Acorn

Biographical Dictionary of Architects in Canada 1800 to 1950 is an incredible accomplishment

After learning of Robert Hill's Heritage Toronto Award of Excellence in Media for his Biographical Dictionary of Architects in Canada 1800 to 1950 I checked it out; what a wonderful heritage resource, what a remarkable work. Robert writes on the site:

"It is based on extensive original research conducted over a period of twenty-four years, much of it unpublished, and provides critically important information including the names of many Canadian architects previously unknown, as well as references to many buildings whose authorship is recorded nowhere else....

The Dictionary website is intended to make available a substantial amount of information in the form of hard, ascertainable facts that have been too difficult to locate, or too time-consuming to gather from obscure sources and collections scattered across the country."

Congratulations to Robert on this tremendous accomplishment. Check out the Biographical Dictionary of Architects in Canada 1800 to 1950.

Hamilton's Lister Block Restoration Revealed

Nice coverage of a heritage victory, the Lister Block restoration in Hamilton, in the Spectator. Everyone says heritage is tough with so many unknowns, but it is being handed over a year ahead of schedule. Clifford Masonry's Donovan Pauly told the Spec:

“It shows what can be done for these old buildings,” said Pauly, who's been on site nearly every day since the restoration began. “With a bit of goodwill and a lot of hard work, we can make these buildings survive."

I preferred it to Mayor-elect Bob Bratina's comments, which do not bode well:

“I'm glad the building is being restored, but the cost is way out of line,” he said. “I never supported spending that much money on it.”

Last word goes to Sam Trigila of Clifford.

“It's nice that it doesn't look crisp and new and flashy ... When a restoration is done properly it should look like you haven't done anything. It takes patience. You really want to do less.”

More Thoughts on the Municipal Election

After I complained last week "that having decent heritage legislation means nothing if you don't have the local politicians on side," Toronto Architect Graham Smith wrote a thoughtful note in comments that included an idea worth considering:

"It is time for us to stop whining about our ineffective politicians and get out there with ratepayers groups, volunteer groups... and start getting our cherished buildings listed and designated. There are hundreds of streets and neighbourhoods across the Province that warrant HCD designation but no will to get them designated as such...

If I learned anything in this election its that the centre/right is more proactive whereas the centre/left expects the nanny-state to take care of everything and are upset when it doesn't work out. Let's all be proactive!"

If I have learned anything in my year and a half as President of the ACO, it is that property rights trump heritage rights in the minds of the centre/right. But our strength may be that we are, by definition almost, a conservative movement. We shall see.

Election Notes From Around The Province

Last week I asked for notes from members around the Province regarding the elections. Here are a few of the highlights: (two from St. Thomas)

In Mississauga, MHC member Jim Tovey was elected Ward One Councillor (Port Credit). I'm sure a few of you will know him from the conferences.
Eric Rogers

In St. Thomas, the anti-heritage mayor was defeated by a 34 year old member of the municipal heritage committee. She is one of those who fought the demolition order for Alma College as an alderman, so will be in a better position now to champion our cause.
Nancy Mayberry

In St. Thomas, alderman Heather Jackson-Chapman was elected mayor, defeating Cliff Barwick. Heather has been the council representative on the municipal heritage committee and chair of Doors Open St. Thomas for the past two years. Heather personally gave tours of St. Thomas City Hall during Doors Open and steered the Doors Open budget through the council approval process.
Laurence Grant

London has a new mayor, Joe Fontana, one-time Liberal MPP and once a member of City Council.   He ran on a platform of no tax increase for the next four years and development to provide an increase in tax revenue.   Four of the five councillors who have consistently supported heritage issues were re-elected but they will have a tough time getting anything related to heritage preservation (if it costs more than a penny) through the new City Council.
Julia Beck

I am not sure what Jeff Lehman's win as mayor of Barrie will mean to heritage there, but I can fairly confidently say that with Barb Baguley as the new mayor of Innisfil, things should look up considerably on the heritage front.  She is (was) a member of the Heritage Committee and was the only one to push things forward in spite of a resisitant and reluctant committee and Council.

The old Council with its single-minded focus on development and jobs - the one that was responsible for the destruction of two marvellous stone heritage farmhouses - has largely been consigned to the rubbish heap.  Only three old members remain and they are mostly all pro heritage.
David Steele

Was This Election A Heritage Disaster or Victory?

I have just staggered in from the defeat party from the campaign I worked on, in a city where we have just elected a mayor who wants to cut every expense out of "respect for taxpayers"- expect challenges over frivolities like heritage when money could be going to roads. Mayor-elect Ford also says that "Toronto is open for business", and as the business of Toronto is redevelopment, we can expect some big fights over the next few years.

In Brantford, heritage activists made a difference. The leader of the South Side Six who rammed through the destruction of Colborne Street came an ignominious third in his campaign for Mayor. Lisa Wood, Branch President, reports that "Chris Friel, heritage friendly, is mayor. We spoke tonight already at the victory party about working together on a heritage master plan....  [ACO Member] Mary O'Grady lost, but ACO member Dan McCreary was re-elected."

In Guelph, Acorn editor and activist Leanne Piper was handily reelected; congratulations Leanne;  the content of the next Acorn will arrive shortly.

We have learned that having decent heritage legislation means nothing if you don't have the local politicians on side.  It is too early for me to tell what the results of this election mean across the Province, but where I live, the signs are not encouraging. The ACO is a charitable organization and could not actively support candidates during the election, but nothing prevents us from being satisfied by the victories of people like Leanne in Guelph and Dan in Brantford.

Heritage vs Photography Rights

In the UK, the National Trust and English Heritage claim that they own the rights to images of historic properties that they own or manage, even Stonehenge, even if taken from the air or across the street. It is turning into an international story, with anti-copyright activists at BoingBoing titling their post "English Heritage claims it owns every single image of Stonehenge, ever."

I wonder if this is the case in Canada. Could we be missing a big revenue stream for heritage, or would we just offend every photographer in the Province, like it is doing in Britain?

Does a reverence for the old stymie the new?

John Bentley Mays recently wrote an article for the Globe and Mail with the  title "A reverence for the old that stymies the new", stating that while he agrees with saving the Union Stations and Old City Halls in Toronto,

"Torontonians have speedily gone from flagrant contempt for our pre-war building stock to obsession with it. Every Victorian brick and plank, every beaux arts and art deco façade, is now viewed as holy...This new public attitude of unquestioning reverence for everything old is bad for architecture, because it thwarts the free imagination of contemporary designers. And it's bad for the city, because it means that the architects designing for Toronto are too often asked to look backward for inspiration, into Toronto's deeply provincial creative culture of the past, instead of opening toward the cosmopolitan future where this city's destiny surely lies."

John Bentley Mays reflects the old attitude toward heritage, that the only buildings worth saving are the glorious piles like the Old City Hall and that everything else is "utterly unimportant." They are not, they are part of the texture of our city, the thing that keeps Toronto from looking like Dubai.

It is about time that architects looked back for inspiration, to see how buildings worked, how they breathed, how they served multiple uses over generations, how they made walkable streets and comfortable neighbourhoods.

Sweeping away perfectly good buildings for sleek uninsulated mechanically ventilated glass towers is neither cosmopolitan (it's rather banal) nor is it where this city's destiny surely lies. From our environment to our natural resources to our buildings, our destiny is in preservation and conservation.

Renovation vs Restoration vs Green Building

When I think back on some of the work I did on heritage buildings when I was in practice in the '80s I cringe. But I thought we were all a lot more sophisticated now, with heritage consultants, stronger legislation and more active and knowledgeable heritage activists.

That's why I found this article in the NTHP's magazine Preservation so interesting, about a "green" renovation of the Darling House, a Greene and Greene bungalow in California. The house became the "the first historic residence in Southern California to earn a GreenPoint rating, a counterpart to LEED certification that recognizes sustainability in new and existing ­buildings."

It also got new double glazed windows replacing vintage single glazing, new siding laid on top of added insulation and a new front door "in the original style."

The comments to the story are vicious, calling it "train wreck of a project masquerading as historic preservation."...." Praising this as an example of sustainability is bewildering"...."They threw original doors and window into the dumpsters!... the owners and architect are clueless, they having touted this, all along, as an "historic restoration," when in fact, it is a damaging travesty to this important house."

I think the real travesty is they call it green. They added a thousand square feet and a three car garage! That is the antithesis of green. It reminds me of Donovan Rypkema's definition of LEED that we heard at the Collingwood conference in 2008: "Lunatic Environmentalists Enthusiastically Demolishing"

Back in the '80s many architects didn't know what restoration was. Now, many don't know what Green means. Unfortunately, it appears that there are also many who don't know either.

Who Owns Heritage?

In one of the lesser-known verses of Woody Guthrie's song This Land Is Your Land, he wrote:

As I was walkin' - I saw a sign there
And that sign said - no tress passin'
But on the other side .... it didn't say nothin! Now that side was made for you and me!

New York preservation consultant Ned Kaufman spoke about the issue of who owns what at the Heritage Canada conference in St. John's two weeks ago. He described what he called "Affective ownership"- those buildings and places that are part of our lives, that we have an emotional investment in rather than a financial one. Catherine Nasmith gives a Toronto example of a place like this in Built Heritage News:

"Do we have any right to that sense of attachment we have to the properties of others that are our touchstones, which shape the places in which we live our lives, or to the places that are important parts of societal memory, or to semi public places like the Inn on the Park which probably was part of the memory of people scattered all across the country, a place of weddings, proms, Bar Mitzvahs, or to churches, where we celebrate birth, death, marriage, places of contemplation, or to our attachment to a favorite view, and the anger we feel when it is plowed under?"

We all have emotional investments and affective ownership in our heritage. This October 25th we have to ensure that those politicians who use "Property Rights" as an excuse for denying protection to heritage buildings and landscapes are tossed out in favour of those who realize that the rest of us have rights too.

The ACO Awards Just Keep Getting Bigger and Better; Join The Celebration on November 19

I sit on the Awards Committee, charged with picking the Eric Arthur Lifetime Achievement Award, The AK Sculthorpe Award for Advocacy, the Peter Stokes Award for Adaptive Reuse and the Margaret and Nicholas Hill Cultural Heritage Landscape Award. The stack of nominations on my desk is daunting; in the few years since the Awards program started, it has gained in prestige, influence and numbers.

The nominations recognize wonderful heritage successes and not a few highly visible failures. They honour an energized, involved and growing community of heritage activists. It is going to be difficult to chose among them.

I hope you will join me in celebrating them all, the winners and nominees at the Annual Awards Dinner on Friday, November 19th at the Arts and Letters Club in Toronto. It is a lot of fun and raises a lot of funds for us. Reserve by calling the ACO at 416 367 8075 or by email.