Tending the Architectural Corpus

摘要

The term preserve, which derives from the compound Latin verb praeservare, literally means "to keep before." This formulation is commonly translated "to save" or "to protect." But it might just as easily be rendered "to keep in view" or "to ensure the presence of." The differences may seem to be minor. Yet, the consequences are far from trivial. An important case in point are the views of John Ruskin and Eugene-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, two nineteenth-century theorists widely celebrated as founding fathers of architectural preservation, concerning the issue of building restoration. Both authors agreed that the practice was a quintes-sentially modern phenomenon. They disagreed, however, about its value. Ruskin, prizing buildings as indices of concrete individual action, negatively defined restoration as a destructive enterprise that produced "a false description of the thing destroyed." Viollet-le-Duc, prizing buildings as indices of abstract societal evolution, positively defined restoration as a creative enterprise that produced "a complete condition that may never have existed at a given time." The result was a debate, still ongoing within contemporary practice, that framed the care of aging structures in terms of the competing claims of subject and object, process and product, endurance and immanence.