By Jugal Patel, Student Correspondent
This is Part 2 in the Adapting to Rising Seas series.
Any home renovation is daunting. Now consider making improvements to an entire historic neighborhood—a neighborhood that already floods frequently and is expected to experience worse flooding in the future due to sea level rise.
“As we looked around, we found there’s absolutely nothing on how you adapt a historic structure,” says Skip Stiles, Executive Director of Wetlands Watch.
Last fall, Stiles began a Virginia Sea Grant (VASG)-funded adaptive design project in Chesterfield Heights, a historic neighborhood in Norfolk, VA. Stiles coordinated the teams of Hampton University (HU) and Old Dominion University (ODU) students and local professionals who designed solutions to the problems of encroaching water.
Tackling the issues of a historic neighborhood was challenging. Not only were there no previous examples to go on, but Stiles says, “In fact, there are lots of ways you can screw it up.”
Official drawings for the Chesterfield Heights neighborhood were first filed on November 5, 1904. Over 100 years later, the neighborhood is one of 14 Norfolk communities on the National Register of Historic Places. It is noted as a surviving example of the early suburban movement, when the advent of streetcars in Norfolk in 1869 triggered new development in previously inaccessible areas.
The century-old neighborhood’s architecture is filled with master craftsmanship and artistic value. Chesterfield Heights still retains many of its original structures, including local interpretations of Colonial Revival and Queen Anne architectural styles.
The same features that give Chesterfield Heights its historical value also present challenges when designing ways to adapt the neighborhood to rising seas. Changing the look of homes or the neighborhood would violate its historic character.
It’s a problem of aesthetics and finances.
“Historic houses tend to be more sturdily built, which makes them more resilient, but also more expensive to address,” says Paige Pollard, an architectural historian with the Commonwealth Preservation Group.
Pollard met with the student architects and engineers who took on the challenge, giving professional guidance on preservation standards for historic properties. But retaining the area’s historic character was just one part of the puzzle when dealing with the century-old neighborhood.
“Working in historic neighborhoods is almost like being a detective,” says William Parks, a 2015 HU graduate who was one of the architecture students on the project.
Parks recalls how he and his classmates struggled to track down the soil maps that are needed for any architecture project. After months of searching, they found them at the City of Norfolk Department of Utilities. The city had commissioned a geotechnical study from an engineering consulting firm in 2013 when it considered adding a wastewater pump station to the neighborhood, and the maps were included in the records for that study.
“It requires a lot of digging to find the right data and reports,” says Alex Carlson, a 2015 ODU graduate who was one of the engineering students on the project. “The main thing is just bringing it all together and making sure you have the most up-to-date [information].”
It took architecture and design teams the full 2014–15 academic year to navigate the challenges of a historic neighborhood and to come up with a plan for addressing current flooding and projected sea level. (Next week’s installment in this series will describe the architectural designs developed for the neighborhood.)
For Stiles, the year-long process of learning the limitations and needs of a historic neighborhood was remarkable.
“I spent 20 years working in Congress,” he says. “This is, by far, the most amazing policy challenge I have ever seen—bar none.”
This story is part of an in-depth, six-part series, “Adapting to Rising Seas,” on the award-winning Chesterfield Heights resiliency design project. Stories are published every Friday and explore different aspects of the project.
