David West wrote:
> Tom Taylor 
>
> Ilene Tyler
David,

Thank you. This is about education in our industry.

That conference as the keynote Stewart Brand spoke about what is now 
called Pace Layering. All of the information I can find on the internet 
has to do with his giving the same talk, I imagine a bit more refined, 
at a more recent (post 9/11) IT conference. Since I want to make a 
reference to Stewart Brands keynote, and Pace Layering, it occurred to 
me it would be a good idea to note the date of my attending his 
presentation. Particularly to note that he was talking to 
preservationeers several years before the IT folks got his ideas all 
caught up in their knowledge architectures.

For the estimating book I am writing up a chapter titled "Metabolic 
Rates, Speed and Consumption". The Speed part deals with Pace Layering. 
In short Pace Layering is often referred to as an Onion of layers in 
which the outer layers move at a more rapid speed than the inner layers. 
In communications it is the Tweeters moving around in the outer layer, 
very quickly and volatile (Brand's outer layer is Fashion), and the 
stone tablet communicators moving around in the center very slowly, and 
they all exist concurrently in the same world. Or the difference between 
BP and letterpress. Stewart at the APTI conference, as I remember, 
directly related the Pace Layering to the group of people present as the 
technicians of the built environment in a maintenance of the environment 
of the layers of movement. We move around on the outside layers with 
communications technologies and we take care of the old buildings that 
house the sacred stone tablets. And he did intimate sacred.

Metabolic rate, that I want to connect with the Pace Layering, has to do 
with how I have noticed that in specific geographic areas (geographic 
determinism) there is a particularly different rate of learning that 
occurs in specific areas related to the prevalence of existing types of 
building stock, and the local economies. For example, in NYC there is a 
very high concentration of masonry buildings and the preservation 
industry as a whole, working on those buildings, gets a concentration in 
the need for an in-field trades workforce that is highly developed in 
specific historic preservation practices that would not be sustained say 
70 miles East on Long Island where there is not a concentration of older 
masonry buildings. Or say to New England where there is a higher 
concentration of historic wood structures, where in NYC there is a 
sparsity of older wood structures. From the perspective of an estimator 
the point being to understand the skilled labor resource as one moves 
from one geographic region to another. The idea of finding a blacksmith 
to bring in to do on-site forge welding on top of a rock surrounded by 
drug dealers in Harlem is one example of the sort of problems that one 
would only consider a need to estimate the cost of in the historic 
preservation industry. Consumption in this respect is how quickly 
practitioners gobble up information from their work environment, and in 
my estimation the majority of the education process occurs on the 
scaffold without ever approaching anything printed on paper. I also want 
to trace how new ideas of methodology, particularly as relates to 
materials science, get to the field where it is applied, and how bad 
information realized, often rather quickly, in the field gets back up 
very slowly in the R & D chain, in short how we move information about 
preservation techniques across the onion of layers.

At that conference I moderated a panel presentation on preservation and 
websites, and brought together several people to present that I had 
previously only met through the internet. This was before APTI had a 
website to speak of, and it was on the train back from Chicago to NYC 
that Gab & Eti were born, leading to the creation of BP. It was also 
pre-PTN, to which at least in my thinking, Brand's ideas had a direct 
influence.

I am able to write this e-mail because I wake up real early and this 
sort of writing is a warm up for my day while I consume a cup of dark 
coffee. It helps me to stay on this side of the lawn.

][<en

--
To terminate puerile preservation prattling among pals and the
uncoffee-ed, or to change your settings, go to:
<http://listserv.icors.org/archives/bullamanka-pinheads.html>