You went to see the Taj on a trip organised by your school. You were spell bound to see the spectacular beauty of the monument but the lack of cleanliness around it disappointed you. Write an article in about 150 words expressing your admiration and your disappointment and the need for “conservation of monuments’
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Answers
Answer:
Introduction
Throughout the renaissance period, preservation and restoration remained an experimental process in which many of the tools, instruments and methods were selected at random. The process was pursued with very little critical or historical understanding. This led to many architects such as Viollet-le-Duc, Sir George Gilbert Scott, John Ruskin and William Morris voicing their perceptions of how preservation and restoration should restore buildings to how they would have appeared in their prime.
Most of our modern principles of conservation arose from the ideas of John Ruskin and William Morris from the mid 19th century. They stated how we are “merely custodians” of the buildings left form our predecessors for our future generations. They also state how our intervention in historic buildings must be kept to a minimum and how continued repair and maintenance of these historic buildings must be valued. These ideas form the basis of modern perception of preservation and restoration of our valued historic buildings and monuments.
What is Conservation?
Conservation is a way of planning designed to conserve historic buildings, areas and monuments in an effort to connect a place’s historical background to its population and primarily its culture. Conservation is means of “green building”, that is, reusing the existing building as oppose to new construction for a modern purpose and use. The four main styles of conservation of historic buildings are preservation, rehabilitation, reconstruction and restoration.
Preservation
Preservation is the means of keeping an historic building a close as possible to its original state by means of continued repair and maintenance. This focuses on the stabilization and repair of the existing materials in the building and the retention of a building’s state as it has evolved over time.
Restoration
Restoration of historic buildings involves reconstructing parts of the building that have fallen into decay as imitations of the highest possible quality of the original building. This form depicts a building at one stage in time and often removes any evidence of any other period in which the building existed.
Rehabilitation
Rehabilitation sees the need to alter or extent to an historic building to meet modern demands while still keeping the historical character of the building.
Reconstruction
Reconstruction re-creates vanished buildings or parts of buildings by interpretive means.
Criticisms of Conservation
Like many developments in urban design and planning, conservation has had its share of negative perceptions. Such aspects if this criticism include;
Cost
Style
Mistakes made
Cost implications of Conservation
There are many costs associated with the preservation or restoration of an historic building. Often they need specialist workmanship which can be both time and money consuming on a construction project. Delicate elements of the building often require propping or some sort of support which can take up valuable space on site. Many of the systems in an old building need upgrading which can be difficult to install. Requirements such as energy rating and fire certificates can be hard to upgrade as often the original design of the building did not consider such modern ideas. Elements such as cavity walls or wood cladding are expensive and difficult to bring up to modern standards regarding these requirements. Structural elements of an historic building are the most endeavouring aspects of the conservation process to get right. Foundations are a recurring issue with many of the buildings as newer structures with deeper and heavier foundations can often cause uplift of the older building. The cost of repairing the foundations of these buildings are astronomical so diligent design of new foundations and monitoring of existing buildings is paramount during construction. All this adds up on a construction project which has undesired implicated cost for both contractor and engineer.
Modern style construction
Due to property price rises and limitation of space in city centres our society has constructed its buildings higher and higher to meet its purposes. This popular style of higher buildings can often cause the older, smaller historic buildings to become dwarfed and ultimately undesirable for its occupants. As the push towards increased numbers of taller sky-scrapers in urban areas is inevitable, this leaves many of the smaller older buildings redundant. Critics also say that the older historic buildings cannot accommodate as many people or businesses as newer developments can. This increases the rent on these buildings and causes low income retailers and residents to relocate. This has a negative impact on a city centre regarding retailing.