Elizabeth Vines adds passionate voice for conserving heritage in South Australia, nationally and overseas
Elizabeth Vines, with her firm McDougall and Vines, based in the Adelaide suburb of Norwood, had a wide influrence on heritage conservation issues in South Australia, narionally and overseas, especially with her second book, Streetwise Asia.
Elizabeth Vines, a specialist heritage conservation architect, had extensive effect consulting in South Australia and nationally as well as having influence with her ideas overseas.
With an honours degree in architecture at Melbourne University in 1977, Vines started her own Melbourne practice, Jacobs Lewis Vines. From the 1980s she practised in Sydney while living in Balmain and moved to Adelaide in 1986. Vines’s work spread across Australia through her Norwood, Adelaide-based practice McDougall & Vines, working on a wide range of heritage projects, and serving as heritage advisor to amany councils and remote places such as Broken Hill and outback Wilcannia.
She was involved in many conservation projects on important heritage buildings, such as Bonython Hall on North Terrace, Adelaide city. McDougall & Vines and Swanbury Penglase Architects worked from 2005 with the property services branch of Adelaide University on the conserving and restoring Bonython Hall, built in 1936. The work won an award of merit in the 2007 UNESCO Asia-Pacific heritage awards.
Vines was committed to the practical reuse, improving and rejuvenating city centres and historic buildings and a passionate advocate for heritage conservation. Her first book, Streetwise (1966 , was a seminal how-to manual for those interested in building and streetscape restoration. It was widely used to guide upgrading Australian towns.
Vines’s work in heritage conservation extended to Asia, and her second book Streetwise Asia – a 2006 World Bank/UNESCO (United Nation Economic Scientific and Cultural Organisation) publication latertranslated into Chinese – was applied widely. Vines taught at the University of Hong Kong was an adjunct orofessor in the Centre of Cultural Heritage in Asia and the Pacific at Deakin University in Melbourne.
Vines became president of Australia ICOMOS (International Council and Monuments and Sites) and a member of Australia's Heritage Council. She also consulted to UNESCO, the Getty Institute, and the World Bank on Asia projects. She set up the Streetwise Asia Fund for Heritage Conservation to provide small scale grants for community-based heritage projects in Asia. She was awarded an Order of Australia in 2009 for contributing to heritage conservation in Australia and Asia.
