Front Page > World > Article Title/Fixture Title

Front Page > Metro

Email | Print | Subscribe

Click-2-Listen

advertisement

Restorer's art gets high-tech boost

By Ann Geracimos
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Improperly formatted date!

Photographs by Barbara L. Salisbury/The Washington Times

---

he historic Georgetown mansion at Tudor Place looks like a skinned cat these days.

The exterior of the spacious 19th-century structure at 1644 31st St. NW, former home of Martha Washington's descendants, has been shorn temporarily of its damaged stucco as part of an ongoing restoration project with a high-tech slant. What remains is the underlying red brick facade, which hasn't been seen since 1914.

The plan is to repoint the bricks, replace the stucco by mid-October and continue taking other extensive corrective measures to upgrade the handsome 1816 house, a National Historic Landmark.

The house, designed by William Thornton, the man credited with designing the U.S. Capitol with the approval of President Washington, is "connected to all the big names in American history," says Jana Shafagoj, director of architectural and landscape conservation at the site.

Until the project began, she says, "nobody has understood how the house was put together." Upon completion, Tudor House again will be covered with a beautiful gold-toned stucco, and the archives will be full to bursting with images and artifacts to be pored over by historians and architects for years to come.

Functionally a museum open to the public and operated by the Tudor Place Foundation, the house is said to contain the most important trove of George Washington artifacts outside of Mount Vernon. However, the residence, praised by architects as the District's most historically intact of its kind, is also achieving prominence for another, very different reason. It is the first small house to have a special advanced laser scanning technique used to map its restoration in detail.

The 3-D photogrammetry technology, a high-definition documentation method known as HDD, can chart with microscopic precision the exterior and interior of any structure or site undergoing study or repair. Resulting images are valuable for learning more about a structure than otherwise could be seen by the naked eye and thus making sure conservation and renovation efforts are as successful as possible.

By "reading" the exposed brick masonry of the house with the help of a laser "eye," Tudor's professional staff also can learn much more about how the house evolved through nearly 200 years of its history. Clues are as small as nail types and brick shapes.

Click-2-Listen

Front Page > Metro