Abstract
New challenges in contemporary age are facing the discipline of architectural restoration. These challenges do not mean that the traditional questions and issues have been definitely solved or that they have lost their relevance: the problems of “why?” and, consequently, of “how” to intervene on existing architectures maintain their actuality. In the same time, some new and additional reasons to affirm and pursue the safeguard of our built environment have come to the fore. Among them we may highlight: the informative potential of ancient architecture, from which we can derive several interesting lessons about smart technological solutions to build in a more ecological and respectful way for the environment and the limited resources of our planet; the need for sparing resources (economic, energetic, territorial, human, social, environmental) because of the energetic crisis and the fragile ecological situation of the Earth. The essay proposes a deep reflection around theoretical and methodological issues on the terms conservation and restoration.
The essay is a revised version of the publication by Stefano F. Musso 2009.
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Notes
- 1.
See, during the XIX C., in Italy, the works of some restorers as Alfredo D’Andrade, Carlo Maciacchini, and Alfonso Rubbiani whooften forced and misunderstood the ideas and the works by Viollet Le Duc giving life to the so-called stylistic restoration.
- 2.
See also the contributions by Walter Frodl and Paul Philipot who co-operated for several years with the School of Specialization in Restoration of Monuments in Rome, directed by Renato Bonelli, the Italian Central Institute for Restoration, founded and directed by Cesare Brandi, and then with ICCROM, contributing in diffusing the Italian positions about restoration.
- 3.
At the end of the 80s of the past century, in Italy, the panorama saw the birth of a new disciplinary tendency within the field of restoration. Someone, belonging to the so-named Milanese School opposed to the overpowering presence of the so-named Roman School and proposed some new horizons and a new concept of what restoration could have been. The “Roman School”, represented by scholars and professors like Giovanni Carbonara or Guglielmo De Angelis D’Osssat was the heir of the long and important tradition interpreted by Renato Bonelli and Cesare Brandi and, even before, by Gustavo Giovannoni. Within that intellectual tradition the influence of the neo-idealistic philosophical thought by Benedetto Croce was still predominant with all the consequences upon a vision of the monuments like masterpieces of art, aesthetically and figuratively examinable, valuable, and consequently treatable with a restoration aiming to free their “real form” (Bonelli), hidden by casual and insignificant transformations, or establishing again their “potential unity” (Brandi). In Milan, reacting to these positions, scholars, university teachers, and professionals like Marco Dezzi Bardeschi and Amedeo Bellini, immediately accompanied by Paolo Torsello and afterwards by many younger ones, gave life to a new tendency that, recalling Alois Riegl’s, John Ruskin’s, William Morris’, or Max Dvorak’s fundamental ideas and works, considered the ancient monuments as far as documents of their own history and, therefore, proposed to respect every traces of that complex history, without any preventive choice due to aesthetical, historical, or ideological assumptions. The debts towards the so-named New History (the “Nouvelle Histoire” funded by the French historians), the Culture History (or “materialist and archaeological culture”, derived from the German term “Kulturgeschichte”) and the most updated currents of the contemporary philosophical and epistemological thought were, in this case, very evident. Recently, that firstly very hard and almost irreducible contraposition has been almost completely exceeded, thanks to the efforts of many protagonists and we conquered, at least in Italy, the common consciousness of the irrepressible historical nature of any artefact derived from the past and, consequently, the idea that right this material consistency must be first of all respected and preserved. What to do beyond the primary needs for conservation, on the contrary, is still a hard and intriguing matter of discussion, above all regarding the possible construction of lacking parts or new necessary components of the monuments entrusted to our care.
- 4.
Leonardo Da Vinci, Lettera ai fabbriceri. In the same volume, some other interesting texts are collected belonging, among the others, to Donato Bramante and Francesco di Giorgio Martini, always related to the problem of the completion of the flesh of the Milanese cathedral and, further on, the so-called Lettera addressed by Raffaello Sanzio (but probably witten by Baldassar Castiglione) to Pope Leone X about the state and the destiny of the ancient ruins in Rome. These writings are very interesting and explicit theoretical expressions about the problematic relationships existing between the protagonists of the birthing Renaissance culture and the medieval incomplete monuments or with the ancient classical ones they assumed as a reference legacy.
- 5.
See, a propos, all the international documents and the numerous International charters devoted to the problem of the destiny of ancient architectures, towns, and cultural landscapes but also to the huge legacy of immaterial goods of humankind in the contemporary world in the perspective of the future generations.
- 6.
As regards the relationships and the respective roles of Science and Technique/Technology in the contemporary world see, in general, the most recent epistemological elaboration from Karl Popper to Hans Georg Gadamer, Francoise Lyotard, and Jürgen Habermas.
- 7.
This circumstance means, by the way, that also our ideas about the decay phenomena and their meanings as regards the needs of intervention are quite relative and absolutely not fixed or universally conceived.
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Musso, S.F. (2017). Conserving–Restoring for the Future What We Inherited from the Past. In: Historical Buildings and Energy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52615-7_2
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