The legacy of anti-scrape and the inadvertent consequences of the Venice Charter: the challenge of contemporary additions in the historic environment

Abstract

The thesis explains the intellectual forces shaping the design of contemporary additions to historic buildings & urban areas in the C20th. “Conservation,” emerging as a separate area of professional practice during the C19th, developed several orthodox positions, critically one stipulating that new design or work to an historic structure or area should be clearly identifiable to retain the historic layers. The thesis tracks the evolution of “new” into “old” from John Ruskin, through the conservation literature to the end of the C20th. Despite stipulating a distinction between the two, conservation theory maintained that such “newness” should be complementary to the old. The introduction of the “contemporary” to historical settings became especially problematic after WWII. The terminology adopted in the English version of the 1964 Venice Charter confused & aggravated the intended approach to design rather than resolving it. The prescription was further undermined late in the C20th with the emergence of new conceptual challenges as conservation shifted from its Eurocentric basis to accommodate changing notions of place, fabric & authenticity. Although early modernist architecture represented a self-conscious turn against historical styles, intellectual discussion of urban problems in architectural discourse after the WWII offered alternate routes from those advanced in conservation practice. The thesis simultaneously examines C20th developments of “new into old” through the lens of architectural & urban design literature, & adopts a “philosophical” frame to the subject, raising fundamental questions about the nature of urban architecture & the design process within existing environments at a generic level.