First Advisor

Juan Manuel Heredia

Date of Award

Spring 6-5-2026

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in Architecture and University Honors

Department

Art and Architecture

Language

English

Subjects

Architectural palimpsest, Adaptive reuse, Historic preservation, Civic memory, Helena Montana, Van Orsdel Memorial

Abstract

Most historic buildings do not survive as they were built, yet preservation frameworks still tend to evaluate them as if they did.

Foundations’ Deep begins with a structure located in Helena, Montana 59602, a building that sits uneasily within the categories it has been asked to meet. Built in the early twentieth century, it has persisted through alteration, abandonment, and use. What remains is not a stable artifact but a record of accumulated decisions, some careful and many indifferent, now embedded in the fabric of the building itself.

The thesis grows from this condition and from the limits of the frameworks used to describe it. Within National Register of Historic Places criteria, significance is often tied to integrity as a threshold condition: a building either retains enough of its original fabric and intent to qualify, or it falls outside protection. The structure at 1250 Sierra Road East resists that logic. It has already been judged, and found, by those terms insufficient.

Precedent studies in preservation theory and archival research expose a quieter problem in the field: that significance is frequently assigned through integrity-based assessments that many altered historic buildings are structurally set up to fail. Across these investigations runs a consistent concern with how history is read in material terms, and how easily that reading is narrowed by regulatory language that privileges clarity over complexity.

Rather than resolving a single building into a restored object or fixed narrative, the thesis asks how built environments are made legible as historically meaningful at all, and what is quietly removed when that legibility depends on completeness, stability, and a clearly traceable past. It situates this tension within preservation theory as part of a broader condition in which historic structures are continually measured against criteria that do not fully account for how cities actually change over time.

And yet the building remains.

No longer legible within the thresholds that determine significance under current preservation criteria, it has been set aside as unresolved. The thesis returns to it anyway, proposing that its future may exist not in restoration or resolution, but in staged reuse, repair, and continued inhabitation shaped over time.

Download

Share

COinS