The Production of Heritage

The Politicisation of Architectural Conservation

Alan Chandler, Michela Pace

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429663239
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

In this important book, the authors unpack the theoretical and practical issues around the development of heritage sites, critically dissecting key conservation benchmarks such as the ICOMOS guidelines, BS 7913 and the RIBA Conservation Plan of Work to reveal the mechanics of heritage guidance, its advantages and conceptual limitations.

Underpinned by an active understanding of the conservation philosophy of William Morris, the book presents five case studies from the UK and North and South America that speak about different facets of heritage value, such as urban identity, commodification, authenticity, materiality and heritage as an intellectual and ethical framework. Heritage is never neutral; its definition is privileged yet its influence is political. Art, landscape and archaeology all offer examples of how the operational ideas of adjacent disciplines can influence an integrated idea of heritage conservation, and how this is communicated in order to determine significance and share in its custodianship.

This book provides insights into how to identify and challenge these limitations, expanding inclusion by describing tactics for changing how people can relate to and build on the past. Clearly written for all levels of readership within the conservation professions and community custodians of heritage buildings and places, the book provides strategies and tactics for understanding the heritage significance of materials, their fabrication, detail and use. The narratives that historic fabric contains can help shape the meaningful involvement of local people, providing a roadmap for those navigating the double-bind of using the past to underpin the future.

Chapter 1
Introduction

The fabrication of history. Heritage conservation in a capitalist culture

Approach

Our approach develops a critical overview of conservation, identifying two key and recurrent positions that run throughout the approaches to the conservation of the heritage environment in the UK, with relevance to practice in Europe and beyond. In the 19th century Eugène Viollet-le-Duc and William Morris formalised two different, if not antithetical visions of restoration, reuse and adaptation of existing buildings. These approaches have been selected here with the precise intent to explore the understanding of the built and cultural legacies in our cities and because they are a recurring point of reference for contemporary conservation practice. The philosophy of Viollet-le-Duc establishes a scholarly reconstruction of history that confirms our expectations of materiality, style and value, as opposed to Morris’s prioritisation and preservation of the marks of time, wear and age as the cultural evidence of human use. William Morris in particular is our primary reference point throughout the book. A social activist associated with arts and crafts movement and founder of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB) in 1877, Morris was concerned with the reading of a building as an historical text, its fabric evidence of both material and social marks of time. Viollet-le-Duc, however, practised restoration using historically informed conjecture to recreate the impression of a particular moment in time, reversing the damage of both weather and the events of history in order to present an informed, but culturally privileged viewpoint for civic consumption. The evidence of historical events – often revolutionary and socially significant (such as the destruction of sculptures on the façade of Notre Dame of Paris in the revolution of 1793), are consequently erased from the building in the name of education, in this case Violletle-Duc’s reinstatement of copies of the missing sculptures as though the Revolution hadn’t happened. Editing history through seamless restitution becomes a form of cultural correction that George Orwell took to its logical conclusion in 1984, but that Morris as a social revolutionary was already sensitive to in 1884.

Both Morris and Viollet-le-Duc are intellectually woven into the charters and standards that frame heritage policy, pedagogy and practice and the unravelling of these very different philosophies becomes increasingly urgent given the role and status of history in an increasingly populist political arena where collective identity is assumed rather than understood. This chapter provides an overview of the origins of ‘conservation’ and the political context that it is bound to; the significance of heritage within its practices is explored through the role of narratives, which have the ability to select from our past and determine what is relevant for our present. We explore William Morris’s thought, especially when social engagement as a form of history is concerned, and the use that current charters make of both language and philosophical approach to conservation. Finally, we offer a reflection on the role of professionals within the definition of heritage, with the intention of opening the discussion on heritage to a larger public. By recalling key thinkers from the last two centuries, presenting best practice and provocative examples, the aim is to reflect on matters of selection, inclusion and readability in order to orientate the reading of the chapters that follow.

1.1 Heritage as narrative – the value of selection

References to the past are increasingly used to orientate construction and to build place significance. This trend brought some specific terms into fashion. ‘Heritage’ is one of them and has been largely promoted as a ‘value’ linked to local specificity and national character. In a short time it has become a buzzword, with projects worldwide including references to it in their marketing materials. Its use involves slippery concepts such as culture, memory and identity, which are fundamental to the political and social discourse at the local and global scale. What needs to be clear is that heritage in itself is not a thing. Rather, “heritage is about the process by which people use the past – a ‘dis-cursive construction’ with material consequences” (Harvey, 2008: 19 see Smith, 2006). This means that heritage is a selective concept that does not necessarily involve history, as history would entail a more careful observation of the facts and their implications (Scrivano, 2017). Heritage doesn’t do the same work as history. It can be easily isolated and rearranged to inform a bespoke narrative. At heart, heritage refers to “the ways in which very selected past materials and artefacts, natural landscapes, mythologies, memories and traditions become cultural, political and economic resources for the present” (Graham and Howard, 2008: 2). Present concerns, therefore, are the temporal dimension of heritage. Its construction is closely linked to the notion of ‘memory’ that, unlike history, seeks an uncritical relationship with the past (Nora, 1989).

More than this, memory is extremely selective and therefore concerned with the celebration of a certain account of the past (Kearns and Philo, 1993). By giving significance to a selected portion of the narrative, memory prevents it from fading but also alters its meaning in relation to the wider historical process that created the context in the first place (ivi). The risk is that the historic dimension is excluded. This allows the selection of interpretations and representations to inform an idea of the present and, in turn, to imagine the future. It follows that “heritage is less about tangible material artefacts or other intangible forms of the past than about the meaning placed upon them and the representation that can be created from them” (Graham and Howard, 2008; Graham, Ashworth and Tunbridge, 2000; Smith, 2006).

Of special interest in the dissection of ‘heritage’ is the use and misuse of the terms ‘tangible’ and ‘intangible’, confusing an understand how and for whom certain buildings, landscapes or social contexts are significant. This ambiguity is often employed in the narrative strategies used to support economic, political and social programmes and teaches us that we should observe communication as another form of construction. The tendency is to refer to ‘intangible’ heritage to mean cultural aspects linked to traditions, habits and practices that exist beyond the single building, and sit in relation to a context or to a wider landscape. Although this is certainly true,¹ we should pay attention to the deviations that abstract narratives can bring, especially when the notion of heritage is exploited by commercial operations.

By defining heritage as ‘intangible’ our physical response to that place can be and is unconstrained – the history that it contains becomes a convenient narrative that both confers status by association but presents no physical constraints to future development or investment return. Quoting an invisible history is intrinsic to the ‘heritage game’ played out in the financial exploitation of both place and commodities. The changing use of urban fabric and the evolving communities within it surely alters the context of place, producing physical alterations behind renovated façades that are fixed, although local people’s ongoing presence in that place is not. The question is how to respond to the presence of individuals, events or beliefs where their significance is not documented and understood. The risk is that both people and urban fabric become an easy material to be renewed through ‘heritage’ informed regeneration, rather than considered within the concepts of protection and conservation projects that could or should involve protecting and conserving livelihoods, ways of life and community footholds in a place.

What do we really mean by tangible and intangible heritage? Real places can, through the way that they are handled, create fiction from fact – one example is the Foundling Museum in Coram’s Fields, London. The museum tells the exemplary history of the Foundling Hospital, and of the artist governors who supported the children’s charity with their work. The actual building seen today was erected in 1935–7, and while the pastiche treatment of the exterior gives an ambiguous sense of the historic, the building contains three original 18th-century Rococo interiors salvaged from the demolition of the original hospital in 1926 – the Picture Gallery, the Court Room and the Committee Room. Within these original rooms that once hosted Hogarth, Gainsborough and Reynolds, who all donated their artworks to raise money for the hospital, their paintings hang and Handel’s musical instruments lie thanks to the Gerald Coke Handel Collection that reinstated the residency of objects belonging to the great composer and philanthropist. The building is therefore a large replica vitrine containing preserved but decontextualised spaces within which original artefacts sit. The tangible history of the building is a misconception because its interior and its exterior purport to be seamless, when in fact two centuries separate them; the presence of Handel’s possessions within rooms where he performed bring the intangible value of his personal presence into a building he never entered but rooms that he did. The issues around tangible and intangible are critical when considering the significance and value of a building or place, and how we reveal or conceal historical fact within heritage fiction. If the tangible can be allusory and illusory, and the intangible actually an integral part of the ongoing changes that have continually shaped a place, greater accuracy is needed in the way we acknowledge significance and actually what is being understood and evidenced.

If we assume that heritage is “a contemporary use of the past” (Graham, Ash-worth and Tunbridge, 2000: 2) we should think that heritage is then used or ‘consumed’. “What is consumed, however, is not so much the heritage itself, in the form of, for example, a building or a cultural landscape, but its representation in the form of historical narrative” (Groote and Haarsten, 2008: 181). It is then easy to understand how the construction and appreciation of heritage becomes a matter of communication, susceptible to the nuances of meaning that the author determines. Heritage is therefore a mechanism able to create meanings (Hall, 1997: 197), a process of selection that needs to be considered in relation to a wider economic, political and social context. Communication strategies never transport notions of memory and identity innocently.

Figure 1.1 Foundling Museum, London.

Source: Picture by the authors, 2019

The concept of heritage, its invention as such and its refinement as a mechanism of communication and selection is a product of European culture and its origins can be traced to the 18th century (Hernandez Martinez, 2008). At that time, the term was used to address ruins and monuments. From there it gradually extended to include urban centres, traditions and natural landscapes. The reason for the rise of a ‘heritage consciousness’ was a perception of the need for conservation. The discipline of restoration initiated in those years, aimed to safeguard precious relics and was the result of a long process that started with the Renaissance. Simultaneously with this fascination for the ancient, history began to be used to inform bespoke narratives. The construction of a mythical past allowed the rewriting of history, providing new legitimation to those in power. Notions of memory, legacy and tradition started to invade the fields of knowledge and arts, as much as the field of politics, and heritage started to be associated with values of identity and legitimacy. The British Empire offers a direct example: all empires absorb their conquests but risk losing shape unless some form of politically controlled cultural legibility is defined and imposed. Thus, they provide limited local identity re-scripted into a ‘natural’ relation with the clear, overarching authority.

The link between power, geography and identity grew stronger in the 19th century, when the idea of ‘national heritage’ was fundamental to the definition of the nation states. Mainly, national and universal pasts were mobilised and monumentalised to give meaning to the present and to envision the future socially, politically and culturally (Huyssen, 2003). Later, after the second half of the 20th century, the notions of identity and representation associated with heritage became more complex, as the subjects able to define it became increasingly detached from the traditional frameworks of nations, ethnicity, class and kinship (Graham and Howard, 2008). Heritage started to be part of narratives linked to local characters and vernacular elements especially in the 1960s, evolving one decade later into so-called cultural planning (Mercer and Grogan, 1995). As early as the Second World war, the importance of global relationships in the definition of local policies and spatial attitudes significantly affected the way heritage was perceived. With the crisis of nation states, national ‘heritages’ once linked to specific geographies were reframed as sites and practices of global significance. In the era of great pacifications, the concept of ‘world heritage’ started to be promoted by international bodies such as UNESCO. Heritage became one of the internationally acknowledged sources of value, progressively shifting its significance from cultural to financial. In the globalised era of economic investments, heritage continues to be a mechanism of communication and selection, but the meaning of territorial affection is less bound to social and community reasons than it was in the past and is increasingly related to financial appropriation. Patrimonialisation has appropriated many symbols from the architectonic, urban and territorial landscape while becoming progressively linked with market operations (Olmo, 2018).

If we assume that heritage is necessarily linked to the making of present narratives, it is clear that there is a need to explore the language of heritage in order to understand underlying concepts and bias. Language, as evidenced in the often contradictory definitions in the glossary, is not neutral; it codifies cultural and political positions and part of this book’s project is to open up the ICOMOS² concept of ‘reading’ a building or monument, asserting that our perspective on the language we use actively influences what we understand. Our language is not neutral and neither is the knowledge that it frames. To explore this observation further we reference the writing of George Orwell and his masterful dissection of language. Politics and the English language (1946a) identified a staleness of imagery and a lack of precision as key factors in the use of language to obscure meaning rather than invite understanding and participation. The use of jargon creates hierarchies of those who understand ...