Virginia S. Lee, M. ARCH

PRESERVATION ARCHITECT/ARCHITECTURAL HISTORIAN

            Virginia S. Lee received a Master’s of Architecture in 1997 from Tulane University School of Architecture.  Her education in preservation architecture started at Tulane University as an undergraduate.  At Virginia Polytechnic and State University, she studied for her Master’s of Science in Preservation.  Initial endeavors included Historic American Building Survey (HABS) projects and a Master’s of Architecture thesis in the adaptive reuse of a warehouse.  Later work incorporated conditions assessments of historic buildings.

            As an undergraduate at Tulane University, Ms. Lee completed three HABS projects.  In the first, Woodland Plantation in West Pointe à la Haché, she wrote the introduction and completed the title page, site map, and a sheet of door details.  The second HABS project, St. Elizabeth’s Orphanage of New Orleans, Ms. Lee arranged as a summer project with the owner, Anne Rice, a novelist.  During her third project, St. Joseph Plantation in Vacherie, Louisiana, she completed the documentation of three outbuildings, and created a conjectural drawing of the St. Joseph store’s original exterior with handicap access and bathroom.  Both Woodland and St. Joseph Plantations received an Honorable Mention in the Peterson Prize competition (1996 and 1997), the National Park Service’s award for historic measured drawings.  St. Elizabeth’s Orphanage placed third in the Peterson Prize competition (1997). 

In Ms. Lee’s Master’s Thesis for a professional degree she explored the adaptive reuse of a warehouse with a new building addition.  A carousel carving school used a warehouse located at the foot of Lookout Mountain in Chattanooga, Tennessee.  The thesis incorporated a reorganized carving classroom, an architect’s office, artists’ studios, and display space.  The new building included a gallery, café, bookstore, and more artists’ studios.

            After graduating from Tulane University, Ms. Lee took a five-month internship as a Junior Collections Architect at the main Historic American Buildings Survey/ Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) office in Washington, D.C.  In the Collections division, architects review and edit the HABS and HAER projects from the regional HABS/HAER offices, universities, and architectural firms.  The office then sends the projects to the Library of Congress for inclusion in the Prints and Photographs division.  Most HABS and HAER projects are available online at www.loc.gov.

After the internship in Collections, Ms. Lee segued into a three-month HABS internship at the Washington, D.C. office.  She completed the project, the Sewell-Belmont House, on Capitol Hill, by the Senate Office Building.  The Sewell-Belmont House housed the Secretary of the Treasury during Thomas Jefferson’s administration.  Consequently, the Secretary finalized most of the Louisiana Purchase at this house.  Since 1929, the house has been home to the National Women’s Party.  After evaluating the partially completed project, she discovered a failure to accurately measure and draft the true measurements of the building.

Other HABS projects include the reconstruction drawings for the Kitchen Building, Solitude Plantation, in Blacksburg, Virginia, the Smokehouse of Stratford Hall, Virginia, and the Brick Barn in Frederick, Maryland.

            Ms. Lee worked on a number of architectural projects in Washington, D.C. and the surrounding area.  The Maggie L. Walker National Historic Site of Richmond, Virginia required reorganization and redesign, including a new elevator lobby.  The Lyndon Baynes Johnson Memorial Grove at the Pentagon required many of architectural and landscape details.

            Ms. Lee also has extensive field experience in building conditions assessment.  Her fortes are wood residence structures and masonry buildings.  Some of her conditions assessments:  Washington National Airport and McKinley High School in Washington, D.C., and various Historic Properties at the Fort Belvoir military base in Northern Virginia.

The project Calvary Baptist Church in Washington, D.C. included conditions assessment, historic research, rehabilitation of exterior, and the reconstruction of the historic spire from a Mathew Brady photograph.  Ms. Lee completed ninety-five percent of the design and drawings.  In 2006 Calvary Baptist Church won the AIA|DC Chapter Award:  “Merit in Historic Resources.”

            At the Historic Districts Landmarks Commission, the position of building plans examiner included enforcement of civil historic building codes regulations, authorization of repairs, additions, and new buildings in local historic districts, and conditions assessment of existing buildings.

At Earth Search, Inc., Ms. Lee wrote the architectural sections of the historic documentation of Duncan Plaza (including the Supreme Court Building of 1955).  Recent New Orleans HABS documentation included the D-Day Museum properties, and the four Housing Authority of New Orleans public housing projects:  C.J. Peete Housing Project, Lafitte Housing Project, St. Bernard Housing Project, and B.W. Cooper Housing Project.