Heritage-making: how a monument is born

An old building is not, in itself, heritage. It becomes heritage when a society decides it is worth conserving — and that decision has a history, criteria and consequences. The transformation of any object whatsoever into an asset to be preserved is called heritage-making: the most theoretical theme, and perhaps the most important, of all those treated here.

To conserve or to restore?

The question is founded in the nineteenth century, in a famous debate. Viollet-le-Duc, in France, defended the restoration that returned to the building a “complete state” it may never have had. John Ruskin, in England, opposed him vehemently: to restore is to destroy, he said; the monument should be allowed to grow old and, if necessary, to die with dignity. All subsequent theory moves between these two poles.

Riegl and the values

In 1903, the Austrian Alois Riegl gave the problem its modern framework by distinguishing the different values we attribute to a monument: the age-value (the mark of time), the historical value, the artistic value, the use-value. To conserve is always to arbitrate among these values, which often come into conflict — cleaning a façade may save the artistic value and destroy the age-value.

Riegl’s great lesson is that there is no “neutral” conservation: every intervention chooses which value to privilege, and that choice is cultural, not technical.

The Venice Charter and Cesare Brandi

In the twentieth century, the doctrine becomes international. The Venice Charter (1964) fixes principles still taken as reference today: the reversibility of interventions, the distinction between the original and the added, the respect for the contribution of every period. The Italian Cesare Brandi, in his Theory of Restoration, gives it a philosophical foundation, defining restoration as the critical moment in which the work of art is recognised in its double dimension, aesthetic and historical.

Heritage as process

The most recent turn, associated with authors such as Laurajane Smith, shifts attention from the object to the act. There are not, in this perspective, “heritage things”: there are processes of heritage-making — practices through which social groups construct, contest and use the past in the present. To ask of a monument “why is this heritage, and for whom?” is, today, as legitimate as to ask its date.

To understand these debates is not a scholarly luxury. It is what allows us to look critically at any intervention — a rehabilitation, a restoration, a classification — and to recognise, behind each apparently technical decision, a choice about which past we wish to conserve.