CULTURAL HERITAGE

WHAT IS HERITAGE?

Is a set of assets acquired by inheritance

• family assets
• State asset
• municipal assets

Culture:

Set of lifestyles,customs ,knowledge and degree of artistic,scientific,industrial development,in an epoch,social group …

CULTURAL HERITAGE:

Set of assets that have to do woth the culture of a people ,nation,city,society…

That is important because it implies the cultural identity of people.

CULTURAL IDENTITY:

From monument to cultural asset

To identify a culture salely by the set of its monuments is a mistake.

In the 2nd half of the2o century the concept of cultural asset is formulated.It integrates objects with historical or artistic value ,but also any expression ,manifestation or significant testimony of human culture with documentary capacity.

Because the second world War the countries had lost their sings of cultural identity, and there was a need for societyto recover and reconstruct those sings.

In industrially developed countries, interest in objects and
Activities in sectors hitherto neglected, such as agriculture began to spread.
If traditonial history had focused on grand politics
events, military events, scientific conquests, discoveries, … that
marked history and therefore the monuments constituted
its best representation,
New history focuses its interest on man and his existence, the working instruments, utensils of daily use, showing a
all-encompassing dimension. Cultural assets constituted its
better representation in the latter case.

The first use of the term «cultural property» in an official document was at the 1954 hague convention convened under the unesco sponsorship to agree on the protection of
assets in the event of armed conflict.
In 1972, unesco proposed a new classification of culture
assets:
• Monuments: architecture, sculpture, painting, archeology …, elements of universal value of the
point of view of history, art or science.
• Sets: sets of buildings, whose architecture and
integration with the landscape gives them an exceptional value

• Places: works of man and nature with universal value.
The Spanish Historical Heritage Law (1985) introduces the
figure of maximum protection and guardianship: the BIC.

WHY PRESERVING HERITAGE?

Preservation is a method of not losing the values of cultural identity.In order to preserve you must know before what the cultural assets of a people are :catalog.

All goods contained in catalogues must be protected and preserved.

But not only these ones ,faced with any action we make as architects we must think about the value of the good on which to intervene before deciding the type of intervention.

WHAT SHOULD BE PRESERVED?

Legislative instruments and interventions .

• Preservation = Operations to be performed on the good to ensure survival against hazards or possible damages.         

• Maintenance = An operation designed to prolong and maintain as long as possible the materials from which the object is made. 

• Consolidation = It is a particular way of preserving, and it is possible thanks to a gradual strengthening. 

• Repairing = Leave in good condition an object that was broken or deteriorated. 

• Restoration = A direct intervention on the monument whose purpose is the restitution or improvement of the legibility that is lost with the passage of time.

• Adaptation = Enable or return something to its old state of efficiency or functionality.

• Reconstruction = A procedure of integral or partial reconstruction of the building, with an exceptional character that has been carried out in specific historical circumstances and as a consequence of traumatic events.

• Anastilosis = A technique whereby a reined building is rebuilt using original architectural elements.

• Ripristinar = An action that suggests to «go back» to the original state of the building by removing or adding later stages.