Le-Duc was a rationalist doer believing in restoration and re-interpretation, claiming the styles of the past had already been glorified. Mere adoption of these historic styles was questionable; architects should study history by all means, but reduce it to the process of argument and then re-describe it through intervention of its time. Authenticity was found in the legibility of the diverse parts of which the survival of the building is composed (Hollis, 2013, p5). With recent thinking and technology, le-Duc’s mantra has been translated from idea to building. According to Tony Fretton for example, buildings “should have a natural relation with the past, and a high degree of freedom in defining the present” (Fretton, 2013, p252). On the other hand, Ruskin was a nostalgic, moral and dreaming thinker. A revivalist, he believed in preservation and conservation, investing faith with the past and the replication of an idealised, permanent and untouched history, returning to the utopian pre-industrial world. He believed in imitation which supposed that authenticity lay in stylistic and aesthetic unity (Hollis, 2013, p5) and he became the Father of meticulous conservation, a practice which became customary in the care of ruins in the 19th century. His profound opposition to restoration was no doubt rooted in his Evangelism beliefs, claiming that only God could ‘raise the dead’ - for Ruskin, it was better for a building to fall than be botched through restoration.
Contemporary Attitudes With protagonist companions Ruskin and le-Duc, and the Venice Charter in-hand, we have seen discourse surrounding the treatment of ruins continue to develop, with contemporary architects drawing upon this rich historical body of ideas. More recently, and since that very Charter of 1964 there has been a resounding call for the ‘authentic’ restoration of buildings in an ever-shrinking homogenous world. The 1994 Nara Document on Authenticity produced during the Bosnian conflicts by a collection of conservation experts, builds upon the Charter and calls for a ‘truth’ in architecture whilst reinforcing the importance of ‘context’: “In a world that is increasingly subject to the forces of globalization and homogenization, and in a world in which the search for cultural identity is sometimes pursued through aggressive nationalism and the suppression of the cultures of minorities, the essential contribution made by the consideration of authenticity in conservation practice is to clarify and illuminate the collective memory of humanity” - taken from Bevan, 2007, p189
John Summerson argues that dealing with ruins specifically involves a kind of “play-acting” and should be approached in that manner, drawing upon one’s taste and imagination. But how much of intervention is attributed to taste and judgement, and how much is attributed to more formal responses discussed, and of course the ruin itself - its conditions, character and story? Rachel Whiteread’s work is worthy of mention in that respect. She is an artist who makes new from old through the process of casting - familiar objects become unfamiliar through inversion. She adopts a consistent style and methodology despite changing context in the aim of provoking consistent notions of self-reflection. Comparable to architectural intervention on ruins, Whiteread gives form to the immaterial, placing importance upon void and the gaps and spaces between things, through which she provokes “meaning of that absence” (Townsend, 2004, p25). The gaps in ruins have a comparably
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