The Creative Architect and the Conservationist: Redefining a Contentious Relationship

The development of instrumental methods of conservation in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in the world, where historic sites are seen as the exclusive responsibility of conservationists, has been detrimental to the historical and cultural continuity of the built environment. Much of our built heritage has been reduced to little more than museum pieces, emptied of contextual relationships or hermeneutical traces. Our capacity to interpret the past depends largely on the opportunities, presented to us through architecture, to participate in its legacy. This investigation, which takes a historical view of the relationship between architectural conservation and practice, argues that only the creative architect can rescue these precious sites from ossification.