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Look backward, architect

Joseph Oppermann: A career in the past

In this story:

The dating game

The book on the Wolfe House

Pulpit puzzle

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By Larry Keller
CNN.com/career Senior Writer

(CNN) - "It's like above-ground archaeology," says Joseph K. Oppermann. "We go in and look at how things are put together."

Sure, his business card reads "architect." But Oppermann, 51, may have logged almost as many hours amid relics as did Louis and Mary Leakey.



Joseph K. Oppermann's restoration work on the Miles Brewton House in Charleston involved extensive interior and exterior detail work

Oppermann specializes in restoring and preserving some of the United States' greatest historic buildings and landmarks. And if they're really old, this architect based in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, performs the delicate task of protecting them and ensuring they will last for years to come.

"I want to avoid the dilemma of George Washington's hatchet on display in the museum," he says. "Unfortunately, since George owned it, it's had five new handles and six new heads. I don't want to be replacing things. I want to keep the originals."

Here are some projects on which Oppermann has worked.

• Montpelier. This Virginia home of James and Dolley Madison was built by Madison's father in 1755. It was enlarged later by the nation's fourth president with the help of a master builder on loan from Thomas Jefferson.

Little is known of the home's appearance at the time it was sold by Madison's widow in 1844. So the National Trust for Historic Preservation hired Oppermann's firm, in part to determine what remains from the time that Madison lived there.

• The Miles Brewton House. This Georgian townhouse at 27 King Street in Charleston, South Carolina, has been owned by relatives and descendents of the merchant and slave trader Brewton since it was built. Dates of its erection by London architect Ezra White vary, from 1765 to 1769. In 1775, Miles Brewton and his family were lost at sea.

Oppermann was hired to restore the house's interior and exterior, retrofitting it with modern conveniences for use as a primary residence. His firm's investigation turned up 18th-century papier-maché wallpapers gilded in some places. "That is extremely rare," Oppermann says.

LEADER OF THE BAND

The historic-restoration architect may serve sometimes as a Pied Piper -- coaxing citizens, committees and local officials to pull together to protect the past.

• Jekyll Island Historic District. Once the Georgia hunting retreat of American business titans J.P. Morgan, William Rockefeller, Joseph Pulitzer and others, the island has been a public park since 1947. Its 33 buildings on 240 acres are registered a National Historic Landmark. In its heyday, Jekyll was visited by Astors, Vanderbilts and McCormicks -- each family building huge "cottages" that could house clan and entourage on trips to the South for the post-Christmas-season "country life."

"Georgian" is a term that refers to the architectural style popular in England during the reigns of Anne and the four Georges. The style in the United States is usually assigned to the years 1700 to 1790. Common features of the style include triangular pediments, columns, raised basements and box chimneys.

Oppermann was hired to evaluate the physical condition of some structures and provide cost estimates to restore them. The Club House is now a fully restored hotel open to the public on the grounds, originally laid out by landscape architect H.W.S. Cleveland.

• The Thomas Wolfe House. The author of "Look Homeward, Angel" and "You Can't Go Home Again" grew up in this Victorian, two-story boarding house in Asheville, North Carolina. The structure suffered extensive smoke, heat and water damage in a fire set by an arsonist in July 1998.

Oppermann has been retained to do the restoration of the historic site.

Dating game

Sometimes Oppermann is hired simply to evaluate how much of a structure is original and its historical significance.

"People tell you, 'This has never changed from the time it was constructed,'" Oppermann says. "There have always been changes. There may have been a baseboard replaced in 1870, a wall that was damaged because of a leaky roof in 1875 that was replaced, but now they're all painted the same."

QUICK VOTE

How important do you consider historic-restoration architecture to be in the United States?
A top priority. We're so quick to rush to new technologies that we can lose our past.
Important but not critical. We're not an old culture, comparatively, and have many modern pressing issues.
Minor. I'd rather see us educate children about our history over preserving bits of it.
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Oppermann detects this anomalies by several means. Say, for instance, that the owner of a house built in 1790 thinks most of its construction is original. Oppermann may discover that cuts on some boards were made with a circular saw, which wasn't in use until the 1830s.

Or he may examine how the frame of the house is held together. If machine-constructed nails were used rather than handmade nails or spikes, that indicates more recent construction.

"Those periods can be very clearly dated," Oppermann says.

The book on the Wolfe House

When Oppermann does find a wall or a covering that's historically significant, the painstaking process of conserving it while perhaps making repairs or modifications begins.

"I think of the building like a fine piece of furniture. I want to try to protect the most significant portions of it," Oppermann says. So, for example, if he's modernizing a historic home by adding air conditioning, Oppermann will try to cut into a wall where relatively recent repairs have been made, rather than go through an older section.

Oppermann not only applies chemicals to make 200-year-old building materials endure, but he's also careful to make renovations that are consistent with construction materials and paint colors from the period.

The Thomas Wolfe House -- work has yet to begin -- is one such challenge. Wolfe's mother bought the rooming house and had little money. "It was close to being a flophouse," Oppermann says. "This was reflected in the material and in the -- I use the word loosely -- craftsmanship. It was really crummy work.


The Thomas Wolfe House in Asheville, North Carolina, was damaged by fire in 1998

"That will be the challenge, to bring that kind of a place back. That we go back with cheap, crude sort of finishes so that it breathes like the house Thomas Wolfe grew up in. Our job is to be very honest to that."

So Oppermann will consider the Wolfe House renovation a success if he can re-create its shoddy workmanship in way that looks like it was from early in the last century when Wolfe grew up there. Otherwise, the house will look like a new poorly built residence.

"As we start this process, we tell people our goal is not to have a building that looks new. It's to be an old building that looks like it's well-maintained with the sags, creases, crevices and wrinkles that all of us get over time."

Wolfe, who lived for only from 1900 to 1938, wrote about the rooming house in his 1929 coming-of-age novel "Look Homeward, Angel." Oppermann says he'll read Wolfe's book -- about Eugene Gant's journey from a small North Carolina town to Harvard -- for clues on how the place appeared. But he doesn't view the novel as gospel.

DEJA VU

In his career's specialization, Joseph K. Oppermann has worked on several of the most revered historical-restoration projects in the American Southeast. Here are images from three of them, one near Tarboro, North Carolina and two in Charleston, South Carolina.

"It's almost like a historic painting," he says. "This is an artist's interpretation - how much license did he take?"

In addition to aesthetics, there also are practical reasons to not use modern materials when restoring old structures. "If one did the sorts of things done in modern construction to an old building," he says, "often times it causes a great deal of damage."

Mortar was used for thousands of years in masonry construction, Oppermann says, by way of example. Placed between bricks or stones to separate them, the mortar - most often made of lime - allowed moisture in walls to escape and gave a building flex.



Edisto Island Presbyterian Church

But nowadays mortar is harder and is used as an adhesive in building materials, not a separator, Oppermann says. It doesn't allow walls to shed moisture. It doesn't give them flex. Use modern mortar on a structure built with old-fashioned mortar and the bricks or stones may crumble.

Pulpit puzzle

One of the projects Oppermann says has excited him the most is a modest, 1820s Presbyterian church on Edisto Island in South Carolina, about 40 miles south of Charleston. He has been sporadically examining the church for a few years, having been hired when it needed repairs.

Some of the church parishioners are descendants of the island plantation families that built it. At the height of its pre-Civil-War economy, the 94-square-mile island produced a highly lucrative long-staple fiber dubbed "Sea Island Cotton." The church balcony has pews that are said to have been made by and for slaves who worked in the cotton fields. Oppermann says he realized that the sight lines of that balcony only made sense if the church had a raised pulpit.

"Sure enough, there were a couple of plugs in the wall that had been painted over," Oppermann says. "If it were at the right height, you could see it from the balcony."

The architect-cum-historian noticed something else. One of the original six panels on a church door had been broken out. "All the other panels have an 1820s molding around them except this one panel, which has an 1860s or 1870s molding."

Congregation members then searched church records and learned that white residents fled the area as Union troops approached during the war but some blacks remained behind and entered the church. "I wonder if they didn't break out that panel to reach inside and unlock the door," Oppermann muses.

"What we now know is the name of the regiment from New York and the commanding officer. They came to the church and looted it. They took a very fine organ, and they probably took the pulpit too."

"We're all stewards of these important places."

— Joseph K. Oppermann

The soldiers placed the organ -- and maybe the pulpit -- on a barge, which then sank, Oppermann says.

He plans to continue investigating the construction of the church, and will look for holes in the floor that may have been used to anchor the pulpit.

"I think we're going to find that," he says. "I will then design a pulpit at the same height. I'll borrow from the details of the rest of the church as to what kind of moldings, what kind of scale. I'll design something that's in keeping with those characteristics."

PLAYING WITH HISTORY

Sometimes it can be a little spooky working so intimately with materials and in structures from the past. Joseph Oppermann talks about those moments.

The church epitomizes what Oppermann loves about his career. "It's the challenge of coming up with really good solutions," he says.

"And there's always this process of discovery. It's the sort of discovery you don't want to keep to yourself because it's to be shared with everybody because it's interesting and important. We're all stewards of these important places."