Restoration versus Rehabilitation
Sad but true, so much of what passes for heritage conservation in British Columbia today is far closer to the theories and practice of the nineteenth century French architect and theorist, Eugene-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814–1879), than it is to the much more conservative approaches of John Ruskin or William Morris. Values-based management is still so poorly understood. Values of architectural history, particularly stylistic purity, trump all others as layers of a building’s history are scraped away and carted off to landfills. In their place an ersatz past is re-created in a finished state and simulacrum is passed off as authentic. Just as the work of restorers of medieval buildings, such as Viollett-le-Duc, are seen today as products of a fertile nineteenth century imagination and inauthentic as medieval heritage, so too will the restorations of today be seen in the future as products of an early twenty-first century imagination with little or no prior historical authenticity.
Restoration: Both the word and the thing are modern. To restore an edifice means neither to maintain it, nor to repair it, nor to rebuild it; it means to reestablish it in a finished state, which may in fact have never existed at any given time.
Eugene-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc
This past spring my wife and I travelled in Italy and England for about a month. What struck us most was the general lack architectural purity and how so much of the past was a veritable dog’s breakfast, a palimpsest, layered and re-layered on buildings and throughout communities, giving places a deep resonance and a spirit of time and place. Tewkesbury Abbey, for instance, which began life as a Romanesque building with Gothic, Tudor, Stewart, Georgian and Victorian overlays, proudly displays its modernistic stained-glass Millennium window.
Buildings and communities are continually altered, adapted and repaired to extend their physical life and make them useful for the societies they are supposed to serve. As they pass through time, they leave in a textured fabric a treasure trove of stories, memories, hopes, dreams and tragedies that reflect the human condition. A problem with period restoration is that multiple meanings and are replaced with a single meaning and restored places have to wait for history to give them depth once again. It’s the difference between what the environmental movement calls a forest and a plantation.
The Standards and Guidelines for the Conservation of Historic Places in Canada defines rehabilitation as the action or process of making possible a continuing or compatible
contemporary use of a historic place through repair, alterations and/or additions while protecting its heritage value. There are a couple of important ideas to note. First, there is no mention about returning historic places back to how they looked at any time in their past (that’s restoration). Rehabilitation is about repair, alterations and additions. Second, however, rehabilitation does not condone any kind of repair, alterations and additions, but ones which must also consider the heritage value of a place.
Now as long as we only preference architectural history and stylistic purity in our statements of significance, rehabilitation translates into restoration-lite. Once again history, tradition and cultural values that differ from the predominately white, middle-class, elite sense of historical hygiene are relegated to the dustbin of history. Perhaps it is time to understand the past as complex, contingent, multivalent and contested, and allow it to be presented in its full richness, instead of the currently prevailing astringency. And since rehabilitation addresses contemporary social needs and uses, the current changes and additions to a historic place only add more value for the future, much like what we see happening all over Europe and elsewhere in the world.
