Looking at the Past, Present, and Future of Historic Preservation at Cushing Terrell

One of our many capabilities at Cushing Terrell is historic preservation. Our design experts who specialize in this area believe in the great potential of buildings that already exist. Their long-storied pasts, their potential for re-use and re-invention, and their ability to support sustainable development are aspects that get our team excited and drive our work.

“The greenest building is the one that is already built.” – Carl Elefante, FAIA, FAPT

Last month, our Historic Preservation team met to establish the mission, vision, and strategy for further developing Cushing Terrell's Historic Preservation program with the goal of thoughtful growth. Our team is comprised of six individuals from a variety of locations who have specialized knowledge and a passion for preservation planning and working with historic structures.

Ava Alltmont (New Orleans, LA), Bill Wood (Denver, CO), Sarah Berwald (Minneapolis, MN), Chelsea Holling (Bozeman, MT), Shawn Pelowitz (Minneapolis, MN), and me, Mia Kaplan (New Orleans, LA) met at our Billings office for a Historic Preservation Summit during which we reviewed the extent of projects Cushing Terrell has completed within the realm of preservation practice and discussed the personal meaning each of us find in this work to determine our path forward.

What we discovered as a group was that the idea of preservation is really a mindset that expands across all the markets we serve — commercial, education, government, healthcare, infrastructure, residential, and retail. Preservation addresses building science through an understanding of historic material compatibilities and informed approaches to the remediation of existing conditions. It addresses sustainability through a lens of reducing a project’s footprint through the reduction of embodied carbon, sending fewer materials to landfills, and making alterations that improve building performance while maintaining or highlighting the unique character of each building. Preservation planning is the acknowledgement that all places have layers of history and meaning, including both tangible and intangible forms of heritage, and a deep-seated place in our communities. As a team, we agreed that our favorite part of preservation is storytelling, using these layers of history and meaning to plan with a sensitivity to cultural heritage that sometimes can be missed without a preservationist's input.

The wealth of our combined knowledge, not just in making recommendations for preserving historic materials, but also from working thoughtfully within existing conditions, makes the Historic Preservation team a valuable resource to the greater Cushing Terrell family.

That being said, we’re here to help you with your projects! Learn more about our work and visit this space in the coming months as I post about our team members and some of their favorite historic preservation projects, including some of those we currently have in the works.

Pictured together at last: Cushing Terrell’s Historic Preservation core team met at our Billings office last month. Pictured from left to right are Ava Alltmont, Sarah Berwald, Chelsea Holling, Bill Wood, and Shawn Pelowitz. I am not pictured because I took the photo.

Featured Project: Canyon Lodge, Yellowstone National Park.