10 C O N T E X T 1 3 0 : J U LY 2 0 1 3 with the mundane practicalities of heritage management from a government hostile to planning (and by implication the ‘drag’ of heritage on enterprise), interesting concepts are emerging elsewhere that also deserve our attention. Loes Velpaus from the Netherlands discusses the historic urban landscape approach to urban heritage management heritage – the kind of place management advocated by the RTPI and also central to the seminal, if now entirely discarded, Power of Place. Claudine Déom and Marie-Andrée Thifault examine how community engagement has led to the conservation of massive unlovely grain silos in Montreal by recognising that heritage values extend beyond aesthetic considerations. Ken Taylor looks at the cultural mapping of tangible and intangible heritage and local distinctiveness at Angkor in Cambodia, and remote communities in the Himalayas. And John Bold reviews the impact of the Council of Europe’s South-East Europe Integrated Rehabilitation Project Plan, which from 2003 until 2010 facilitated heritageled regeneration in countries such as Albania, Croatia, Bulgaria, Romania and Serbia. Items plucked from the columns of a recent issue of Natural Stone Specialist (May 2013) include the development of candidates to attain the Level 6 NVQ in ‘Construction Site Management: conservation’ and the importance of this for the skills base in the stone industry. It seems that one advisory service facilitating these NVQs has seen interest triple in 2013. That must be good news for the sector. Also noted is an overview of limestone by Barry Hunt (following his general introduction to natural stone for construction in a preceding issue of Natural Stone Specialist). Hunt describes this stone’s fitness for purpose and durability, and sets out a table of some standard tests applicable to it. On the subject of skills, the SPAB’s Lethaby Scholarship scheme has been going since 1930 and the William Morris Craft Fellowships since 1998. These initiatives have greatly added to the development of a new generation of individual building professionals and the expertise of craftspeople essential for the proper care of historic buildings. The SPAB Magazine (Spring 2013) explains what the participants did in 2012 and what value they gained from the opportunity the society gave them. The latest issue also explains the scope of a pioneering database of Welsh stained glass (http://stainedglass. llgc.org.uk); the generally alarming state of cemetery monuments (using as a comparison those illustrated in a book by Batsford published in 1916); and the practical application of the SPAB philosophy of repair applied to the 16th-century south porch doors at Beckley Church, Oxfordshire. Various options were considered for the doors in 1996: removal; repair and retention in situ; taking down, conserving and fixing in the porch or elsewhere in the church; making new facsimiles; or making a new design. The second option was pursued. The article provides a detailed assessment of the construction which informed the repairs, which are well illustrated in the article. The project clearly demonstrates that such historic fixtures can be retained in situ by a combination of conservation and minimal replacement of losses, following the principles of conservative repair. ‘In the end, they had neither to be fixed “dead” to the walls as a static display, nor replaced with facsimiles or doors of a new design, nor indeed burnt as firewood, as had been suggested by a number of people!’ More research awards likely to lead to publications of interest to conservation professionals have been gleaned from the Newsletter of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art (Issue 36, May 2013). Among those noted are to Robert Kronenburg into the intriguingly titled The Architectural History of British Popular Music Space: 1650–1950 and to Rosemary Hill to prepare her bookThe Antiquary in the Age of Romanticism. Bob Kindred MBE From Architecture, Mysticism and Myth by WR Lethaby, published in 1892 The history of architecture, as usually written, with its theory of utilitarian origins from the hut and the tumulus, and further developments in that way—the adjustment of forms to the conditions of local circumstance; the clay of Mesopotamia, the granite of Egypt, and marble of Greece—is rather the history of building: of ‘Architecture’ it may be, in the sense we so often use the word, but not the Architecture which is the synthesis of the fine arts, the commune of all the crafts. As the pigments are but the vehicle of painting, so is building but the vehicle of architecture, which is the thought behind form, embodied and realised for the purpose of its manifestation and transmission. Architecture, then, interpenetrates building, not for satisfaction of the simple needs of the body, but the complex ones of the intellect. I do not mean that we can thus distinguish between architecture and building, in those qualities in which they meet and overlap, but that in the sum and polarity of them all; these point to the response of future thought, those to the satisfaction of present need; and so, although no hut or mound, however early or rude, but had something added to it for thought’s sake, yet architecture and building are quite clear and distinct as ideas—the soul and the body. Of the modes of this thought we must again distinguish; some were unconscious and instinctive, as the desire for symmetry, smoothness, sublimity, and the like merely aesthetic qualities, which properly enough belong to true architecture; and others were direct and didactic, speaking by a more or less perfect realisation, or through a code of symbols, accompanied by traditions which explained them. The main purpose and burthen of sacred architecture—and all architecture, temple, tomb, or palace, was sacred in the early days—is thus inextricably bound up with a people’s thoughts about God and the universe. Behind every style of architecture there is an earlier style, in which the germ of every form is to be found; except such alterations as may be traced to new conditions, or directly innovating thought in religion, all is the slow change of growth, and it is almost impossible to point to the time of invention of any custom or feature. As Herbert Spencer says of ceremonial generally: ‘Adhering tenaciously to all his elders taught him, the primitive man deviates into novelty only through unintended modifications. Every one now knows that languages are not devised but evolve; and the same is true of usages.’
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