Twelve people, three trucks, one shop.

Origin

The practice was founded in 2014 by Sloane Marek, then in her ninth year as the in-house mechanical lead at the Carnegie Museum of Art’s conservation department. The Carnegie’s lab opened in 1981 with the hire of paintings conservator Karen Crenshaw; by the time Sloane left it had grown into the multi-disciplinary unit that now contributes to CMOA conservation publications and the broader cultural-heritage field. She left because the institution had as much HVAC as it could chew, and a few too many of the people calling her at home for advice were small institutions that could not afford a Carnegie-scale practice. The practice answers the calls.

Jules Okonkwo joined in 2017 from Carnegie Mellon’s mechanical-engineering department, where he had been writing his M.Eng. thesis on LoRaWAN sensor placement in masonry buildings. Petra Anastassiou joined in 2019 from the Image Permanence Institute at RIT, where she had been training conservators to use the dew-point calculator and the eClimateNotebook. The three of them remain the senior practice. Around them have settled nine other engineers, technicians, and a graphic conservator who reads our climate ribbons better than the engineers do.

The brief

We hold ourselves accountable to a narrow definition of the work. We design, build, and tune mechanical systems whose job is to keep a defined volume within a tight band of temperature and relative humidity, with controlled fluctuation rates, for decades. We do not do general-comfort HVAC. We do not do residential air conditioning. We do not do retail or office build-outs. When a friend asks us to look at the heat pump on their kitchen renovation, we recommend three firms in town who do that work better than we ever will.

What we do, instead, is the seam between conservation science and mechanical engineering. The two trades share more than they admit. A conservator’s case files and a mechanical engineer’s commissioning binder are the same artifact rotated 90 degrees: a long, dated, technical record of what was wrong, what was done, and what needs to be done next. We write our deliverables in that register. A typical project closes with a 60–180-page binder, hand-bound at our shop, indexed, and given to the client on the day of final commissioning. Every binder is a working document. Every binder gets reopened.

The shop

We work out of a 6,800-square-foot second floor on the 4200 block of Butler Street in Lawrenceville. The building was a piano-roll warehouse in 1898, a printing shop from the 1930s through the 1970s, and a furniture-finishing studio for most of the 1990s. The floor still has the divots from where the cylinder press sat. We bought the lease in 2015 and built out a clean room, a sensor lab, a fabrication bay, a small library, and three desks for design work. The clean room is what we use to assemble exhibit-case retrofits. The sensor lab is where we burn-in every new Conserv node before it ships to a site.

You’re welcome to visit by appointment. Lawrenceville is a 16-minute walk from the Heinz History Center, four blocks from Contemporary Craft’s new home, and the 91 bus from downtown drops you a block away. We will offer you tea or, on the right kind of afternoon, the espresso machine in the corner of the library that an institutional client gave us as a thank-you in 2022.

The people

There are twelve of us. Three principals (mechanical engineering, sensors and telemetry, commissioning), four mid-level engineers, three field technicians, a graphic conservator-on-staff who interprets our long-term ribbons, and a shop manager who keeps the books and the espresso machine running. We do not subcontract design work. We do subcontract heavy ductwork, structural penetrations through historic envelope, and any work that requires a steamfitters’ union card.

You can read full bios on the team page. The short version: most of us came out of either a museum or a university lab. None of us came out of a residential HVAC franchise. We pay attention to that distinction because it shapes the kinds of mistakes a junior engineer is liable to make — the residential-trained instinct is to chase comfort; the conservation-trained instinct is to chase stability. Stability is harder, slower, and considerably more expensive. It is the work we have agreed to do.

What we’ve read (and re-read)

Some texts we keep within reach of every desk:

• Stefan Michalski, “The Ideal Climate, Risk Management, the ASHRAE Chapter, and Proofed Fluctuations” (Getty Conservation Institute) — the single most-cited PDF on our practice servers.
• Garry Thomson, The Museum Environment (2nd ed., Butterworth-Heinemann, 1986). Out of print and worth tracking down.
• The IPI Dew Point Calculator companion documents and the eClimateNotebook user guide.
• ASHRAE Handbook — HVAC Applications, Chapter 24 “Museums, Galleries, Archives and Libraries”, current edition.
• BS EN 16893:2018 — Conservation of Cultural Heritage. Specifications for location, construction and modification of buildings or rooms intended for the storage or use of heritage collections.
• NPS Conserve O Gram series — particularly 3/4 (relative humidity) and 3/2 (temperature).
• Sarah Staniforth (ed.), Historical Perspectives on Preventive Conservation (Getty Conservation Institute, 2013).

The full library catalog is browsable in person; we do not maintain an online index because frankly we don’t want to be confused with a research library. We are an engineering shop with a reading habit.

What we don’t do

A short list, in service of saving you a phone call.

• Residential HVAC, except as a quiet accommodation to existing clients with private collections in their homes.
• Commercial-office and retail HVAC.
• Restaurant kitchen ventilation.
• Cleanroom HVAC for semiconductor or pharma; we work in conservation cleanrooms only, which are a different problem.
• Refrigeration for grocery, food service, or industrial process. (Cold-storage vaults for collections, yes; that is a different domain.)
• Same-day or same-week emergency response for properties we have never seen. We do hold standby for retainers.
• Bidding against general contractors on price-led RFPs. We are unable to compete on the dimension RFPs reward.

For all of the above, we are happy to refer. Pittsburgh is a deep enough trade ecosystem that for nearly any work we don’t do, we know two firms who do it well. Ask.

A note on form

This site is written in the same register as our project binders. If you find that voice peculiar, that is the practice. If you find it useful, you are probably the kind of client we work well with. Either is information.