Highland Village is an immersive living history museum dedicated to preserving Nova Scotia’s Gaelic heritage. It features animated characters dressed in traditional attire who recreate and interpret rural life in a historic village located on Iona, Breton Island. The newly designed tourist and commentary center serves as a cultural and physical gateway to this rich experience.
The museum, including the new commentary center, leads visitors through a timeline of historical periods and cultural backgrounds. The center’s design creates a sense of time travel by guiding visitors along a pathway through a series of distinct yet repetitive architectural volumes. These structures reflect the folk forms found throughout the Highland Village itself.
The pathway features a series of continuous thresholds, with both internal and external ramps that ascend into the site. These transitions, marked by rough-sawn wood and corten steel, lead visitors to exhibits, viewing platforms, and passages connecting to other parts of the village. The building’s exterior showcases a natural cedar veneer, harmonizing with the steep, mountain-shaped roofs of the four volumes.
The roof eaves are thickened and reinterpreted in metal, evoking the traditional Gaelic thatch roofing technique used during the Scottish Highland clearance period—a method that spurred the first wave of immigration.
The fourth intermediate volume is set on its own axis, becoming the metaphorical heart of the complex. It houses the core exhibition and the genealogy library. This space subverts the traditional Scottish black house by showcasing the wooden interior on the building’s exterior, using local spruce boards arranged with visible edges and gaps.
The building’s exterior material draws inspiration from the primitive black house vegetation, flipped inside to become fiberboard with acoustic treatments. Additionally, a replica of an authentic Black House from the Hebrides is situated on the museum grounds.
This project marks Nova Scotia’s first public sector building designed with a passive house strategy. It incorporates super-insulated walls and roofs, triple-glazed high-performance windows, and ultra-efficient heat recovery systems to maximize energy efficiency.
Project Drawings
△ Functional Zoning Diagram
△ Plan View
△ Section Diagram
△ Section Diagram
△ Analysis Chart
Project Information
Architect: Abbott Brown Architects
Area: 728 square meters
Year Completed: 2022
Photographer: Maxime Brouillet
Manufacturers: Agway Metals Inc., Vetta Windows & Doors
Design Team: Jane Abbott, Alec Brown, Katelyn Latham, Karen Mills, Kim Chayer, Asma Ali, Nick Glover
Structural Engineer: Campbell Comeau Engineering Limited
General Contractor: Brilun Construction Ltd
Mechanical & Electrical Engineer: Dillon Consulting
Landscape Architect: Gordon Ratcliffe Landscape Architects
Location: Iona, Canada
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