Roger White
College of Arts and Law, University of Birmingham
As is well known, approaches to building conservation until 1994 were dominated by a Western-oriented perspective that reified the fabric of buildings so that each phase of a building’s history could be read in its own right. In 1994, the Nara Document was issued offering a completely different cultural perspective on the conservation of buildings. This presented an approach that sees conservation as a means to preserve not the fabric of a building, but its constructional authenticity. In other words, it is not important to retain the components of a building, but to replace them exactly if that is necessary to preserve the structural integrity of the building. This principle has now been enshrined and validated as an equally valid conservation approach.
My purpose in this lecture is to talk about another approach that belongs to antiquity, but which represents a distinctive strand in building conservation: the use of “spolia” in buildings. Spolia is a term used to describe the recycling of architectural materials into a new building in a way that leaves the embedded elements visible and intelligible. As a practice, it was used in ancient Rome, but is very characteristic of the Middle Ages in Europe. This paper explores why such an approach was used, what it tells us of ancient attitudes to buildings, and how it contrasts with the approach used in the Nara Declaration.
(Presented in the 2018 Chulalongkorn Asian Heritage Forum : Culture of Longevity, 15-16 August 2018, Mandarin Oriental Hotel, Bangkok, organized by Institute of Thai Studies, Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences, College of Population Studies, Chulalongkorn University)