What's the point of the past?

Old buildings are touchstones of authenticity in a world increasingly bewildered and besmirched with meaningless signs derived from the past. But we have to work on old buildings themselves because they are subject to the attrition of custom and time. How should we work with them today?

Old buildings represent capital of two kinds. First, economic - in that we inherit a massive investment of resources and energy from our ancestors which we should destroy only with the greatest deliberation and analysis of potential gains and losses in material terms. The second type of capital is cultural: the buildings we grow up with are some of the most deeply moving parts of the sets on which the play of our lives is enacted; we need them to help provide the essential link that humans make between past and future, without which we are no more than animals, living in an eternal present.

Of course, many people would like us to assert our humanity and power of remembrance by living in a saccharine, sanitised evocation of the past. This is notably so in England, the only country in the world which is so cowed by its history and so little confident of its future that it calls its cultural ministry the 'Department of National Heritage'. Poor Prince Charles is perhaps more a product of this national collapse of cultural nerve than an instigator of it, though he has certainly added to its avalanche-like momentum.

An equally timid and demeaning attitude to the past is to be seen in the work of the countless devotees of PoMo: the application of overblown pretentious and degraded signs derived from Classicism to second-rate buildings. PoMo is an absurd reverence for the ferocious powers that generated the Orders, and in our time it offers the wielders of corporate power the assurance that they are descended from the most authoritarian regimes ever invented. We are inclined to suppose that because the short reign of that fatuous approach in the schools and general debate is over, it is dead. But it is certainly not so in practice. You will not see it in these pages (except sometimes in our Outrage column), yet it dominates much commercial building throughout the world.

Another level of misinterpretation of the past is the gross stupidity of trying to spread the forms of vernacular architecture over large modern buildings. An out-of-town superstore is made to look like a traditional barn magnified 50-fold: a company headquarters in the suburbs is a Brobdingnagian row of alms-houses.

Against all this increasingly frenetic misuse of forms and images from the past, real old buildings have the great value of being authentic: touchstones of reality against which vulgar modern flim-flam can be judged. But old buildings themselves often need to be worked on: they have a tendency to fall down, and the functions they house constantly change. How are we to cope with them?

William Morris and the friends with whom he founded the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB) elaborated principles that are as important today as they were a century and a quarter ago. Old work should be tenderly repaired: new work should be seen to be new. SPAB's enemies were 'ignorant destruction and pedantic reconstruction',(1) and they remain so to us still.

'Ignorant destruction' is clear, but 'reconstruction' is a difficult concept. Morris was attacking high Victorian architects like George Gilbert Scott who had proposed to 'restore' Tewkesbury Abbey to what he believed to be its original Gothic state, and in so doing scrape away all the changes and additions of intervening centuries. Morris's objection to this was threefold. First, no-one could know what the original state of the building was, so restoration was in fact alteration to an ideal invented in the nineteenth century. Second, restoration was literally impossible, since nineteenth-century craftsmanship could not be the same as the work of the Gothic masons, for (at least according to the theories of Ruskin and Morris) medieval craftsmen worked in loose association inspired by faith, rather than as closely inspected and directed gangs controlled by modern contracts. Morris's third objection to 'pedantic reconstruction' was that the accretions collected by buildings over succeeding generations are in effect a record of history, and their destruction impoverishes the present because it suppresses the past.

These arguments all apply quite clearly to Gothic architecture - or at least the version championed by Ruskin and Morris. Yet they are scarcely universal. Clearly if part of a grand Classical composition were to be partly destroyed - a house in one of Nash's Regent's Park terraces burned out for instance - we would seek to restore it as closely as possible to its previous condition. We have copious records of the original state of the building; we could match the early nineteenth-century craftsmanship(2) and the restored house could be indistinguishable from its neighbours. We could even make the ornament mechanically, and do the twiddly bits in plastic without really detracting from the effect (surely Nash, that great master of stuck-on stucco would have welcomed fibreglass with acclaim).

So should other Classical buildings like the Parthenon be restored in the same way? Thank goodness, succeeding generations have (on the whole) held back.(3) We have perhaps even less idea of what the temple really looked like when it was finished by Ictinus and Callicrates in the fifth century BC than Scott did of the original state of Tewkesbury Abbey. We know that it was coloured (see for instance AR May 1996, p44), that it was highly ornamented with gilded wood and sometimes ivory, but there are no visual records, hence reconstruction is impossible. On the other hand, think of the campanile of St Mark's in Venice. Few who see it today remember that it fell down in 1902. Because numerous records existed, it could be re-created (at least outwardly), and made to look as if the collapse had never happened.

The campanile strategy is at one extreme of the spectrum of approaches to old buildings, but it can scarcely be regarded as a panacea. Think of the way in which some well-recorded European urban areas were rebuilt as would-be facsimiles after destruction in the two World Wars. For instance, there can be few places more sinister than St Malo. Admittedly its dark Breton granite is not the most joyful of materials, but the attempt to recreate wholesale a city quarter has resulted in a fabric as lifeless as a Gothic cathedral after being scraped by a Victorian knighted architect. An organic tissue that had grown up over many centuries has been replaced by a dull stage-set, built (with the very best of intentions) from a set of rules intended to evoke the past, but which had no hope of generating a cheerfully plural backdrop for urban life. So, while total restoration may be acceptable - even necessary - for an individual monument like St Mark's campanile or a house in a Classical terrace, it is unlikely to work on a large scale with a less well-defined original.

A much more flexible and rich approach is to be found in the work of Carlo Scarpa, who for instance in Verona Castelvecchio restored with respect for the old, and was concerned to cherish (and often emphasise) accretions to the original fabric. But his own bold interventions could never be confused with old work; his details and use of materials were completely of this century, though the new craftsmanship was of its kind as fine as that of the medieval predecessors.(4)

More recently, this attitude has been seen in Giancarlo De Carlo's work in Urbino (AR June 1983) and Catania University (AR October 1993), and in Renzo Piano's proposals for Palladio's Basilica in Vicenza (AR March 1987), and his handling of the Lingotto car factory (AR November 1996). The approach has always flourished in one way or another in Italy among its incomparable collections of old buildings from every period. But it is not limited to Italian architects, as is shown for instance in Norman Foster's insertion into the fabric of London's Royal Academy (AR December 1991) and Jean-Michel Wilmotte's Chiado National Gallery refurbishment in Lisbon (AR January 1995).

In the end, approaches such as these: robust yet respectful to the existing, must guide our attitudes to most old buildings. At one extreme, we must avoid senseless destruction at all costs - and at the other, stupid reconstruction. We can learn much from old buildings: about scale, space, route and materiality for example, but copying their forms is in most cases an insult to the original work, and to our own society, which surely deserves from architects of our time the degree of ingenuity and originality which the ancestors brought to making the buildings we inherit. P.D.

1 Morris, William. Report. Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, First Annual Meeting, London 1878, p 17.

2 Morris would argue that this is because Classical architecture is essentially the architecture of slavery, in which craftsmen are forced to carry out the designer's wishes with great accuracy, leaving no scope for individual freedom.

3 Though the north colonnade was partly restored in the 1920s, using steel reinforcement which has now corroded.

4 In his use of new materials and techniques he went further than most of Morris's SPAB followers who tended for instance to add to a stone building in stone, but used in a way that clearly showed it to be new work.