• Words, words, and more words What do all those words mean, anyway?
• What good is a bad restoration? Conjecturally-restored historic buildings and the problems they present.

WORDS, WORDS, AND MORE WORDS

Bernard Shaw once allowed that the French didn't care what they did, so long as they pronounced it correctly. Sometimes, though, it does help to know what you're doing, and what word describes it. Several commonly used old-building terms seem to have different meanings depending on who's using them, making for confusion and worse. In the possibility that the enlightenment gained may justify the struggle, here are some definitions, based on those used by the National Park Service:

Preservation has two meanings. Broadly, it is the preferable "umbrella" word for the process of retaining an existing building, rather than demolishing it and doing something else with the space it occupies.

Beyond that, though, preservation has a specific meaning under the umbrella--to keep an existing building as it was at a particular time without restoration to an earlier period. The time in question is usually when the property ceased to be used and became preserved as a museum.

The most successfully preserved buildings are time machines, with layers of use, change, and life all preserved to be seen, studied, and appreciated. They give the visitor a sense of time, evolution, and change. The trade-off for this sense of passage through time, of course, is the loss of the sense of any particular period, since later work is left in place which may alter or even contradict the feeling of a still earlier time.

Restoration is so frequently used as an umbrella word meaning the same as preservation that it is tempting to give up and let the two be synonyms. They aren't, though. "Restoration" is formally defined as the process of returning a building (or part of it, if you want to be a stickler) to its known former appearance by a combination of removing later accretions, reconstructing missing elements, and conserving what remains.

The key word is "known." If you do not know what was there in the first place, you can't put the building back into its former condition, and therefore you can't restore it.

When the intent is to restore, but the necessary knowledge about former appearance is absent, one has a conjectural restoration , a hybrid that lies somewhere between an informed hypothesis and a flight of fancy. Most restorations, even those founded upon exhaustive research, require some conjecture. As a general rule, the more conjecture , the less restoration . Rehabilitation is the proper term for what often is loosely called restoration.

Rehabilitation is the proper term for what is often loosely called restoraton. In rehabilitation, the emphasis is on returning a building to use by a combination of restoration, repair, and new construction. Recovering a particular former appearance is not necessarily a concern, nor is preserving its appearance as of a particular time. Rehabilitation properly should embody respect for the structure and its detail, but unfortunately, that is not necessarily true, either.

Reconstruction refers to replacing missing elements, which can range from small bits of molding to entire buildings. That restoration phrase, "known former appearance," pops up again, because properly reconstruction exactly replaces something that had been present at a particular time in the past, but subsequently was lost.

Repair is the well-known process of making something serviceable again.

Conservation is a specialized type of repair that is undertaken when the fabric of the object to be repaired is intrinsically valuable. Goals for conservation include retaining as much of the original object as possible (patching broken window sash, for instance, rather than replacing them with new), and ideally making repairs in such a way that a later conservator can modify them with minimal damage to the object.

Stabilization is a temporary measure intended to re-establish sufficient structural and weather integrity in a deteriorated or unsafe building to allow it to survive in its present form until more comprehensive and permanent preservation work can be undertaken. Examples include shoring, temporary roofs, and other weather enclosures. The problem with stabilization is that it is often called on to last many years longer than originally intended, as anyone familiar with history museum organizations can testify.

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WHAT GOOD IS A BAD RESTORATION?

I sometimes visit restored buildings that are badly done by today's standards. Usually house museums associated with an historical person, they were first restored at a time when literal accuracy took second place to realizing its restorers' image of the place in which that person would have lived if (s)he had had the resources and good taste of the restoration committee..

This resulted in absurdities like the Mr. Someone House, altered to obliterate all traces of his occupancy, the Mme. Someone Else House, restored to an appearance it had lost before she lived there, and the Historic Person House, restored to a date fifty years before it could have been built.

As associative historical sites--places that illuminate and interpret historical figures and events --these buildings range from crippled to worthless. Their inadequacies snare their stewards into either burdening visitors with digressive descriptions of how this actually is where Mr. Someone lived, but it doesn't look the way it did when he lived there becauseÉ or sliding over the whole matter and knowingly letting visitors take away a wildly distorted idea of how Mr. Someone lived.

Bad as it is, such an old restoration has one paradoxically redeeming aspect: it does show a time and culture very accurately. The problem is that the time it shows has nothing to do with its historical period of association--rather it invariably and eloquently evokes the time when it was restored .

Such a building may be valuable to historians as a window onto how the recent past viewed its more distant predecessor. The propertys' owners, though, are in the business of interpreting historical associations; for them, the fact that the Someone Else House is a superb example of early twentieth-century historic-building "restoration" is worse than irrelevant; it hampers them in carrying out their mission. They don't care that the Mrs. Someone Else House expresses the attitudes of the 1920s toward the past; it makes a dreadful vehicle for interpreting Mrs. Else and her life.

Because the earlier reworking inevitably destroyed evidence essential to an accurate restoration of the building's former appearance, any re-restoration must include bounteous conjecture. Conjectural restoration can come close to representing a generic building of a particular time and place, but no matter how well it is done, such a reworking lacks the authority of a real restoration--a building returned to its known former appearance at a specific time.

So the problem remains: The building may be a good-to-excellent example of a later era's view of the past, but that fact is irrelevant to its owner's purpose. It is a poor associative historic site, and its owner is in the associative-site business. For whom does the present "bad restoration" have value? How can we resolve the conflict between these mutually exclusive aspects of an historic building?

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