Applied and Reapplied Preservation

Abstract:Architectural preservation has been a participatory activity all along. This is because of the universal and perpetual need for maintaining and repairing older structures. The commonsense of repairing, when possible, rather than replacing anew has instinctive appeal. It almost always means a savings of time, materials and money. Successful ingredients for translating preservation theory and intentions into practice involves commitment, imagination, resources, and planning and organizational skills.Over the past three decades, especially, evolving architectural preservation technologies and methods have considerably expanded our capacity to conserve the built environment. Traditional methods of building preservation such as hand drawn recordation of structures, clipboard surveys, and print photography have largely been replaced by digital documentation, geo-referenced data bases and “smarter” displays of information. A plethora of affordable new tools for scientific materials analysis and testing, both in the laboratory and in the field, are increasingly available. Radically improved data management capabilities, communications systems, plus contributions to the field from the allied professions of engineering, archaeology, museology, public history and education have significantly enhanced architectural preservation practice. Today, the preservation field’s purview and technical capabilities are robust to the point where in some places there is nearly an over-abundance of abilities to preserve the built environment. Applying these abilities remains the challenge.Renovating buildings traces back to earliest civilizations across the world. Untold tens of millions of structures have been rehabilitated in the past century alone. Many were carefully restored and respectfully rehabilitated noted historic xxiv structures. The majority, however, have been renovations and expansions of more ordinary structures. Still, such interventions involve some degree of preservation-thinking. Additionally, if one considers that maintenance is an act of building protection, then architectural preservation must represent well over half of the world’s residential and commercial building industry.In time, naturally, most all prior restoration and rehabilitation interventions themselves need re-doing. As a result, today’s preservationists are increasingly involved with “re-restoring” buildings and, in relation to that, “re-researching” and “reinterpreting” them as well. Such operations could be termed reapplied preservation.