ABSTRACT
Originally conservation involved select monuments of special historic or artistic importance. In 1995, a decade after it was launched by UNESCO's General Director, the Campaign to Save Old Sanaa was awarded the prestigious Aga Khan Award for Architecture. City's medieval form, and the traditional people who inhabited it, seem to confirm its authenticity as described by the World Heritage Convention. An approach is shared by the Italian team that ran a workshop at Center for Architectural Studies (CATS) in inventory methods: reconstruction is allowed, as long as it is done with the proper materials and methods. The modern approach to conservation, what the chapter calls the 'historicist approach' relies on various tools to document and classify cultural products. In the context of capitalist modernity, change is no longer a matter of assimilating new concepts and practices within an existing framework: rather, new systems are embraced that undermine the framework itself.
