The Venice Charter Revisited

With a foreword by HRH The Prince of Wales. The Venice Charter of 1964 was a major step towards better conservation of traditional buildings and places. It has since become the founding document of ICOMOS, the organisation for professionals in conservation. However, the requirement of clause 9 that new work must be distinct from the architectural composition and must bear a contemporary stamp, has been misused to justify clashing new buildings in old places around the world. The results have attracted condemnation by citizens from Sydney to St Petersburg and beyond, and have prompted UNESCO to reconsider the issue of new buildings in historic urban landscapes. The Venice Charter Revisited: Modernism, Conservation and Tradition in the 21st Century is a timely look at how planning has gone wrong, why it needs to be fixed, and how we can heal the mistakes of the past within the spirit of the Venice Charter. With over 700 pages and with more than 350 black and white photographs and diagrams, and including the full text of the Venice Charter and the INTBAU Venice Declaration - which seeks to guide development in historic areas to a more harmonious relationship with its surroundings - these 64 essays on new buildings in old places provide an authoritative source on heritage and planning in a diverse and rapidly developing world.

A completely updated new edition of David Lowenthal's classic account of how we reshape the past to serve present needs.

South Asia is famous for its monuments, past and present. Monuments have been created, destroyed and rescued by competing communities and incoming empires in the making and re-making of history, identity and memory. This collection brings together an international cohort of senior scholars and younger researchers to examine the vast diversity of monuments (and conceptions of monuments) in South Asia from the 1850s to the present. The chapters investigate what constitutes a monument, and interrogate the conditions for its survival, demise or recycling. To explore the afterlives of monuments is to investigate how, where, when, and why monuments have been remodelled, re-sited, destroyed, defaced, or abandoned. It is to investigate the theories of memory, history and community, as well as new forms of artistic practice and global media. As different South-Asian communities claim a stake in the making of national, religious, cultural and local identities and histories, the status of monuments and debates about cultural memory have become increasingly urgent. This book was published as a special issue of South Asian Studies.

How realistic is it to expect translation to render the world intelligible in a context shaped by different historical trajectories and experiences? Can we rely on human universals to translate through the unique and specific webs of meaning that languages represent? If knowledge production is a kind of translation, then it is fair to assume that the possibility of translation has largely rested on the idea that Western experience is the repository of these human universals against the background of which different human experiences can be rendered intelligible. The problem with this assumption, however, is that there are limits to Western claims to universalism, mainly because these claims were at the service of the desire to justify imperial expansion. This book addresses issues arising from these claims to universalism in the process of producing knowledge about diverse African social realities. It shows that the idea of knowledge production as translation can be usefully deployed to inquire into how knowledge of Africa translates into an imperial attempt at changing local norms, institutions and spiritual values. Translation, in this sense, is the normalization of meanings issuing from a local historical experience claiming to be universal. The task of producing knowledge of African social realities cannot be adequately addressed without a prior critical engagement with how translation has come to shape our ways of rendering Africa intelligible.

This book contains the two formal lectures delivered by the authors at the University of Melbourne as part of the 2010 Miegunyah Distinguished Visiting Fellowship Program, and an anthology of essays written during the last ten years. These writings formed the basis for the academic activities undertaken in Australia during the residency at the Melbourne School of Design. CLAUDIO D'AMATO GUERRIERI is full Professor of Architectural Design and the current Dean of the Faculty of Architecture at the Polytechnic of Bari, which he founded and first headed in 1990. Between 2003 and 2009, he was the Director of the Program in Architecture and Industrial Design within the same Faculty. He was previously Chair of Architecture at the University of Reggio Calabria, and taught at the University of Rome. Since the 1980s, he has been part of many government commissions on the transformation of architectural teaching in universities. Professor d'Amato Guerrieri received his Laurea in Architettura in 1971 from La Sapienza University of Rome, where he subsequently obtained a Master degree in Study and Restoration of Monuments in 1974. Since 1978 he is part of the Architects' Professional Register for the jurisdiction of Rome. ATTILIO PETRUCCIOLI holds the Chair in Landscape Architecture at the Polytechnic of Bari, where he is also the Director of the Architecture Department. Between 2003 and 2009, he was the Dean of the Faculty of Architecture. Before his appointment in Italy, Professor Petruccioli was the Aga Khan Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, and the Director of the Aga Khan Program of Islamic Architecture at Harvard and MIT. He is currently a member of the Italian Inter- University Research Centre on Developing Countries (CIRPS), and sits on the Board of Directors of the American Centre for Maghrib Studies, the Board of the International Seminar on Urban Form, the Committee of Honour of the International Network of Traditional Building Architecture and Urbanism (INTBAU) of the Prince of Wales Foundation in London, and the International Association for the Study of Traditional Environments (IASTE). He is also a research associate at the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University.

Repair, reuse and disposal are closely interlinked phenomena related to the service lives and persistence of technologies. When technical artefacts become old and worn out, decisions have to be taken: is it necessary, worthwhile or even possible to maintain and repair, reuse or dismantle them - or must they be discarded? These decisions depend on factors such as the availability of second-hand markets, repair infrastructures and dismantling or disposal facilities. In telling the stories of China's power grid, Canadian telephones, German automobiles and India's shipbreaking business, among others, the contributions in this volume highlight the persistence of technologies and show that maintenance and repair are not obsolete in modern industries and consumer societies.

Places are locations of value where psychological and cultural needs are satisfied. Human relationships with particular environments play a key role in motivating, developing, and nurturing the life of societies. Undifferentiated space becomes ‘place’ as we understand it better and its built and natural forms become endowed with value. However, misunderstanding the critical importance of heritage locations, particularly based on rejection of local and regional distinctiveness, has often led to their destruction. Featuring essays from across central Europe and beyond, and aimed at practitioners, decision makers and concerned citizens alike, this book raises awareness about the responsibility that we bear for every action taken that modifies the formal and socio-cultural context. Potentially, these actions can negatively impact the cultural landscape. Learning to recognize the essential value of heritage to the ‘place-ness’ of our cities and landscapes is vital in helping us to preserve and enjoy their intrinsic beauty and cultural importance.

By improving our understanding of how the tangible and intangible dimensions of heritage are correlated, we could develop a relationship with heritage that goes beyond the mere act of conservation. This book argues that we need to recognize the historic monument as a tangible aspect of a holistic expression of culture that is rooted in specific spatio-temporal conditions. However, since the latter are constantly changing, it is vital to identify an implicit contradiction with the goals of conservation. As the intangible dimensions are more dynamic, driven by the transmission, reception, and advancement of knowledge, the reliance of the prevailing treatment of heritage today, conservation, ossifies this relationship. By examining three major heritage monuments - the Pantheon, Teotihuacan's Sun Pyramid and Alhambra - the book shows how these sites are the product of multiple strategies and unforeseen agents, accumulated through history. It emphasizes how these historical trends need to be better understood in order to attain a more 'organic' relationship with heritage and offers some recommendations that should be analyzed in participative processes of deliberation: the Pantheon's continuity could be extended; the Pyramid's loss, accepted; and Alhambra's exclusion, reversed. In this way, the book invites people to engage heritage from a historical understanding that is open to critical reassessment, dialogue, and cooperation.