The Conservation Movement

Book excerpt: Shortlisted for the 2014 SAHGB Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion. Certainly, ancient structures have long been treated with care and reverence in many societies, including classical Rome and Greece. But only in modern Europe and America, in the last two centuries, has this care been elaborated and energised into a forceful, dynamic ideology: a 'Conservation Movement', infused with a sense of historical destiny and loss, that paradoxically shared many of the characteristics of Enlightenment modernity. Miles Glendinning's new book authoritatively presents, for the first time, the entire history of architectural conservation, and traces its dramatic fluctuations in ideas and popularity, ending by questioning whether its recent international ascendancy can last indefinitely.