Michael Cook Email & Phone Number

In recent years, through my work at Lovell Chen, I have been involved extensively in assessment, planning and strategic management of heritage places and values, working throughout Metropolitan Melbourne, Victoria and across Australia. These places range from traditional heritage buildings, to parks, trees, gardens and waterways, large-scale built infrastructure, key public sites and institutional settings. Our team is involved across all the stages of heritage assessment, planning, design, physical conservation and statutory process, and we are often working in close collaboration with owners and managers, design and engineering teams, and public authorities to find paths that will sustain and perpetuate the value of historical and contemporary places. In this, our practice has the privilege of working with some of our most celebrated public buildings, places and landscapes. We also tackle many of the most challenging conservation and adaptation scenarios, involving heritage places exposed (often literally) to dynamic environments or to economic and social forces that will unavoidably transform them. We find ourselves reminded that established methods, practices and tools (like the heritage study and the management plan) require renewal and reimagining to better support stewardship by today's owners, communities, institutions and governments. We are being asked and are challenging ourselves to understand and manage heritage values contextually, in terms which are relevant and resonant today, and which can be brought into alignment with the other urgent priorities and relationships that will shape a sustainable and just future. As a practitioner, I draw upon my training as a landscape architect and past professional experiences in urban design and infrastructure planning, and on a longer personal history of research and artistic engagement with ecologies and natural systems, public infrastructure and industry, environmental management and community memory in Canada and the USA. In Australia, I have continued these broader engagements, particularly in ecology and environmental history.

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  University Of Toronto

  Master Of Landscape Architecture