43rd Annual Conference

SOCIETY FOR THE STUDY OF

ARCHITECTURE IN CANADA

Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario

May 24?27, 2017
Time plays a crucial role in architecture. Typically, sites are designed with a specific function for a particular setting in a particular era. Nevertheless, architecture is not just built for the here and now, but also for the past and for the future; it can be commemorative, harkening back to a bygone era, or it can be visionary, seeking to communicate its message for centuries to come. Far from static, architecture also changes as time goes on, acquiring additions, alterations, new purposes, and new sets of meanings.
How do we connect these various temporal aspects" How do we valorize architecture?s past (s)" In what ways do we contribute our own contemporary knowledge and values to specific sites" In what ways are architecture and architectural knowledge protected for and transmitted to future generations" How are all of these simultaneously considered and what can we make of a multitude of layers and/or palimpsests" As the venue for the 2017 Conference of the Society for the Study of Architecture in Canada, historic Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario is the ideal place to explore these ideas. Long inhabited, the site was first indigenous territory, then one of the first settlements established in Upper Canada. As such, it has played many roles over the years: it was Upper Canada?s first capital from 1792 to 1796; the town and its mi...