MESSAGE FROM WILLOWBANK'S
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
Julian Smith
Welcome to Willowbank. This is a place where people believe in learning by doing. It is a place where people enjoy both the academic challenges of debate and discussion, and the joys of apprenticeship training under masters in conservation, restoration and adaptive reuse. It is a place that crosses the boundaries between theory and practice to arrive at an integrated approach to design and development. Many of our greatest cultural treasures – from small artifacts to vernacular buildings to complex cultural landscapes – have been created by individuals and communities who combine theoretical insight with practical skill, art with craft, innovation with experience. These same cultural treasures are best maintained and given new life by people with similar insights and skills. This is sustainability in its truest form.
Willowbank is dedicated to nurturing these insights and skills. The School of Restoration Arts and the Centre for Cultural Landscape are complementary programs. The School is internally focused, providing an in-depth training experience for a select group of students. The Centre is externally focused, communicating the core ideas to a wider audience. Both are located within the beautiful Willowbank estate. The estate, with its combination of natural and cultural features, is an ideal laboratory for a cultural landscape approach to design and development. For 8,000 years it has been an important place of human habitation. This sense of layering over time is a necessary basis for developing a dynamic rather than static view of our shared cultural heritage.
During its pre-contact period, Willowbank was an encampment site for various First Nations people. Some of them were portaging their canoes around Niagara Falls on long voyages into the continent and back. Today, there is still the sense that Willowbank is a stopping point for people on their own journeys, a temporary place to rest and exchange stories and share knowledge and insight.
Willowbank’s activities are increasingly international in scope, and its community of students, faculty, staff, Board, and friends is expanding rapidly. At the same time, the Willowbank estate will be forever embedded in the particular history of its place and its time. The juxtaposition of the universal and the particular is one of the creative tensions that make Willowbank a special place.
About Julian Smith
Executive Director of Willowbank and Director of the Centre for Cultural Landscape
Julian is an architect, conservator, scholar and educator. He is internationally recognized for his contributions to the field of heritage conservation in general, and to cultural landscape theory and practice in particular. After a childhood in Montreal, Quebec; Delhi, India; and Cambridge, Massachusetts, he did undergraduate work at Oberlin, graduate studies with Kevin Lynch and others at MIT, and a certificate in preservation planning at Cornell. He worked in the contemporary design field with Peter Eisenman at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York City, and later returned to India to do research on cognitive mapping of historic town centres in South India. He moved to Canada and eventually became Chief Restoration Architect for the National Historic Sites program, a position he held for six years. He then established his own architectural and planning practice, and also founded and directed the graduate program in Heritage Conservation at Carleton University. He became Executive Director of Willowbank in 2008. Julian has been responsible for design and development work involving significant cultural sites in Canada, the U.S., France, Italy, India, Sri Lanka, and Japan. Among his projects are the restoration of the Vimy Monument in France, the Aberdeen Pavilion in Ottawa, and the Lister Block in Hamilton, and master plans for the Parliament Buildings in Toronto, the Central Experimental Farm in Ottawa, and a new campus for a historic college in south India. He has also developed policy documents for a variety of federal and provincial agencies in Canada, and has been Canadian delegate to UNESCO for the drafting of the new international recommendation on Historic Urban Landscapes. His use of a cultural landscape framework allows him to move across the boundaries between architecture, landscape and urban design. Julian is architectural advisor to the Trustees of Queen's University, a past member of the Advisory Committee to the Minister of Canadian Heritage, and a frequent contributor to international forums. He is a recipient of Heritage Canada's Gabrielle Léger Award and the Architectural Conservancy of Ontario's Eric Arthur Award, both recognizing lifetime achievement in the heritage conservation field.