Sloane Marek, P.E.

Where she came from

Sloane Marek grew up in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in the long dim of the steel-industry collapse, and she will tell you that she got into mechanical engineering because her family rented a row house heated by a 1928 American Standard cast-iron boiler that the landlord refused to replace and that she eventually rebuilt herself, at age sixteen, with parts ordered out of the back of a Penn-Engineers magazine. She earned a B.S. in mechanical engineering from the University of Pittsburgh in 2002 and an M.S. from the same department in 2004, with a thesis on chilled-beam systems in surgical suites.

Her first job was at Affiliated Engineers in Madison, Wisconsin, on hospital and pharmaceutical-cleanroom HVAC. Three years there taught her, in her words, “most of what I know about how to keep a building within a band, and almost nothing about how to keep a collection within one.” The latter she learned at Carnegie.

Nine years at Carnegie

In 2005 the Carnegie Museum of Art posted an opening for an in-house mechanical lead embedded in the conservation department, reporting jointly to the head of facilities and the head of conservation. The hire is unusual and the dual-reporting line is harder than it sounds; the department had been founded in 1981 with the appointment of paintings conservator Karen Crenshaw, and by 2005 it had grown into the multi-disciplinary group whose conservation publications are still distributed nationally. Sloane took the job and spent nine years there.

She rebuilt the chilled-water plant in 2008 (a project that took two summers and was delivered on time), commissioned the photograph-storage cool vault in 2010, and led the post-2011 envelope tightening that allowed the museum to drop from a Class-A regime to a defensible Class-As regime — saving roughly 22 percent on annual HVAC operating cost while measurably narrowing the daily RH band. She presented the envelope-tightening project at the 2013 AIC Annual Meeting in Indianapolis. The post-print is in our shop library.

The work that taught her most, by her own account, was a series of small ones: an 18-month dehumidification retrofit of a basement print-storage area in 2009; a quiet de-rate of a problematic 1997 air-handling unit in 2011; a 2012 condition-survey walk-through of every gallery on the museum’s Founder’s Day weekend, with the building empty and the chillers running at minimum. “You can’t build a feel for a building from a CAD drawing,” she has written. “You build it from the floor.”

Founding the practice

By 2013 Sloane had been getting calls at home from small institutions and private collectors who could not afford a Carnegie-scale practice. She was answering as a favor on weekends. The board of a Westmoreland County historical society, on a 2014 site walk, was the third in eight months to ask her if she would consider hanging her own shingle. She wrote a business plan over Easter weekend, submitted her resignation in May, and signed the lease on the Butler Street shop in July 2014. She ran the practice solo through the first eighteen months. Jules joined in 2017, Petra in 2019, and the practice has grown by roughly one person a year since.

She holds Pennsylvania PE 098‑3214 and is LEED AP BD+C accredited. She is a voting member of ASHRAE Technical Committee 9.8, a professional associate of the American Institute for Conservation, and serves on the small-business advisory committee of the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust.

What she does today

Sloane is the design lead on every Class-AA gallery project the practice takes. She runs the Tuesday-morning project review where every active site is read into the room. She writes the firm’s risk registers. She co-authors, with Petra, the binder a client receives at final commissioning. She does not run a service truck and has not pulled a permit by hand since 2019.

She lives in Highland Park with her partner, who is a librarian at Carnegie Library’s East Liberty branch, and a 14-year-old beagle who is the longest-tenured employee of the practice (as the office mascot, since 2014).

Selected publications & talks

• Marek, S., & Anastassiou, P. “Field practices for cultural-heritage HVAC commissioning in pre-1920 masonry buildings.” Forthcoming, AIC Annual Meeting 2026 post-print, Pittsburgh.
• Marek, S. “Envelope before equipment: a defense of the 18-month diagnostic.” ASHRAE Journal, March 2023. ashrae.org.
• Marek, S. “Talking to a curator: a translation guide for engineers.” ASHRAE TC 9.8 webinar, 2021.
• Marek, S. “The 22 percent question.” AIC Annual Meeting, Indianapolis, 2013. Post-print in conference proceedings.
• Co-author, AIC Sustainable Conservation Environments working-group white paper, 2022.

Talk to Sloane

For new institutional projects, write the studio at studio@plenumandreed.example. Sloane reads every intake form, but the first phone call is usually with Petra.