[1] The nineteenth century bequeathed to the practice of architectural conservation two incompatible philosophies, each articulated with a rigor that has kept both alive well beyond the century that produced them. [2] For Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, the French architect who oversaw the reworking of numerous medieval structures, to restore a building was not to preserve it as found but to return it to a state of stylistic completeness—“a finished state,” in his famous formulation, “which may never have existed at any given time.” [3] The restorer, on this view, must grasp the logic of the original design so thoroughly that he can supply what its builders intended but never achieved, correcting the accidents of history in the name of the design's own principles. [4] Against this stood John Ruskin, for whom such intervention was a species of falsehood. [5] A building's value, Ruskin held, lay precisely in the accumulated traces of the centuries—the weathering, the wear, the visible hand of successive generations—and to strip these away in pursuit of an imagined original was to destroy the very thing that made the structure worth keeping. [6] Better, he insisted, to maintain a building honestly in its age than to counterfeit its youth.
[7] The opposition is often reduced to a contest between conjecture and humility, with Viollet-le-Duc cast as the arrogant improver and Ruskin as the reverent guardian. [8] But the caricature obscures a premise the two men shared: both assumed that a building possesses a single, recoverable meaning, whether that meaning is located in its design or in its patina. [9] Later conservation theory would unsettle that assumption, treating a monument as an accretion of meanings, no one of which holds automatic priority. [10] The international charters that now govern preservation practice bear the marks of both figures—and of the sustained effort to escape the very terms in which they framed the debate.
