Competing Values?
Balancing Heritage and Environment
The 30^th Annual Conference of the Alliance for Historic Landscape Preservation

The Alliance for Historic Landscape Preservation will be celebrating its 30^th anniversary from May 28^th to 31^st, 2008 in Montreal.  We will be looking ahead at the ways and means by which to balance and to integrate heritage conservation practices and historic preservation treatments with environmentally-sustainable activities.  These concepts are not necessarily mutually exclusive. 

Downtown Montréal

Mt. Royal Park from Downtown

Papers and discussions
On Thursday and Friday mornings, a series of presentations and discussions will focus on the ways and means to best balance and integrate landscape heritage conservation practices (known as historic preservation treatments in the U.S.) with environmentally-sustainable activities.  These presentations and discussions will take place at the Masonic Temple on Sherbrooke Street.  Erected in 1929-30, this classically-inspired edifice was designed to respond to the moral principles of Freemasonry: a tour of the various lodge rooms and the reception hall, each boasting a unique interior design and colour scheme, will be provided.

Masonic Temple

Mile End Library

The wrap-up discussion on Saturday afternoon will take place in the mezzanine of the Mile End Library on Park Avenue. (This red brick edifice was designed in 1904 to house the Anglican Church of the Ascension and served as such until the early 1990s, when the congregation moved northward.  In 1993, it was purchased by the City of Montreal and tastefully converted to house the Mile End branch of the municipal library, a use that allows it to remain a vital meeting place for the local community.)  We will have a retrospective of the Alliance’s accomplishments over the last 30 years and its challenges and priorities for the future: are there new roles for the Alliance across the continent? 

Field sessions

Mount Royal Park
Thursday afternoon will be spent walking around Mount Royal Park, inaugurated in 1876, and one of Frederick Law Olmsted’s masterworks.  Participants will have the opportunity to discuss the new conservation and management plan of the ‘historic and natural district of Mount Royal’ with experts from the City of Montreal and the Ministry of Culture, as well as the Friends of the Mountain.  We will also be able to examine firsthand, at the peak of spring, this remarkable green space in the heart of Montreal, with its imprints of Olmsted, Frederick Todd and others, not to mention the numerous conservation projects that have taken place on the mountain over the last two decades.

Boat Tour

Vieux Port at east end of canal

Lachine Canal
Friday afternoon will feature a boat excursion of the Lachine Canal led by experts from Parks Canada and the City of Montreal.  This extraordinary landscape, commemorated by the federal government for its important role in Canada’s industrial and maritime history, has recently undergone extensive restoration and revitalization.  As it continues to face urban development pressures, we will discuss the many conservation challenges associated with this new chapter in its history.

Urban park along The Main

Mile End

The Main and Mile End
On Saturday morning, participants will be treated to a tour of one of the liveliest sections of Montreal’s Main by Les Amis du boulevard Saint-Laurent Boulevard, L’Autre Montréal and Mile End Memories.  A 6-km stretch of Saint-Laurent Boulevard was designated a historic district by the federal government in 1997 due to its key role as a "corridor of immigration" and as a meeting place for the many cultures that make up Canada’s population, as a street where the clothing industry and small businesses thrived, and as a place of entertainment and source of inspiration for artists.  We will also wander through the streets and lanes of the adjacent Mile End neighbourhood and discuss measures that have been put in place by the Plateau Mont-Royal to protect the character of this multicultural urban vernacular landscape. 

Redpath Museum

Redpath Theatre

Keynote Address by Holly Dressel

Good News Or Else:
The Need for a Radical Expansion of Landscape Preservation Goals

Holly Dressel's presentation on the occasion of AHLP's thirtieth anniversary, the aptly-named "Good News or Else," argues for public support for a serious expansion of the current definition of historical landscape and for the need to radicalize a preservation mandate.  It will also help lay out a roadmap to begin to achieve both goals.  In her speech, Dressel will draw the good news from current legislation protecting vast agricultural areas across Europe as well as from little-known historical landscapes in India and South America that combine culture and aesthetics with a profoundly ecological understanding of water and land use.  She will build this discussion towards a picture of what will happen if North American preservationists don't get together with environmentalists to protect much larger swaths of our own landscapes.  Dressel argues that to survive in an increasingly polluted and resource-scarce world, we need to develop a shared culture that honours and truly understands history. If we don't, we will lose more than just our past; we will lose the very ability to survive in our respective ecosystems.

Holly Dressel was trained in France as a medieval art historian with an emphasis on the history of architecture and architectural spaces. Her first public lectures here in Montreal, in her late 20s, were on the history of gardens. But by the time she was in her late 30s, she had shifted her focus from the history of plants and human constructions to the biology of natural survival. She argues that the buildings and the landscapes that tell long stories of human history also reveal how that history intersects with the natural world.

This public lecture will take place at the Redpath Museum. 

Click here for the full text.

Le Pavillon

View from Le Pavillon

Anniversary Banquet
On Saturday evening, we wrap up the Alliance’s 30^th-anniversary conference with a banquet at the Beaver Lake Pavilion in Mount Royal Park.  This generously glazed structure, with its prismatic roof and colourful murals, is surrounded by balconies overlooking the mountain landscape.  It was the most innovative of several park structures built by the City of Montreal during the 1950s, when "beauty for recreation" was the motto for the city’s parks and "leisure in the age of automation" was a priority for municipalities across North America.  Considered a masterpiece of Modern architecture, the building was tastefully restored in 2005-06.  In addition to a cafeteria, it now houses Le Pavillon, a popular bistro whose manager, Arji, has promised to serve us a memorable five-course meal to celebrate the Alliance’s past, present and future.

Register now!

For more information about the conference hotel, link to the Chateau Versailles.  For more information about Montreal,visit: www.tourisme-montreal.org.