Adapting to Changing Times: The legacy of old dairy barns

by Catherine Calvert, Director of Community Sustainability

VIA Architecture

Western Washington has an architectural legacy from its former dairy agricultural past which is both valuable and perplexing at the same time. This area was once considered ideal for dairy farming due to its gentle climate and lush landscapes, producing brands such as Carnation, which became synonymous with “contented cows” and healthy milk products in the early 20th century (1). As with so many forms of small-scale agriculture, the family dairy farm began its decline as industrial-scale enterprises began to dominate production in the post-WWII years. The agricultural landscape gave way to suburban development throughout the Puget Sound area, but in many places there remain visible reminders of this architectural and cultural past. The challenge now is how to preserve and adapt these structures, particularly barns and silos, to present-day uses. In recent months we have visited three former dairy farms that are each rising to this challenge in distinctly different ways.

Petersen Farm, Silverdale

The Petersen Farm in Silverdale is a 167-acre parcel that was farmed for 51 years as a dairy and subsequently a beef cattle farm by Gerald Petersen, who passed away in 2009. His estate has been working with the Great Peninsula Conservancy, a Kitsap-based non-profit land trust, to purchase the development rights to the property in order to maintain the property as active farmland in perpetuity. Last month, with local business and community support, the farm’s fundraising campaign met its goal to raise matching funds for a USDA Farm Protection Grant. This is one of the last remaining large agricultural parcels in Kitsap County, and preservation of the area’s farming heritage in the Clear Creek Valley is an important community legacy.

Petersen Barn (credit)

Peterson Barn (credit)

An interesting thing about this farm is that it contains portions of three homesteads in the area that date back to the late 1800’s, when the land was first cleared. One of the original houses built by the pioneering Levin family still stands on the property, as does the 1902 Holm barn, recently placed on the Washington State Heritage Barn Register (2). This makes for an interesting archaeology in considering restoration work, and how to be respectful to several simultaneous layers of architectural history. The barn, a gable-on-hip style with vertical stave wood grain silos adjacent, is in need of basic structural stabilization work before any new uses could be contemplated. Preservation and adaptive reuse of this structure is going to be a big challenge.

To read more about this project visit:

http://www.kitsapsun.com/news/2010/jun/22/conservationists-working-to-keep-this-central/

http://www.greatpeninsula.org/documents/SavePetersenFarmbrochure.pdf

Kinnear Ambold Barn, Fall City 

Also recently placed on the Heritage Barn Register is the Kinnear Ambold Barn, part of an original 40-acre farm that served as a dairy until the 1940’s. Much smaller in scale than the Petersen property, a portion of this farm is privately owned, left to a Seattle business owner by an elderly neighbor in 2008, and the remainder being donated to the PCC Farmland Trust. Its barn sits prominently on the Fall City-Issaquah Road, and is noted as a prominent feature on this historic corridor in King County literature (3).

Originally built in 1910, this is an English Gambrel style milking barn with an adjacent concrete stave silo. Deeply buried in blackberries when the current owner took on the task of building renovation, the floor and foundation were decayed enough that restoration was not a possibility, and a complete re-build of the lower floor was the only way to save the building. Working closely with King County’s preservation architect Todd Scott, the owner hopes to modernize the structure to meet current codes while honoring the building’s original architectural style, and provide the infrastructure to suit a future commercial tenant. The site is ideal for who could develop a business catering to interest in local agriculture, or some kind of commercial enterprise that caters to the cyclists and sightseers that pass by frequently on the Issaquah-Fall City corridor.

Kinnear Ambold Barn, Fall City (credit VIA)

To read more about this project visit:

http://www.djc.com/news/ae/12034831.html (subscription required)

http://www.dahp.wa.gov/sites/default/files/Round9_PresentationBarns.pdf

Tahoma Farms, Orting

One of the PCC Farmland Trust’s most recent conservation projects is the 100-acre former Ford Dairy in Orting. In 2009 this farm was transformed, through the purchase of development rights, into three organic farms including the 40-acres Tahoma Farms. The Ford Dairy had operated for over 70 years and had over 300 cows at its peak; the Tahoma parcel received the bulk of the building infrastructure from the former dairy, including a rambling collection of barns, sheds, silos, and paved livestock yards. The challenge for the current owners is that their production is focused on organic fruits and vegetables rather than animals, so they have little use for such a large amount of built space beyond basic needs such as office space, washing and storage rooms, and equipment storage.

Most of the buildings are in fair condition, consisting less of traditionally enclosed barn space like the Petersen or Kinnear Ambold properties, and more as a large and diverse covered area of pole construction with trusses and rafters. The opportunity is there to eventually develop these structures into uses that are compatible with organic farming, creating a potential agritourism destination and diversifying the farm’s income stream. The buildings are currently clustered together in a way that suited the dairy’s needs; the design challenge for adaptive reuse will be to keep the best of the structures and create space between them for other uses to flourish.

Aerial of Tahoma Farms (credit Google)

Tahoma Farms Barn (credit VIA)

Tahoma Farms former dairy structures (credit VIA)

To read more about Tahoma Farms:

http://www.tahomafarms.com/

http://www.pccfarmlandtrust.org/our-farms/orting-valley-farms/

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/pacificnw/2015934162_pacificpfootpcctrust28.html

What these barns share, despite different settings and circumstances, is the challenge of adapting to a change in context. All purpose-built for an industry that no longer needs them, through a variety of ownership strategies, funding sources, and commercial needs, each of them is likely to find its way back to an extended useful life. Here are some great examples of the reuse of barns and silos that could be used for inspiration:

NL Architects adaptive reuse competition, Amsterdam (credit)

Adaptive reuse barn, SCDLP, UK (credit)

seARCH Architects, Residence, Amsterdam (credit)

References:
(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnation_(brand)
(2) http://www.dahp.wa.gov/sites/default/files/Round10_BarnPresentation.pdf
(3) http://your.kingcounty.gov/kcdot/roads/wcms/planning/historic/corridors/IssaquahFallCity.pdf

Photo credits:
1: http://www.buylocalfoodinkitsap.org/the-peterson-farm-a-legacy-in-danger
2: www.highdynamicrangeimages.wordpress.com
3: VIA Architecture
4: Google
5: VIA Architecture
6: VIA Architecture
7: http://inhabitat.com/abandoned-silos-transformed-into-a-climbing-gym/
8: http://dornob.com/vernacular-barn-converted-into-spacious-modern-home/
9: http://weburbanist.com/2009/10/12/adaptive-reuse-15-creative-house-home-conversions/

Walk 21 - Vancouver, BC

by Graham McGarva, Founding Principal
VIA Architecture








The 12th annual Walk 21 International Conference was held this year in Vancouver, BC from Oct 2nd to October 5th . These conferences work to “create a world where people are able to walk as a way to travel, to be healthy, and to relax.”

As the bi-pedal of poetry and mathematics were brought together, the Doctors (as in medical doctors who presented at the conference), emerged in the lead as advocates for active transportation.

Many of their presentations pointed out that they could do little, just help people with their pain when it is already too late. It is, in fact, planners who save lives.

Dr. William Bird, leader of the Natural England and Intelligent Health NGO’s in the UK, gave us the math “3-4-50”; the blunt fact that in our western world, three behaviors -- poor nutrition, lack of physical activity, and tobacco use -- contribute to four diseases: heart disease/stroke, cancer, type 2 diabetes, and respiratory conditions, such as asthma. These diseases result in over 50 percent of all deaths.

The World Health Organization's (WHO) September 2011 Conference on Non-Communicable diseases resoundingly concluded that despite global media concern over the transmission of communicable diseases (AIDS, SARS, Ebola virus etc.), in terms of impact and threat it is non-communicable disease that is the new global epidemic.

If this appears to be a circular reference of rhetoric that leaves you feeling at all cynical, then Dr. Penny Ballem, the City Manager for Vancouver, spelled it out in simple arithmetic. If education spending were kept at 27% of the provincial budget and health costs kept growing at 8% with a continued rate of revenue growth of 3%, then the health costs in 2018 would rise to 72% from 42% in 2005. Under the premise of a balanced budget, health costs would have vacuumed up all of the public purse.

Now that we had been grabbed by our purse strings, we were all paying attention.

The resounding conclusion of the poets and the doctors is simple: improving our health habits will lead to improved quality of life and result in significant savings to taxpayers.

1 in 6 people in North America have some form of disability. Walking, rather than obesity, is the issue. Despite the billions of dollars spent on advertising lean products, calorie counting means nothing if you don’t get off your butt. The best improvements are seen in those who go from least active to slightly active ( from there the geometric scale flattens out).

And as we collectively drag our buttprints across the sands of time Dan Leeming, Principal of Planning Partnerships in Toronto, reminded us it took 100,000 years to learn to walk upright and only 60 years to undo it.

Larry Frank, Professor at the University of British Columbia, translated this into the transportation planning perspective that the 350 calories in a pizza will get a cyclist 10 miles, a pedestrian 3.5 miles and an automobile 100ft.

Much policy has been based on "decision based evidence making." 99% of US transport funds have been dedicated to things other than ped/bike (active transportation).

The current leading edge of research, not surprisingly, is on the hidden health costs of transportation. The engineers are not necessarily the problem as the distinction is increasingly being made that connectivity is the key versus proximity. People’s perceptions are all important.

Gordon Price’s “Motordom” has become the defining reality of our suburban environments – with every message screaming impediment to the latent pedestrian that is trapped inside every car. And for a century each generation of children has been confined within decreasing orbits of autonomous locomotion.

We have corralled ourselves in and fattened ourselves up for the slaughter. It is up to us to rethink the boundaries that we place in the path of our daily lives. Thus walkability and connectivity are what the doctors’ prescribe for our health dollars, engineers for our transportation dollars, and urban planners for our design dollars.

In short, every curb radius counts.

It was a great conference, with lots of the multi-disciplinary enthusiasm without which nothing great will ever be achieved. So I ended my conference enthusiastically walking through the future that will be Surrey City Centre – the largest (and most walkable?) urban environment in British Columbia.

The Commons: Thoughts from Madison

By Catherine Calvert, Director of Community Sustainability

VIA Architecture

This past June I had the pleasure of attending the Congress for the New Urbanism conference (CNU 19) in Madison, Wisconsin.  Never having been to Madison, I arrived with no prior knowledge about the city, and was wholly unprepared for the strong sense of the commons that I experienced there.

Madison is quite unique in its city planning; a small downtown set on an isthmus between Lake Mendota and Lake Monona, and located in its pivotal center is the state capital building.  Completed in 1917, this imposing white domed structure forms the terminus of each radial street in a rigid 8-point symmetrical geometry.  The immediate surroundings of the Capitol grounds are a formal, tree-lined park that forms a significant green space in the center of the city.  This is markedly different from our Washington state Capitol in Olympia, which is set away from the urban center in a campus setting with other legislative facilities.

(Photo Credit: legis.wisconsin.gov)

(Photo Credit: alumroot @ Flickr)

(Photo Credit: VIA Architecture)

At VIA and the Community Design Studio, we talk about rediscovering “The Commons”.  Wikipedia defines this as a term that refers to resources that are collectively owned or shared between or among communities, and attributes to Peter Barnes several characteristics of commons:  “The first is that the commons cannot be commodified – and if they are – they cease to be commons. The second aspect is that unlike private property, the commons is inclusive rather than exclusive — its nature is to share ownership as widely, rather than as narrowly, as possible. The third aspect is that the assets in commons are meant to be preserved regardless of their return of capital.” (Reference 1) 

Although commons can refer to any collective cultural asset, from an urban design perspective, the commons is associated with public space.  Civic in character, the commons is used for a variety of community gatherings such as celebrations, or any other kind of event dedicated to public assembly and enjoyment.  The traditional village green once served this function, and in a larger city, public squares, parks and streetscapes now also become the milieu for communal urban life.

(Photo Credit: VIA Architecture)

(Photo Credit: Berkeley image bank)

During my few days in Madison, the capitol grounds provided two excellent illustrations of the use of the commons as the spatial backdrop for collective expression.  On a Friday evening, there was a gathering of protestors opposing provisions in the state’s Budget Repair Bill proposed to restrict public employee collective bargaining and address a state budget shortfall.  This was one of a series of protests at the capitol that had occurred over the previous few months, and this particular evening’s gathering was peaceful, accompanied by significant police presence, and with the other activities of a Madison summer evening carrying on in the immediate surroundings.

(Photo Credit: John Hart, Wisconsin State Journal)

The next morning at dawn, with no trace of the gathering of the prior evening, the Dane County Farmer’s Market was in full swing.  Operating continuously since 1972, this market is the largest producer-only farmer’s venue in the country.  Tents are set up around the entire perimeter of the capitol square, with so many customers each week that pedestrian flow operates in a counter-clockwise direction only.

(Photo Credit: hawcreekoutdoors.com)

The demonstration of abundance in early June, in comparison to the products of our record-cool Northwest spring, was staggering.  Madison is considered a national hot spot for farmer-chef connections and is the home of many restaurants notable for their celebration of local cuisine.  With this kind of bounty outside their front doors, it is easy to see why:

(Photo Credit: VIA Architecture)

Among the keynote speakers at the Madison CNU gathering was Andreas Duany, one of the leaders of the New Urbanist philosophy.  In his 2011 book on Agrarian Urbanism (Reference 2), Duany discusses some flaws associated with New Urbanism that have become apparent with the “diminished circumstances confronting the 21^st century”.  Among these is the assumption that social interaction would be based around retail shopping as leisure occupation, which has now been proven unsound as Americans readjust their priorities and adapt to a new economic reality.  Duany proposes that the farmer’s market (resulting from surrounding agrarian activities) becomes the new urban condenser, and that societies coalesce around two major activities – the selling and exchange of food, and the community hall as gathering place. 

Madison provides an interesting demonstration of this approach; using the backbone of the civic space to support both the energy of the market and the passionate beliefs of its citizens.  It is helpful to look to cities like Madison as precedents that demonstrate a more deeply rooted understanding of what the commons should be, rather than to models of newer development that often apply a ‘surface treatment’ of the commons by over-utilizing retail to simulate civic life.

We have written previously about the Transition Towns movement and the desire by many communities to rediscover the power of the collective. Madison is an inspiring model of a town that is using both its historic infrastructure and its present-day vitality to strengthen urban-rural connections and maintain the importance of its commons.  As designers we can continue to be mindful of the importance of our public spaces, and to ensure that our community assets include well-designed, appealing and appropriately scaled gathering spaces that serve our civic needs and reinforce the sense of place that expresses our communities.

Reference 1:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_commons

Reference 2: "Theory & Practice of Agrarian Urbanism," Andreas Duany and DPZ, 2011, The Prince's Foundation for the Built Environment.

Announcing our new Community Design Studio

VIA Architecture is pleased to announce the formal roll-out of its Community Design Studio (CDS). Informally conceived in 2009 as an initiative to serve smaller-scale, yet equally visionary projects that have not been traditionally taken on by architecture firms, we are ready to introduce this approach to a broader audience.

VIA has built its reputation on integrated architectural design and community planning over a period of 26+ years, and we are perhaps best known for our large-scale projects such as the various phases of Vancouver’s SkyTrain system, the Seattle Monorail Project, and master planning for communities as diverse as Southeast False Creek, Bremerton, Kelowna and Tacoma. Yet quietly in the background, we have long served community groups, non-profits, and other smaller clients with thoughtful, crafted responses to much more humble needs. It is this work that we are now bringing to the forefront.

We are inspired by the growing interest locally and globally in urban agriculture, homesteading, community-shared resources, the revival of practical skills and preservation. Simultaneously, we are aware of communities across the country that are, in some measure, fragmented or even broken due to social, economic and environmental factors such as missing infrastructure, unequal access to food and outdated regulations. We recognize the great potential to address these issues in profound ways through small-scale, hands-on design approaches that can have a powerful cumulative effect.

Our focus with the CDS will be issues of applied craft, community resilience, planning and design for food production, and other problems where we can be of direct assistance to improving the quality of life for our clients. Our work seeks to restore and reinvigorate communities through thoughtful, practical and cooperative solutions around food, mobility and open space.

The CDS consists of architects and community planners within the VIA team who share a passion for helping to create connective communities that are resilient and thriving. The team is led by Catherine Calvert, VIA’s Director of Community Sustainability, who brings a background of not only architecture and sustainability work, but specialized training in areas such as Farm Design and Permaculture.

Our services include:

• Integrated design and planning for small-scale residential, commercial and institutional projects in rural and semi-urban areas.
• Visualization and early design services for agriculture-focused site planning and building projects, both urban and rural.
• Education around issues of strategic sustainability, local resilience and design for self-sufficiency.
• Resolution of regulatory barriers to community-based projects.
• Facilitation of community discussions or workshops.

To date we have worked on a variety of projects in the Seattle area, including:

Rainier Vista Community Farm – VIA has been assisting Common Ground in the design of shelters made from salvage materials.

Atlantic City Urban Farm – VIA has been working with Seattle Tilth and the Friends of the Atlantic City Nursery on site planning concepts for conversion of the former Seattle Parks nursery to a new urban farm.

Spectrum School Farm – VIA provided early site design concepts for a one-acre farm on the campus of the North Kitsap High School, designed to support the school science curriculum and provide food for the school kitchen

Option A

Option B

Finn River Cidery in Chimacum WA – VIA is working with this 33-acre organic farm on site planning concepts, as well as the design of the Chum Hut, a shelter for educational gatherings adjacent to the salmon-bearing Chimacum Creek that runs through the property.

Our projects are both urban and rural in location, serving the Puget Sound and Fraser Valley regions to date but with the potential to expand beyond these areas to wherever we can be of assistance.

VIA has been actively interested in the topics of food security, planning for agriculture, and issues around integrating art and agriculture in urban areas. See our previous blog posts on these topics:

- Grow: an art + urban agriculture project
- Trends in Small Farming - Kitsap County
- Rethinking Highest + Best Use
- Transitioning Towards Local Resilience
- Agriculture through Rose-Colored Glasses