11 March 2009

Global Seminars & Invited Speaker Series

STATELY HOMES AND PALACES OF NAVARRA

"Combrar y restorar. Principles and criteria of restoration

D. Gabriel Ruiz Cabrero
School of Architectureof Madrid

The term "restoration" as applied to architecture as we understand it today is relatively recent, having been established as a consequence of the monarchical Restoration in France, when it was decided to rebuild the tombs of the kings that had been razed to the ground by the Revolution. The first "Inspector General of Historic Monuments" appointed in these days of the political restoration, with Louis Philippe on the throne, was Ludovic Vitet, who already then established with great determination and success the "Principles of the Restoration".

There are, however, important precedents for architectural work of this kind which history has recorded. The great Theodoric proceeded to restore the Roman monuments of Ravenna when, after conquering it, he made it the capital of his Gothic kingdom, and even earlier Constantine restored ancient buildings which had been destroyed with the same purpose purposeto enhance his power. The famous arch that bears his name in Rome is ornamented with sculptures from earlier buildings that had been stripped of their decorum. Constantine intended in this way, in the manner of the conqueror, to enrich his work with the spoils of earlier famous works. We cannot therefore speak of restoration in the sense we now give to the word.

The chronicler, years later, in the 13th century, wrote about the Mosque of Cordoba: "They restored it in this way, and to restore it is as much as to restore it to the service of God". 

Restorar was the contemporary form of languagefor restore, but when he wrote like this, what he meant was that the Christians had restored the monument to the status of Cathedral, remembering that before being a mosque it had been the church of San Vicente. 

The chronicler uses "restoráronla" or "restauraronla" as the recovery of the character of a Christian temple, not the original form of the building, which is paradoxical, since at the same time he was ordering the cathedral chapter to conserve it.

In Cordoba Cathedral there is also the oldest example I know of authentic modern restoration, which was undertaken in 1815 by Bishop Trevilla when he ordered the organist Patricio Furriel to remove the chapel of San Pedro to recover the domes of the mihrab entrance hall, and to restore the damaged voussoirs on the front of the mihrab, which he did with painted glass in colours similar to the originals, although with slight variations where the losses were irrecoverable. This attitude prefigures the Romantic sense of restoration, as this concept of restoration must be seen as a direct result of that aesthetic movement.

Mihrab of the Mosque of Cordoba

Although, as we have said, it was Vitet who first established the principles of restoration when, in 1837, he wrote: "... the first and inflexible principle in restoration is not to innovate.It is not often enough repeated that in restoration the first and inflexible principle consists in not innovating, even if the laudable desire to fill inand embellish drives innovation."It is to Victor Hugo that we must attribute the first efforts to make restoration a public interest topicand to denounce the abusive interventions of architects. In 1825, he wrote "Guerre aux démolisseur", launching a movement in favour of heritage conservation with respect for history.

It was Violet le Duc who, with his numerous works, was the first to offer a modelof intervention that was practised in our country until the beginning of the last century, when architects such as Puig i Cadafall or Velázquez Bosco, incorporated caution when intervening and a demand for the archaeological knowledge, which came from English circles close to Ruskin.

It is interesting to confront Violet with Ruskin, for in their expressions lie the limits of the discussion on the principles of restoration.

Violet wrote: "to restore can mean to bring the building to a Degreeof perfection it may never have known", an attitude that led him to actions such as putting a metal spire on Notre Dame, because according to him at the time it was built it was canonical for it to have one. And to build it, contradictorily to the above, of iron, as it was also a superior technique for him. 

Ruskin, from a position that was perhaps more strictly romantic, but certainly more conservationist and more literary, advocated non-intervention, preferring to see a noble building fall down rather than be transformed into something else. He wrote that "the public does not know the true meaning of the word restoration, it means the most complete destruction of the work of art" and argued that the merit of the artist's work lay in the last centimetres of the carving, which had been lost over time and were impossible to recover. Restoration theory oscillates between the Frenchman's optimistic stance on restoration and the Englishman's abstentionist and contemplative one, with reflections that lean to one side or the other, depending on the case. 

A later and fundamental contribution to the theory of restoration was that of Giovannoni, who introduced domestic architecture into the territory of this activity. He began by defending the importance of the structural condition of buildings (which led him to historical monuments and the vindication of the Roman mural Structures) and from there he moved on to the problem of urban centres in his country. By defending the importance of the buildings surrounding the monument as part of it, the value of the whole and not of the isolated fact, critical of those contemporaries who believed that they showed the monument better if they destroyed its surroundings, he extended the concept of monument and with it, that of the territory of restoration to domestic architecture. He coined the term "Arquitectura minore". He wrote: "Per la conoscenza e la valutazione di quella grande documentazione storica tradotta in pietra che si si ha nei vecchi centri, la minuta congeria delle case ha valore spesso maggiore dei grandi monumenti".