Sense of history: Capturing and utilizing immaterial values for sustainable heritage protection

Sense of history: Capturing and utilizing immaterial values for sustainable heritage protection

Franken, V.
Meijer, S.A.

Industrial Design Engineering

Design Engineering

2013-04-19

In light of the current economic and political climate, the government retreats in many ways, also from the field of heritage protection. Other market parties are expected to step in. This has consequences for the requirements that are set for the overall usability and energy performance and resource use, of heritage buildings. Currently, the commonly used way of value assessment of listed heritage buildings is not equipped to deal with the new demands. It is restrictive in the changes that are allowed to be made, inhibiting the changes necessary to accommodate new demands on 1) usability, and 2) sustainability. These add to two general issues with the currently used value assessment. Firstly, the method with which value assessments are made it hardly takes immaterial values into account. Secondly, the method and its resulting assessment is difficult for designers to use: it lacks handholds on the values that aid design decisions. In the present study, we suggest limitations of the conventional value assessment method. Instead of only charting the (cultural) historic importance of the material, we focus on the perception of this cultural historic value: the feeling of history that is evoked by the material. Using theory on ‘sense of place’ from the fields of urban and landscape planning and geography, a model for the ‘sense of history’ is proposed, for which the sensory experience is taken as a starting point. This has led to five elements of space that describe the way it is experienced: (1) spatial qualities, (2) material finishes, (3) indoor climate, (4) traces of use and (5) craftwork. The method presents these values in such a way that they can be used directly in the design and decision process, by architect, user and sustainability expert.

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:c75b42fa-fe80-4140-9323-e8fe1497f805

Delft University of Technology

978-94-6186-168-9

Livinggreen Scientific Conference, Delft, The Netherlands, 19 April 2013

Institutional Repository

conference paper

(c) Franken, V.
Meijer, S.A.