John Beaty, a doctoral student of historic preservation at the college, will head the research behind developing a quick and inexpensive methodology for evaluating the compatibility and durability of repairs to historic masonry. Mortars are made of different combinations of sand and mineral binders such as lime and Portland cement. Because these combinations produce different physical properties, Beaty’s larger goal is to identify the mortar blends that are durable and compatible with historic masonry.

“I am very proud to receive this grant from the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training,” Beaty said. “It is a very competitive award, and UF is the only historic preservation educational institute to have been selected.”

Beaty said the funding will help offset the expenses of doing work in the field and help provide specialty equipment needed for the research.

“I see my research as a step toward a larger goal,” Beaty said. “I would like to facilitate the process of conserving our cultural heritage far into the future. Finding the most efficient repairs for historic masonry would be my small contribution.”

The National Center for Preservation Technology and Training — part of the National Park Service – aims to create new technologies and training opportunities to preserve historic resources throughout the United States.

“This prestigious grant is one example of a multitude of significant research initiatives currently under way by historic preservation faculty and students,” said Marty Hylton, director of the college’s historic preservation program. “Research here at University of Florida is helping secure the future of important heritage sites throughout the nation and internationally.”

Two groups of historic preservation students at the College of Design, Construction and Planning helped take the state park, which was already listed on the National Register of Historic Places as “locally significant,” to the next level: a listing at the state level of significance.

For two semesters, graduate students researched primary source documents to support the site for the elevated status and then write the nomination proposal. Three students opted to complete the nomination during a third semester.

Rachel Thibeault, co-primary writer of the nomination, said that the news came as a relief and as a sense of accomplishment.

“It’s pretty amazing to be able to work on something like a nomination while you’re still a graduate student,” Thibeault said. “It goes way beyond something to put on your résumé.”

Barbara E. Mattick, who heads the National Register Programs for the State of Florida, said that additional information about the site’s history as a Confederate memorial was significant enough to warrant the submission of an entirely new nomination.

At the end of the Civil War, Confederate Secretary of State Judah P. Benjamin – fearing arrest by the U.S. Army, treason charges and the possibility of death – escaped to England by traveling in disguise under a false name. Historical documents further prove that Benjamin sought shelter for roughly two weeks at the Gamble Plantation, the only surviving plantation house in South Florida.

Jim Flook, co-primary writer of the nomination, consulted wartime documents to prove Benjamin’s stop at the site.

“Working on a nomination is one avenue of sharing history,” Flook said. “It’s the ability to take a research project and put it out in front of other people so it can be seen and used.”

Janet Matthews, scholar in residence at the college, has a long history of working with the site as a former Florida state historic preservation officer and former associate director, cultural resources and keeper, National Register of Historic Places with the National Park Service.

The two courses, which took place over spring and fall 2010, included goals to “work with a complicated site and to understand the hard work of documentation and formal writing, which has implication for interpretation to the public,” Matthews said, adding that she “valued the benefits to students of experiencing the tough slog through precision writing in consultation with the state.” The students themselves opted to finalize and submit an official nomination and not simply conduct a class exercise. The park’s elevated status redefined the protected boundaries at the site and broadened its historic documentation.

“This adds to the official record the stunning fact of a courageous, undercover escape that happened in a place we can visit today,” Matthews said.

The nomination was formally reviewed by the Florida National Register Review Board on March 23 in Tallahassee prior to submission to the National Park Service in Washington, D.C., and was officially listed Sept. 23.

University of Florida and University of Tennessee researchers recently joined forces to settle such a time question for historians working to renovate one of St. Augustine’s oldest historic properties, the Ximénez-Fatio house.

In the current issue of the journal Tree-Ring Research, Henri Grissino-Mayer, an associate professor in geography at UT, and Leda Kobziar, an assistant professor with UF’s School of Forest Resources and Conservation, describe their use of dendrochronology to help verify the home’s original age and to pinpoint when it was expanded to include a second-story wing.

They were able to verify the age of the original building to 1798 and that the second-story wing was built in the late 1850s — at least two decades later than historians had believed.

While dendrochronology, or tree-ring dating, has been used extensively in some parts of the U.S., it has been used far less in southeastern states such as Virginia, Tennessee and North Carolina, and only rarely in the southernmost states, such as Georgia and Florida. Because the region’s rainy, hot climate causes wood to decay more quickly, the technique had not been attempted as often as in other regions.

But the UF-UT study proves it can be done accurately in the southernmost parts of the U.S., said Kobziar, a member of UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, and researchers expect to be asked to use the technique more in the future.
Dendrochronology works like this: Trees from a particular geographic area tend to respond similarly to climate changes, such as rainy seasons or drought. Those changes cause differences in the width of growth rings inside the tree.

Researchers create a master chronology by visiting a living forest and collecting many growth-ring samples from living and long-dead trees. In this case, UT researchers had created a massive chronology based on longleaf pine stumps in the Lake Louise, Ga., area.

The pines were full of resin, which kept the stumps extremely well-preserved, and some samples from that area dated to the 1400s, said Grissino-Mayer.

Once researchers have a baseline chronology of growth rings, they can extract samples from the building or wooden artifact whose date is in question and cross-check using a computer program that compares the relationship between tree rings to find matches.

For the researchers in the Ximénez-Fatio study, however, it took a lot of elbow grease — and a little paint thinner — to finally unravel the mystery of the home’s age.

Unlike less-resinous tree species, the longleaf pine beams in the home were much tougher to extract samples from, Kobziar said. The researchers’ drills gummed up repeatedly because of the pine resin, until Grissino-Mayer found an engineering colleague who suggested dipping the hollow drill bits in paint thinner.

“I wish we had thought of it beforehand, because I can tell you I gained some bicep muscles doing all that work,” Kobziar said.

Grissino-Mayer, a national leader in modern-day dendrochronology, predicts a growing market for those wishing to ensure historical accuracy for buildings and artifacts — everything from ship timbers to violins.

For Julia Gatlin, executive director of the Ximénez-Fatio historic house and museum, solving the mystery of the home’s timeline, “totally changed the story as we knew it.”

By knowing the correct dates, she said Ximénez-Fatio officials can now tell visitors that it was the third colonial woman to run the home as a boarding house, Louisa Fatio, who undertook the renovation — not the first, Margaret Cook, as was thought. And they know the wing was built between 1856 and 1858, not between 1830 and 1842.

Gatlin has been speaking to history groups from St. Augustine to Mount Vernon, encouraging them to use dendrochonology to pin down questionable dates.

“The story we had was wrong and now we know our facts are right,” she said. “I am so excited about this.”

As part of a community project, 50 graduate students in UF’s College of Design, Construction and Planning will unveil 50 proposals this summer for a multi-use building and public space in the Bridge District, a section of the city between Washington and Church streets, said Martin Gold, director of UF’s School of Architecture.

Other Florida projects UF students have prepared include housing designs to encourage people to move into less dense sections of downtown Jacksonville, a redevelopment of Chipley’s business district to accommodate hurricane evacuees and a transportation design for the Waldo Road Corridor near Gainesville that would protect the area’s natural resources.

With the federal Department of Transportation’s plans to widen Interstate 4 through downtown Orlando by adding high-occupancy vehicle lanes, the students’ design proposals aim to unite the city’s densely built east side with the less developed west side on the opposite side of the freeway, Gold said.

“Our work in urban design and planning is a way the university can give back to the community,” he said. “It will allow Orlando to make decisions about how they want to plan, develop and evolve their city in a transparent environment; visually exploring ideas with stakeholders in a way they just couldn’t afford to do in the private sector.”

With the planned closure of the Amway Arena and movement of Orlando Magic basketball games and other events to a new arena, the UF architecture students took the opportunity to propose designs for a multi-purpose building near the new Amway Center to integrate it with other sections of the city and prevent it from being an “island,” he said.

On the street level of the proposed multi-use building might be a sports museum or space for retailers displaced from the closing of the old arena, with a hotel located above, Gold said. “An important piece of the project is what is put on the ground underneath that would enhance people walking back and forth from one side of the interstate to the other,” he said.

Other plans call for converting some of the vacant parking space beneath the interstate to other uses, Gold said. A skate park has been proposed, but a basketball court or park with an overlooking restaurant might also work well, he said.

The student projects were part of the first-year graduate curriculum of the School of Architecture that included 50 students led by associate professor Michael Kuenstle, professor Bill Tilson, assistant professor Ruth Ron and adjunct professor Guy Peterson.

Typically, when communities hire private architects, they have rather specific ideas of the job they want done and pay firms to develop their ideas in some detail, Gold said.

With the UF students’ work, the city commission and public are able to review many different proposals in the form of drawings, architectural renderings and three-dimensional models, giving them the opportunity to see which aspects are appropriate about a particular scheme before making a decision, he said.

“People feel less threatened having more time to digest the ideas, and they know that since it’s a student project, bulldozing isn’t going to start tomorrow,” he said.

Students benefit from the experience of presenting their designs to civic leaders, who may have a different perspective than their professors about a project’s criteria, Gold said.

“We find there is much greater acceptance when an idea is presented by a student than by a professional, even when it is exactly the same idea,” he said. “Out of a willingness to help the student grow, people seem to be softer on the negative parts and really hone in on what they like about the project, which makes the conversations more positive.”

The project is an initiative of the UF research and teaching center Citylab-Orlando, which was developed by the College of Design, Construction and Planning. The program began operating out of the old convention center just south of the Amway Arena last fall in partnership with the University of Central Florida Center for Emerging Media.

Orlando is ideal for field work because it has many urban characteristics that Gainesville lacks, including a larger downtown, and as a postwar city that developed around the automobile it has a sprawling residential population typical of many American cities, Gold said. “When people go to architecture school, many of the issues they deal with are urban related, so Orlando serves an important role as a working laboratory for us,” he said.

Other states have developed prosperous tourist trades by enticing city dwellers to natural and historic places, said Tina Gurucharri, a UF landscape architecture professor, who is leading a team that is exploring similar prospects in Florida.

“Rural tourism is popular because with so many people living in cities today, there are lots of kids who have never been on a farm, ridden a horse or even picked fresh fruit,” she said. “Florida hasn’t really developed this new emerging form of tourism, but other parts of the country have been very successful at it.”

The Midwest has its “farm days,” where children milk cows and feed chickens, and the Rocky Mountains its “cowboy weekends” where families ride horses and round up cattle, Gurucharri said. In North Florida, rural tourism could make a splash in riverside communities, with opportunities to kayak, canoe and paddle; bicycle on tree-lined country roads; and walk through historic downtowns, she said.

Rural tourism offers an economic boost to small communities struggling to survive as young people leave for jobs elsewhere by luring urbanities in the opposite directions and by protecting local “mom and pop” businesses against encroaching mega corporations, she said.

With an anonymous donation, UF’s School of Natural Resources and Environment surveyed Hamilton County residents and businesses for an economic analysis. Students and faculty in UF’s College of Design, Construction and Planning, working with their colleagues in the Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, then prepared comprehensive proposals for the county, with its thousands of acres of undisturbed public lands; three pristine rivers and many cemeteries. Suggestions include an eco-lodge on the banks of the Suwannee River; a welcome center combining a farmer’s market, bike rental shop and restaurant that could feature Southern home cooking; and a 425-acre historic district in the town of Jasper.

“Our design approach was to take advantage of the area’s rural character because they have amazing cultural, historical and natural assets,” Gurucharri said. “There are Victorian homes, old cemeteries and live oak trees that are really beautiful.”

The area draws thousands to the annual Florida Folk Festival at the Stephen Foster Folk Cultural Center State Park in White Springs, Gurucharri said. But few concertgoers stay overnight because accommodations are limited to cabins and camping, she said.

To capture those tourist dollars, the UF design team proposed an eco-lodge next to the state park along the river bank, with elevated trails to protect soil and vegetation, Gurucharri said. “Especially as the baby boomers age, while some people like camping along the river, there is another group who want a different experience and can afford to stay in a lodge with hot showers and meals,” she said.

Raising the visibility of Jennings, another Hamilton County town, is the aim of one team proposal to renovate an empty historic brick building along the Interstate 75 corridor at the city’s entrance into a welcome center where visitors could sample fresh produce and Southern cooking and rent bicycles, Gurucharri said. The idea is modeled after the old orange stops along the highway, befitting Jennings’ location near the Florida-Georgia border, she said.

The most extensive revitalization plans are suggested for the town of Jasper, where UF students inventoried 150 historic buildings, many of them old Victorian homes, and proposed creating a pedestrian-friendly residential and commercial historic district.

A redesigned central park would be the civic heart of the community, with arts and crafts fairs and blackberry festivals, around which sidewalk cafes and retail shops could be built, Gurucharri said. Running through the park would be a greenway along an old railroad corridor that bisects downtown, with nearby countywide biking trails, walking paths and a driving path for parades of old cars, she said.

With extensive efforts from local citizens, the city is moving ahead with some of the UF suggestions and is seeking a $500,000 Florida Department of Transportation grant for roadside trees, sidewalks, planters and various central park improvements, Gurucharri said. The first blackberry festival, one of 12 in the United States, is scheduled for June, she said.

Cindy Eatmon, co-owner of Bass Furniture and a lifetime Jasper resident whose roots date back to when the area was homesteaded, praised the UF’s team’s efforts to maintain the town’s rural character and said the timing could not have been better. “Our town was dying,” she said. “It used to be a booming community, but if you drive through town, you see a lot of empty buildings.”

In the report that looks at 2008 economic data, agriculture and related industries contributed $76.5 billion to the state’s economy, said Alan Hodges, an extension scientist with UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences.

“Every single sector of the economy has been affected in the recession, there’s just no getting away from that. And agriculture is no exception,” Hodges said. “However, it looks like agriculture has taken less of a hit than some other segments.”

Hodges has been involved in the annual report’s production since 2000.

Economic data compiled by the federal government lags about two years behind, and 2008 is the most recent year for which data available, he said. Economists peg December 2007 as the start of the country’s recession.

The report tracks more than 90 industry sectors – such as farming, ranching, pest control, fertilizer manufacturing, mining, food and beverage manufacturing, paper and lumber production, golf courses, recreational fishing and commercial hunting and trapping.

Agriculture’s $76.5 billion value-added impact from the 2008 report is down from the 2007 figure of $93 billion — but that’s similar to the economic hit suffered by other industries during the same time period, he said.

The value-added impact includes what economists call multiplier effects, which Hodges explains like this: A farmer buys things like seeds, fertilizer, machinery and equipment from suppliers. That spending creates revenue for suppliers and their employees, who spend their wages on things like food, housing and transportation.

The researchers rely on a model called IMPLAN that tracks a vast array of economic transactions between business sectors.

Agriculture’s value-added impact is down, and Hodges said he believes lower demand for the state’s agricultural exports is to blame. For example, citrus fruit is exported from Florida to Europe and Asia, and those exports were down by nearly 20 percent in 2008.

Still, agriculture and natural resource industries accounted in 2008 for about 8 percent of Florida’s gross state product.

Accounting for nearly 1.3 million full- and part-time jobs, or 14 percent of the state’s total employment in 2008, agriculture ranks second in jobs among the state’s economic sectors, though Hodges notes that UF’s report reclassified some jobs from the North American Industry Classification System’s designations.

Among industry groups, average annual growth in value-added impacts from 2001 through 2007 was highest for mining (19 percent) and crop, livestock, forestry and fishery production (10 percent), followed by food and kindred products distribution (5 percent) and forest product manufacturing (3 percent).

For more data, please see the full report: http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/fe829.

New trends in hospital design are helping health-care systems to better choreograph care and provide a soothing yet energy-efficient environment.

Consider the Shands Cancer Hospital at the University of Florida, which opens Nov. 1. The new 500,000-square-foot, $388-million medical tower is an extension of the Shands at UF academic medical center on its new south campus. The tower will feature 192 private beds and will house the Shands Critical Care Center for emergency and trauma services. Medical teams will serve a variety of inpatients, including those receiving diagnostic and therapeutic oncology care.

“Through academic medicine, we offer patients novel diagnostic and treatment options by expert physicians, researchers and teachers, and skilled and compassionate nurses and clinical teams,” said Timothy Goldfarb, Shands HealthCare CEO. “Now we have added a truly innovative, healing setting that incorporates industry best practices and therapeutic design to enhance our patient’s overall health-care experience. This is the hospital of tomorrow.”

Shands and Gainesville Regional Utilities partnered to establish the GRU South Energy Center to provide 100 percent of the hospital’s energy needs. The onsite power plant will ensure uninterrupted power, independent of the city’s energy grid, regardless of a prolonged outage elsewhere in the community. It will efficiently convert fuel into electricity and provide 46 percent savings compared with traditional fossil fuel-burning generations. Officials estimate this will save 27 million kilowatts per year, enough to power about 3,000 homes.

The commitment to use environmentally sustainable construction methods to build the hospital has earned Shands HealthCare the silver Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design designation per the U.S. Green Building Council rating system.

“We used insulated windows that are treated to reduce solar glare and white rooftops designed to reflect heat,” said Brad Pollitt, Shands HealthCare vice president for facilities. “The facility’s air-conditioning heat wheels help to recover lost energy and irrigation and drainage systems use reclaimed water. We provide showers for employees who bike to work and special parking for hybrid cars.”

Pollitt says that Shands is now being considered for gold-level LEED certification and will be one of a few academic medical centers nationwide to achieve this rating.

“Opening the Shands Cancer Hospital at UF marks a milestone for us,” said Dr. David S. Guzick, UF senior vice president for health affairs and president of the UF&Shands Health System. “It will enable us to meet the growing needs of cancer patients, advance our ability to care for emergency and critical care patients and ensure our long-term commitment to meeting the region’s health-care needs.”

In designing the building, hospital facilities teams worked with architects whose expertise is health-care environments. Nursing and medical staff provided input to incorporate features such as nurse stations that improve sight lines to patients and monitoring systems and details that give patients control of their environment, allowing them to adjust lighting and window shades with the click of a remote. There is abundant natural light on each floor and hallway lights are wall-mounted or recessed so patients aren’t subjected to blinding glare as they are wheeled from place to place.

“Every planning and design decision we made as a team was centered on patient comfort and ease for hospital staff in providing safe and healing care,” said Laura Stillman, principal-in-charge/project director at Flad Architects.

“The new building is light-filled, welcoming and easily navigable for patients, families and staff – and we believe it offers hope to those who will experience it,” she added.

In 2009, more than 100,000 cancer cases will be diagnosed in Florida, second only to California in the nation’s cancer cases. In north Florida alone, at least 4,500 new cases are diagnosed annually. One in seven adults treated at Shands at UF has a cancer-related condition.

The new tower also includes the Shands Critical Care Center at UF, which combines an emergency department and Level I trauma center. The emergency room has 62 treatment areas and provides clinical teams the capacity to treat 100,000 patients a year. The trauma center has four large treatment rooms and is strategically located directly beneath the rooftop helipad that can hold the weight of two helicopters at once – making care a brief elevator ride away when every moment counts.

In addition, in mass-casualty situations the emergency department capacity can be quickly doubled. The private exam rooms have break-away doors, are 18 inches wider than code requirements and can hold side-by-side beds.

The hospital also includes 12 high-tech operating rooms designed to accommodate anticipated evolutions in robotics and 3-D imaging; surgical intensive and intermediate care units; and a bone marrow transplant unit, outpatient clinic and stem cell lab. A full-spectrum radiology department features the “crown jewel” of imaging, the Aquilion ONE 320-detector row CT scanner. The $2.5-million diagnostic tool, the second Shands HealthCare has acquired, helps physicians diagnose cancer, and it can detect stroke and heart disease in minutes, replacing dozens of other tests that typically take hours or even days. Shands was the first in Florida and one of only a handful in the nation to acquire this technology.

Ultimately, hospital officials worked hard to create a setting that underscores their commitment to hope and healing, from the Garden of Hope, which provides a place for quiet reflection, to the Sanctuaries of Silence and Peace, areas for meditation and prayer.

“As our clinical teams focus on each patient’s medical and physical condition, the beautifully designed building creates a healing environment and helps us support their emotional well-being,” Goldfarb said.

Some studies indicate that design improvements lead to improved patient outcomes, although more research needs to be done, according to Robert Cassidy, editor-in-chief of Building Design+Construction magazine, based in Oak Brook, Ill.

“There’s great value in saving energy, improving day-lighting and providing views of nature and other amenities, such as healing gardens and family centered patient rooms and facilities,” Cassidy said. “One of the ways the patients and families evaluate a health-care setting is how bright and cozy it is. Whether those elements have a benefit in reduced length of stay or other clinical benefits is not scientifically proven, but our gut tells us they do.”

In today’s tight economy, the lengths apparel stores go to lure customers with deep discounts and colorful interior designs are likely to fall short if shoppers don’t like how they look in the mirror, said Anne Baumstarck, who did the research for her master’s degree in interior design at UF.

“The dressing room represents the final moment when the consumer decides whether or not to make a clothing purchase,” she said. “It is where the sale is made.”

Yet retailers often overlook the importance of how the room is illuminated, thinking all shoppers need is an overhead light to be able to see when trying on merchandise, Baumstarck said. But shoppers may have other needs, and lighting direction appears to affect how people see themselves, she said.

“After all sorts of money is invested in a store’s atmospherics, it gives shoppers a letdown to have poorly planned dressing rooms,” she said. “Retailers diminish the feeling they’ve worked so hard to create in the main store.”

While other studies have examined lighting on the sales floor, none have looked at the effects it has on shoppers in dressing rooms, Baumstarck said.

In Baumstarck’s study, 60 female shoppers ages 18 to 35 who tried on clothes in the dressing rooms at Wolfgang, a Gainesville clothing boutique, showed a clear preference for frontal lights — those installed along the sides of the mirror — to overhead lights, which were mounted on the ceiling.

“Women complained that overhead lighting created shadows on their face, making them look unattractive,” she said.

To avoid these unflattering shadows, shoppers had to step back from the mirror and move around, Baumstarck said. “They were constantly engaged in trying to negotiate the best spot to stand and ended up dancing around the dressing room,” she said.

When customers notice the negative aspects of their surroundings, it distracts them from paying attention to the merchandise, Baumstarck said. “You never want a consumer to be thinking ‘I hate this lighting’ instead of ‘I like this dress,’” she said.

Overhead lighting also makes a room seem smaller — even cramped — creating a need to escape, Baumstarck said. With frontal lighting, dressing rooms appear roomier, and shoppers said they were willing to stay longer and even try on more clothes, she said.

Women most impressed with frontal lighting were those who placed a high priority on personal appearance and how they looked in clothes; by comparison, more utilitarian shoppers cared only about finding a particular article of apparel that fit, the study found.

Results showed that this “self-oriented” shopper would sometimes comment about frontal lighting giving their skin a healthy glow, making their cellulite less visible or being so soft and flattering that it made it appear they were in a bar or restaurant in the evening, she said.

Previous research shows consumers choose a store with a particular image, such as one that is healthy and sporty or sexy and trendy because they want to be seen as having those attributes, Baumstarck said.

Lighting was so important that it captured a majority of the comments — 51 percent — that women made in the study, Baumstarck said. Of the 36 comments made about overhead lighting, 25 were negative, representing 69 percent of the total, and 11 were positive, making up 31 percent. In contrast, frontal lighting generated 34 comments, of which 20 were positive — 59 percent — and 14 were negative or 41 percent.

Lighting in stores varies, with overhead lights common in lower-priced bargain stores, Baumstarck said. Some retailers don’t even designate lighting for dressing rooms; the same overhead light fixtures serve both dressing rooms and the main sales floor, she said.

“It’s not all about the clothes,” she said. “What woman doesn’t go into a dressing room and engage in a dialogue with herself about how attractive she is? You don’t want to give her any opportunity to feel badly about herself.”

Baumstarck’s study has great implications for retailers and consumers, especially with the economic downturn, said Paulette Hebert, an Oklahoma State University design professor and lighting expert. “One important variable, such as dressing room illumination, may mean the difference in a store remaining viable in today’s economy,” she said.

“Determining a specific dollar value for quality of life is a challenging undertaking,” said project co-director Timothy McLendon, staff attorney at the Center for Governmental Responsibility at UF’s Levin College of Law, which conducted the study along with UF’s Department of Urban and Regional Planning. “Therefore, we offered local decision makers a number of options for protecting historically valuable assets that contribute to the community.”

Florida residents also recognize the importance of historic preservation, according to a survey commissioned as part of the overall study. Based on surveys of more than 1,500 Floridians during November and December 2005, and January 2006, the most threatened historic resources in Florida include historic and scenic landscapes; old homes and neighborhoods; and old downtowns. Respondents, likewise, saw a need to preserve Florida’s historic resources for future generations, scenic reasons and education. The survey was conducted by UF’s Bureau of Economic & Business Research as part of its monthly statewide consumer confidence survey.

The report includes models and tools available to further historic preservation in Florida and to measure the impact of historical structures, events and related activities on the enhancement of the quality of life in Florida.

Specifically, the use of community indicators is described as a tool for decision-makers to measure their success in improving the quality of life in their communities. Community indicators are bits of information that are combined to provide a picture of what is happening in a community. For historic preservation purposes, these may include items like the number or type of local ordinances; the number of projects qualifying for historic tax credits or exemptions; changes in property values; numbers of historic districts; and visitors to and support for local historic museums. Other tools included in the report are preservation laws and policies, tourist-related tax revenues, and creative solutions to conflicts of gentrification, sustainability and rehabilitation.

“We’re excited to have this wonderful study to confirm that along with the economic impacts that result from historic preservation, the quality of life is indeed improved as well,” said Caroline Tharpe Weiss, executive director of the Florida Trust for Historic Preservation, which provided key support for the study.

Sprinkled throughout the report are examples of model communities and projects that have succeeded in using the tools to enhance quality of life. DeFuniak Springs and Fernandina Beach are described as communities whose historic roots lure tourists and improve the economies of their regions. The St. Augustine Lighthouse and Museum; the Fort Christmas Historical Park in Central Florida; and the Riley House museum near Tallahassee are provided as case studies of how history museums can be important community resources.

Also described in the report are conservation districts in Tampa, Sarasota and Zephyrhills that offer ways for local governments to balance historic preservation through protection, rehabilitation and revitalization, all contributing to a neighborhood’s culture. Other incentive programs, including tax credits and exemptions and grants have been key to preserving and improving Florida communities.

The 18-month study was funded with historic preservation grant assistance provided by the Bureau of Historic Preservation, Division of Historical Resources, Florida Department of State, assisted by the Florida Historical Commission. The study was a collaborative effort involving multiple UF partners: the Center for Governmental Responsibility; the Department of Urban and Regional Planning; the Center for Building Better Communities; the Graduate Program in Museum Studies; and the Center for Tourism Research and Development.

The Quality of Life study complements an earlier study on the Economic Impacts of Historic Preservation in Florida released in 2002. The full Quality of Life report is available at: www.law.ufl.edu/cgr, or copies may be obtained from the Division of Historical Resources, Florida Department of State 850-245-6333.

Fifty-seven percent of those surveyed said they considered high-rises to be vulnerable to terrorist attacks, but an even larger number, 60 percent, reported feeling safe in these buildings, the UF study found. The findings were from interviews with 384 people walking into one of the seven tallest structures in Tampa, Fla., on Aug. 14, a month before the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

“People may still believe skyscrapers are terrorist (targets) but so are subways, stadiums and airplanes and that doesn’t stop people from riding to work, going to football games or flying across the country to see their family,” said Brandon Moore, who did the research for his master’s thesis in building construction at UF.

If anything, the skyscraper has become even more popular since Sept. 11, with the number under construction nearly doubling, Moore said. Between 2002 and 2006, 1,334 skyscrapers in the United States were built or scheduled to be completed, compared with 593 from 1996 to 2000, he said.

“Skyscrapers are the biggest man-made achievement we see on a day-to-day basis,” Moore said. “They have too much symbolic value to be toppled by terrorists.”

The stature of these buildings in America’s cultural and physical landscape was recognized by survey respondents. Sixty-five percent said they were proud of the nation’s skyscrapers, and 56 percent said they could identify cities by their skylines.

Moore said the findings could apply elsewhere because Tampa is a typical mid- to large-sized American city, which, like other parts of the South and West, is booming. Tampa has 57 skyscrapers, the tallest being the 579-foot AmSouth Building. Sixteen high-rises are under construction.

Although Tampa may not be considered a major terrorist target like Manhattan, a highly publicized incident involving a small private plane crashing into the 42-story Bank of America building occurred on Jan. 5, he said.

Besides symbolic value, economics and conservation may also explain the skyscraper’s growing popularity; it allows the maximum amount of people in the smallest amount of space, Moore said.

“Suburbia is losing its appeal with strip mall after strip mall, subdivision after subdivision and the hassle of having to drive everywhere with the cost of fuel,” he said. “People are starting to want to live in the city, where they can walk to work or walk to the gym.”

Building vertically instead of horizontally makes sense because a building that takes up the space of one city block can house an entire community, with medical offices, pharmacies, grocery stores and apartments that house hundreds of residents, Moore said.

“With the world’s growing population and diminishing supply of land, the skyscraper is the building of the future, even though it’s been around for more than a century,” he said.

The skyscraper was invented after the Great Chicago Fire destroyed most of the downtown’s wooden-framed, low-level buildings, Moore said. Steel was used to rebuild downtown because it was more fire resistant, and one of its unforeseen physical properties was that it allowed buildings to be taller, he said.

The world’s first skyscraper was Chicago’s 10-story Home Insurance Building built in 1885, but once New York approved skeleton steel construction in its building code at the turn of the century it quickly became the nation’s skyscraper capital. It was not until 1974 that Chicago regained distinction with construction of the Sears Tower, the world’s tallest building at 1,451 feet until the 1,483-foot twin Petronas Towers were built in Malaysia in 1998.

Today the skyscraper is something of an “Asian Tiger” because of its stronghold in China, Japan, Malaysia and Taiwan, Moore said. Eight of the world’s 10 highest buildings are in Asia, including the tallest, the 1,671-foot Taipei 101 in Taipei, Taiwan. The other two on the list are the Sears Tower, fourth, and the Empire State Building in New York City, ninth.

“With scarce land, booming populations and thriving economies, it is no wonder that many Asian nations are taking the lead in skyscraper construction,” Moore said. “As pagodas and shrines disappear, the skyscraper is taking their place.”

The study explored the implications of the single-family room design when compared with open-bay, double-occupancy and combination configurations at 11 hospitals nationwide. The single-family room design has separate rooms for each infant, while the open-bay unit has one large room with all the infant stations side-by-side.

Typically, staff working in an open-bay unit believe their jobs will be more difficult and they will spend less time with patients if their unit is redesigned as a single-family room unit, said Debra Harris, UF interior design assistant professor who was principal investigator for the study. This is because the open-bay unit allows the staff to see all patients and to have ongoing contact with other staff in the unit.

“However, once the unit switched to the single-family room, we found the opposite to be true. Staff noticed the obvious benefits of the private rooms for the patient and family,” Harris said. “At the same time, the staff were able to rely on technology to assist them in keeping abreast of their patients’ health. Staff reported lower stress and higher satisfaction in the single-family room units.”

The study revealed many benefits to the single-family room design, but surprisingly, found a relatively low increase in the cost to construct a new unit at an existing or new hospital.

“There was a mere 3 percent increase in the first construction costs for the single-family room design. We thought it would be greater,” Harris said.

The study looked at Level III NICUs, which care for the most acute babies needing the most specialized care. Researchers employed five methods to compare the units, including space allocations, construction costs, staff preferences and perceptions and occupant behaviors. The study was published in the October issue of the Journal of Perinatology.

Other researchers involved include Mardelle Shepley of Texas A&M University, Robert White of Memorial Hospital in South Bend, Ind., Kathleen Kolberg of the University of Notre Dame and James Harrell of the Harrell Group in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Previous research on single-family room units is limited. Harris views this study as a preliminary, comprehensive effort to generate future in-depth research.

Researchers were unable to obtain sufficient data to compare the impact of room design on the health of the infants, but a future study will include data on weight, days on ventilation, head circumference, hospital-acquired infections, length of stay, etc.

“This study presents an agenda for further research. In addition, it can be used as a tool for hospitals to determine if their NICUs should or can be designed as single-family units,” Harris said. “For those renovating existing space, this may prove challenging. But for new units, it is an option that should be considered.”

Making stores attractive and alluring to shoppers has long been the aim of retail designers rather than preventing theft, but a store’s interior layout often influences shoplifters in whether to steal there, said Caroline Cardone, who did the research for her master’s thesis in UF’s interior design department.

“Shoplifters enter a store, scan the space and quickly judge whether it’s unprotected, understaffed or offers a quick escape,” she said. “Once they recognize a store’s vulnerability, they’ll take advantage of it again and again.”

Some common patterns emerged in Cardone’s analysis of data collected by the Loss Prevention Research Council, a multidisciplinary team of UF researchers, which included interviews with 20 apprehended shoplifters in Orlando, Dania, Fla., and Chicago.

The criminals often sought stores with chaotic, overpacked aisles or crowded, cramped spaces because they offered good camouflage, she said.

Wide, clear aisles, a clean, well-maintained interior and a logically planned store make it less likely for thieves to escape detection, Cardone said. Aisles should be visible from the checkout lane, and the cashier’s view of the store should not be blocked by high shelves overstuffed with merchandise, she said.

“Such design tactics will help contribute to the perception of the store being orderly and well-monitored, which seems to make shoplifters feel more vulnerable,” said Cardone, who will present her findings Tuesday at a two-day retail design workshop at UF.

Thieves reported seeking “blind spots” hidden from the view of employees and closed-circuit television cameras where they would take products they had picked up in other parts of the store and stuff them into a sock or pocket, Cardone said. Often these were easily concealable items such as batteries, film and tooth-whitening products that could easily be resold on the street, sometimes to support a drug habit, she said.

Some stores place these sought-after goods behind counters or in locked cases, frustrating legitimate customers who must go out of their way to ask for them, which hurts sales, Cardone said. A less threatening approach might be to station employees in the aisles in direct sight of these coveted items, perhaps at a “customer service station” by the cosmetics counter or pharmacy, where they can answer questions from customers while watching for suspicious activity, she said.

“One CVS pharmacy had a regular employee camped out in the aisle with a folding table and her job was to market cosmetics to people,” she said. “It makes a lot of sense to have an employee in cosmetics talk about the benefits of the products. By the same token, you don’t dare steal anything with this person standing 2 feet in front of you.”

Stationing a store “greeter” near the exit and lengthening the amount of space between the cashier and front entrance also increases the odds that shoplifters will be caught, she said.

Alternate exits create stealing opportunities, as many large mass-merchant chains find with attached garden areas that sell plants and garden accessories, Cardone said.

“The offender simply brings the stolen goods to the garden area, tosses them over the fence and leaves the store,” she said. “Either the thief retrieves the merchandise later or an accomplice is waiting on the other side to catch it.”

Electronics store Best Buy’s practice of placing cameras, iPods and other electronic products on counters with flexible cords allows customers to touch and test the products without walking away with them, Cardone said. ‘”The best displays are able to both protect and market the product,” she said.

Few studies examine how a store interior design affects shoplifting despite the crime’s high toll, which in 2004 totaled an estimated $10 billion in losses, Cardone said. “Retailers have tried everything to minimize shoplifting – stringent apprehension policies, high-tech protection devices and increased security measures – but none have solved the problem,” she said.

Joshua Bamfield, director of the Centre for Retail Research in Nottingham, England, praised Cardone’s research. “This kind of thorough research into the ways retailers can cut losses by thinking carefully about their stores’ layout and design is exactly the type of study corporations need to help combat the menace of shop crime,” he said.

The Program for Resource Efficient Communities, sponsored by UF’s School of Natural Resources and Environment, encourages sustainable development practices by working with builders, architects and other professionals involved in all phases of residential community development.

“Many new developments are master-planned communities with thousands of homes consuming large amounts of energy and raw materials,” said Pierce Jones, a professor in UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences and director of the program. “These communities represent a major change in land use from agricultural and natural areas to urban or suburban. Developers buy large tracts of land, and their decisions can affect important ecological systems.”

The program matches the knowledge of UF faculty with the needs of developers. Participating faculty have expertise in many disciplines, including environmental engineering, energy, water, wildlife, forestry, landscape architecture and building construction.

Stephen Mulkey, director of research and outreach for the natural resources and environment school, said the school helps the program gain access to UF county extension offices to address the issue of growth in the state. “The program has shown that we can meet the needs of development and do it in a sustainable way,” he said.

The Program for Resource Efficient Communities recently worked with developers of the Harmony community in Central Florida. All 7,200 homes in Harmony will be built to meet or exceed the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star standards.

“This means lower electric bills for each homeowner,” Jones said. “The overall result is a reduction in the demand for power generation and the need to burn fossil fuels.”

More than 7,000 of Harmony’s 11,000 acres are devoted to woods, wetlands, lakes, parks and recreation areas available to residents, he said. The golf course, which wraps around existing wetlands, was designed to preserve the area’s diverse plant and animal life.

“Developers are beginning to realize that they can offer open space as an amenity and add other features such as golf courses to enhance the natural environment rather than degrade it,” Jones said.

Some cities in Florida are providing additional incentives for builders to use “green” building methods, he said. The City of Gainesville recently implemented a green building program to promote the voluntary use of sustainable and environmentally friendly practices in design and construction. The city uses standards developed by the Florida Green Building Coalition and the U.S. Green Building Council.

“The Program for Resource Efficient Communities evaluates these certification standards for best design and management practices,” Jones said. “Builders who follow the standards receive fast-track permitting and a 50 percent reduction in permitting fees.”

He said UF faculty also participated in the design and development of Madera, an 88-home community developed by GreenTrust, LLC, on a wooded 44-acre site adjacent to the UF campus.

“The first home built in the Madera community took advantage of the Gainesville Green Building Program and saved the builder $650 in permit fees after accounting for the fast- tracking and 50 percent discount,” Jones said.

Those who buy Madera homes can choose from a range of construction and appliance packages that reduce electricity and water usage as compared to a typical home, Jones said. Durable and recyclable construction materials reduce the amount of waste going into landfills. Landscaping with native and drought-tolerant plants further reduces water consumption and the amount of turf, pesticides and fertilizers needed.

The Program for Resource Efficient Communities evaluates and promotes several other green certification programs and standards, including Audubon International’s Signature Programs, a series of nonprofit education and assistance programs to help landowners, managers and developers follow sustainable practices.

In addition to reviewing certification standards, the program creates and teaches continuing education courses that satisfy Florida licensing and professional association requirements.

Some of the course topics include construction techniques to improve indoor air quality, deter termites and limit building moisture problems such as mold and mildew. Other areas focus on windstorm-resistant housing, durable materials and renewable and recyclable resources for building construction.

Jones said the program also develops environmental education for homeowners, supports applied research and provides case studies. The program screens research at UF to identify projects of interest to developers and leverages collaborative efforts in the private sector to determine new areas of potential research for UF faculty.

“We want to show everyone from developers and homeowners to realtors and mortgage bankers that energy efficiency adds value to a home while helping conserve our natural resources,” Jones said. “We want to make people aware that alternative methods of design and construction are available. In the face of Florida’s rapid growth, green building methods can help to preserve and even enhance our quality of life.”

UF will be among the first universities in the nation to fuse efforts to make campus practices environmentally friendly with an interdisciplinary academic emphasis on sustainability.

“We focus on three aspects of sustainability: ecology, economy and equity, or social justice,” said Kim Tanzer, chairwoman for the 150-member UF Faculty Senate that has initiated the Office of Sustainability, along with the Office of the President.

“It’s important to ‘green’ the campus, but it’s also important that we’re applying our research expertise to the campus, so the fact that we’ll have an academic officer and a director in the same office will allow us to use the campus as a living laboratory,” Tanzer said. “We’d like to draw together all the good efforts being done on campus already and use the office to create a new synergy.”

Although the Office of Sustainability will not officially open until an executive director is hired in November, some sustainability efforts are already under way. They encompass every aspect of the university from living wages to the designs for new buildings.

In the past year, UF has assembled a roster of more than 100 faculty members whose teaching, research or service involves some aspect of sustainability.

In November 2000, the university announced a living wage program for entry-level employees. The current starting salary is $8.67 per hour.

Currently the university recycles seven categories of recycled solid waste: paper, cans, glass, scrap metal, masonry, yard waste, and sludge. More than 30 percent of all solid waste generated by the university is recovered on campus and recycled through various local or regional brokers and processing firms.

The university’s purchasing policy supports the purchasing of products that will minimize any negative environmental impacts of our work.

Fred H. Cantrell, associate vice president for finance and administration, said the new office is expected to establish UF as a global leader in sustainability, reduce operational costs through sustainable practices, and improve the quality of campus and community life.

UF also is designing new buildings that meet the standards for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED), Tanzer said. Current buildings with this design include additions to the Florida Museum of Natural History and the Levin College of Law, along with the new Rinker Hall. The LEED standards reward innovative design, site selection, materials and technological features that save money and the environment.

“Among academic projects, the butterfly pavilion at the Florida Museum of Natural History demonstrates sustainability in a number of ways,” Tanzer said. “The [McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity] is a LEED-certified building, and the internationally prominent research program promotes sustainability.”

Butterflies are sentinels of environmental problems, she said. If butterflies cannot survive in an environment, it is an indicator of high levels of pesticides or other non-sustaining factors.

Six primary areas of sustainability were identified in the 2002 Report of the Task Force on Sustainability: research, education, campus operations, community outreach and integration, campus community, and organizational policies and practices.

Professor P.K. Nair, a member of the sustainability committee, said efforts to provide for needs of the present should not compromise the ability of future generations to provide for themselves.

“This is a serious issue for leading academic institutions such as UF that are supposed to shape the ‘state of the future,’” Nair said. “An Office of Sustainability at UF will provide a focal point and stimulus for our efforts and ability in addressing these issues.”

Tanzer said UF’s sustainability efforts go beyond business practices.

“It is very important to include all aspects of sustainability in a university, because our students don’t just learn within the classroom, but from their whole environment,” she said.

Tanzer said many students at UF have become aware of campus sustainability efforts, and many have become involved. UF students complete about 150,000 hours of community outreach work each year.

The Office of Sustainability has a Web site, www.sustainability.ufl.edu, and has begun its search for an executive director.

In the first, a team of research engineers from UF and two other Florida universities deployed five mobile wind towers in Dennis’ projected path, then monitored and recorded the hurricane’s winds as it powered ashore. In the second project, UF Institute of Food and Agriculture Sciences researchers followed the hurricane’s impact on UF’s “hurricane house” near Pensacola, built to withstand winds exceeding 140 mph.

The 3,000-square-foot house adjacent to the Escambia County extension office in Cantonment was all but undamaged. The top wind gust the engineers measured was about 120 mph, about the same as reported by meteorologists.

With both projects, data and experience from the storm’s strike will add to the growing body of knowledge about how to build homes to withstand hurricanes.

“Overall, the idea is to learn the most efficient way to make houses stronger without costing a lot more,” Kurt Gurley, a UF associate professor of civil engineering, said of the tower project.

Gurley’s team of 17 research engineers and students from UF, Florida International University and the Florida Institute of Technology left Gainesville on Friday and Saturday, towing the towers behind Ford F-250 trucks. The project is part of a larger hurricane research effort called the Florida Coastal Monitoring Program, sponsored by the Florida Department of Community Affairs.

Designed for quick setup and able to withstand 200-mph winds, the 5,500-pound structures stand more than 33 feet tall when erected. They house instruments measuring wind speed and direction, barometric pressure, humidity and rainfall.

The team put up the towers between Navarre, just east of Pensacola, and Panama City.
They also placed instrumentation designed to measure hurricane wind forces on four pre-selected homes in Navarre, Destin and Santa Rosa Beach. Dennis made landfall Sunday afternoon between Pensacola Beach and Navarre Beach.

Team members spent Saturday and Sunday nights safely ensconced in a hotel east of Pensacola in Mary Esther, but they were able to gauge the tower data in real time thanks to a cell phone connection to three of the towers’ onboard computers. The peak preliminary wind gust of 120 mph was recorded by the Navarre tower, probably located in or near the eye Hurricane Dennis, Gurley said.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration also tapped the tower data. NOAA uses the UF data, as well as data from other sources such as satellites and research aircraft, to produce detailed maps of hurricane wind forces used by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and other responders to hurricanes.

The tower data “is probably the most accurate wind measurement we can use in our analysis, so we’re very happy to have it,” said Mark Powell, a NOAA atmospheric scientist based in Miami.

The hurricane house, officially known as the Escambia Windstorm Damage Mitigation, Training and Demonstration Center, was undamaged with the exception of some wet carpet, said Lamar Christenberry, Escambia County extension director.

The house shows how existing homes can be made more hurricane-resistant. For example, its features include impact-resistant doors, a steel “safe room” and a garage door that will withstand winds of more than 150 mph.

“Our hurricane house demonstrates that it is possible to build a home that will come through hurricanes such as Dennis and Ivan with little or no damage” Christenberry said.

The house is one of three facilities located at UF/IFAS Extension Service offices around the state. Other hurricane houses are in Fort Pierce and St. Augustine, and a fourth house will be completed in August at the UF/IFAS Fort Lauderdale Research and Education Center. The Florida Department of Financial Services provided $2.3 million for the houses, and UF’s Shimberg Center for Affordable Housing in the College of Design, Construction and Planning supervised their design and construction.

In the wake of four devastating hurricanes in 2004 and with the likelihood of another active hurricane season this year, the houses are becoming magnets for educating builders and residents about wind-loss mitigation, energy efficiency and environmentally sensitive construction, said Pierce Jones, director of the UF/IFAS Florida Energy Extension Service.