We’re back and at it, here at Willowbank, and right into the thick of things. After an enjoyable three week break, (Happy New Year – by the way), we launched right into design this week. I have to say that, as with most topics Julian covers, learning design concepts from Julian is eye opening. We [...]
Read more →Welcome, reader. This is the first of a series of bi-weekly musings about the state of the heritage conservation field in Canada and internationally. These comments are written from a Willowbank perspective, although they are personal and subjective and without any formal approval from our Willowbank Board or anyone else. The idea for a series [...]
Read more →This past weekend we rallied together as students to finish up our first (of what will hopefully become an annual tradition) Christmas float for the Niagara-On-The-Lake Santa Claus Parade. Over the past month or so, various groups of students have been getting together in the evening to build the float. The general idea was to [...]
Read more →The Bright Salon is done! Well, that may be an inappropriate description of the situation. But our rehabilitation of the architrave and pocket shutters is done. You’ll recall that we started working on the Bright Salon about a month ago, culminating in some amazing success with the plaster wall going back in. Unfortunately after figuring [...]
Read more →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 we [...]
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 of–well [...]
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 last, [...]
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 to [...]
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 stages [...]
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 we [...]
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