ABSTRACT
Narrative forms a key element of Alasdair MacIntyre’s virtue ethics, providing a means of understanding character formation in an individual’s or a community’s response to life events, and accounting for continuity of identity through change. Based on Paul Ricoeur’s exploration of the relation of temporality and narrative, a narrative approach to conservation focuses on continuity through time and provides a positive account of change to historic buildings as a sign of life, not an admission of failure.
This chapter proposes the central metaphor that a historic building is best understood not as a pile of discrete values, but as an intergenerational, communal, ongoing narrative, and that where change is called for, our task in this generation is to write a fitting chapter to drive that narrative forward. In following the grain of tradition, narrative offers a natural means of engaging with historic buildings as cultural wholes rather than merely as collections of parts. The chapter concludes that the proposed narrative approach is able to overcome the limitations and potential abuses of the current methodology, and promises a theoretical framework better suited to the challenges faced by conservation, with welcome implications for greater public participation in and, crucially, ownership of, historic buildings.
