Happy Holidays

Happy Holidays to all.

Novel Cleaning for Architectural Plans

           The first thing you notice when you open a canister of architectural drawings that have been closed for 50 years is the smell.  Best I can describe it is that it is a little like strong candle wax.  This smell is from the resin that coats much of the material in the Castle Drawing Collection, which dates from 1914 to the 1950s.  The resin is embedded in the linen sheets of many of the sets of plans and also on the waxy tracing paper called vellum by architects.  The resin attracts dirt and in the case of the vellum has caused deterioration and brittleness not only in the impregnated papers but in anything around it.  All challenging to say the least. 

            Most of the sets are bound together by clips.  You know the kind.  Punch them through a hole and then open the two wings to hold the material together.  They look like brass, but I don't know what metal they actually are.  At any rate when they oxidize they create a blue crust on the clip.  This crust flakes off and embeds in the linen or vellum staining it a blue-green color.  Pretty color, but not so great for the linen and tracing paper. What to do to keep the crusty bits from scattering everywhere, which is what happens no matter how careful you are.  At first I used a very, very soft brush. It worked but I had to do everything twice. Then I went back to my days in the museum.  The way to clean linen is to lightly vacuum them through a screen using an up and down motion. (I talked about this several blogs ago.) You have to use a vacuum with a hepa filter of course and one that has variable suction speeds. (See blog on vacuums I have loved) These are costly, but the only way to go. First I vacuum the front and back of the clip to remove as much of the crust as possible before touching them. Then with gloves on I carefully removed the clips and vacuum the holes again. I’m sure a conservator would be horrified, but it worked. Never use a push and pull method vacuuming you can smudge the ink, which is embedded in the coating.  That’s only for the linen material.  For the vellum and tracing paper you have to use the brush method.  What  Waverly Lowe and Tawny Ryan Nelb recommend in their book Architectural Records is grating an eraser (buy at Gaylords or Hollinger) and brushing the bits lightly over the surface.  It does work well - tedious of course.  It’s impossible to get all of the blue stain off of any of the material, but once you remove the clips it won’t get worse.  If anyone has other ideas about how to deal with this problem I am all ears or eyes.

Architectural Drawings - The David S.Castle Collection

           Been busy for the past month.  Started a new project - interesting, but demanding.  The project is the processing of a collection of architectural plans designed by one of the most important early architects in the West Texas region.  His name is David S. Castle and he opened his architectural office in Abilene, Texas in 1915.  During his long career he designed many of the municipal buildings, courthouses, commercial buildings, churches, and residences throughout the West Texas region.  When he died his son, also an architect, closed the family business and moved elsewhere.  Before he left town he gave the plans from the Abilene office to the Tittle Luther Architectural firm.  They have preserved these important papers since the 1950s. 

            Our goal is to organize, inventory, and clean these papers so they can be digitized.  They have been housed in an unheated storage shed in either metal or cardboard canisters.  The plans are drawn on a variety of material - linen, tracing paper, vellum (waxy feeling coated paper, not calfskin).  The collection is large ( over 700 separate sets of plans) and has been touched only briefly during the 50 years the material has been in storage.  (The earliest set of plans so far dates to 1916- thirty years after Abilene was founded)  Processing the collection is a challenge because of the size of the individual pieces and their condition.  Dealing with material that is as large as 38” by 42” and is coated with resin is a little like wrestling slippery fish.  Learning the best method for handling, cleaning, and flattening the material safely and organizing it following the original order has been interesting and I will use other blogs to describe what we have learned as we learn it.  We only have one more week of work so I’m taking a brief break from this blog for the holidays. More in 2015 on archives, preservation, and architectural drawings and maybe fish.