HSFF welcomes our 2019 Faith and John Gaw Meem Preservation Trades Intern, Ramon Dorado, this month. Ramon will be working with HSFF staff on a number of hands-on projects including improvements to our home, El Zaguán, as well a partnership with El Rancho de las Golondrinas to restore their Pino Ranch House, which also happens to be the latest addition to our Register of Properties Worthy of Preservation. Preservation Specialist Mara Saxer asked him some questions about himself and his perspective on buildings and preservation.
Mara Saxer: What drew you to working with historic buildings? How do you find it compares to new architectural design projects?
Ramon Dorado: I was born in the historic city of Chihuahua, Chihuahua and moved to New Mexico, which showed me the need for historic building to tell our history. Historic buildings are records of our past, which is what motivated me to research and study architecture. New buildings just continue to tell our story and the evolvution in technology and architectural design.
MS: You just graduated from the UNM Historic Preservation program. Congratulations! Tell us a bit about the sorts of projects you worked on as part of the program, and any that you might still have ongoing.
RD: As an architect student I worked on many projects with the American Institute of Architects (AIA) and with some of my instructors. With AIA, I helped with temporary event installations and permanent installation, such as at The Balloon Fiesta Museum. With my instructors I got more into preservation and preservation technologies. I worked on the Pecos National Monument to helped restore some of the convento’s adobe walls and mud plaster, helped organize an adobe workshop called TICRAT (Taller Internacional de Conservation y Restauracion de Arquitectura de Tierra), an international workshop series hosted alternately in the United States or in Mexico that has been going for over 20 years. In 2018 it was hosted in Santa Fe, New Mexico and in Pecos National Historical Park. Participants had hands-on experience with plastering, making adobes, installing adobes, working with lime, and making pigments. Pecos Monument was also used for a technologies workshop where I was able to use new technologies to help better preserve building, including LiDAR laser scanning and photogrammetry. This helped create precise 3D models which we can turn into holograms or virtual tours. We did soil testing to make sure the adobe and plaster has the right consistency of soil. I was also involved in documenting over 50 structures along the Camino Real in the Bernalillo County area.
As an architecture student I thought that I will be just designing and constructing but I was also involved in the finding of a lost church in Belen, New Mexico. Nuestra Señora de Belen Church had been lost for over 300 years, but Samuel Sisneros, an archivist at UNM, found documentation of its location. He took a group of students to excavate, and we were able to find what was left of the church foundations. Before graduation I worked on a project with NPS that involved AR (augmented reality) and VR (virtual reality) technologies at Bandelier National Monument. We created virtual tours with a 360-degree view, allowing people to experience a guided tour of the site.
MS: What do you see as the biggest challenges facing preservationists and architects working in historic contexts, now and in the future?
RD: The hardest part is finding out what is historic and what is not. Some past preservationists’ techniques to preserve buildings make it hard to tell what is original, which makes it hard to know what point to restore a building to.
I think new technologies will help preservationist find better ways to save buildings and monitor any threats that can effect them.
MS: Any goals or wishes for summer projects while you’re at HSFF?
RD: I just want to learn and explore the area of preservation to better understand how and why we preserve.
MS: What’s next for you after this internship, now that you’ve completed your degree? Do you have plans or goals?
RD: My main goal is to become a licensed architect. Also, I would like to explore other area in the discipline of architecture such as set design for movies. The other thing I would like to do is to go back to school - but this time it would be to teach preservation and architecture.
