Conservation of our heritage is a cornerstone in the urban planning field. As we have to build more sophisticated buildings and develop our city building, but at the same time, we have to conserve our historical buildings that give the city its beauty and identity. They give us a sense of history and memory while we are moving toward the future. Today there are more than 1,007 world heritage sites beside 779 cultural cities we have to pay more attention to them and their conditions.
There are many approaches that architects follow while conserving historical sites:
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Preservation:
The advantage of historic places is that they already exist they do not need the energy to create new buildings, or make new infrastructure. So we have to save those existing conserved energy buildings. They also made from precious materials that may not be found nowadays. The preservation of historic buildings includes its maintenance and retention of their components and form.
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Rehabilitation:
Rehabilitation aims to the useful life of an existing buildings. Rehabilitation tries to bring heritage sites into the modern world without affecting any of historic elements. The rehabilitation should be made with regard to safety, accessibility, energy efficiency and environmental issues.
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Restoration:
Historic England’s Conservation Principles defines restoration as returning a building to “a known earlier state, on the basis of compelling evidence, without conjecture”. A number of criteria are set out which normally make restoration acceptable.
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Reconstruction:
It is the process of the reestablishment of what occurred or existed in the past.
