Traditional Building Conference

Greetings from Chicago, Illinois! I guess I can say I am the Midwest correspondent for preserve and restore now. Today I have been working a booth for The Preservation Trades Network , at the annual Traditional Building Conference.

PTN is a non for profit membership organization founded to provide education, networking and outreach for the traditional building trades. PTN works with North American and international partners to provide educational resources, events and workshops that build opportunities for collaboration, and exchange of skills and knowledge. PTN is well known in the preservation field and I was fortunate to talk to a lot of interesting people at this conference. Besides working the exhibition hall, I also got to attend some lectures. One seminar I enjoyed in particular was transforming the past to save the future, presented by Tom Liebel, an architect from Baltimore. Liebel discussed an adaptive reuse of an old factory building. This project was a perfect mix of preservation, sustainability and establishing community. Check out Miller’s court, I was inspired, and they worked on a tight budget.

More to come soon, including day two of the conference and my recent trip to a historic Mies van der Rohe.