Robert Mellin named Member of the Order of Canada
Robert Mellin, Associate Professor at the School, and the winner of numerous awards, notably for his contributions to preserving Newfoundland’s architectural heritage and for his publications that have made modern architecture more accessible to a wider audience, was named a Member of the Order of Canada on December 26, 2014.
He has been a registered architect since 1978. In 2002 he was elected to the R.C.A. (Royal Canadian Academy), and he was elected to Fellowship in the RAIC in 2009. He has received eight Southcott Awards for his heritage conservation projects in Newfoundland, and in 2005 he received a Manning Award from the Historic Sites Association of Newfoundland and Labrador. In 2006 he received the Paul E. Buchanan Award for excellence in fieldwork and interpretation from the Vernacular Architecture Forum. He is past-Chair of the Heritage Foundation of Newfoundland and Labrador.
In 1987 Mellin began fieldwork and research on the outport of Tilting on Fogo Island, Newfoundland, the subject of his 1990 University of Pennsylvania Ph.D. dissertation supervised by Henry Glassie and Marco Frascari. He continued his research and volunteer heritage conservation work in the community for the next twenty-five years, and Tilting was subsequently designated The Tilting National Cultural Landscape District by the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada and provincially as a Registered Heritage District. During this time he also did research for Parks Canada on the architectural history of the Ryan Premises in Bonavista, followed by research for Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation on the historic neighbourhoods and associated housing typology of the City of St. John’s, Newfoundland.
His book Tilting: House Launching, Slide Hauling, Potato Trenching and Other Tales from a Newfoundland Fishing Village was published by Princeton Architectural Press in 2003 and it won the Winterset Literary Award. His chapter on the Ludlow premises in Joe Batt's Arm, Fogo Island, Newfoundland appears in the anthology Despite This Loss: Essays on Culture, Memory, and Identity in Newfoundland and Labrador (St. John's: ISER, 2010). In 2011, Professor Mellin’s book Newfoundland Modern: Architecture in the Smallwood Years, 1949-1972, was published in the McGill Queen’s/Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation Studies in Art History series. In March of 2015 Winter in Tilting, his second book on this Fogo Island outport, will be published by Pedlar Press in St. John’s.
For the full listing of Order of Canada appointments from December 26, 2014, please see the following of the Governor General of Canada.