Made of Stone: Heritage Masonry grad shapes new career

Posted on Thursday, November 9th, 2017

Not so long ago — the blink of an eye in the lifetime of a slab of limestone — John-Philippe Smith was languishing miserably in a Toronto office. Not so long after, he was applying his chisel to 400-year-old stone sculptures in the shadow of the Louvre. The path between these contrasting careers cuts directly through Algonquin College’s Perth Campus.

Smith is a master stone carver, a profession whose foundation was laid, so to speak, in the Masonry – Heritage and Traditional program. The 45 week compressed Ontario Diploma Program covers everything from the craft of brick-laying to the art of stone-cutting, and prepares its graduates to be journeymen masons or heritage conservators. Smith graduated from the program in 2004.

“I didn’t want to be part of that (office) rat race anymore and having been somewhat artistic as a kid, I was looking for something that I could do with my hands,” Smith says. “Somebody mentioned becoming a stonemason, and I thought that sounded like a pretty cool job.”

At Algonquin College, he says, “I basically discovered my love for working with my hands and becoming a craftsperson and what that meant… One of the things I remember is how much fun it was.”

Smith is one of fewer that 100 conservator stone-carvers in Canada. Since 2012, he and fellow carver Danny Barber (a regular instructor in the Heritage Masonry program) have run Smith & Barber – Sculpture Atelier, Inc. The company was contracted to renew all the stone-cut elements in the Parliament Buildings, from hand-carved mouldings to neo-Gothic gargoyles, in the lead up to the sesquicentennial.

A highlight, he says, was working in the Memorial Chamber in the Peace Tower, repository of the Book of Remembrance since the First World War. Fittingly, the stone for the chamber’s vault, columns, floor and altar comes from Britain, France and Belgium. Working on “the memorial Chamber altars, being part of that is extremely special,” Smith says. “What those altars mean is unbelievable.”

His career has flourished. And Algonquin College was his launching pad, Smith says.

“I found the course offered a general scope of the trade as a whole; as a stone-carver, I’m quite focused on a niche component of that, but I was able to gain knowledge from all the other aspects of the trade that, day to day, do help me run my own business.”

After graduation, contacts made though his instructors helped him find work with stone-carving studios in Toronto. In 2011, he decided to try his luck in Europe, where the trade flourishes. In France, Atelier Jean-Loup Bouvier, one of Europe’s premier sculptural studios, hired him. Soon he was carving stone in the renovation of notable Paris heritage buildings including the 17th-century Palais Royal, near the Louvre.

Smith cautions current students that getting to where he is in the business is not an easy process. “When you leave the program you’re going to have to work really hard probably as a labourer or as an apprentice, and there’s a lot of manual labour and a lot of hard work and it’s often times not the glory work…Be persistent and push through and find other people you can learn from.”


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