Temperatures getting a little uncomfortable? Your artwork and antiques are probably feeling the humidity as much as you are.
Paintings and works of art on paper expand and contract in response to changes in temperature and humidity, say experts with Chubb Group of Insurance Cos.
That can cause surface distortions, flaking paint, growth of mold, staining or decay. It's not only the summer months that pose a threat to your most cherished pieces, either.
Furniture and gilded frames can dry and shrink during the winter, while wood absorbs moisture when it's humid.
If the gesso primer layer beneath your frame isn't thick enough to flex with the expansion and contraction of the wood, then it will flake and detach.
ARTKABINETT members know about the perils of nature when it comes to protecting their collected works. Mies Van der Rohe's iconic Farnsworth House in Plano, Illinois is a classic example of Mother Nature's capacity to harm.
The Fox River inundated the modern masterpiece, built on five-foot-tall risers, in 2008. Floodwaters reached the front steps of Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House in the second "hundred-year" flood of Illinois' Fox River since 1996.
Storms flooded rivers in northern Illinois, Wisconsin, and Ohio, causing at least two deaths and damaging hundreds of houses -- but not the 1951 Farnsworth House, a National Trust Historic Site in Plano, Ill.
"One hour we were eating dinner; the next hour, we [were] surrounded by a lake of four-foot-high water, and we couldn't get out of the town or to the house," Barbara Campagna, Graham Gund Architect of the National Trust, said in an e-mail.
"We were probably most scared Friday morning when the water was rising and we couldn't find a boat and thought we'd just have to stand there and watch it be subsumed."
Floodwaters rose four feet, covering four acres of the 58-acre riverfront site, and stopped on Friday afternoon, just 18 inches from the Farnsworth House's door, Campagna says.
"We really lucked out and can look at this as a drill," Campagna says.
Using a borrowed flat-bottom boat, Campagna and colleagues from Landmarks Illinois, which co-operates the house with the National Trust, rowed to the house to raise its furniture on crates, buying it a few more feet if the waters continued to rise.
"It's an absolutely devastating scene," said James Peters, president and CEO of Landmarks Illinois, which manages and operates the house for the National Trust for Historic Preservation, in a statement today.
"At this point, we are fairly confident the 2008 tour season, which was scheduled to extend through November, is over."
Now the nonprofit is constantly raising money to repair and safeguard the steel-and-glass Farnsworth House.
Landmarks Illinois volunteers paddled boats to the house to helped raise the furniture out of harm's way.
The Fox River has also flooded three nearby bridges and many houses.
The National Trust for Historic Preservation bought the 1951 house at auction for $7.5 million in 2003.
"Weather-based damage and destruction of older and historic sites is a national issue, and in the case of the flooding of Farnsworth House, which we saved with our partner, Landmarks Illinois, it is also a personal one," said Richard Moe, president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, in a statement today. "Our principal concern is for the safety and welfare of members of the public directly impacted by the storms."
In 2003 Landmarks Illinois and the National Trust for Historic Preservation saved the 1951 house from a possible move by buying it from British art patron and architecture aficionado Lord Palumbo for $7.5 million at a Sotheby's auction.
Given its problematic site on the flood plain of the Fox River, moving it (or somehow raising it higher above the ground than the five-foot columns on which it is perched) might no longer seem quite as unthinkable as it did back then, although the original site is certainly part of its architectural identity.
We have, over the course of our five years managing this property, continually investigated solutions to the threat posed by the river.
To that end, we begin this discussion with a list of previously proposed ideas:
1. Placement of a pontoons under the building
2. Longer column extensions that slide out of their footings
3. Szikorsky Helicopter to lift the 300 ton house
4. Hydraulic jacks to raise it in place
5. Building up the site flood plain by 12 ft.
6. Move the house to high ground
7. Retractable flood walls surrounding the house.
8. Waterproofing everything inside the house (vinyl upholstery, plastic laminate wood?)
9. Inflatable raft under the house
10. Internal sandbags around furniture and core
11. Dikes and dams
12. Moats
13. Fixed Moment Frame below the soil
14. Sandbags
15. Temporary flood walls
16. Reverse aquarium designed to rise out of the ground
17. Giant Zip lock bag
18. Steel waterproof shutters
http://www.farnsworthhouse.org/
