Orin M. Bullock Jr., a former Baltimore architect and a national authority on historic preservation, died Tuesday of sepsis at Meridian Nursing Center in Centreville. The Rock Hall resident was 88.
"He was one of the pioneers in restoration in the country by the time he came to Baltimore," said Michael F. Trostel, a Baltimore architect who knew him for more than 35 years.
"He was very active in the preservation movement in Maryland and worked on such projects as the Waverly House in Howard County and the Rogers Tavern in Perryville. He was very good at research and indulged in minute histories of buildings and their various layers of usage.
"While working on the Rogers Tavern, a controversy arose over the placement of a staircase, and after using a paint chip that he had found, he was able to determine the original angle of the staircase. It wasn't where any of the others thought it would be."
Mr. Bullock was also a writer, lecturer and teacher of restoration technology at the University of Maryland.
He was one of the architects who began the Colonial Williamsburg restoration in 1929 and was director of architectural research there from 1953 to 1961. He restored a 17th-century Quaker meeting house in Newport, R.I.
Mr. Bullock was a technical consultant for Historic Annapolis Inc. and for the Maryland Historical Trust and was awarded the Calvert Prize in 1980 by the state of Maryland.
He came to Baltimore in 1961 and in 1967 was appointed chief of property rehabilitation for the Baltimore Urban Renewal and Housing Agency. He was not content to simply talk about restoration, so he restored a Bolton Hill townhouse -- at 1432 John St. -- and moved in.
His 1966 book "The Restoration Manual," published by the American Institute of Architects, is still in print and is considered a seminal work in the field.
He was concerned that blight was caused not only by abandoned buildings, but often by what was erected in their place.
"We must beware of the accelerated creeping blight by contemporary replacement," he wrote in a letter to The Sun in 1963, "which is threatening the unique cityscapes which make Baltimore a personality among the cities of the world."
He once described Baltimore as an "architectural laboratory" and observed that "the city grew in stages 10 years apart. Houses, brick red rows, brownstones which are elegantly carved but succumbing to age and refined mansions represent every period from 1750."
He decried the loss of what he defined as "regional differentiation," in which cities lose their identity to wholesale bulldozing.
"I know architects who say the hell with the old buildings," he told The Sun in 1966. "But cities are becoming aware that one of the dangers over urban renewal is over-bulldozing. You don't keep ahead of anything, including slums, by bulldozing, and in some cases cities have put up new buildings that are uglier than the ones they tore down."
He greatly admired Mount Vernon Place and attributed its beauty "to its atmosphere of elegance, its peaceful air, its comfortable human scale that even the presence of large institutional buildings has not quite destroyed."
He once described himself as a "preservationist instead of a restorationist," yet he was practical in his view of buildings that were to be spared.
"Buildings are to be used, to be lived in. If they are restored, they should have some function today and not just be an interesting old place where someone famous once slept. Every building of historical association cannot, and should not, be a museum."
After leaving Baltimore, he lived in Rising Sun for several years before moving to Rock Hall.
"He never really ever retired," said his daughter, Amanda Scalabrin of Columbus, Ohio.
Born and reared in Oakland, Calif., he was a 1927 graduate of the Harvard University School of Architecture. He was in the Navy during World War II and the Korean War and was discharged with the rank of commander.
In addition to his daughter, he is survived by his wife of 30 years, the former Lucy Kirk Meadowcroft; and a grandson.
Plans for a memorial service are not complete.