Abstract
The built heritage of the 20th century concerns society in general: it is the background to everyday life and the stage of ‘past experience’. Therefore, recent past buildings should not be considered merely for their aesthetic features; they also have to do with physical well-being, social rituals and representations, as well as with associated concepts such as values and emotions. But conservation of 20th-century heritage is not straightforward. It requires specific strategies as well as critical and operational tools, which are not part of the cultural background of the actors of the transformation of our cities (architects, engineers, heritage officials, etc.) and do not yet feature in current design teaching curricula in most universities. To fill these gaps, in 2008 four Swiss architectural schools (USI, EPFL, ETHZ, SUPSI) launched a research project titled ‘Critical Encyclopaedia for reuse and restoration of 20th-century architecture’ (2009–2013). The article presents one of the outcomes of this research: the work developed by the section titled ‘Historical and Critical Tools for Conservation’, which will be published shortly. It provides readers with the cultural, theoretical and critical frame of reference required to understand recent architectural heritage in its widest sense: as a historical, symbolic and aesthetic resource, but also as being endowed with social, economic and ecological value. By examining theories and doctrines which have developed over time and thanks to the exemplary nature and variety of the selected cases, it provides a historical appraisal of how intervention in the field of recent heritage has evolved over the past 60 years. Furthermore the oeuvre presents intervention tools in action: by analysing a vast array of case studies which address the main areas of conservation practice (historical and critical research, analysis of materials and technical features, identification of compatible new uses, regulatory compliance), it provides a methodology to develop concrete and appropriate criteria for any specific case.
Highlights
Most of the buildings in which we live, work, spend our free time today, etc. were built in the last century
For the user the spaces of a home, office, factory, and those of a town hall, museum, cinema, parliament, public bath, airport or place of worship are the background to everyday life, and the stage of ‘past experience’, with all this entails
In the domain of activities related to the conservation of 20th-century architecture, there is no disciplinary corpus having a unitary, intelligible and shared structure, that is to say, built around a theory, methods, tools and practices in which actors can identify and which are subject to transmission
Summary
Most of the buildings in which we live, work, spend our free time today, etc. were built in the last century. The debate on the restoration of 20th-century architectural heritage started in the 1980s, and the work carried out since has produced a vast amount of knowledge, such knowledge is still fragmented, unorganised, not comparable, and challenging to find. This knowledge has been poorly received by the general public and by professionals—architects, engineers, heritage department officials—and students, who are and will be the key actors in transforming of our cities. This state of affairs is disquieting, especially if we consider the immense task of conserving recent heritage; the breadth of this task is linked to the continuing ‘making’ of new heritage assets, recognised as a hallmark of our time (Heinich 2009), to the extreme variety of building types produced by modern civilisation, as well as to the progressive extension of the period of reference: we no longer merely include the ‘heroic relics’ of the 1920s and 1930s, and buildings from the post-war period, from the socalled ‘postmodern’ years, as well as today’s built heritage in general, rightly considered as a resource from the perspective of sustainable development
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