Harris Pargework Ceiling

Harris county Courthouse Pargework Ceiling

Old Historic ceiling

Last year I told you about this ceiling at the Harris County courthouse.

( See blog) Hard to believe it was over a year ago. We have now made molds of the elements, cast all the items needed to recreate the ceiling and installed the pieces. The ceiling was framed in and plastered, and finished in a slick white coat finish by Golden West Plastering of Houston Texas. They did an exceptional job. We typically like to control all the plastering as it is hard to find plasterers that understand how to plaster a ceiling that is flat and true to plane, any imperfections will make it tough to install the pieces but in this case the work was perfect.

In this photo we have laid out control lines to install all the pieces to. It is extremely important to flow the lines as any deviation will show up as you look down the ceiling.

After checking the layout and making sure all the electrical devices as well as the fire sprinklers will fit into the pattern correctly we start installing the pieces. After installing all the pieces we will “tool up” the joints and make the joint lines disappear. Tedious and slow work for sure. blue lines are the centers of the elements the red lines are the edges of the corners in the quadrennial. We then labeled the elements to insure we alternated the elements.

The crown mold and frieze that runs along the wall both have a pattern in them that requires us to start from one direction and make all the cuts correctly to keep the pattern flowing all around the ceiling. Tougher than it looks but it  makes a big difference. We started out from the only original piece left in the room and kept the pattern flowing. The trick is to find the most inconspicuous place to hide this. The old way was to find a door the opens against a corner of the room and hide the joint there. That way as you enter the room you would have to turn all the way around to see the miss pattered joint.  However we had to start from the historic piece and continue around the room and end up on the other side of the historic piece. I challenge you to find the bad joint. (I know where it is but as of yet no one else has been able to find it)

Our decorative painters have also started painting the ceiling. It also is a very labor intensive painting project. It has two colors on the ceiling a yellow ceiling paint and a glazed painted surface on the ornamentation. Glazes tend to show all the imperfections in the plaster but luckily none showed up.

So here is the completed mockup area . Now that we have complete acceptance of the paint procedure we can finish the paint. We will be doing so in the next two weeks.

Finished ceiling

Time out to Learn

Last week I attended the APTI conference in Los Angeles.  The Association of Preservation Technology International is a great organization of professionals involved in the restoration of our heritage in the built environment. Attendees were architects to trades men, from educators to art conservators from all over the United States Canada and South America, all there to learn from each other and share their findings. There were papers presented from Adobe restoration to saving public murals to drying wet buildings. Papers are presented on projects showing what the challenge was and the procedure followed to try and resolve the issue. Some have no easy solution and more study is needed but we all learn from both success and failures.

One of the best things in this institution is the evolvement of students. The organization has collage students who are studying preservation in collage present case studies that they are working on. It gives me much confidence in the talent that is coming out of the universities that have preservation studies.

I wish that all professionals involved in restoration would attend these conferences but sadly most do not. You have to ask though would you want a firm working on your historical building that is not keeping up with all the issues that affect the restoration of these buildings especially in the light of how some restoration efforts in past have resulted in increased damage to the buildings instead of preserving them.