What the Rules Say

“We’re not permitted to mimic the heritage.”
Art Phillips, director of development for Larco Investments Ltd.

“The architects say that there is a by-law that prevents them from building an expansion that mimics the original building.”
CTV News

These claims are perhaps the strangest of all those made in the conversation around the proposed addition to the Château Laurier. They buzz around the truth like a fly looking for somewhere to land on your dinner plate. They need to be shooed away before they do some real harm.

I mentioned the by-law claim in an earlier blog. In short, we have no such by-law.

What we do have is a web of international, federal and provincial guidelines. Unsurprisingly, none of these actually requires additions to historic buildings to be incongruous and disruptive of the heritage fabric.

Let’s start with the grandparent of heritage standards, the Venice Charter – not quite the first, but the most far-reaching and internationally influential set of guidelines for the conservation of heritage monuments. At first glance, Article 12 would seem to offer a glimmer of support to the positions stated above:

Replacements of missing parts must integrate harmoniously with the whole, but at the same time must be distinguishable from the original so that restoration does not falsify the artistic or historic evidence.

The phrase ‘distinguishable from the original’ would certainly seem to apply to the Château Laurier design. The problem is, this Article applies to ‘replacement of missing parts’, not additions, and its sole goal is to ensure that posterity can form an accurate picture of the building’s history. For the Charter’s position on additions, one need read no further than the very next article:

Additions cannot be allowed except in so far as they do not detract from the interesting parts of the building, its traditional setting, the balance of its composition and its relation with its surroundings.

If we take another look at the proposed Château addition in light of this guideline, I think no comment is needed:

This principle filters down into Canadian federal guidelines through Parks Canada’s Standards and Guidelines for the Conservation of Historic Places in Canada (which was linked in the Citizen to Art Phillips’ claim about not being permitted to ‘mimic the heritage’). One of its fourteen ‘General Standards’ states:

Conserve the heritage value and character-defining elements when creating any new additions to an historic place or any related new construction. Make the new work physically and visually compatible with, subordinate to and distinguishable from the historic place.

The words ‘distinguishable from’ appear once again, but to cite them in isolation from the rest of the guideline – which stresses conservation, compatibility and subordination of new to old – is either disingenuous or extremely careless. Not to mention the other thirteen Standards, which again and again emphasize the importance of minimizing impact on the character-defining features of heritage buildings (including composition and massing, both of which are grievously compromised by the proposed addition to the Château).

The Ontario Ministry of Culture also has its Eight Guiding Principles in the Conservation of Built Heritage Properties. These include a principle called ‘Legibility’:

New work should be distinguishable from old. Buildings or structures should be recognized as products of their own time, and new additions should not blur the distinction between old and new.

There’s that word ‘distinguishable’ again, although it seems to have suffered some mission creep since the Venice Charter. The provincial guidelines add that additions should be ‘products of their own time’ – a very slippery notion, as I discussed last week in my blog Imitation. And however you interpret it, it does not equate to a requirement that additions be incongruous with the historic fabric. Five of the eight provincial Guiding Principles begin with the word ‘respect’.

So, no one’s forcing the architect’s hand. This discussion is about values, not rules.

Peter Coffman
peter.coffman@carleton.ca