KVPT’s Patan Darbar Earthquake Response Campaign - Work to Date - September 2016

notably the weathering that causes decay. This view implies
that although a building may be well looked after,
nothing can prevent weathering, so the surface is bound
to develop patina. The more common case, however, is
that the curatorial agency has to deal with neglect (often
wilful), mechanical damage, and partial or wide-ranging
destruction in the wake of natural calamities and war.
The “Modern Cult of Monuments” says that there must
be no interference with the natural process of decay, an
approach that rules out conservation of any kind. In
short, it is the patina that establishes and guarantees authenticity.
In contrast, Ruskin valued the “age”, that
is, the antiquity of a building: “Its glory is in its Age,
and in that deep sense of voicefulness, of stern watching,
of mysterious sympathy, nay, even of approval or condemnation,
which we feel in walls that have long been
washed by the passion waves of humanity”. The emphasis
here is not on the tangible, visually perceptible surface
but on immaterial messages — whatever one may understand
by “passion waves of humanity.”
Ideological constraints: Conservation as a belief
system
In 1916, Riegl’s successor in office, Max Dvořák (1874–
1921), published a Catechism for Preservation of Monuments
(Katechismus der Denkmalpflege) designed to
communicate the idea of preservation to a wider public.
Both titles, Riegl’s The Modern Cult of Monuments and
Dvořák’s Catechism suggest that preservation is not so
much a rational attitude as a belief. According to The
American Heritage Dictionary (2006), a cult is an “obsessive
devotion to or veneration for a person, principle
or ideal” and a catechism “a brief summary of the basic
principles of religion,” namely Christianity. In our context,
both definitions may seem a little extreme and do
scant justice to the authors. But the definitions rightly
indicate that, in sum, conservation principles are not
based on science but on a system of belief, this being
the very reason why the conservation issue all too often
degenerates into a “slanging match” in which the differences
between the adversaries involved are often grossly
exaggerated.
This belligerence had already become apparent in Ruskin’s
day. In 1854, the French architect Viollet-le-
Duc was of quite a different opinion than Ruskin and
maintained that restoration is a “means to re-establish
[a building] to a finished state, which may in fact never
have actually existed at any given time”. This early debate
demonstrates in fact the wide range of values the
term “restoration” incorporates. In any case, it is never
linear but always rich in ambivalence.
It is exactly this ambivalence, the diversity of approaches
to which we want to draw attention in the context of the
Nepalese debate about the rebuilding of lost monuments
in the wake of the 2015 earthquake. Conservation and
restoration are based on specific experiences in a specific
historical, social and even political context.
Riegl and his German colleagues, like the architect Cornelius
Gurlitt (1850–1938) and the art historian Georg
Dehio (1850–1932), shared the same appreciation of
“age value”. In 1900 Gurlitt maintained “that the aim
of any restoration is the preservation; one should spare
what is decayed from further degradation. One should
restore in such a way that it remains obvious what in a
building is old and what is new, and one should mark
what is added stylistically as new.” Dehio followed suit in
1901, asserting in the context of the controversy regarding
the restoration of Heidelberg Castle that “it is a psychologically
deep-rooted longing” that “the old should
look old, with all its experiences, such as wrinkles, cracks
and wounds.”
From the Venice Charter (1964) to the Nara
Document on Authenticity (1994)
Gurlitt and his colleagues established a cult based on
a system of belief that among conservationists has re-
29