Context 167 - March 2021

50 C O N T E X T 1 6 7 : M A R C H 2 0 2 1 Director’s cut Practitioners for a planet in peril ‘Sometimes demolition is necessary, the precondition for architecture to happen. But much of the time the real skill would be to understand how to reuse and to avoid that tragic waste of embodied energy and embedded memory.’ Edwin Heathcote, Financial Times, 9/10 January 2021 It is unfortunate that Edwin Heathcote sees more dilemma than resolution in his ambitions to avoid the ‘tragic waste of embodied energy and embedded memory’ so prevalent across the management and creation of buildings and places in the 21st century. Sadly, that reference to ‘the real skill… to understand how to reuse’ reads as hypothesis, at best, and possibly even dream- led fantasy. Certainly it confirms that he does not have even an unconscious awareness that there is already a dedicated professional skills framework in place to manage these intertwined and critical resources together: historic environment conservation. The lack of awareness of the existence of such skills in an expert as well-read and thoughtful as Heathcote is, in part, because at the very heart of modern society there is little recognition that the cultural and environmental twains might ever even meet, never mind that they must operate in unison if waste is to be truly reduced. Such concerns as his are coming to the fore even more today because, with the threats of Trump and climate so closely intermingled in so many headlines, society finds it increasingly difficult to continue the historic dissociation between cultural inequities and environmental imbalances, or managing sensibly across meaning and material. The historic norm of that dissociation is well represented by Abraham Maslow’s 1943 model ‘Hierarchy of needs’, which paints social progress as an evolving succession of increasingly more abstracted ‘achievements’. That evolution is represented graphically by a pyramidal rise from a ‘base’ focused on materials necessities for survival – when the most basic of needs of life must first be addressed, such as food and shelter – to a cultural peak of achievement, where ‘softer’ and typically cultural values become the aims of both individuals and society. These last are more personal priorities that sit on top of, but still apart from, the more tangible needs and prerequisites of living. As Maslow’s model represents ‘material needs’ and ‘cultural luxuries’ as sequential, rather than interdependent, they are unified only by the fact that material considerations are relegated as social and cultural priorities evolve. Ultimately, the thinking that shapes Maslow’s 20th-century model is still firmly in place in this first quarter of the 21st century. It is alien to any search for a balanced iteration in decision- making across the physical aspects of a society – such as the physical need for shelter – and the intangible values of culture – such the meanings that shelter embodies. In contrast to Maslow’s historic perspective, built and historic environment conservation approaches culture – collective and individual – not as a supplanting of the physical and material values, nor as their successor. Rather such conservation recognises culture as being embodied within its material manifestation. This affirms the physical and environmental implications of those embedded cultural values, including when considering options for retention, conservation, and/ or replacement. In conservation practice those two central threads of material and meaning, that