The Basis of Dealing with Heritage in Sana'a City An Analytical and Critical Vision of the Architectural Changes Panorama 1972-1990

Abstract

Sana'a city has its own conditions in dealing with its architectural heritage because it has not obtained its political nor social awareness but in late stages. It focused at the beginning of 1962 revolution on stabilizing its new political system and this created a modern capital fit with the major political transformation without paying attention to the form or architectural structure of this capital. Therefore, the modern architecture prevailed to become a characteristic of this city.
 After ten years of revolution, and as a result of tracking what was going on in the world, discussing its events, conflicts and cultures through cultural and scientific exchange which began Yemen generally in and Sana'a especially strived to achieve with Arab and western countries, an individual, government and international awareness developed about the great importance of the cultural heritage of Yemen from a general scope and the importance of traditional architecture and the maintenance of the Yemeni identity whose architecture specially incarnates its most important cultural branches.
 These social, governmental, and international authorities had adopted a special vision in dealing with heritage through learning lesson from the local experiences in building, through using local building materials and decorating frontages with traditional items incarnated with the values and spirit of traditional architecture to exposure the cultural and historical asset of the traditional architecture through modernity that being witnessed by the world in which Yemen is a part of. 
 Thus, governmental and architectural models found to use decoration items and traditional building materials for the first time that can be considered as a basis to start dealing with heritage at governmental and social level.
 So, the research aims to tackle that perspective which represents the basis of dealing with heritage , analysis and criticism, as it represented a dominant concept which had a great impact on the architectural perspective at that time and later through forming a theoretical frames for heritage's concept in language and architecture, after then how to use it in the architectural works and
 studying these works which appeared for the first time on a government level and then appeared in foreign and Yemeni designers' models, and therefore it changed the architectural view, at that time and affected it for later stages.