In her opening article: Hold Up! Holding on to Patina and Imperfection., ir. W.J.A. (Nanette) de Jong, Architect Advisor at the Cultural Heritage Agency talks restoration. What is the balance, the right middle or the right tone?

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Swing Door Catch, Belgium, probably 19th-Century.

Hold Up! Holding on to Patina and Imperfection

In his book, The Decay, biologist Midas Dekkers wrote about a restoration that was carried out too far: “There’s nothing old about the building anymore. Precisely because of the restoration, the old is gone. Even if the façade is deliberately overhanging and the frames are not the same size, there is no longer any eaten dirt in the wood, the old newspapers behind the wallpaper are gone, no mouse finds a hole anymore. Children soon realise; this is no longer a nice house. Only the form has remained. The old house has been deprived. “An old building can become hard and distant due to a far-reaching restoration. Every unevenness is then eliminated. It is like new again. Compare such a tightly drawn property with the face that has been treated with botox. The soul has disappeared from both.”

Maintenance is important because a building collapses differently. It must be watertight. But with heavy restorations it can happen that the inspired beauty is lost. It would therefore not be wrong to renovate valuable buildings a little less and to pay more attention to the preservation of patina and imperfection. These age characteristics cause emotion. Beauty as a sensory experience, that’s what it’s all about.

Interior door patina before …. and after

That which pleases

In the time of the ancient Greeks, beauty was not an autonomous concept, Umberto Eco wrote in The History of Beauty. She was fictional. That is hard for us to understand in the 21st century, but the way we look at beauty was only introduced in the 18th century. The Greek word ‘kalos’ roughly translates as ‘beautiful’, but a better meaning is ‘that which pleases, arouses admiration, which catches the eye’. Kalos not only stores things that are perceptible with the senses. It is also about soul and character, which you see with the eye of the mind rather than with the eye of the body. The classical Greeks related beauty to size and adaptation. According to the Roman architect Vitruvious, the founder of our image of architecture, beauty was one of the conditions that a good building had to meet, in addition to robustness and functionality. However, he did not describe what this meant exactly in his books.

The term ‘aesthetics’ is an invention from the 18th century and then meant ‘the doctrine of the sensory experience’. One of the components of aesthetics was the attention to the picturesque. The ruin played an important role in the landscape parks built at the time. A walk through a park was structured as a series of scenes in a theatre piece and each scene had to evoke a different feeling for the walker. Flowerbeds make people happy, a dark forest causes a feeling of fear and the view of a solitary tree in an otherwise empty field, gives peace. And ruins? Ruins were specially built to evoke feelings of melancholy.

Interior door patina before …. and after

Traces of Use

Annual maintenance reports do not look at the cultural-historical state of a monument. While that should of course be the point. What is the essence of the building? How do you express this in the various components? The doors, the chimneys, the roof tiles, all tell the story of the building and usage history. Especially because of the patine that is still visible: the traces of use, the wrinkles, the cracks, the worn, the crooked, the collapsed, the picturesque.

It is not for nothing that most people have a strong sensory experience at the sight of a somewhat ruinous building. Because what could be better than peeling paint and a crooked wall? Such a structure corresponds to our romantic ideal image of a relic from earlier times. But you still have to be able yo use it. It must be comfortable, not leaky and certainly not collapse. You have to find the right centre. The Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands defines the term ‘quality of restoration’ as the balance between a good technical condition, possible adaption to a new function and the preservation of cultural-historical value. Patina and imperfection considers the service as part of this value.

The Good Life

But what is the balance, the right middle or the right tone? It is best to determine the correct tone for each building separately, based on research into the technical and cultural historical status. Then it is about both the outside and the inside, and about the environment. This approach is comparable to the good life according to the four cardinal virtues in philosophy: measure, courage, wisdom and justice. A heavily wooded building has gone too far and is therefore immeasurable. But a ruinous state is also not a realistic option. It takes courage to do nothing when restoring. But if you are sensible and only replace what is needed and pay attention to making the building gracefully aged, it is a great asset to society that does justice to all of us.

Telling the story of a building is becoming increasingly important. But to be able to tell that story you need the traces from the past. Where can patina and imperfection be seen and preserved?

However, it is not wise to raise imperfection to the new standard. Let a building retain its casual je-ne-sais-quoi character. And let’s accept some decline. Every generation determines its own history. What if we appreciate patina and imperfection when writing our history. Just because it’s beautiful.

Autor: ir. W.J.A. (Nanette) de Jong
Architect Advisor at the Cultural Heritage Agency

This text is a translated extraction of a larger article in Het Tijdschift 2, 2016. 

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