Antoinette Lettiere is a senior architecture student at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, and she has been active in the Shotgun House restoration project in Cairo, Illinois, since 2008. Toni’s involvement began when she registered for Preservation Summer, an elective architecture course taught by Prof. Robert Swenson. She worked alongside Prof. Swenson to document historic houses in Cairo’s historic district and to complete condition assessments on houses potentially slated for restoration.

Toni joined the 2009 Adventures in Preservation workshop, where the goal was to restore a historic shotgun-style house for use as affordable housing. During the two-week workshop, she learned a variety of hands-on preservation skills from Bill Black, Jr., one of the region’s leading building conservators. Following the workshop, Toni spent the next ten weeks working to complete work on the shotgun house exterior as well as completing some of the interior restoration.

While continuing the work as an independent research project, Toni won two awards – the 2009 Undergraduate Research Forum Independent Research Award and the REACH: Research-Enriched Academic Challenge award. She will use the many skills she has gained over the past two years to help teach and lead work at AiP’s 2010 shotgun house hands-on workshop before heading to Portland State University in Portland, Oregon, this fall to work on her Master’s degree.