Preserving historic buildings is essential to understanding our nation’s heritage. In addition, it is an environmentally responsible practice. By reusing existing buildings historic preservation is essentially a recycling program of ‘historic’ proportions. Ex isting buildings can often be energy efficient through their use of good ventilation, durable materials, and spatial relationships . An immediate advantage of older buildings is that they already exist; therefore energy is not necessary to create new building m aterials and the infrastructure is already in place. Minor modifications can be made to adapt existing buildings to compatible new