CONTEXT 185 : SEPTEMBER 2025 9 Undeclared issues From John Winstone, retired conservation architect Your contributors to the ‘Leaders of conservation thought’ issue of Context (June 2025, 184) raise more questions than they answer. The novel approach of presenting history post-Ruskin backwards in time from the IHBC’s contribution detracts rather than aids understanding. The final article, titled ‘Nineteenth century conservation thinking from Ruskin onwards’ then reverses the sequence to the traditional, logical one. Was that contributor fully briefed to where the issue was heading? IHBC members are not presented with the enormous achievements of the amenity societies/statutory consultees through the course of the 20th century and into the next 25 years. In toto, the issue complicates history leaving many issues undeclared. Where, for instance, is the criticism of misdirected or damaging conservation? The issue fails to even-handedly separate the execution of conservation from powerful voices orchestrating their own take on conservation through policy initiatives against waves of governmental indifference and shortcomings. John Winstone Letter The writer’s voice From ‘Beyond the cult of the monument’ by Miles Glendinning, Context 70, June 2001 During the first quarter century after 1945, despite the effective exclusion of war from the equation in western Europe, the cooperative, or complementary, relationship of new and old buildings under a strong nation-state control seemed to have been further strengthened. But from around 1968, events took a decisive turn to sever that relationship, a development which has led to our present situation today. The fundamental forces at work were a relaxation of the intense discipline and state authority of the postwar years, and, more generally, a collapse in the credibility of the post-Enlightenment doctrine of controlled historical progress. In architecture, the immediate effect of these was to discredit completely the modern movement’s campaign for radical rebuilding, and instead elevate conservation to a sudden status of dominance, as the only major combatant still left on the field. The latter’s victory was directly bound up with the defeat of planned social building; for the first time ever, monuments and new buildings were plunged into an open confrontation. Yet paradoxically the effect on the conservation movement, after an initial phase of anti-establishment activism, was to increase even further the interventive and controlling activity of the state. In Scotland, government conservation activity was treated during the 1960s and 1970s as an integrated part of the Scottish Development Department, a ministry created in 1962 specifically to promote state-led modernisation. And then, in a second stage of evolution, that machinery became static and ossified. Conservation became a sheep in wolf’s clothing: as with the language of revolution in the Soviet Union under Stalin and his successors, a permanent, institutionalised status was given to the highly politicised ‘shock’ language inherited from Ruskin and Morris, and also from the 20th century total war epoch – loss, threat, destruction, vandalism, rape, protect, save, tragic, scandalous, and so forth. This new orthodoxy extended the scope of modern controllability far further than even the modern movement, by claiming it could inventorise and ‘protect’ the entire built environment – including, ultimately, the environments of the modern movement themselves – for ever. The social structure of this new establishment was just as elitist and dominated by experts as the modernist technocratic planning it replaced. Everywhere across western Europe there was a move away from the old creative traditionalism to a new fundamentalism, which claimed it could fix and ‘stop’ dynamic human cultures through preserved material culture objects. Leaders of conservation thought The influence of Ruskin and Morris Lord Kennet’s achievement Inspired by John Ashurst Institute of Historic Building Conservation No 184 June 2025 Stalin: politicised shock language
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MzI0Mzk=