Narrative Theory in Conservation

Change and Living Buildings

Nigel Walter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429763212
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Kunst
• Subtopic: Kunst Allgemein

Narrative Theory in Conservation engages with conservation, heritage studies, and architectural approaches to historic buildings, offering a synthesis of the best of each, and demonstrating that conservation is capable of developing a complementary, but distinct, theoretical position of its own.

Tracing the ideas behind the development of modern conservation in the West, and considering the challenges presented by non-Western practice, the book engages with the premodern understanding of innovation within tradition, and frames historic buildings as intergenerational, communal, ongoing narratives. Redefining the appropriate object of conservation, it suggests a practice of conserving the questions that animate and energize local cultures, rather than only those instantiated answers that expert opinion has declared canonical. Proposing a narrative approach to historic buildings, the book provides a distinctive new theoretical foundation for conservation, and a basis for a more equal dialogue with other disciplines concerned with the historic environment.

Narrative Theory in Conservation articulates a coherent theoretical position for conservation that addresses the urgent question of how historic buildings that remain in use should respond to change. As such, the book should be of great interest to academics, researchers, and postgraduate students from the fields of conservation, heritage studies, and architecture.

Chapter 1

Context

People and change in conservation

In a higher world it is otherwise,

but here below to live is to change,

and to be perfect is to have changed often.

John Henry Newman ([1845] 1909)

The conservation of historic buildings is just one of many disciplines with an interest in history; an interest, that is, not only in the minimal sense of intellectual curiosity, but also in the fuller sense that its outcomes are strongly influenced – or arguably determined – by the particular understanding of history adopted. Yet conservation rarely takes the time to reflect on that underlying theoretical understanding, and it is much the poorer for it. While modern conservation deals with buildings going back to antiquity, its processes are the product of modernity and come laden with modernity’s particular ideological commitments. This book aims to take a fresh look at conservation theory, and in the process to suggest possible means of resolving some of the inherent and persistent contradictions that flow from those commitments. The approach taken is to bring the undeniable modernity of conservation into dialogue with resources from beyond the confines of Western modernity, and hopefully to promote a more fruitful exchange with adjacent disciplines such as archaeology, architecture and history of art.

E. F. Schumacher is best known for his book Small Is Beautiful (1973) which was highly critical of conventional Western economics and championed ‘appropriate’ technology as a means of empowering individuals and communities; the book had the subtitle ‘economics as if people mattered’. His last book, A Guide for the Perplexed (Schumacher 1978), was published posthumously and set out the philosophical approach underlying his earlier work. Central to this was a critique of what he saw as the dominant ‘materialistic scientism’, particularly the misapplication of the methodology of the ‘instructive sciences’ to other fields such as the social sciences. The opening paragraph of the first chapter, ‘On Philosophical Maps’, reads:

On a visit to Leningrad some years ago I consulted a map to find out where I was, but I could not make it out. I could see several enormous churches, yet there was no trace of them on my map. When finally an interpreter came to help me, he said: ‘We don’t show churches on our maps’. Contradicting him, I pointed to one that was very clearly marked. ‘This is a museum’, he said, ‘not what we call a “living church”. It is only the “living churches” we don’t show’.

(Schumacher 1978: 9)

In my experience as a practising conservation architect, those non-professionals responsible for historic buildings – including in England those who care for our parish churches – often face a similar perplexity. Conservation offers an official procedural and theoretical ‘map’, based on a series of largely unstated commitments, which similarly seems to ignore many of the salient features of the cultural landscape. Perhaps the most obvious of those missing features is a coherent account of the relation between a historic building and those groups of people that gather around or within it, and whose identity is often in turn formed by it. For Schumacher, his perplexity ‘remained complete until I ceased to suspect the sanity of my perceptions and began, instead, to suspect the soundness of the maps’ (ibid.). This book adopts a similarly critical approach to the maps provided by Western conservation for navigating the heritage landscape.

1.1 Beating the bounds: the scope of the argument

Despite a handful of valiant exceptions, conservation has typically shied away from locating its commitments in any wider theoretical landscape that might produce better maps, greatly to its detriment. Symptomatic of this is John Earl’s otherwise excellent Building Conservation Philosophy (2003) which, despite its title, contains not a single reference to acknowledged philosophers of any kind. Earl himself warns of the danger that practitioners who ignore philosophical questions ‘will find themselves in a rudderless ship’ (2003: 3) but, since philosophy is understood in the weakest sense – merely as ‘approaches’ – he does nothing to locate the discipline with respect to other philosophical landmarks. Leaving aside the irony of a discipline that champions physical context while ignoring the theoretical hinterland beyond its narrowly defined borders, this substantial omission is downright dangerous; practice must connect with theory if practitioners are to know whether their intervention will be for the long term good, or not. In any case, even if we wished to, we cannot avoid theory; we either engage with it deliberately, or we find ourselves animated by a philosophy not of our choosing. Since modernity is founded on the flight from tradition and towards dreams of progress and emancipation from the past, the implications for historic buildings of ignoring the wider philosophical landscape are both substantial and urgent.

The approach taken in this book is therefore not only to critique the operation of contemporary conservation practice, but also to propose an appropriate theoretical foundation and to explore its implications, both for professionals and community interests. Its central concern, in terms both of practice and theory, is the question of how people and physical heritage interrelate. This first section starts by considering what is meant by the evocative term ‘living buildings’, which often stands as a marker of these concerns, but is seldom defined, and then looks at our understanding of change to historic places, a frequent point of contention between experts and non-professionals. It then considers some more direct parallels between buildings and people, and how conservation can be located within an ethical framework.

The question of living buildings

The term ‘living building’ describes buildings that remain in use, particularly those in use for the purposes for which they were first created. This is a primary distinction for conservation, but one that is insufficiently acknowledged, either in theory or practice. In turn this raises the central questions of who makes heritage, and of who gets to decide what matters and how; these have been a central concern of heritage studies since its inception. The issue of living buildings therefore stands as representative of a rich set of questions concerning how we engage with the past and with the material world.

The evocative first sentence of the preamble to the Venice Charter (ICOMOS 1964) positions historic buildings, termed ‘monuments’, as ‘living witnesses’ of ‘age-old traditions’ (plural), but makes no acknowledgement of the creative workings of tradition (singular). These ‘witnesses’ are ‘living’ in the minimal sense of having survived, but they lack any sense of agency. Meanwhile, Article 3 of the Charter states that ‘the intention in conserving and restoring monuments is to safeguard them no less as works of art than as historical evidence’. This in turn has profound implications for the question of change to historic buildings. After all, to change evidence is to falsify it, and to change a work of art is to destroy its integrity; clearly the approach of the Venice Charter is not one that addresses heritage that changes. By contrast, the twentieth-century philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer declared that ‘works of architecture do not stand motionless on the shore of the stream of history, but are borne along by it’ (Gadamer [1960] 1989: 157). While this holds in the minimal sense that history will inevitably leave its mark on any building, Gadamer is making the bolder claim that change is in the very nature of historic buildings, since they are not only the products of but also actors in the ongoing cultural life of a living tradition.

In England, official conservation guidance mentions living buildings primarily in the context of places of worship. Churches are described as ‘living buildings at the heart of their communities’ in the very first sentence of New Work in Historic Places of Worship (Historic England 2012: 1). The phrase is also used for the enticingly titled guidance Living Buildings in a Living Landscape (Historic England & Countryside Agency 2006) on the future of traditional farm buildings; however, neither document provides a definition. Elsewhere, the leading conservation architect Sir Donald Insall (2008) chose Living Buildings as the title for his monograph celebrating 50 years of practice. While he too offers no definition, for Insall all buildings are living; they are our interlocutors, and it is important that we know our place in that dialogue, allowing the building to address us before we ourselves speak (2008: 7). Perhaps the term ‘living building’ is assumed to be self-explanatory, but a thorough exploration of its implications for the practice of conservation is long overdue.

The main international focus for work on living heritage in conservation has been the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM); a brief paper, Living Heritage: A Summary (Wijesuriya 2015), outlines their approach. Living heritage is understood in terms of four interrelated forms of continuity: of function, of relation between a core community and the tangible heritage, of expressions (entailing a recognition that heritage places will continue to change), and of care. An explicit link is made to change, recognizing it as part of the living nature of a heritage place. In 2003 ICCROM convened a forum on living religious heritage, with the resulting publication (Stovel et al. 2005) providing case studies from across the world and from a variety of religious and cultural traditions. Ioannis Poulios (2014) has developed a detailed application of a living heritage approach – based on the same four forms of continuity – to the monastic sites at Meteora in Greece.¹

The need for a living heritage approach within conservation arises in response to a disconnect between the life of living buildings and their material fabric, but it important to note that this is a problem of modernity’s own making. The pre-Cartesian view is of a material world that is animated, mutable and protean. The seriousness with which alchemy was taken in Western culture into the seventeenth and even eighteenth centuries, despite its later caricature as primitive chemistry, provides one trace of this; architectural examples of this include the Hortus Palatinus at Heidelberg castle, which was entirely structured around an alchemical understanding of light and water, or the use of progressively darker materials to structure degrees of holiness in some South German Baroque churches (Walter 1991). Against the standard Western view of physical objects as inert compounds of matter and form, known as ‘hylomorphism’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1987: 408), Tim Ingold also draws on alchemy to propose a ‘morphogenetic’ view. Rather than seeing the process of making as the imposition of an internal mental form on an external material world, for Ingold it is instead ‘a process of growth’ (2013: 21, emphasis original):

Making, then, is a process of correspondence: not the imposition of preconceived form on raw material substance, but the drawing out or bringing forth of potentials immanent in a world of becoming.

(Ingold 2013: 31)

Such a ‘bringing forth’ calls for a non-modern approach. John Ruskin, so important to the development of conservation, could speak of a ‘living architecture’ and insist that in the surface of ancient stones ‘There was yet in the old some life’ (Ruskin [1849] 1903: 243, emphasis original); yet Ruskin’s adoption of the idea is partial and selective, and is employed to argue for the prevention of the sort of elective change that living heritage entails.

The preliminary definition of a living building as one that remains in beneficial use establishes the fundamental distinction between living buildings and ‘dead’ monuments. This distinction is not a new one. In 1904, William Locke reported the recommendations from the Sixth International Congress of Architects held in Madrid to the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA); the first of the six agreed principles was:

Monuments may be divided into two classes, dead monuments, i.e. those belonging to a past civilization or serving obsolete purposes, and living monuments, i.e. those which continue to serve the purposes for which they were originally intended.

(Locke 1904, emphasis original)

Principles 2 and 3 then state that dead monuments should be preserved with minimal intervention, while living monuments should ‘be restored so that they may continue to be of use’ (emphasis original). It was the Belgian Louis Cloquet who seems first to have developed this distinction in the 1890s; dead monuments such as pyramids, temples, and ruins should be preserved while restoration was more appropriate for living monuments such as churches, castles, and manor houses (Tschudi-Madsen 1976: 98–99). Locke articulates the rationale for preservation: ‘the importance of such a [dead] monument consists in its historical and technical value, which disappears with the monument itself’; this is noteworthy for the early use of the language of value(s), the investment of that importance (in the case of ‘dead monuments’ only) exclusively in the material fabric, and the tacit understanding that the importance of ‘living monuments’ is not similarly constrained. It should also be remarked that this understanding of living buildings was articulated by an international gathering of architects, whereas art historian Alois Riegl’s almost contemporaneous ‘Modern cult of monuments’ ([1903] 1996) makes no such distinction.

The use aspect positions an active community or group of people as essential to the vitality described by the word ‘li...