Letting Go: the Limits of Intervention

The purpose of this paper is to draw attention to the issue of the final limit of conservation interventions towards architectural monuments in the context of a holistic concept of heritage protection. The full text is addressed to Polish readers due to its special reference to the situation in the Polish system of protection of architectural heritage.

Although architecture belongs to the sphere of applied arts, most of the buildings were not created as works of art. Their raison d'être was - and still is - the possibility of implementing technical tasks in a manner strictly meeting the users' expectations. They were mostly subordinated to the principles of technology and economy. Their life cycle assumed even aesthetically degrading transformations, wear and tear as well as planned or unplanned end. The end of existence of an ordinary building is as natural as the pursuit of an eternal preservation of a (traditionally understood) work of art in its original condition. And such an end should be perceived as natural, and in some circumstances acceptable, even from conservation point of view. By adopting the concept of overwhelming “heritage” uncritically, Polish law allows it possible to extend protection to every building from undefined “past era”, regardless of its condition, without a question of the technical feasibility of the intervention. In the absence of an objective assessment system, this led to a huge increase in the number of buildings entered in the list of monuments and to the ineffectiveness of the formal protection. It has also worsened the ability to protect still existing and very neglected objects of real monumental values.