World Monuments Fund Launches Traditional Building and Historic Preservation Field School at Mount Lebanon Shaker Village, New York

The World Monuments Fund (WMF), in partnership with the Shaker Museum and Library (SM&L), Preservation Trades Network (PTN) and University of Florida College of Design Construction and Planning (UFCDCP), has launched a model field school dedicated to traditional building and historic preservation at the North Family Site of Mount Lebanon Shaker Village, NY, a National Historic Landmark that was placed on both the 2004 and 2006 World Monuments Watch lists of 100 Most Endangered Sties. A major component of WMF’s larger initiative to address the loss of educational and training opportunities in the traditional building arts, this pilot field school will serve as a model for adaptation and replication at other WMF sites in the United States.

The nine-week field school, which began in June 2006, has brought together apprentices from the American College of the Building Arts (ACBA) in Charleston, SC, and the Association Ouvrière des Compagnons du Devoir et Tour de France (Compagnons) from across France, to work with graduate-level architecture and building construction students from the University of Florida’s College of Design Construction and Planning and high school students from the Preservation Arts & Technology Program at the Brooklyn High School of the Arts, New York City, to document and restore the timber frame of the North Family Shaker Granary (1838) at Mount Lebanon Shaker Village. One of the oldest structures on the site, the Shaker granary is the only one in the world that still survives.