Architecture as Heritage

What is heritage?

Heritage refers to a collection of culturally related goods acquired via inheritance that represent the customs , knowledge and stage of development of a particular era or social group.

What is culture?

Culture means a group’s or generation’s distinctive way of life, tradition, level of artistic, scientific or industrial knowledge.|

–Cultural heritage:

Cultural heritage is the heritage of tangible and intangible heritage assets of a group or society that inherited from the past generations. a heritage is an income of a selection society.

–Cultural assets:

After the WW2 , many nations were left with no cultural identity, and there was a need to recover or build a new culture.
Industrially developed countries focused more on activities neglected before, such as agriculture and handcrafts, then new history came to focus on men and its existence, instruments of work, utensils of everyday use…., leading to make cultural asset each its peak.

In 1972 the UNESCO, came to classify cultural assets as listed:

  • Monuments: architecture, sculpture, painting, caverns…
  • Sets: group of constructions whose architecture and integration with the landscape gives them an exceptional value.
  • Places: works of people and nature with universal value, from the historical aesthetic and ethnological point of view.

Why preserving heritage?

Preservation is a method of not loosing the values of cultural identity, in order to do that you should know before what the cultural assets of people, which are CATALOG, and all god in catalogues must be preserved and protected. Not only this but as architects , we have to think about the value of the good, to opt for the form of intervention before choosing with whom to intervene.

How to preserve heritage?

Legislative instruments:

  • Protecting: legal actions, administrative rules…
  • Inventorying: locating and describing the assets of a specific extent
  • Cataloguing: locating and describing+ providing historical and economical valuation.

Actions of interventions:

which is a sum of multiple activities and activities to maintain the cultural heritage ( Preservation, maintenance, repairing, consolidation, renovation, adaptation, reconstruction, anastylosis, restoration ).

To restore an edifice is not to maintain it, repair or rebuild it, but to re-establish it in a complete state that may never have existed at a particular moment

Eugène Viollet-le-Duc