VERTICES
Winter 2021-22 20222022
the island their home. GSA’s Pacific Rim Region has a wonderful collection of historic buildings. From the Beaux Arts masterpiece Browning Court of Appeals, which survived San Francisco’s 1906 earthquake, to the Art Deco U.S. Courthouse at 312 N. Spring Street in Los Angeles that played a key role in the history of school desegregation, to the midcentury modern architec-
Browning Court of Appeals, San Francisco, CA
JANE LEHMAN, Architect, LEED AP (B.Arch. ‘82)
The buildings that we studied in the 1970s when I was an architecture student are now old enough to be considered historic. We can look back on them to see how they’ve withstood the test of time.
For the past 17 years, I’ve been the Regional Historic Preservation Officer at the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) in its Pacific Rim Region. I’m a licensed architect. I spent the first 10 years of my career in private architectural practice doing custom residential design work. My federal career began after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake in San Francisco when I started doing disaster recovery work for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). After 12 years with FEMA, I moved to the National Park Service at Golden Gate National Recreation Area where I was the historical architect for Alcatraz, the former island prison in the San Francisco Bay. One of my favorite projects on Alcatraz was the seismic retrofit of the main cell block. Thousands of visitors each day wander through the historic prison without being aware of, or seeing, the massive concrete tie beams that connect the cell blocks to the island bedrock. As the owner’s representative during this construction, I was responsible for balancing the needs of all the project components and stakeholders, which included the construction contractor, the historic buildings, the daily visitors, and the thousands of nesting seabirds that make
ture that was popular in the 1960s and 1970s. A historic building is like a layer cake, rich and satisfying. Historic preservation work starts with research, but you keep digging in and you learn more and more about a building and its history. Buildings may or may not look the same as they did when originally constructed, because buildings must move forward with us, or they won’t get preserved. Most buildings are not preserved just for preservation’s sake, they must function well and meet modern safety and accessibility standards, too. Preservation work is just like good architectural design, if it’s done well, most people don’t notice, they just appreciate the spaces.
Alcatraz Island, San Francisco Bay, CA
U.S. Courthouse, Los Angeles, CA
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PennState Architecture Alumni
Jane Lehman Regional Historic Preservation Officer, Pacific Rim Region United States General Services Administration (GSA) I’ll never know what my greatest professional accomplishment is because my work involves preserving historic places for future generations. I like to think that 50 years, or 100 years, or 200 years from now, people will be appreciating something that I participated in preserving, just the same way that I appreciate the architecture and other historic places saved for me. Or maybe they’ll be thinking, “I can’t believe how much concrete they dumped underneath the cell block, this thing’s not going anywhere!” My two passions have always been buildings and history. I’m fortunate to be able to take my two favorite pastimes and make a wonderful career out of them. Ever since I was young, I’ve loved buildings and I always knew I was going to be an archi tect. Architecture is not just a choice one makes in college, it’s a calling.
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