Enriching Dynamics between Historic and New Design Using Heritage Frameworks

Enriching Dynamics between Historic and New Design Using Heritage Frameworks

This webinar is part of the RAIC 2024 Conference on Architecture, now available to stream!

Topics: History, Heritage and Culture

Length: 1 hour | What's Included: Video, Quiz, and Certificate of Completion 

Can the whole be greater than the sum of the parts? Why do some adaptive reuse projects seem to present the historic and the new as a poetic whole while others seem disconnected? This session explores the compelling benefits of a heritage conservation framework to achieve a clear, coherent design narrative, grounded in its historic place. Historic attributes are the catalyst for the new design, allowing old and new to coalesce while remaining distinct. This framework is based on conservation “best practice,” with a flexible, robust methodology for adaptive reuse and complex rehabilitation. It leads to tailored design solutions, via a simple, repeatable process. Through two case studies, the Voltigeurs de Quebec Armoury and the Ministère des Finances building, we explain the heritage design framework, its benefits, and its implementation throughout a project for optimal design synergies.

By the completion of this session, participants will be able to:

• Define a sustainable adaptive reuse conservation design framework, identify its components of “understanding, planning and intervening”, relating to specific historic places through heritage planning and best architectural and technical practices.
• Evaluate how to develop, apply, and implement a place-specific heritage conservation design framework with a thoughtful, tailored design narrative, using this reproducible, agile, rigorous methodology regardless of building, age, location, size and/or use
• Describe the simplicity, scalability, and reproducibility of the heritage design framework through two distinctly different case studies each with a unique outcome.
• Recognize the value added of a diligent application of the described principles, when applied from project inception through completion, within the context of extending a historic building’s life.

Subject Matter Expert:

Pascal Letourneau 
OAQ, OAA, ICOMOS, APTI, CAHP, MScA, Conservation of the Built Environment
Partner at DFS Architecture, Senior Architect in Heritage Conservation

Pascal Létourneau leads the heritage team at DFS Architecture, comprising conservation architects, technologists and conservators. His deep interest in heritage conservation began in his teen years and was developed during his architectural studies at Université de Montréal. Pascal is highly regarded in the conservation community, and well known for his work with a great variety of heritage specialists, including engineers and masonry, wood, glass and metal conservators. 

His repertory of completed projects includes the conservation of some of Canada's most iconic heritage buildings, judiciously applying both traditional and state-of-the-art methods and technologies.

Two of Pascal’s current and recent projects are: Parliament of Canada Centre Block rehabilitation, for which he was selected to lead a large group of conservation architects and heritage planners, and the reconstruction and repurposing of the historic 1888 Voltigeurs Armoury on the Plains of Abraham in Quebec City, for which he was also the conservation lead.