Nianti Bird-Ortiz

President Lincoln and Soldiers' Home National Monument, National Trust for Historic Preservation

The President Lincoln and Soldiers' Home National Monument, known as the Lincoln Cottage, is currently going through a process of restoration and preservation. As an intern for the National Trust for Historic Preservation, I helped in the completion of the last stage of the exterior restoration of the Lincoln Cottage as well as documentation of the interior. I also assisted with the design development phase for the Visitors' Education Center, a historical building that will undergo a process of adaptive rehabilitation. These projects included tasks such as carpentry, tagging architectural artifacts and submittals, and creating design mock-ups. Other responsibilities included historic hardware assessment, research, architectural and engineering planning and design review, and preparation of the completion report for the exterior restoration project. As an architecture and preservation certificate student, I was able to experience first hand the critical and significant relationship between the two disciplines.