FROM THE LEXICON - CUDC Quarterly 2:3 - Summer 2003

Restoration

n the entry on "restoration" in his magisterial Dictionnaire Raisonnée of 1866, the great theorist and architect E-E. Viollet-le-Duc states, "The term and the thing itself are both modern. To restore a building is not to preserve it ... it is to reinstate it in a condition of completeness which may never have existed at any given time."

Of course, Viollet’s is hardly the only view on the subject. An alternative approach, emphasizing the conservation of buildings in their present state, developed at  about the same time among English followers of aesthetician John Ruskin, and both schools of thought inform contemporary practice in historic preservation. Still, Viollet’s remarkably frank definition points to a central difficulty. Like all forms of memory, historic preservation is always selective to some degree.

Viollet’s practice was to "return" the great medieval churches of France to the conception of their original designers–or what he imagined that to be, since there are no drawings and medieval designs were altered routinely during construction. This "ideal date" approach to restoration (often used for important historic sites in the U.S.) works well enough with major monuments, but it can involve stripping away the effects of time, and the character and depth they add.

With a discreet monument, this is largely a question of managing impressions, of getting over the disappointing flatness that, for example, a newly cleaned painting can have. With an individual building, especially a great one, the initial shock is usually well worth the gains that restoration brings. The situation is more ambiguous with anonymous, minor buildings, even more so with urban places, and perhaps even more still with landscapes.

In these sites, the changes wrought by social and natural processes may be as worthy of remembering as the original state. We might want to conserve what these sites have "learned," rather than return them to innocence, both for the sake of historical honesty and to do justice to newer forms of understanding, such as ecology. In addition, these everyday sites usually have work to do, unlike landmarks, which have been given a permanent vacation from function. For all these reasons, to say that something should be "restored" is the beginning of a complicated interpretive process, not the end.