Editorial: Interpretation, Experience, and the Past

Figure 1.

New York State Pavilion, Flushing Meadows Park, Queens, New York. Philip Johnson, architect (1964). Decay and the failed promise of the future combine to make a forceful and poignant postmodern ruin whose interpretation and reuse remain ambivalent, 2009. (Frank G. Matero)

Any consideration of the interpretation and display of heritage sites demands reflection on three critical questions:

• • How should we experience a place, especially one that is fragmented, accreted, and possibly illegible?

• • How does intervention affect what we see, what we feel, and what we know?

• • How can display promote effective and active dialog about the past across space and time?

All conservation is a critical act that results in the conscious production of “heritage.” As an activity of mediation between the past and the present, conservation is ultimately responsible for what the viewer sees, experiences, and can know about the past and its relationship to the present. Much contemporary practice is concerned with finding an acceptable balance between protecting the many values that characterize places of historical and cultural significance, not the least of which involves the complexities of change to the tangible and intangible aspects that uniquely define all heritage. Such questions have been fundamental to classical conservation theory and practice concerned with interventions in the life of a building or place regardless of age. The tension inherent in this dialectic defines the very nature of conservation as the push and pull between the emotional and humanistic on the one hand, and the rational and scientific on the other (Fig. 1). James Marston Fitch attempted to explain and guide such intervention policies through a triadic model (Fig. 2) based on three tangible aspects of heritage:

1. 1. The “present physiognomy” of the building/site, that is the accumulated physical evidence including age, what Ruskin called “voicefulness”;

2. 2. the “architectonic or aesthetic integrity” of the building/site in purely formal terms or the original artistic aesthetic intent, what Viollet-le-Duc termed “stylistic unity”;

3. 3. the “phylogeny and morphogenetic development of the artifact across time” or the development of type and structure, each work being unique and individual unto itself, a concept associated with Cesare Brandi’s “potential unity” and related to Gestalt philosophy.

More recently, intangible aspects of heritage places have joined the list in the name of a more evenly represented values-based approach that has gone far in attempting to give heritage greater visibility and meaning to a larger audience.¹

Figure 2.

A triadic model of the modalities of built heritage. (Frank G. Matero)

At least since the late eighteenth century in Europe, sites of national historical importance have been maintained, repaired, and interpreted in a manner distinct from their ordinary everyday counterparts. Whether preserved or restored according to the prevailing principles of their time and place, heritage sites were viewed as exceptions to the rules of normal building maintenance and repair and practical alterations. Take for example the extreme case of ruins. Preservation and display as an integral part of their intervention began in the eighteenth century with the belief in and contemplation of nature and the solace that could be derived from a ruin. There was no question of preservation in the Romantic or Picturesque attitude toward a ruin.² The ruin was there to stimulate the visitor, the effect sometimes enhanced by selective destruction and cultivated vegetation. The pleasure to be derived was one of reconstruction in the mind’s eye of the ancient place in its original state; the better one understood the ruin, the better the imaginative reconstruction.

It was in the late nineteenth century that the first formal attempts to both excavate and display in a scientific manner were attempted at excavations such as Assos (Turkey), Knossos (Crete), and Casa Grande (Arizona). Like other heritage sites, the conservation of ruins requires the removal or mitigation of deterioration; however, the very nature of their fragmented disposition also determines and affects their meaning and character. This has a direct and powerful effect on visual legibility and indirectly conditions our perceptions...