Too much to handle: Architectural conservation in the widening scope of heritage

Architectural conservation is an attempt to preserve, conserve, and protect buildings, objects, and environments of historical or cultural significance. An official status as a significant heritage building is usually a precondition for such preservation. Continuous expansion of the definition of built heritage gathers more and more buildings and environments under the scope of heritage preservation and architectural conservation. This expansion generates an urgent need to reconsider the concepts, premises, and practices of architectural conservation, while the heritage preservation adopts new perspectives and frames of reference, such as sustainability, to define and support it. The widening scope challenges conventional architectural conservation as more and more versatile buildings are included in the category of heritage buildings. Consequently, more and more people – heritage professionals and non-professionals – become involved with heritage buildings. While aiming at
understanding the consequences of the contemporary perception of built heritage, the dissertation elaborates on the significance of heritage discourse. It is not indifferent how we talk about our built environment: the concepts we use to describe it affect our attitudes and, furthermore, the built environment’s preservation, maintenance, and repair.

This article-based dissertation focuses on the challenges and potentials of the
widening scope of heritage. The main research question is whether the widening scope of heritage improves the quality, significance, and sustainability of the built environment. The four articles attempt to reconsider some fundamental presumptions of architectural conservation through case studies and research literature from several fields of study. Since the preservation and maintenance of buildings depends on the shared recognition of their value, the first two articles explore the processes through which such values are typically acknowledged and shared, and answer to the first sub-question of this dissertation: how and why the scope of heritage widens. The articles explore the concept of built heritage, and the reasons for its ongoing expansion through focusing on the canonisation process of the Nordic Wooden Town (article 1), and the heritagization processes of former railyard buildings at the Northern railyard in Tampere, Finland (article 2). The second sub-question, how to redefine architecturalconservation in the widening scope of heritage, focuses on the implications of the widening
scope of heritage, and on how the perception of architectural conservation could
evolve. These questions are studied in the articles 3 and 4, which elaborate on the potential of spolia (article 3) and barn architecture (article 4) for contemporary architecture and architectural conservation. Based on all the four articles and their main results, I have formulated the main argument of this thesis: it is environmentally and culturally essential to link the theory of architectural conservation with discourses on the management of the existing building stock.

The thesis combines three lines of research approach: 1) case analysis, 2) concept analysis, and 3) theory comparison. Theory comparisons and concept analysis are used to cross-connect theories from different fields, architectural conservation, heritage studies, and repair studies. Theory comparison accompanied with concept analysis enables the formulation of a vocabulary of its own for the culturally and environmentally oriented management of built heritage. The conclusive analysis of this thesis is conducted with the cross-case analysis method, which aims at the clarification of concepts, their characteristics, and relations to other concepts and phenomena.