Last week I wrote about diversity as it applies to the economics of cities and regions. Though not ground breaking in any way, I mentioned that relying on a sole sector of the economy–say, for instance, the service sector–is not only unhealthy but irresponsible as well. I tried to related this approach to how...
Read more →Diversification–it’s the new buzz word–well, maybe not that new. From Jane Jacobs to Richard Florida we now seem to have figured out that putting all of our eggs in one basket isn’t the way to go. Perhaps this is because we don’t seem to have a lot of eggs at the moment. Our scarcity...
Read more →We went on two field trips this week to visit 4 very different buildings. The juxtaposition of the buildings and how they were developed gave me pause to think about how we perceive the use of heritage buildings and what that means for their rehabilitation. I will start with the buildings that we saw...
Read more →We had the absolute treat of having Thomas Neumeyer, a stone conservator, from Denmark, teach us this week. Not only did we learn some amazing facts about Denmark–like that bluetooth technology is named after the second King of Denmark, Harald Bluetooth…who knew? We also learned how to become stone advocates. We now know how...
Read more →Last year we learned the rudimentary skills necessary for timber framing. This year we jumped right in, got down to work and got our mortises and tenons on! We were preparing and fitting the second wall of a forty foot long, post and beam construction, open air pavilion. We are building the pavilion in...
Read more →I grew up in a border town – not Niagara/Buffalo, but the ‘twin city’ Sault Ste. Marie border in Northern Ontario. Until recently, I’d never thought about how that has influenced my life and what kind of relationships and communities can form around a border. As a child, we’d go “across the river” as...
Read more →We were very dedicated to one project here at Willowbank this week. Typically our classes are all over the place but with the exception of drawing on Wednesday, we focused on reinstating a plaster wall in the Bright Salon. Originally we were to have five days to reinstall the architraves around all of the windows in the salon but it only made sense to put the plaster wall back in first. Unfortunately that has taken quite some time to finish and I’m not sure we’ll have the time to put back in all of the architraves.
View of one of the McMichael Collections Gallery windows – the question was really whether or not you could look out from them on the inside. This week was kind of all over the map or as I like to say it was the perfect conservation recipe -a little of this and a little...
Read more →This week was amazing, (see last weeks post for my explanation for using this opening line, yet again.) We had a fairly theory intensive week, the overarching theme of which seemed to centre around the question: “What is heritage?” And let me tell you, that’s not an easy one to answer. We began the...
Read more →This week was awesome! I know, you’re probably thinking: “You said that last week.” But it was, I’m not kidding! Next week’s going to be awesome too (we’ve got Julian and Cultural Landscape classes for most of the week – my favourite!) And trust me there will be weeks which are just okay and...
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