Design 2147 CEO Sisto Martello recently spoke with Angel Ayón, AIA, Founder of AYON Studio, about his book Reglazing Modernism and his career in historic preservation.
Q: Tell us about how your career in historic preservation started.
A: My dad was a contractor and I tell people I’ve been in the job site since I was six years old. I always hated it. Hated the smell of cement on my hands, getting up so early… but I had all that background in me and I went on to become an architect. When I graduated, the options over there [in Cuba, where Angel is originally from] were either you go to work for tourism or you go to work for preservation endeavors. I chose to go with preservation. As you know, old Havana is an amazing place. There’s so much going on there. At that time, Plaza Vieja was being demolished, there was construction happening everywhere. And I was just right there at the place where they were doing all that. And then they were teaching a master’s in historic preservation there. I was like, “I’ll take the master’s in preservation.” And I fell in love with the stuff, man. I fell in love with the notion that you have this dilapidated place that had value, it had meaning. It doesn’t look that good right now, but you can learn how to read it, how to bring it back and how to change it and make it work, make it functional, make it livable. And then just bring back to life something that has character, you know?
Q: Often in historic projects, you have a specific function and program that the client has to achieve, but you also have a budget. What is your approach to that?
A: Yes, and usually then they want it to be LEED, and then we’re like, “Okay, what do we do here?” And there’s a lot of design ideas. I actually was on a site this morning checking out the progress. We’ve made a whole bunch of probes, and I wanted to see the probes. I told my staff, “I want to go there.” One of the things about this project, which is a library, is that it had to be designed to LEED standards. So the big question there is, how much insulation should we include on those walls, and do we have any room for insulation? And I wanted to know, because I’ve seen all the renovation and some of the plans, and I had the question as to what’s behind the walls? What’s behind the plaster finish? What is really cool is that I’m there and I’m explaining to the staff, “Okay, well, on the lower levels, most of those walls, they have 3-coat plaster on wood lathe. That’s probably the original 1928 interior wall finish. But what I’m seeing on the upper levels on the second floor, that is a 3-coat plaster and metal lathe. That’s going to be a little bit later and that’s going to become…”
Q: It’s starting to tell the story.
A: Right! And then, and then now I’m looking at a ceiling probe and I was like, “Well, if you look closely, you’ll see the wood joists. You’ll see the primary framing and you see the ghost of the old wood lathe that was removed.” Because, remember, we saw the drawings from 1968 when they put HVAC in this building. This building originally didn’t have air conditioning, right? So now we see the duct work and all that. So they demoed all the ceiling, removed all that fabric, and then you can see the joists are still there. They put it all back together using plaster on a galvanized steel mesh and so on. The more you dig into the building, the more you see… you understand what you are looking at, what’s going on here, what happened. You confirm what happened on all these drawings that we spent time looking at it. And I just find that part fascinating. Just to be able to read through the history and then learn from the building and figure out how to bring it back. We were talking this morning. I said, “Oh my goodness, we only have like two and a half inches from the outboard side of the wall to the plaster finish. We have no room for insulation.” So that means that we have to remove all those plaster finishes probably, and then there’s all this millwork. We can remove it and salvage it, but the back of the library is round.. If you remove it when you build up the wall and you try to put it back, it’s a different radii, so it’s not going to fit in. So how do we deal with that? That is actually when the preservation specialization or the preservation background really comes handy. You try to understand what has value, what can and cannot be done, what should or should not be done, and then try to strike the right balance between all these conflicting interests.
Q: When working with historic properties, there is usually pushback about certain elements. It’s not that you can’t have the element, it’s that you have to an element that adheres to the time and what the architecture meant at that moment.
A: Yeah, and I think that actually makes it harder. Because sometimes you just can’t do the obvious. You can’t just do the easy thing. You have to think it through to figure it out. Because it’s not just that room, it’s all that comes with it, and how do I fit it in? You have to be methodical because you have to consider all that is being proposed and think it through. How could it be done?… How can we make this better? What is the right spot for the new building systems? Is that the right material, the right finish? How can I change this?
Q: How do you pass that approach on to the next generation?
A: For me, first and foremost, it’s pay it forward, you know? I’m not here because I’m great and because I’m super intelligent or because I’m super capable. I’m here because I put all my time and I made an effort and I paid attention. And I’ve been super lucky to have the mentorship of so many people: Lenny Franco, Pamela Jerome, and many others back to my start in Cuba who really spent the time and care in training me, in teaching me and making me a better professional. And I try to do that with the staff. I also do it because I know that we have a responsibility to our Clients and to myself, and to the business, to get it right. For me, there’s nothing like going there this morning to understand the probes so we’re all on the same page. It’s just to really inform the conversation about what comes next. Do we need to insulate those walls? Do we really have to remove all this 1920s plastic finish? Can we turn a 1928 building into a LEED-rated facility without insulating those walls? Probably not…
Q: So many times the things that require the most thought and planning are the things that no one notices when they walk past the building.
A: Yes. And the job is not about, at least from a preservation perspective, the job is not about making a grand statement. It’s about getting it right, doing the right thing, and being meticulous about it, then leaving behind something that when people come back to the building they feel like, “Oh, actually, this looks really nice. I don’t know what’s going on. Maybe it’s a little bit warmer. [laughs] Maybe the windows are better. This acoustically sounds better, the lighting’s better and all these things.” And that’s the job, you know? That’s the job. We take all these assets that have been granted to us and we have that responsibility to bring them forward. We’re lucky to be able to do that.
Q: You have written a book, Reglazing Modernism. What inspired you to do that?
A: This book is a labor of love. It all came out of a job. When I was working with Len and Pamela, we were the architects for the restoration of the Guggenheim Museum and I was the project architect. I had the privilege of documenting that building, doing the documentation, determining how it was all put together, really understanding what the materials were. You may recall all those drawings that we prepared with the cracks in the façade, working with Silman and ICR and all the assessment and understanding of, how to deal with the concrete and so on. But there was one scope that we were able to develop by ourselves, and I worked with Lenny very closely on this, and that had to do with the windows and the skylights. The museum has the big rotunda space, and then you have the little three-story wing called The Monitor. That’s how Frank Lloyd Wright called it originally, and it is known today as the Thannhauser Galleries. There were all original steel-frame windows, not thermally broken. As you can imagine, as the building went from the original construction to meet international museum standards, now you’re pumping in highly humidified air to try to maintain the correct temperatures and humidity. In the winter, there were a lot of issues about the performance of the windows. So we had this amazing situation of having original steel-frame windows designed by a prominent architect and a very distinguished, prominent building that were in really good physical condition but performed very poorly.
We went through the analysis in trying to figure out what to do. I remember that we presented 18 options to the Landmarks Preservation Commission. We concluded at that time that in order for us to be able to represent to the museum that the dollars that they would spend would be spent wisely and would prevent any kind of issue, not just in terms of condensation, but also the relationship between the interior and exterior, the views of Central Park and so on, replacement with a thermally-broken steel frame system was the option that would be suitable. We went out to ask people, “Hey, do you have a thermally broken steel frame system?” And they said, “No.” And we said, “How come?” And they said, “Nobody’s asking for that.” This is between 2004 and 2008. So we went ahead and designed a custom steel-frame system that, to my knowledge, was the first thermally broken steel frame system installed in America. It’s still there and it’s still performing very well. But that really made an impact on me because it was the opposite of everything I knew about preservation, where you treasure original historic fabric, especially if it shows exceptional design, all the things that went into it. And then it made me really think about, “Well, is this what happens with Modern buildings? Do you just remove it all? Does it have to be replacement only? Are there any other ways to do it?” We did that work, and I’m proud of it. I think it’s still performing, and it was the right thing to do.
The more I looked around, the more it became very clear to me that this was a larger issue that needed to be addressed: what were the appropriate intervention approaches for exterior glazed closure that are so relevant to defining the character of Modern architecture.
In 2014, when I went on my own and I started AYON Studio, I thought that I would have all the time in the world and said, “Oh, I’m going to apply to this Mid-Career Fellowship, and I’m going to get some funding to see if I can do the research on Reglazing Modernism.” It had a good name on it. I got the fellowship, and I did the research, and I put together a number of case studies. And man, when that was over, it was very clear to me that it could not be a PDF in some non-profit’s organization’s shelf. It really needed to be put out there.
The book has 20 case studies in the US and Europe of significant modern buildings with some type of intervention on their steel frame assemblies. We are presenting those case studies through the three main intervention categories of repair or restoration, rehabilitation and replacement. Replacement can also be appropriate, but not always.
The book really asks, what are the appropriate and different intervention approaches? It’s about learning from other case studies and disseminating information, creating best practices, and creating a conversation about what do you do with these kinds of buildings and who did what, but also why and, and what exactly was done.
Reglazing Modernism: Intervention Strategies for 20th-Century Icons (Birkhäuser, 2019) won the 2021 Lee Nelson Book Award from the Association for Preservation Technology International for the most outstanding and influential book-length work on preservation technology.
It is available from the publisher, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon.
