The essay aims to retrace the events leading up to the organisation of the 1931 Athens Conference, the first international conference on the conservation and restoration of monuments. Organised in ...Paris by the Office International des Musées under the aegis of the Société des Nations, the initiative brought together over one hundred participants including archaeologists, architects, conservators and art historians to discuss heritage issues. The Conference emblematised a key moment between the two wars, bringing out new approaches and new problems within a discussion that had been going on for many decades, including through, and it is first in this sense too, a comparison between the legislations of different countries. The political and cultural climate linked to this initiative today represents a fundamental stage in understanding the birth of the international debate on heritage conservation issues.
Villa Borbone show up to the eye of the attentive traveler immersed in the geometries of a lush garden, fading into the motility of the coastal landscape. A set of buildings, including the small ...chapel steeped in classical suggestions, is a part of what once constituted the vast property of the ducal family. An incredibly precious heritage, which this book aims to account for, restoring its history, its materiality, but also all its fragility, in an attempt to define a path that can contribute to its preservation.
The question this essay attempts to answer is what the role of theory is today in the complex world of restoration and conservation. But that is not all. The aim is also to bring back to the centre ...of the discipline the theoretical nodes, which too often take second place to the design and technical aspects, such as those that give substance to the discussion on heritage and patrimonialisation. Much has been said on the critical formulation of a restoration project, especially today, in the face of global phenomena becoming ever more complex there is a necessity to recuperate the theoretical and notional values of the discipline. Faced with the advancement of technical solutions and the ever-increasing intrusiveness of scientific instruments, restoration risks losing its theoretical foundations. In addition to questions about laboratory investigations, sustainability, climate change issues or the choice of green products, it seems more necessary than ever to return to the more strictly philosophical-humanistic questions that must then necessarily be the foundation of restoration work..
The climate between the two world wars was a critical moment for the emergence of a debate on issues regarding the conservation of world heritage. In particular, all the innovative ideas that began ...to take shape in the early 20th century were amplified until they took on an international dimension. A fundamental role in this sense was played by the League of Nations and the whole series of organisations, such as the Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle or the Office International des Musées, which at least partly formed the basis for the establishment of Unesco. The role played by the Office International des Musées, later inherited by Unesco, was decisive in triggering an intense exchange between scholars and technicians belonging to the various member states in the field of museology and cultural heritage conservation. As a result, in these decades initiatives on the restoration and conservation of monuments flourished, and among them above all La Conférence sur la conservation des monuments held in Athens in 1931. The political and cultural climate linked to this conference now represents a defining moment in understanding the start of an international debate on issues regarding the emergence of the concept of world heritage and its protection.
Last February the Péniche Louise-Catherine, a reinforced concrete barge built by Le Corbusier at the end of the 1920s for the L'Armée du Salut, has sank in the waters of the river Seine in Paris. For ...years the Péniche, which has long been classified as historic monument, has suffered from negligence as being considered a minor work among the vast biography of the French-Swiss architect, the attempts of a private association to safeguard it notwithstanding. The story of the asile flottanti is even more paradoxical as in the light of the recent nomination of part of Le Corbusier's architectures for the Inscription on the World Heritage List.
Today it would be necessary to render the intersection between words that give life to things and traces that continuously refer back from stone to documents, from archive documents to the ...independence of the work, with its autonomous temporality of continuous metamorphoses. It would be appropriate to do it by highlighting what is considered “residual”. Not only, as it is commonly said nowadays, because of the resilience of the restoration material to destruction, at least semantically. But because restoration faces the dilemma of micro-history in a world that we would like to be global and should have knock down all barriers. Globalization has accelerated the “presentism”, thus undermining even the language of actors, as well as of those involved in restoration and preservation, who have as their cognitive foundation the multiplicity of time and of the times that history entrusts to the restorer. Only recovering the space and the meaning of words that are not used solely to make homogeneous what is not can bring back to those relational knowledges, such as restoration, their theoretical foundations.
Following the investigative paths, the author interlaces a series of documents and clues to delineate the events of the restoration of the Villa Savoye by Le Corbusier, but above all the role played ...by the various actors involved in this story, which is still not closed. From George Everard Kidder Smith to the multifaceted Jean-Louis Véret, who would in fact become the villa’s most stubborn conservator and interpreter, starting with the writing of his Carnet d’identité, one of the most ambiguous and fascinating sources for the history of the restoration of modern architecture. Susanna Caccia Gherardini, thanks to her research time as Guest Scholar at the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles, thus adds a new piece to the studies she has already published on the subject.
