As Australians and New Zealanders question their respective histories, architects are also re-evaluating their understanding of built heritage and the ways they work with it, this year's Ted McCoy lecture series speaker Kerstin Thompson says.
"To work with heritage is an enormous responsibility that demands trust from those who commission and care from us transforming that which is somehow precious to our community, and of great social value," she said.
"Change is typically necessitated by obsolescence - a redundancy created by the end of a prior use."
The principal of Kerstin Thompson Architects, in Melbourne, presented her views on built heritage - including the adaptive re-use of buildings - in her talk "Integrating heritage into our future cities" as a part of the New Zealand Institute of Architects' annual festival of architecture on Thursday night.
Ms Thompson praised Dunedin's "precious assets" as she walked a crowd of about 50 at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery through a series of her company's projects that showed her understanding of heritage, focusing on projects that were heritage-listed and represented a range of approaches.
Preservation was also about places being "social repositories" - and people's memories of places mattered, she said.
One project, The Stables in Melbourne's arts precinct, showed her company's "light touch" in adapting the former Victorian Mounted Police Stables for the Victorian College of the Arts' faculty of fine arts and music.
While the V-shaped building with a practice yard in the middle had been repurposed, a "heritage slice" had been faithfully restored.
In much heritage work what was "taken away to reveal" was just as important as what was added to a structure. In keeping with this the former practice yard was kept as a courtyard and the stalls that once housed the police horses were converted into art studios at a ratio of one horse to two students.
At the art school's opening, a photograph showed the mounted police who attended - on their horses - in the faithfully restored heritage slice section of the now modernised building.
"One of the things that was really lovely was that the policemen were really touched that it was still so much like they remembered," she said.
"So even though there were, on the one hand, some quite radical changes made to it, on the other hand they could still see and smell what was their place for a very long time."
