Architectural Conservation

‘A paper on the Conservation of Historic Edinburgh, with particular reference to the Georgian New Town’, 1972

This paper was prepared alongside the conclusion of ‘Conservation on the Continent’: https://www.academia.edu/46714633/Conservation_on_the_Continent_1972_unpublished_

I spent part of my final University year in Edinburgh, attached to the office of the Interim Director of the Edinburgh New Town Conservation Committee (ENTCC). My Year 5 had two parts: this written dissertation; and a design project for a major vacant site in the New Town. As with ‘Conservation on the Continent’, the word ‘heritage’ does not feature in this paper; the word appeared in its familiar present-day usage somewhat later.

This report of a study tour undertaken during the 1971 long vacation between the fourth and final years at the Department of Architecture, University of Cambridge, has remained with me as a historical record, a point of reference for subsequent visits, and a source of occasional eccentricities.

One apparent curiosity, the omission throughout of the word ‘heritage’ is easily explained. Maybe others at the time had a different experience, but in my circles ‘heritage’ signified ‘inheritance’ until the early 1970s: land, property, and ancestral. This is the sense used in The King James Bible (1611); Jane Austen’s Emma (1815); J B Priestley, Our Nation’s Heritage (1939); and ongoing through into the early 1970s. ‘Heritage’ did not appear in today’s sense, whether as the ‘heritage construct’, ‘authorised heritage discourse’, or in market branding, until 1972 at the earliest, and then initially with 1975 European Architectural Heritage Year (with which I became directly involved). Neither ‘heritage’ nor today’s mass tourism existed in the summer of 1971.

This paper presents a literature review about aerogel-based products for building, focusing on the plasters used within the architectural restoration sector. Aerogel has entered the construction field in the last two decades as a component of many insulation products, due to its high thermal performance. Aerogel-based plasters allow the matching of high thermal performance and limited thickness. This makes them suitable when retrofitting an existing building and also when restoring a heritage building. We analyze the results of recent research, focusing on the most commonly used methods for assessing the thermal performances and durability of aerogel-based plasters. As a result of this review, we propose a guideline for manufacturing samples destined for laboratory tests.

The history and development of architecture. Those two words accompany a traditional subject taught for decades at faculties of architecture. The goal of the subject is to look into the past and to update the present, enabling the current students of architecture to orientate themselves more easily in the complex and demanding search for creative starting points.
The history of architecture is a subject that logically lends itself to being presented in the form of lectures. However, in the past, the schools of architecture used to teach the subject through practical exercises. Those exercises provided a practical opportunity to create a historical theme with enough time for one’s own study of details and general connections. This article covers the development of the depiction of the history and development of architecture against the background of the events that took place in the course of the century of architects being educated in Brno.

The book describes the cooperation between the Faculty of Architecture of Brno University of Technology and the College of Architectural Arts of Guangxi Arts University in Nanning in 2018 and 2019. It offers studies of the participants in the Chinese-Czech workshop on rural architecture in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region in southern China, and presents a joint summer school on traditional architecture and sculpture in Brno and at Račice Castle in Moravia.

Tall buildings are a controversial topic in urban planning, particularly when the construction site is located in an urban conservation area or close to it. Heritage conservation measures in many countries often regulate the height of new buildings to preserve a traditional, iconic urban panorama. For some, the new building´s height in and of itself is a violation of heritage values; others see high-rises as trademarks of progress. Both attitudes are quite recent. In the past, belltowers, spires, minarets, and domes enriched urban skylines without compromising their visual coherence and what was perceived as beauty. The paper explores various aspects of the current debate, tracing its history back to the turn of the twentieth century when the office and residential skyscraper enlarged the family of tall buildings. Unlike in America, these two types of buildings remained rare in Europe until the 1950s, and the exceptions often involved a symbolical underpinning. Later on, high-rises became part of the mass building industry in Europe, changing the urban environment significantly. After 2000, despite the high cost and public disapproval, highrises are still constructed and designed often with the ambition to compete with traditional landmarks. The paper mentions several current projects (in Prague, Olomouc, Vienna, and Seville) where the controversy affected heritage protection on various scales (NGOs, local policies, and World Heritage advisory bodies). Is the height of new structures the most significant threat to preserved heritage values? Is their contrasting image inevitable? And what about high-rises that deserve heritage protection?

This study addresses the general protection of sites through the idea of preserving the "environment" as a functional whole. Within this broad framework, the text focuses on the meaning and goal of the so-called conservation areas. The first part examines how and when a holistic concept of protection emerged. The second part reviews the current state of affairs, while the third section develops an argument in favor of a holistic understanding of the environment based on interdisciplinary research and complex adaptive systems. The study emphasizes the pioneering impulses from 19th-century Central Europe for the protection of the style and "memory" of historical cities, the creation of nature reserves, the protection of landscape character, the democratization of conservationist initiatives, and the discussion about these initiatives' motivations. It further argues that traditional environments, today preserved in conservation areas, differ starkly from unprotected areas in terms of these environments' systemic qualities. Traditional environments have the natural qualities of living structures, which explains their attractiveness, making "preservation of life" the common goal of the entire conservation movement.