August 5, 2014

Last week, my wife and I attended a talk by Alison Brooks at the Perimeter Institute on the connections between architecture, heritage, and our cultural history. A graduate of the Architecture program at the University of Waterloo, Alison founded her own firm in London, England and has racked up the awards.

The talk was part of the Building Waterloo Region series of exhibitions and lectures on local architecture. I’m proud that Waterloo is the only city in the country with four Governor General Architecture Award winning buildings at one corner – the Perimeter Institute, the Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery, CIGI, and the Balsille School of International Affairs.

Through Alison’s stories of particular projects, it was clear how much she valued a rich understanding of the history and culture of a place as part of designing buildings that she termed ‘future heritage’. In communities like Oxford, it meant referencing the history in modern construction, where the new can enhance and honour the old while telling a new story. I also took away how much you could do when you didn’t have to accommodate car parking, which is particularly the expectation around higher order transit stations in London.

While we don’t have hundreds of years of built heritage in Waterloo, we do have some opportunities to create a better framework between new and old through the following actions currently underway at City Hall, which I’ve been pleased to support:
– updating the city-wide zoning by-law, implementing our progressive Official Plan
– developing station area plans around LRT stations, to shape future development
– reviewing and updating our urban design guidelines to strengthen building design, and
– creating a heritage strategy, to help protect our past while building our future

I believe that the lens Alison provided of our current development as our future heritage is important. We need to view the new as part of what future generations will see as past. That means what is new should have clear connections to our cultural history but should also shape our future cultural history, adding who we are today to our long story as a community. That is what I’ll be looking for as the City updates the four policy frameworks I mentioned above.