Lecture: Conservation and Restoration Documentation as a Source in Architectural History

Restoration and conservation of architectural monuments normally results in a bulk of survey and project documentation, which for the most part remains unpublished and barely consulted by the students of architectural history. The goal of this lecture is to attract scholarly attention to the preservationist archives, discuss the most common type of documents that they contain, their function and structure, and finally reflect upon how the intention to conserve and restore influence the selection of historic, archeological, and technical data included in the survey notes and preservation projects. Using the example of my own work with the preservationist documentation generated by the Soviet restorers in Central Asia and the British cultural bureaucrats in Mandatory Palestine, I will show how the raw data contained in these archives could undermine and overturn the broadly accepted facts and narratives of architectural history.