Neal Vogel
Neal Vogel
Neal Vogel is the Principal of Restoric, LLC, a restoration consulting and contracting business specializing in historic window restoration in Evanston, Illinois. Vogel has provided consulting and contracting services for a wide range of window, skylight and dome restoration projects over the past two decades including stained glass works by Tiffany Studios, Burne Jones, Maitland Armstrong, George Maher, Charles Connick, and D’Ascenzo Studios.
Neal teaches preservation courses at The School of the Art Institute’s Historic Preservation Program. He has also authored numerous technical articles and briefs on window restoration and ornamental glass for the National Park Service, New York Landmarks Conservancy, and various journals.
Presentations
Historic commercial glass and art glass
This session was geared toward architects, contractors, preservation professionals, building owners, and board representatives. This session highlighted the technical and business concerns of historic window and door restoration (along with ornamental glass through case studies that include churches, theaters, and civic buildings.
Historic Windows and Doors at Home
This session was geared toward homeowners and the public as a broad overview covering the fundamentals, pitfalls, and resources for repairing, refurbishing, and restoring historic wood and steel windows and doors. How-to methods were presented along with the pros and cons of hiring contractors.
Lisa Stone
Lisa Stone
Lisa Stone is curator of the Roger Brown Study Collection and adjunct associate professor at the Art Institute of Chicago's department of art history, theory, and criticism. She focuses on the preservation and interpretation of artists' environments and on the relationship of objects to creative practice. She researches artists who work independently from the mainstream, whose work is often home based, and ignores or dissolves boundaries between home and studio, life and art. She spends time on a garden/ruin in Spring Lake, IL, and operates Preservation Services, Inc.
Presentations
Saving and Preserving Outdoor Art Environments
Beginning with an overview of remarkable preservation projects of self-created, Wisconsin outdoor art environments, this workshop explored the challenges of preserving these unique and often unconventional sites. It also covered ownership, landmarking nontraditional resources, site documentation, physical conservation, change over time, and site interpretation. Plus, how to cultivate historical societies, nonprofits, and local units of government to become custodians responsible for ongoing preservation, maintenance, and site management.
Embellishing Home: Outdoor Art Environments in Wisconsin
Three monumental devotional grottos in Iowa and Wisconsin had a profound impact on artist-builders in the region. Stone introduced the historical backdrop of two Catholic devotional grottos and their introduction of embellished concrete as a seductive medium. This was followed by a visual tour through seven highly original art environments created within this regional tradition.
Robert Mack
Robert Mack
Robert Mack is an architect with nearly 40 years of experience in historic preservation first with the National Park Service and, for the last 35 years, as the head of MacDonald & Mack Architects. He is an adjunct professor at the University of Minnesota where he teaches courses related to historic preservation. Mack has a long list of publications, but by far the best known are the first two Preservation Briefs from the National Park Service. Mack is a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, and his firm was recently named the Firm of the Year by AIA/Minnesota.
Presentations
Historic Masonry 101
Masonry is an important component of virtually every building, even those we do not think of as "masonry." This session provided an introduction to historic masonry, the different historic masonry materials including, how they were used and typical problems with the materials.
Green Home Performance
In talking about "sustainability" we frequently think of insulation, water-saving toilets, energy-efficient appliances, and other physical ways of environmental preservation. There are, however, two other pillars of sustainability: social sustainability and economic sustainability. This session discussed the important role historic preservation can play in all three aspects, both at the individual building level and at the broader neighborhood level.
Jim Draeger
Jim Draeger
Jim Draeger is an architectural historian and deputy state historic preservation officer at the Wisconsin Historical Society with more than 25 years of historic preservation experience. Draeger celebrates the importance of ordinary buildings to our daily lives through his research, writing and lectures. His longtime enthusiasm for quaint, unique and beautiful taverns formed the backbone of his new book, "Bottom's Up: A Toast to Wisconsin’s Taverns and Breweries".
Presentation
Bottoms Up: A Toast to Wisconsin's Taverns and Breweries
Join author Jim Draeger for a celebration of Wisconsin's taverns and the breweries that fueled them. Draeger shared highlights from his new book, which explores the rise of taverns and breweries, the effects of temperance and Prohibition, and attitudes about gender, ethnicity, and morality. It traces the development of the mega-breweries, dominance of the giants, and the emergence of microbreweries. Draeger illustrated the story of how Wisconsin came to dominate brewing - and the place that bars and beer hold in our social and cultural history using stories and examples from seventy taverns and breweries featured in the book.
