Old windows part of the soul of our past
Don’t trash them; restore them, says Shannon Kyles
They say the eyes are the windows of the soul and so, correspondingly, the windows must be the eyes of the home. Or of any building.
As Hamilton steps into its own vision, in a time of excitement and forward growth, mingled with pride of past, including architectural heritage, we should take care of our eyes.
The windows are, of course, not just the eyes of a building; they’re part of the lungs, maybe even the hypothalamus (the body’s thermostat), regulating temperature.
Windows do all those things: they bring light in, like the eyes, bring in air like the lungs, seal in desired warmth and coolness. But apart from functional considerations, windows, again like the eyes, contribute to a sense of “beauty.”
So why, asks Shannon Kyles, would you replace the windows in a beautiful old building? “It’s like poking its eyes out,” she says, of the common but horrifying expedient of replacing original windows with vinyl and other modern materials.
Old windows should be restored, not replaced, says Shannon, Mohawk College architecture professor, daughter of late Hamilton architect Lloyd Kyles. Now she has the studies and evi- dence to prove it.
Shannon doesn’t just teach architecture, building heritage and restoration to her students. She evangelizes. It’s about salvation, of buildings. She goes to every length. Four years ago, I wrote about how she disassembled a crumbling Regency-era cottage in Ancaster, preserving everything of character, stored it in her basement, and reassembled it as a historic bed-and-breakfast (The Gryphon) in Prince Edward County.
Her new crusade is old windows. She’s mad for them, and when you see what can be done by virtuoso restorers like Drew Skuce and Walter Furlan, you will be too.
In her typical all-or-nothing, let-the-devil-take-the-hindmost manner, Shannon and her students built a “test” structure, a whole miniature house, to prove a point. That properly restored windows are as efficient as and last longer than, the best replacement windows, replacement windows which can never, good as they might be, truly belong in an old building the way its originals do.
“We got old windows from the 1830 townhouses on Sydenham in Dundas, and they (the windows) were old-growth forest wood,” says Shannon, as she shows me through the test house in the Leaside Building at Mohawk’s Stoney Creek campus.
She asked the aforementioned Drew Skuce (Paradigm Shift Customs) and Walter Furlan of Furlan Conservation to restore the windows. The j ob they did on two large six-by-six, double- hung windows from the 19th century is superlative in every way.
They’ve grafted pieces of wood into damaged areas, smoothed and refitted, touched up, machined the fittings and pulley action beautifully, restored functionality and preserved the character of the glass, allowing its idiosyncratic, mature textures, bubbles and blebs to assert themselves. They used linseed paint. The before-and-after contrast is striking.
“They’re not recognizable,” says Shannon. Dutch fixes, she calls some of the work. “Meticulous fitting of pieces of wood, often with friction fits, sometimes epoxy.”
Shannon and her team put the old windows through a battery of tests.
“Vinyl decomposes,” says Shannon. “Bad replacement windows last five years, the best ones 25 to 50 years,” but heritage windows, made of old-growth wood, properly restored will last potentially hundreds of years.
But they can never be as energyefficient as the new ones, right? Never be up to building code?
Over the course of several “blow tests,” results got measured. The old windows, restored, were every bit as efficient. “In every case, there was more leakage in the new windows,” Shannon says.
She’s now using her evidence to try to get building codes and legislation to recognize the virtues of restored windows and has launched a petition to get the wording “restore windows and doors” added to the language of any grants and bursaries aimed at energy retrofit programs over the next few years.”
Heritage windows, made of old-growth wood, properly restored will last potentially hundreds of years. SHANNON KYLES