Conservation

Conservation

Architectural conservation refers to the processes by which the physical integrity of a site, and thus its ability to tell its story, is maintained and prolonged.

Canada recognizes a range of treatments that fall under the umbrella of conservation:

Preservation is aimed at maintaining as much extant historic material as possible, recognizing that buildings undergo alterations and additions through time and that these changes are important parts of its history.

Rehabilitation is considered to be appropriate for buildings that may have experienced more deterioration. While an emphasis remains on the maintenance of historic materials, there is more flexibility about alterations and modernization. Rehabilitation may be applied to a building chosen for adaptive reuse, a process in which the heritage character of the site is retained to the extent possible while it is completely altered for another purpose (e.g. a church becoming an apartment house, or a fire hall reused as a restaurant).

Restoration is generally reserved for particularly important sites, and emphasizes the most significant moment in the building’s history (which may be the time of its construction, or perhaps when an important person lived there), retaining and even reconstructing features dating from that moment and removing later additions. In every case, the building’s character-defining elements are central to the conservation.