2013 “RESTORATION DESIGN” COURSE
CONSERVATION HERITAGE (CH) PROGRAM EXERCISE
For doing “Restoration Design” exam is essential to elaborate a conservation program exercise
referring to a cultural heritage place proposed by students.
The Cultural Heritage (CH) place’s to be chosen must be characterized by:
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being statement to cultural significance. Thus, it may be an archeological site as well as an
historical building (alone or as a group), an historical centre town or an historic urban
landscape too.
being affected with decay and/or deterioration building phenomena, loss of proper
installations, features and components, as well as site’s accessibility and/or usability
improper solutions, as when there’re building barriers or past intervention works caused
incompatible or invasive outfits, for example. Obviously every physical disease, loss of
proper installation systems, invasive settlements and solutions or incompatible use of new
building material could individually have hurt CH place, as in connection to one another.
Once chosen your exercise’s CH place you’ve to submit it to the professor for choosing it definitely
or replacing it for a more adequate course’s requirements choose.
For correctly doing Conservation Heritage (CH) program’s exercise you must adopt a
comprehensive and integrated approach aimed to the identification, assessment, conservation
and management of a selected CH place, always within an overall sustainable development
framework. Investigating and recording site-specific as-found condition, finding up causes,
contents and assets of each negative factors now afflict CH place, it properly represents the first
CH program’s exercise essential part, prior to elaborating main conservation project’s
requirements, objectives and strategies.
Your basic exercise purpose is to define and adequately detail CH conservation project
development, just like a process (“ the CH conservation process”), indicating its phases and main
related contents and objectives.
Your CH conservation exercise (CH exercise) must clearly demonstrate to have correctly developed
conservation process tailored to selected CH places. The CH exercise’s development has to be
systematically organized from collecting existing data and historical notes about building
development and alterations during its life to documenting and recording so-called “as-found
building condition”, from choosing adequate investigating and surveying methodologies and
means to defining likely causes of phenomena and factors affected specific “as-found condition”
with, until elaborating main project’s contents, goals and strategies. Therefore, conservation
program must be designed referring to your selected CH place’s properties and qualities, as well as
to all its difficulties, loss and probable negative impact-factors, to properly define and illustrate
objectives, methods, instruments and outfits each CH project phase would have to realize. The CH
conservation program must be developed as you’ve learned by studying the GCI “Recording,
Documentation and Information Management for the Conservation of Cultural Places”, especially
for what concerns the Heritage Information (HI) Conservation Process (see pp. 20/27). Use that
format to apply a systematic and comprehensive approach for solving qualitative and concrete
factors now affecting CH place with, creating a sort of master-program of the conservation process
you’d manage for satisfying each preservation and sustainability requirements, detailing and
illustrating purposes, reasons, mean, methods and likely outfits for each of your CH program steps.
Collating existing documents of a selected CH place - like measured drawings, pictures, photos,
maps, plans, as well as historical notes and iconography - is your first task. Don’t forget to include
the broader urban context and geographical and morphological setting too, by gathering historical
such as current documents of CH place’s environment and neighboring, to properly understand
environmental conditionings. By collating and analyzing existing documents you’ve first to define
and illustrate what cultural values and statements are to be preserved. Then, by on-site
investigations and applying Heritage Information technics and graphics (sketches, measured
drawings and detailed exterior and interior photo-survey), you must detect and adequately record
“as-found condition” with its main phenomena of deterioration and decay, improper and invasive
structures, features and installations as well as every loss of usability and accessibility. Thus, it’s
essential a complete prior CH place photo-survey of its exterior and interior room as well as its
neighboring and environment, indicating each photos’ locations on proper plans or maps.
For completing the Heritage Information (HI) conservation program’s phase, you’ve to indicate
which HI methodologies, instruments and tools could help you better documenting and
understanding “as-found condition”, describing why and for what goals you’ve chosen each of
them, referring to site-specific properties, loss and problems. Therefore, you must clearly say
which kinds of documents, records and information technologies would be useful to adequately
survey “as-found building condition” and so better acknowledge site-specific properties,
settlements and assets such as main causes of deterioration, decay and negative impact-factors.
In summary, each conservation program’s phase must indicate what are its contents and outfits,
why you’ve chosen to adopt those methods and instruments, what objectives you want to reach
for and how you think to do it correctly. Each conservation program’s phase can comprehend
sketches, measured drawings, photos, as well as texts, tabs, graphics or schedules, such as every
information means able to express and properly communicate conservation design purposes and
requirements, and all that’s more useful to understand your design-concept and development too.