Restoration / Architecture · Design and Construction
Guide · YOY Mimarlık
Where does the idea of restoration come from?
Repair is as old as building itself; but restoration became a discipline bound by principles only in the nineteenth century. To understand why “let us return it to its original state” is not always the right answer, it helps to know that two-hundred-year argument.
Repair is old, restoration is new
Almost every ancient building still standing has been kept alive by repair and renewal through the centuries. In that sense the history of restoration can be traced back to the beginnings of building itself. But there are two fundamental differences between repair in the past and restoration today.
The first is scope. In the past, buildings that were religious, national or ideological symbols were sustained by the will of society or by endowments; today conservation has passed beyond the single monument and taken in the modest buildings that make up historic urban fabric.
The second and more important is the theoretical basis. Restoration today is carried out according to defined principles, not according to personal opinion or the architectural movement of the moment. The turn towards a scientifically conducted discipline began only in the nineteenth century — and it came about through the collision of opposing views.
Unity of style: Viollet le Duc
The new interest in medieval buildings in mid-nineteenth-century France led to an irresistible increase in restoration work. The leading figure of the period was the architect and architectural historian Eugène Emmanuel Viollet le Duc (1814–1879). Notre Dame, Saint Denis and Amiens cathedrals, the walls of Carcassonne and the château of Pierrefonds are among the works he directed.
Viollet le Duc’s famous definition ran thus: to restore a building is not to keep it, repair it or rebuild it, but to bring it to a finished state that may never have existed at any given moment. This theory, known as stylistic recomposition or “achieving unity of style”, sought to complete a monument according to the ideal style of a single period.
Applied to medieval buildings, the approach produced great damage. Very few medieval buildings were completed in a single campaign; the building of a cathedral could take more than a century, during which the prevailing artistic movement changed and differences of style arose between its parts. When a monument was to be restored to its “original style”, the changes, repairs and additions it had gathered over its history were demolished and lost.
Even so, some of the principles Viollet le Duc argued for still hold today: that the condition of a monument should be documented in detail with drawings and photographs before restoration begins; that the restorer should research the building’s period, regional character and construction techniques in depth; and that beginning a restoration on the basis of assumptions is extremely dangerous.
The romantic reaction: Ruskin and Morris
The critical climate against work driven by the pursuit of unity of style was prepared under the leadership of the painter and critic John Ruskin (1819–1900). Ruskin argued that a work of art should be preserved in the form in which it has come down to us; rejecting the removal of additions in the name of stylistic unity, and their replacement by designs that could never be fully known, he held that doing nothing was the better course.
Ruskin’s remedy was continuous maintenance: if monuments were properly cared for in time, restoration would never be needed. A few sheets of lead laid in time, a gutter cleared in time, save both roof and walls. This position is known as the “anti-restoration” movement.
What had remained a poetic ideal reached a wide public through William Morris (1834–1896), a leading figure of the Arts and Crafts movement. Morris founded the SPAB in 1877 and issued a manifesto asking those concerned to put protection in the place of “restoration”, to stave off decay by daily care, and to refrain absolutely from tampering with the fabric or ornament of a building. The society’s first international success was the halting of the proposed restoration of the west front of San Marco in Venice.
The legacy of that stance is plain today: protection comes before restoration, and continuous maintenance is the best conservation there is.
The settlement: Boito, Giovannoni and the charters
The first attempt at a middle way between the two extremes was Luca Beltrami’s theory of “historical restoration” in Italy: monuments should be restored on the basis of concrete data drawn from archival documents and from investigation of the building itself. The demolished Filarete tower of the Sforza Castle in Milan was rebuilt on this understanding. Criticism of the theory centred on the sufficiency and reliability of the documents: an engraving or a painting carries the artist’s interpretation and cannot be treated as a scaled architectural drawing.
The real settlement was established by the Italian architect Camillo Boito (1836–1914). The principles he set out in 1883, regarded as the forerunner of modern conservation rules, were these: monuments document the history of humanity and must therefore be treated with respect; consolidation is better than repair, and repair better than restoration; necessary additions must rest on concrete evidence, be made in a different material and character, and the restoration must be marked with a date; additions of later periods are to be accepted as part of the monument and preserved unless harmful; and every operation carried out must be documented with reports, drawings and photographs.
Gustavo Giovannoni (1873–1947), who carried Boito’s principles to an international level, argued for more scientific restoration and for conserving monuments together with their surrounding fabric. These views were adopted at the Athens Conference of 1931 and given legal form in Italy in 1932 as the Carta del Restauro.
The destruction of the Second World War and the large-scale rebuilding that followed forced a revision of the principles. The congress held in Venice in 1964 produced the Venice Charter, still the fundamental reference text today. Article 1 widened the notion of the “historic monument” to embrace urban and rural settings, and took in not only great works of art but more modest works that have acquired cultural significance with the passing of time. Article 3 defined the aim thus: to safeguard monuments no less as works of art than as historical evidence.
Later texts widened that frame: the Declaration of Amsterdam (1975) brought forward integrated conservation, the Nairobi Recommendation (1976) the contemporary role of historic areas, the Washington Charter (1987) historic towns, and the Nara Document (1994) the idea that authenticity may be judged differently from culture to culture.
Why does this argument concern your house?
Because the reasoning behind the decisions the Regional Conservation Board issues today is the outcome of that two-hundred-year argument. To understand why the proposal “let us remove this later part and return the house to its original state” is usually refused, it is enough to know the Viollet le Duc debate: unity of style is not the aim of a restoration.
To understand why the proposal “it fell down, let us build the same again” calls for documents, it is enough to know the criticism of Beltrami: if the evidence in hand is not to scale, what is produced is not reconstruction but interpretation.
And to understand why the approach “why spend on maintenance every year when I can overhaul it all at the end” is mistaken, it is enough to recall Morris’s manifesto. Protection is both cheaper than restoration and more faithful to the building.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is “let us return it to its original state” not always right?
Because most buildings do not have a single “original state”. Over a long life a building takes on additions and alterations in different periods, and some of these carry historical and artistic value of their own. Article 11 of the Venice Charter states this plainly: the valid contributions of all periods to the building must be respected, since unity of style is not the aim of a restoration. Revealing an underlying layer can be justified only in exceptional conditions — where what is destroyed is of little importance and what is brought to light is of great value.
Is the Venice Charter binding in Turkey?
What binds directly is national legislation: Law No. 2863 on the Conservation of Cultural and Natural Property and the principle decisions of the High Council for Conservation. The Venice Charter, however, is a body of principles adopted by the boards that direct conservation practice in Turkey, and it is regularly cited as authority in board decisions, project reports and academic assessments. In practice it is hard to justify a restoration report without reference to it.
So is doing nothing the best course?
No — Ruskin’s uncompromising position arose as a reaction, and was later softened to make it workable. The approach today is not to do nothing but to conserve with minimum intervention. A building left unmaintained is lost as well, only more slowly and more quietly. The right course is to deal with damage while it is small, and at every intervention to choose the path that does least harm to the original fabric.
Source
The principal reference for this summary is Zeynep Ahunbay, Tarihi Çevre Koruma ve Restorasyon (Historic Environment Conservation and Restoration), YEM Yayın, Istanbul 2009, Chapter 1: The development of conservation thought and its theoretical basis, and the appendices. For the texts of the charters, the publications of ICOMOS and UNESCO.