ABSTRACT
Conservation is a modern project and cannot be correctly understood except through the concerns and commitments of modernity. Modern Western conservation can be seen as a response to two traumatic episodes of unnecessary loss of historic fabric: firstly, the nineteenth-century passion for the restoration of historic buildings and, secondly, the wave of reconstruction following World War II. Responding to the first of these episodes, the 1877 SPAB Manifesto was William Morris’s direct attack on the contemporary practice of the restoration. While modern conservation has changed and grown, Morris and his Manifesto remain foundational to its self-understanding.
Despite their apparent dissimilarity, parallels can be drawn between the early conservation movement and the international modernism of post-war reconstruction; these result from a common underlying belief in the discontinuity between modernity and previous ages. This suggests the need for an alternative and non-modern basis for a theory that addresses historic buildings that have survived from pre-modernity. The adjacent discipline of cultural landscape demonstrates how an alternative body of theory can lead to a very different set of practices which sees people as integral to heritage and thus offer a contrasting approach to authenticity, character, and ongoing change.
