Theory, Practice, and Standards: A Conversation about Built Heritage Conservation Education and Training

This article is reproduced with kind permission from the Getty Institute’s ‘Conservation Perspectives’ newsletter.

Tony Barton, chair of Donald Insall Associates in the United Kingdom—one of Europe’s principal specialist architectural practices—has extensive experience in the conservation and reuse of historic buildings. As a visiting lecturer, he has taught at the University of Birmingham and the University of Salford.

Jigna Desai is an associate professor at CEPT University in India, where she is the chair for the master’s program in Conservation and Regeneration in the Faculty of Architecture. She also serves as executive director of the Center for Heritage Conservation.

Frank Matero is a professor of architecture and chair of the Graduate Program in Historic Preservation at the Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. He is founder and editor in chief of Change Over Time, the inter-national journal on conservation and the built environment  published by the University of Pennsylvania Press.

They spoke with GCI senior project specialist Jeff Cody and Jeffrey Levin, editor of Conservation Perspectives, The GCI Newsletter.

Jeffrey Levin    
What does each of you consider the major challenge for improving education and training related to the conservation of built heritage?

Tony Barton 
In the United Kingdom, and Europe too, architects get a fantastic education. But while some of these young students are amazing, they are taught next to nothing about historic buildings. Because our architectural firm specializes in historic buildings, we have to mentor and train them, and check everything they do. The key challenge is to turn them into conservation architects. It’s a whole different skill. We had been dealing with this over the years in an informal way, but now we’ve set up our own conservation training course, because we really don’t get students who come prepared from the schools of architecture.

Frank Matero
After thirty-five years of teaching, I’ve come to believe that all heritage conservation/preservation is both a cultural and a professional practice. The professional challenges exist at both entry and midcareer levels, and they relate fundamentally to a lack of professional standards—whether that means official job titles, governmental position descriptions, or professional certification. That’s particularly true in the United States. I know a bit about the English situation and the efforts by RIBA [the Royal Institute of British Architects] to define the qualifications for architects to work on listed buildings. I don’t know the situation in India. While I think we’ve made tremendous strides in academically training young professionals in defining what the issues are and in teaching the requisite knowledge and skills, practice has been less rigorous in the inclusion of that expertise. In the United States, preservation is not exclusively architect driven—it involves a variety of disciplinary knowledge in the humanities and sciences. We haven’t done well in defining what a heritage specialist is and how that translates into professional requirements. If that doesn’t happen, the necessary expertise required for a successful project cannot be guaranteed. The issue is not, “Do we know enough?” but rather, “Do we have enough say in the professional decision-making?” We don’t—and it’s largely because of a lack of standards and, by extension, formal qualifications such as certification. Of course, this also includes professional responsibility and liability.

Jigna Desai
India has a history of a little more than a century of preservation, through the Archaeological Survey of India [ASI]. For a long time, conservation was considered the domain of archaeologists. Engineers and architects were involved in conservation through ASI. Heritage conservation as a specialization was accepted only very recently in India. The Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage, the first department for educating and training conservation architects, and other institutes for arts conservation and museology were all established in the mid-1980s. Some of the first engagements of architects in built heritage conservation date to that time. Regulations and professional ethics for conservators are still evolving. And while opportunities are increasing, the systems within which they can operate and the qualifications required to practice are still in a fluid state. In this context, the challenge is on both the demand and the supply sides. Unless midcareer professionals specifically require a certificate to be employed for particular assignments, they are hesitant to invest in education and training. Having said this, in the last couple of years we have seen a shift in the way government funding is being made available to conservation—there is more of it. There is also a recognition in the policy landscape of heritage as a commodity for tourism—as well as heritage, in some cases, as a cultural resource in a developmental process. This will place a great demand on building capacities for conservation expertise. And here the challenge will be for institutions and organizations to be better prepared.

Barton
I was interested in what Frank said about standards. Conservation accreditation is a big thing in the United Kingdom. RIBA, which is our national architecture body, has brought in a conservation accreditation register. In addition, there is the AABC—Architects Accredited in Building Conservation—and for both you have to prove your skills by submitting case studies in which you did the work. Those case studies go to peer review, and then you’re either accredited or not. I think you need about five years of conservation experience to be able to be accredited. So there’s been a game change in conservation architects in the UK. Some of the heritage authorities and those funding them demand an accredited conservation architect.

 

We need to understand what’s special about a building. What makes it tick? What does it mean to the neighbors?
You read the building, you get its history, and you see where it sits in the historical context.

Tony Barton

Matero
That’s precisely the formula needed. The client has to demand the expertise, and the academy or training entity has to provide the knowledge/skill base to satisfy the third leg, which is government-required credentials such as certification. If you don’t have all three, it’s a power struggle. Fifty years ago, at least in the United States, architects and historical archaeologists led the call to know more about archaic and obsolete buildings to preserve them. This interest has matured beyond the “site” and recognizes the social and even political implications of the physical work. It reminds me of the emergence of environmental science from traditional biology and ecology as a new field due to expanded concerns for advocacy and management. What’s happened in our field is that it has broadened to include a wide range of “core competencies” while also requiring specialization. Different countries have different trajectories for preparing people for professional conservation/preservation, and for me England was one of the first to offer such midcareer specialization—at York and other schools. So it’s surprising to me that there isn’t a proliferation of worthwhile specializaotion degrees after obtaining the first professional degree.

Barton
From my point of view as chair of an active frontline practice, I’m not as interested in the education of younger colleagues as much as in their training that follows from the academic achievement. What I want from the architects on the design team is to be able to read the building, to understand the issues, to know what needs to be done, to talk to everybody and bring them on board, and to make design decisions that repair the building properly. Hands-on stuff. I’m not in the academic world, and what I want to see is results.

Desai
On the question of education versus training, at CEPT University we’ve just started witnessing midcareer shifts to conservation. There have been a couple of enrolments in the master’s program and a few in the doctoral program. It is rare for individuals to drop their practice for a few years and take up advanced education. We also find that there is not a great demand for mid-career short-term training programs. Most of our programs are taken by students who are doing a course anyway. For instance, young students who are otherwise taking a course in, say, heritage management but want to understand more about lime might take a workshop we’re doing.

Barton
In the UK, there are some short-term training programs we send architects to. The SPAB—Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings—does a weeklong intensive conservation course, and their short-term training programs are great. It doesn’t cost a lot of money—about $1,000 for a week—and we’re prepared to give someone their wages and the week to go. They get a crash course in what’s coming their way as a conservation architect. We like those short courses, but it’s rare that any of our group go on a sabbatical to get a PhD.

 

In the process of understanding the diverse specifics of each place, international organizations play a crucial role of facilitating knowledge exchange and contextualization. Having said that, to make this effective, international organizations must tie up with local organizations...

Jigna Deasai

Cody
Returning to the question of certification—Frank, you mentioned the shift in environmental sciences. I wonder if the widespread LEED certification process provides a possible precedent for conservation in terms of certifying architects?

Matero
It could. By the way, anyone can be LEED certified —it doesn’t have to be someone with architectural credentials. But, again, having certification is only effective as long as that certification is respected and required for projects that would benefit. I’ve always taught in schools of architecture, first at Columbia and now at Penn, and I work among faculty and students who are studying planning, landscape architecture, art, and architecture. Design theory and studio learning are the dominant pedagogies. Preservation/conservation is in that mix as an allied program, but by its very nature it exists as a cross-disciplinary field encompassing preservation planning, public history, and technical building conservation. Professional disciplines such as architecture equate to departments, and their curriculum is required to comply with professionally regulated standards. In most professions, anyone graduating with an academic degree proves competency through certification and/or licensing. For a long time, preservation was considered a specialization within more traditional existing disciplines, eventually leading to its own specialized training, given the explosion of information needed to conserve and manage built heritage. Recently I’ve been working with the National Park Service to develop a technical preservation training program for existing employees involved at all levels of cultural heritage, and what I’ve recognized—and this equates to what I see across the disciplines at my school—is that you can’t collaborate if you don’t share a common language and understanding of heritage values and methodologies. Without that it’s chaos, and ultimately the site suffers. Education is fundamental, but the professional world has to carry it forward. One of the best things we ever did at Penn was to enable architects, landscape architects, and planners getting their first professional degree to also enroll in a certificate or a dual degree in historic preservation. That’s one way that practice changes. It’s important now to put designers and planners out into the world who understand built heritage needs and can work with specialists. But clearly there are different paths, as we are discussing.

Cody
Recently, many have noticed a widely expanding notion of what constitutes “heritage,” making it even more challenging to achieve some of the objectives we’re discussing. The broadening of the definition of heritage has implications not just for urban planning and landscape architecture but also for tourism management, anthropology, and other disciplines that presume to be engaged in what’s commonly called “heritage management.” That term has multiple connotations, don’t you think?

Barton
We may have something here dividing us by a common language. What is heritage management in the United States?

Cody
It depends. There are probably about a hundred US programs with diplomas or certificates that give some sort of qualification that is not universally recognized. Someone involved in tourism can assert they understand something about heritage, and they might market themselves as being a heritage manager or a heritage specialist. This is a global trend. In Southeast Asia, where I’ve worked more extensively than in the United States, there’s a proliferation of tourism management programs.

Desai
In India there are over four hundred programs in architecture, but fewer than ten programs offering a master’s in conservation. And there is only one degree program in heritage management, and a dozen undergraduate and postgraduate programs in archaeology. A handful of institutions offer degrees in museology and arts conservation, with few opportunities for doctoral studies in the area. These programs provide a “space” where the learners gain a holistic understanding of the domain, along with the methods needed to practice the expertise. They also push boundaries of knowledge. Fewer programs lead to a situation where there are few full-time conservation practices in the country. Educators, trainers, researchers, and reflective practitioners are few. There are numerous online short certificate courses—some offered by organizations, some by institutions. Very few are aimed at professionals with a view toward continuous education. Individuals who take these courses could be coming from any background, and because of the lack of regulations in the field they end up as “heritage practitioners.” Heritage conservation being a multidisciplinary field, this exposure that individuals get to it is extremely important for the practice. I think there is value in having, say, anthropologists do a short course to know more about heritage, but they are primarily involved on sites as anthropologists. Economists may do a short certificate course, but their primary role is that of economist. If there aren’t enough institutions offering programs that address important conservation issues, the practice of conservation in the country—which is likely to increase—will suffer.

Barton    
Does the Indian government manage standards for conservation professionals?

Desai
We recently had guidelines from the National Monuments Authority that outline standards for practice, but, unfortunately, we don’t have any implementation measures and monitoring processes in place. Appointments in the public sector are getting formalized, but the regulation is quite loose regarding who can privately practice conservation.

Matero   
It’s not an accident that the word “heritage” has arisen as the common way to talk about this collective inheritance. But “heritage” is a constructed thing. Its values are derived from those in a position to attach significance to a place or a thing. Years ago, the GCI pioneered this with its values-based projects that looked at conservation and management plans, in part as a way of leveling the playing field so that one set of values or interest group didn’t dictate the entirety of what that heritage meant. I work predominantly in the Southwest on Native American ancestral archaeological sites, where the theories and methods of conservation were largely dictated by archaeologists early on. I’m always amazed how these structures aren’t seen or managed as standing architecture or cultural landscapes. And when you get into stakeholder concerns, issues of what is to be preserved and how cannot be answered by one discipline or stakeholder group alone. The whole idea of management was to get more people at the table to talk about the many values of heritage and then to make informed decisions about what to do and how to do it by those with professional expertise. Now, at this point, anyone without previous training can write a conservation management plan because there aren’t identified standards for qualifications to do that. A clear set of knowledge and skills should be required to work on heritage sites, no matter how you define them. So it comes back to education—but the problem is that we don’t have enough practical experience formally included in academic training, such as a field project year, because of a lack of fiscal support.

Levin
How do we strike a balance between the theoretical underpinnings of the practice with the practical hands-on training that deals with materiality?

Barton    
A conservation management plan is something we at Insall do for every job we have, and this is exactly what we train our staff to do. We need to understand what’s special about a building. What makes it tick? What does it mean to the neighbors? You read the building, you get its history, and you see where it sits in the historical context. You go into the buildng and take a look at the way it’s been messed around. And then you start to understand its significance. We’re about changing buildings, but we’re creative conservationists. We’ll change buildings while maintaining their significance and adding another layer of significance in a beautiful and relevant way. We have listed buildings in the UK, and a conservation management plan approach demonstrates to the authorities that what’s being proposed follows the grain of the building. We have to take that academic side—which is great fun, by the way, and we all enjoy it—but you can’t ask somebody fresh with a PhD to come up with a proper conservation management plan. Conservation management plans have to guide change, and it’s a leap from the academic conservation management plan to actually coming up with creative proposals to maintain a building’s significance. That’s at the heart of our conservation training program.

Levin     
Jigna, how do you handle that balance between the theoretical and the practical?

Desai    
Well, this is where the lack of regulations actually helps. We use it to our advantage. In India, designated heritage sites are often contested in terms of ownership or in terms of the value they have, which religion or community they belong to, and what their history is. Fortunately, or unfortunately, we often find no records, or the records are contested. Sometimes the contesting parties both have records they have had made. And some sites may be abandoned. Because of the lack of regulations, if a site is abandoned and nobody is using it, we’re actually able to occupy it with the consent of neighbors, or of the one person who claims ownership or custodianship of it. We occupy it for a year or so for educational purposes and study processes of conservation through the site. Through our Center for Heritage Conservation, we’re planning to formalize this process and turn it into a conservation site school. We’re able not only to look into the technological aspects of materials and structure, but also to do stakeholder meetings to understand how value is constructed around that contested site. For example, there’s one abandoned site that was supposed to belong to a particular religious community, and the religious head gave us the permission to occupy it. The discussions on the site included the traditional philosophy of conservation, and how it did—or did not—reconcile with the accepted World Heritage approach. Along with this, through our theory courses, we constantly bring in theory and best practices from around the world.

Matero
Tony and Jigna, what you’re both talking about is the difference between critical thinking and technical skills. Why is conservation critical thinking? Because it involves reflection, judgement, and action. Without action, it’s all for naught. But this isn’t fully appreciated by our allies in the other fields who don’t engage in heritage issues. I train my dog; I don’t train my students. I educate them as conservation specialists. And that’s because critical thinking is involved. In the eighteenth century, most universities taught academic, not professional, subjects. Benjamin Franklin, who founded the University of Pennsylvania, believed in the unification of theory and practice, leading to the first “modern” university of academic and professional disciplines together. This is also fundamental to conservation, but both the public and other professionals don’t appreciate that fact. They see it as either a technical problem or a social problem. But it’s both.

Cody     
All of you seem very committed to the issue of understanding the building. The current COVID crisis has only increased the proliferation of Zoom and other digital technologies that take us away from a hands-on familiarity with the resource. How do we handle this challenge of needing students to understand the place, while we are increasingly moving toward remote learning and digital technologies?

Barton   
Back in the beginning of June, I came out of lockdown in my kitchen and went on a scaffold with a builder, where we talked about pointing and brickwork. I got back into Chester Cathedral, and it was an absolute joy. We had a fantastic conversation about how the building had managed. I do think it’s a matter of scale with this Zoom technology. We can do it with up to six people—maybe twelve is okay—but beyond that, you’re being “talked at.” But it’s going to be great for our internal training program. We don’t all have to go to London. We can do it like we’re doing this today. We have invited someone who lives in Manchester, which is on local lockdown, to see something of interest in Chester. We can get a tablet, walk around, and show him. This is just an extra tool for us in terms of background training. It’s the academic side we’re going to get from Zoom sessions. For the practical side, you’ll still need to get on the scaffold, talk with an older architect conservator or consultant who knows what happened in this building, and go read the building. You can’t read a building if you’re not in it.

Matero
Technology will serve us as needed. It’s already happening in building diagnostics. We use drones to do roof and facade surveys, and all kinds of telemetry to report back data in terms of monitoring, especially with a changing climate. But technology is not going to take the place of in situ building evaluations. I do worry about this in conservation education, because I don’t believe you can develop critical skills and knowledge in understanding the built environment if you don’t go to the site. But remote methods can be incredibly valuable, especially now during the pandemic, for the students abroad or trapped in their apartments. I hope we’ll all be back together soon enough, but it’s going to be a hybrid experience going forward, for sure.

Desai   
I was personally extremely gutted when I realized that this entire semester would be online. We did major restructuring in the hope that by January next year maybe we could visit the site. We decided to offer subjects that could be viewed online through videos and lectures and hoped that the site visits and laboratory experiments could be done later. There is also the value of a campus where the politicized conversations of heritage and conservation take place. For students, campuses are safe spaces, where fearless discussions and debates can occur. It is in this space that young individuals living in the historic city can hold such contestations. And that is the vacuum that online learning can’t fill. Having said that, there are a couple of important positives of online teaching. It makes teaching and learning more affordable and accessible to more individuals. International collaborations that bring global perspectives can be accessed. Instructional  webinars have dropped the cost of doing that. The travel cost goes down and so does the environmental footprint for introducing such educational initiatives.

Cody
Talking about international linkages, how can international organizations like the GCI, ICOMOS, and ICCROM assist with education in terms of both critical thinking and technical conservation, perhaps providing a broader perspective on the issues we’ve been addressing here?

Matero   
This is an important question that I’m seeing played out now in terms of the dilemma we face this fall. How are we going to teach, and will the delivery method be up to the task not only of educating the students, but also of inspiring them? Online education doesn’t replace the inspiration that comes from personal contact and a historic site. I hope everyone in heritage practice, as well as in heritage education, realizes that whatever methods and means we embrace going forward, we must have a say in what those goals should be. But we haven’t had the conversation about whether it’s actually going to be successful in ways we should be measuring. We’ve got to be clear about whether going remote or going hybrid will really deliver the goods. One thing I’m now convinced of is that most international conferences can be remote—and if properly planned and organized, we can have far greater communication assuming we’re not trying to replicate in-person meetings exactly. But it’s greener and more accessible, and it levels the playing field in terms of participation costs. Students can now attend at a fraction of the cost.

Barton
If I could get some of our younger architects to speak to some of Jigna’s students in India—and, Frank, your students in the States—and share experiences, that would be great. We’ve just made the world really small. Remember pen pals when we were kids? Well, I’m guessing you at Getty could organize this. You could connect young professionals—not in midcareer, but post-graduate—just learning their conservation craft, with archaeologists, architects, and historians. A few years ago we did a joint conference with architects and conservationists in Cologne, Utrecht, and Ghent, and it was a fantastic interaction, learning from each other and sharing experiences of what we were doing at sites. It was a lovely moment in our careers. But we had to take the Eurostar train, or fly to Cologne for two or three days. Now, using this technology that wasn’t there five years ago, the learning environment is smaller, and you could get far more from it. It’s that pen pal thing—and it could really work for my colleagues. What do you do with lime in Delhi? What’s the stone in Arizona? How do you deal with making historic buildings sustainable? Just sharing those experiences in small groups would be great.

We have an obligation to continue to question and to advocate not just for heritage but for heritage education and professional expertise—because without either, there’s no heritage worth saving.

Frank Matero

Levin     
In talking about technology, we started by discussing how we can use it to compensate for what we’re missing. But, Tony, your point is that we can use this technology to create new opportunities and connections.

Cody    
A major benefit of this kind of technology, of course, is that you can reach many more people and perhaps inspire people by using digital technologies. At the same time, the technology can’t substitute for that actual place-based understanding that can only come from first-hand experience.

Matero   
At every IT seminar on remote education I’ve taken over the last three months, the IT specialists begin by saying, “Do not treat the online experience as a replacement for the classroom.” Once you recognize that, you’re free to rethink it in a way that meets your objectives. If you bring people together in a small enough group, you can have a conversation that can move the needle an inch or so—which is what the GCI used to do in convening experts meetings on any number of topics.

There’s no reason that can’t be done using remote technology, but the key is keeping it small. And then, when it’s appropriate, you meet in person.

Desai
I want to add that the reason why ties with international organizations are so important to us is that there are certain conservation concepts that came out of past struggles in different countries that we in India are dealing with just now. We have our own challenges, but there are certain concepts that we get introduced to—for example, the concept of cultural rights and sustainability—that are articulated better in other contexts. Of course, these concepts need to be understood in the situated knowledge of the site that one deals with, and then it takes its own direction. I think the Nara Document on Authenticity is a great example of global knowledge exchange. In the process of understanding the diverse specifics of each place, international organizations play a crucial role of facilitating knowledge exchange and contextualization. Having said that, to make this effective, international organizations must tie up with local organizations that are embedded in the place.

Matero   
Heritage is a global phenomenon and concern, but it’s understood and practiced through its diversity of expression. That’s the point. Now, with the many threats to this diversity as seen in attacks on people and places around the world, the moment is right to reaffirm the value of heritage precisely in its diversity of human expression—and, at the same time, question the narratives that we’ve inherited about that heritage. We have an obligation to continue to question and to advocate not just for heritage but for heritage education and professional expertise—because without either, there’s no heritage worth saving.