The City of Vancouver has led North American cities in commemorating Modern
heritage. In 1990, City of Vancouver planners initiated the Recent Landmarks
study, thus launching a progressive, specialized program aimed at documenting
and conserving the city's post-war architecture. While this program has raised
awareness and catalogued a large stock of Modern resources, few of the
identified buildings have been protected with legal heritage designation. Thus it
seemed appropriate to explore Vancouver's Recent Landmarks program in this
thesis and assemble comparative information (from other jurisdictions) against
which to measure it.
Thus the primary purpose of this thesis is to point to contemporary heritage
conservation initiatives and programs in North America that are specifically
concerned with twentieth-century buildings, in order to inform heritage planning in
Vancouver. The secondary purpose is to amplify current efforts to broaden and
redefine the notion of structural heritage to include twentieth-century work.
This thesis surveyed representatives (i.e. civic planning or cultural/landmark
Department staff, and representatives of local chapters of DOCOMOMO, the
international organization formed to document and conserve the works of the
Modern movement) in Toronto, Victoria, New York, Los Angeles, and Phoenix.
The results of the thesis show that by 1999, all but one of the five surveyed North
American municipalities had addressed the issue of Modern heritage. However
none of the consulted cities had developed distinct programs to address this
resource. For example, while several cities reported listing Modern buildings on
their heritage inventories, none of the municipalities canvassed reported the
development of studies or inventories that were focused on post-war landmarks.
Thus from this information, it appears that the Recent Landmarks initiative in
Vancouver remains quite exceptional. This program has identified several (and
spurred the designation of some) significant Modern buildings, stimulated the
creation of reports and studies, and made strong attempts to engage the public.
In sum, the results gleaned from this thesis survey show that the Recent
Landmarks initiative remains a leader in the specialized realm of heritage
conservation for Modern architecture, and that many North American cities have
yet to match Vancouver's efforts.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/10558 |
| Date | 05 1900 |
| Creators | Wickham, Andrea Lynne |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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