Architectural conservation Archives

New Sensory Approaches to the Past assembles a series of research projects investigating cultural environments through the lens of the senses. The book presents the latest approaches to sensory archaeology and heritage research that aim to understand the lived experience of past inhabitants. Interdisciplinary case studies carry out investigations in three different registers: personal and embodied, teamwork and collective responses to the historical environment, and digital reconstruction. An international cast of contributors includes archaeologists, architects, sociolinguists, military experts, cultural studies scholars and acoustics specialists, with research sites spanning Palaeolithic rock art to a 1960s North American fairground. Descriptions and analyses of sensory in-situ investigations offer methodological transparency with the visual analysis that is common in archaeology and heritage assessments is placed alongside ethnographic techniques, landscape survey, sound recording, preservation advocacy work and various forms of digital reconstruction. This interdisciplinary approach harmonizes research terminologies across fields, fostering a comprehensive understanding of sensory-based studies and the methods used to carry them out. The book revitalizes familiar concepts with new insights and provides a platform to examine and resolve interdisciplinary ambiguities, making it an invaluable resource for advancing sensory research.

Architecture and Fire develops a conceptual reassessment of architectural conservation through the study of the intimate relationship between architecture and fire. Stamatis Zografos expands on the general agreement among many theorists that the primitive hut was erected around fire – locating fire as the first memory of architecture, at the very beginning of architectural evolution.

Following the introduction, Zografos analyses the archive and the renewed interest in the study of archives through the psychoanalysis of Jacques Derrida. He moves on to explore the ambivalent nature of fire, employing the conflicting philosophies of Gaston Bachelard and Henri Bergson to do so, before discussing architectural conservation and the relationship between listed buildings, the function of archives, and the preservation of memories from the past. The following chapter investigates how architecture evolves by absorbing and accommodating fire, while the penultimate chapter examines the critical moment of architectural evolution: the destruction of buildings by fire, with a focus on the tragic disaster at London’s Grenfell Tower in 2017. Zografos concludes with thoughts on Freud’s drive theory. He argues the practice of architectural conservation is an expression of the life drive and a simultaneous repression of the death drive, which suggests controlled destruction should be an integral part of the conservation agenda.

Architecture and Fire is founded in new interdisciplinary research navigating across the boundaries of architecture, conservation, archival theory, classical mythology, evolutionary theory, thermodynamics, philosophy and psychoanalysis. It will be of interest to readers working in and around these disciplines.