Built Heritage
Built Heritage
Project Background
Project Background
One of our specialties at Davis MacIntyre & Associates is the recording and interpretation of heritage buildings, or “buildings archaeology.” We particularly undertake this work when a building is about to be heavily renovated or demolished, to ensure that the structure is documented for future study if the structure itself cannot remain standing. We are also happy to record and study buildings with the goal of improved site interpretation, and how best to bring a building back to how it looked at a particular time in history.
Details to suit your needs
Details to suit your needs
For over a decade, we have recorded and interpreted heritage buildings, scaling our level of detail and time on site according to the needs of our clients and the conditions of the buildings. We're proud to have the most experienced standing buildings archaeology team in Nova Scotia available to measure, photograph, record, research, and interpret heritage structures across the Atlantic provinces.
Highlighted Project - Morris House
Highlighted Project - Morris House
One of our favourite recording projects in recent years was the Charles Morris Office Building, also known as Morris House. In 2013, the house was moved from downtown Halifax to its new home at the corner of Charles Street and Creighton Street, where it would begin to undergo renovations. DMA archaeologists conducted detailed recording of the building in 2018 on behalf of the Heritage Trust of Nova Scotia.
The results of the recording radically changed our understanding of the building's original layout. Now appearing as a fairly standard Victorian Halifax house from the outside, small signs in the building's framing and layout eventually showed that the house was closer to a "Cape Cod" style home, likely one-and-a-half instead of two-and-a-half stories tall, with a massive central chimney that was likely removed around 1899.
The ground floor of Morris House as it appeared in 2018.
The ground floor of Morris House as it appeared in 2018.
A reconstruction of the same ground floor as it likely appeared in the eighteenth century.
A reconstruction of the same ground floor as it likely appeared in the eighteenth century.
