buildings that were
constructed in the early 20th century or
maybe late 19th century that are part of the
infrastructure.”
Responsibility for maintaining these
structures falls to the superintendents of
the individual parks. “Many parks used to
have a small preservation crew in-house,”
says Vitanza. “Certainly a lot of the bigger
parks, especially out west, and the more
remote areas, have in-house expertise to
The Archi
November 2011