CONTEMPORARY EURASIA VOLUME VI (1) Contemporary-Eurasia-VI-1-engl | Seite 71

CONTEMPORARY EURASIA VI (1)
sought to address in his Conservation Manual and in his dealings with
the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB).
Long before the manual was published in 1906, John Marshall
brought out a shorter and less ambitious version called Conservation
of Ancient Monuments: General Principles for the Guidance of Those
Entrusted with the Custody of and Execution of Repairs to Ancient
Monuments. In this pamphlet, Marshall spelt out the precedence that
preservation should take over restoration. “Officers charged with the
execution of the work of repair,” Marshall wrote, “should never forget
that the reparation of any remnant of ancient architecture, however
humble, is a work to be entered upon with totally different feelings
from a new work or from the repairs of a modern building. Although
there are many ancient buildings, whose state of disrepair suggests at
first sight a renewal, it should never be forgotten that their historical
value is gone when their authenticity is destroyed, and that our first
duty is not to renew them but to preserve them” 12 .
It is fairly evident from these remarks that the principles of
preservation of ancient structures that Marshall was articulating
stemmed from a philosophy of preservation and heritage management
that had become dominant in Victorian Britain and large parts of
Western Europe by the late nineteenth century 13 . The conservation
movement began to exercise increasing influence on prominent
architectural and antiquarian bodies of Victorian England, such as the
Society of Antiquaries and the Royal Institute of British Architects
(RIBA). In 1877, at William Morris’s (influential intellectual and
thinker) initiative the movement got its own learned society, the
Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, also known as the
Anti-Scrape Society. The SPA