Maintaining the Character of a Place: Critical Approaches to Built Heritage in Newfoundland

Starting Point

Heritage practice tends to treat buildings as artifacts, fixing them at a chosen moment and defending them against change. That approach sits awkwardly in Newfoundland, where the culture around buildings has always been one of repair, maintenance, and adaptation as their function shifts. Bonavista makes the tension plain. The town has absorbed many international architectural styles over its history, and it holds a vacant school among its buildings, an ordinary problem facing communities across the province.

Integrated Strategy

Rather than argue from principle, the thesis uses Bonavista as a laboratory for participation in the heritage process. It develops the local theme of flexible space, takes changing technology and material innovation as a given rather than a threat, and challenges the habit of preserving static traditions. Four styles of learning structure the enquiry: student, interpreter, apprentice, and participant. Each is used to reimagine the vacant school as a place for knowledge transmission, and to test what a framework would need to do to hold the evolving conditions of life in the town. The drawings carry the argument alongside the writing, with blue lines showing new interventions against black lines for existing conditions.

Lasting Impact

The result is a framework that characterizes a place rather than freezing it, and an argument that heritage is something communities do rather than something done to them. It offers Newfoundland towns holding empty buildings a way to think about what comes next that does not require choosing between conservation and use.