ABSTRACT
This chapter critiques the forces that shape the conservation process and the often unacknowledged theoretical understanding that undergirds it. It argues that current conservation processes fail to address the particular concerns of living buildings, too readily equating change with harm. Tracing the development of the contemporary conservation framework built around significance made up of discrete values, the usefulness of the parallel between buildings and people is considered. The questions of material vitality and whether historic buildings can be said to possess agency are explored, and conservation is framed as a branch of applied ethics.
From its roots in the Enlightenment, modernity supposes a fundamental discontinuity with the past, a rupture followed by a new beginning. Bruno Latour noted that one founding characteristic of modernity is a dichotomy between the natural and social worlds. Because conservation is a thoroughly modern phenomenon, it makes a sharp distinction between people and inanimate things, a distinction which pre-moderns – the care of whose buildings is a principal concern of conservation – would have rejected as absurd. The chapter argues that modernity’s repudiation of hybridity accounts for modern conservation’s difficulty in accounting for living buildings, which thus remain inadequately theorized.
