April 18, 2024
Shaping the World Around Us: Evan on the Socio-Cultural Importance of Heritage Sites and Monuments
Evan Hunter is Republic’s Heritage Lead Architect. He was the first member of the Canadian Association of Heritage Professionals (CAHP) from Manitoba and a past board member. Evan is well known for his heritage conservation work and contributions to preserving Canada’s built history.
For the International Day for Monuments and Sites (April 18), we asked Evan to share his thoughts on the importance of heritage conservation and his connection to historic buildings and places. He reflects on our shared experience of shaping the world around us and the lessons we can learn from the built environment.
Q1: Can you describe your interest in heritage conservation?
Evan: What interests me the most about heritage is it expresses people, or the things that humans do. That is what’s most significant, that we shape the world around us, and buildings are a key part of that. I love how buildings communicate time, and social and economic conditions. It’s neat to see the craftsmanship and the materials being used. What I also find remarkably interesting is how these buildings often outlive the people that built them.
They have their own life too, different people come into them and start to use them in diverse ways, and people change them. While heritage conservation is important, it’s more interesting to look at how these buildings have adapted and changed, but we still love them from the time they came from, and what they meant when they were originally built. I think that’s the most fascinating thing.
Q2: Heritage buildings, sites, and monuments are thought of as relics. In some way when we think of them as artifacts from the past, they may seem stagnant, but like you said they grow and develop over time. Can you talk a bit about how they grow with people and the environment they’re in?
Evan: I’m honestly not a huge fan of taking a building, putting it in a bubble, and trying to keep it static. I love the way buildings grow. The stone cathedrals in Europe when you look at them, over time the stairs get dished out from hundreds of years of footsteps. I love how that speaks to people who have lived in them and shaped them to what they wanted for the time.
It’s respecting what those buildings are and what they were. Shaping them for a new need and giving them a new function, or adding something, making them meet the needs of today in a unique way. That’s what I love.
Q3: What is the importance of heritage sites and monuments? To you, or to society in general.
Evan: I think they’re important because we always need to remember the conditions that made these buildings and why they were important at that time. This informs why we think they’re important.
We’ve all heard how our high school history teachers tell us that you must learn from the past, and in a way that does have to happen in this context. We can also learn from the past by looking at these old buildings and acknowledge certain realizations such as – they didn’t think of people with mobility needs back then. You adapt the buildings to suit that, but you also notice that as a society we have come a long way. It’s nice to appreciate that.
I love thinking about solutions where the buildings didn’t have the technology or materials and products we have now, but they dealt with the products available to them, in the same conditions such as rain or –40 C temperatures in Winnipeg winters. These are things we can learn from how these buildings were built.
Learning these approaches is important because sometimes we rely on new materials and technology in this profession. I had a professor once tell me, “Buildings never leaked until they invented caulking.”
Q4: Do you find that you reference some design decisions and materials used in heritage buildings?
Evan: I would say so, yes and in a few different ways. Buildings have life and the people who use the buildings change the standards and guidelines.
Respecting a building’s character-defining elements allows us to appreciate how a building has changed over time and how people started to use buildings in different ways. You recognize the meaning and importance of a building, the cultural or social significance of a time which can also be attributed to the building.
Q5: What heritage project would you be thrilled to work on?
Evan: There’s one that always stuck with me, and I know some work has happened on it, it’s a campus in Scotland, St. Peter’s Seminary in Cardross, northwest of Glasgow. It was built in the 60s, a very Brutalist Modern campus where the Catholic church would teach new priests. It very quickly fell out of favour in the 70’s and eventually was abandoned then sat and turned to ruin.
There’s been recent movements in the last couple of decades in the UK to find a way to use the building again, and last I heard though I may be a bit behind on this, they were turning it into a performing arts space.
They’ve stabilized the ruin but haven’t done much to bring it up to any sort of new building function. It just exists as this very cool and quirky performing arts and artist space, which I think is extremely exciting as a project.
You want to make safe access and have some facilities and washrooms, maybe even an event space outside of it. It would be fun to be part of a project like that.
Q6: Do you have a favourite heritage building/site/monument?
Evan: This is a hard question and my opinion changes. I was lucky to see lots of beautiful, ruined castles in the Scottish Highlands. I’ve also been lucky to go to Brasília and see a city that was planned from scratch in the 60s.