Beauty and identity in architectural heritage

Heritage, memory and quality of judgment

Abstract

Architectural heritage is generally perceived as an inheritance received from the past and passed on to future generations. This interpretation, though widely shared, risks obscuring two essential aspects of the phenomenon. The first: heritage is not an objective reality, but the outcome of a cultural process through which a community attributes value to part of its historical legacy. The second, less frequently discussed: recognizing this constructed character of heritage does not resolve the problem of protection, but shifts it to another plane. The quality of the process of value attribution, and of the interventions that follow from it, depends on the cultural and professional quality of those who carry it out.

Starting from these premises, I address the relationship between beauty, identity, and architectural heritage, comparing some of the main contemporary theories and analyzing emblematic cases. I hold that heritage should be understood not only as the outcome of a cultural process, but also as a living reality in continuous evolution, whose interpretation requires a conscious critical exercise. Contemporary debate still oscillates between a defensive conservatism that uses protection as a veto and an openness to transformation that too often abandons the question of quality. Conserving does not mean merely protecting a material testimony of the past. It means choosing which values and meanings to pass on to the future. And this choice requires competence, not just caution.

Introduction

Who decides what merits preservation?

Let us ask why some buildings are recognized as heritage and others are not. The question may seem simple, but it leads to issues that are anything but obvious.

Reflection on architectural heritage is frequently framed around the need for conservation. There is discussion of restoration, protection, constraints, and modes of intervention. Much less frequently do we ask about the quality of the judgment that governs these choices. Yet this is precisely where the hardest problem lies.

In heritage work we encounter two mirror-image dysfunctions. On one hand, necessary and culturally grounded interventions are blocked in the name of protection exercised as a veto, without any positive criterion of evaluation being articulated. On the other, interventions of insufficient quality, conceived without genuine mastery of the historical and architectural context, gain approval without the question of design quality ever being seriously raised. This asymmetry is not an occasional anomaly. It is a structural symptom.

Conserving does not mean protecting matter regardless of anything else. Transforming does not mean simply complying with norms. Both operations require a solid, culturally grounded project, capable of engaging with the complexity of the place. The ability to conceive and judge such a project cannot be taken for granted.

Building on these considerations, my contribution proposes a reflection on the relationship between beauty, identity, and architectural heritage. I argue that heritage must be understood simultaneously as a cultural construction and as a dynamic process, but that this awareness remains insufficient unless accompanied by a recovery of the quality of aesthetic and design judgment.

The modern invention of heritage

One of the most widespread convictions consists in regarding architectural heritage as a natural and universal category. It is often imagined that some buildings intrinsically possess characteristics that make them heritage regardless of the eras and cultures observing them. I consider this interpretation naïve.

The modern notion of heritage is the result of a relatively recent historical process. For much of European history there was no system of protection comparable to today's. Buildings were preserved, transformed, or demolished according to their usefulness, their political significance, or their religious value, but not because they were considered cultural assets in the contemporary sense of the term.

Many monuments of antiquity were used as quarries for building materials. Medieval buildings were altered during the Renaissance. Entire portions of historic cities were transformed without this raising any particular concern.

The birth of the modern concept of heritage is generally linked to the events that followed the French Revolution. The destruction of numerous symbols of the ancien régime prompted a new reflection on the relationship between collective memory and material testimonies of the past. This is how the idea began to develop that certain assets should be preserved not for their immediate usefulness, but for their historical and cultural value. Over the course of the nineteenth century this sensibility consolidated progressively, giving shape to the concept of the historic monument and to the first institutions dedicated to its protection(1).

Historical value, artistic value, commemorative value, and age-value,far from being immutable properties of buildings, become ways through which communities attribute meaning to buildings.

This awareness is now widely shared, yet by itself it is not enough. It recognizes the problem without resolving it. If heritage value depends on the gaze of the society that recognizes it, the question becomes: what is the quality of that gaze? Who is capable of exercising it competently? These are the questions that contemporary debate still struggles to address openly.

From this perspective it becomes clear that heritage is not simply something we inherit from the past. It is also something we construct in the present through choices, interpretations, and attributions of value. And it is precisely in this space, between inheritance and interpretation, that the cultural quality of a community is measured.

1. The birth of the modern concept of heritage is generally traced back to the period immediately following the French Revolution. Between 1789 and 1794, the iconoclastic waves and the destruction of symbols of the ancien régime led to the creation of the first institutions dedicated to the protection of cultural assets: the Commission des Monuments (1790) and the Commission des Arts (1794). Over the nineteenth century, this sensibility was consolidated with the establishment of the General Inspectorate of Historic Monuments in France (1830) and the publication of the first Inventaire des Monuments Historiques (1840), marking the start of a systematic policy of protection that spread progressively across Europe.

Beauty and aesthetic judgment

If heritage were determined solely by beauty, the problem of identifying it would be relatively simple. It would be enough to recognize the most beautiful buildings and ensure their preservation. Yet experience shows that reality is more complex.

Many of the assets today considered heritage were not recognized primarily for their aesthetic qualities. Disused factories, industrial infrastructure, military fortifications, working-class neighborhoods, and productive landscapes have become full members of contemporary cultural heritage without necessarily meeting traditional criteria of architectural beauty(2). This observation prompts us to question the relationship between heritage and aesthetic judgment.

Modern reflection on beauty finds one of its fundamental references in Immanuel Kant. In the “Critica del giudizio”, the philosopher describes aesthetic judgment as a subjective experience that nonetheless aspires to universal validity. Kant's contribution(3) remains important because it shows how judgment about beauty cannot be reduced to a simple property of objects and, what matters most here, that it also cannot be reduced to a purely individual preference. Aesthetic judgment aspires to being shared; it requires argument; it presupposes a culture.

In the twentieth century Pierre Bourdieu showed how aesthetic taste is profoundly shaped by cultural, social, and historical factors(4). What a society considers beautiful is not immutable: it changes over time and varies according to context. Many buildings appreciated today were long ignored or even scorned. Consider medieval architecture, reassessed only from the nineteenth century onward, or industrial heritage, recognized as a cultural asset only in the 1980s.

I believe aesthetic value should be regarded as one component of a broader system that includes historical, symbolic, identity-related, and social aspects. When a community decides to preserve a building, it often does so because it recognizes in it a part of its own history and collective memory. But this recognizability is never separable from formal quality: it is beautiful places, or at least places significant in their form, that settle into memory.

But Bourdieu's observation carries an uncomfortable consequence that the debate tends to avoid: if taste is culturally formed, it follows that its formation can be more or less thorough, and therefore that not all aesthetic judgments carry the same weight(5). A judgment grounded in a solid architectural culture, in deep knowledge of history and technique, in an ability to read context, is not equivalent to a generic preference. The relativization of taste cannot become an authorization to abandon the quality of judgment.

It is precisely here that the question of heritage intersects with that of professional competence. Deciding what to preserve, how to intervene, which contemporary project is compatible with a historic context, these are operations that require sensitivity and competence.

2. The inclusion of assets lacking traditional aesthetic qualities within cultural heritage is the result of a normative and theoretical process developed between the 1960s and the 2000s. A first expansion occurs with the Venice Charter (1964), which extends the notion of the monument to the urban and environmental context. In the 1970s and 1980s, various European legislations began to recognize the historical and documentary value of industrial archaeology; in Italy the turning point comes with Legislative Decree 490/1999 (Consolidated Text on Cultural and Environmental Heritage), which explicitly includes “testimonies of industrialization” among assets eligible for protection. The subsequent Code of Cultural Heritage and Landscape (Legislative Decree 42/2004) consolidates this opening, recognizing cultural value in artifacts, complexes, and landscapes linked to production, labor, and social life. Internationally, UNESCO's Convention for the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage (1972) and the Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape (2011) definitively sanction the shift from an aesthetic-monumental conception to a historical-cultural and social conception of heritage.

3. Immanuel Kant develops the theory of aesthetic judgment in the “Critica del giudizio” (1790), where he defines the judgment of taste as “subjective” yet endowed with a claim to “universal validity”. His analysis marks a turning point in modern reflection on beauty, since it distinguishes taste from individual arbitrariness and grounds it in the capacity to argue and share aesthetic experience within an educated community.

4. Pierre Bourdieu develops his analysis of taste in “La distinzione” (1979, french ed.; italian ed. Il Mulino, 1983), where he shows how aesthetic preferences are not spontaneous expressions of the individual, but the result of processes of internalization tied to social position, education, and cultural habitus. Taste, far from being natural or immediate, is for Bourdieu a form of social classification that reflects and reproduces the symbolic structures of a given era.

5. Pierre Bourdieu shows how taste is not an immediate given, but the product of a socially and culturally formed habitus. From this it follows that aesthetic judgments do not all carry the same weight: the ability to formulate a well-grounded judgment depends on the individual's cultural capital, their education, and their familiarity with the aesthetic and symbolic codes of a given field.

Heritage as the construction of value

Beauty, then, is not enough. But its place cannot be taken by aesthetic indifference.

The awareness that beauty is not sufficient to explain a building's value leads to a further question: what process transforms a building into heritage worthy of protection?

Heritage is born the moment a community attributes value to a given historical legacy. This statement may seem obvious, but it is not without consequences.

If heritage depends on the attribution of value, then it does not coincide with the set of old buildings. It coincides with the set of buildings that a society decides to consider significant. Every society chooses what to remember, what to value, and, inevitably, what to forget. We are often inclined to think of collective memory as something spontaneous. In reality it is the result of continuous processes of cultural construction. Heritage, too, takes part in these processes.

Cities are made up of thousands of buildings, but only some of them become objects of protection. The reasons may vary: historical value, architectural quality, symbolic relevance, identity-related significance. In every case, a judgment is involved.

And it is precisely the quality of this judgment that must be questioned. Recognizing that heritage is a cultural construction does not automatically guarantee that this construction is well made. A process of value attribution can be grounded in a historically and architecturally solid reading, or it can be the result of contingent pressures, cultural fashions, bureaucratic inertia, or simply insufficient competence. The difference matters: it translates into buildings protected that did not deserve it, into contexts disrupted that would have deserved attention, into approved interventions that have irreversibly impoverished the very heritage they intended to enhance.

I believe this observation calls for a certain prudence, not toward transformation as such, but toward the ease with which judgment is often exercised in both directions. If heritage is a cultural construction, then the quality of that construction depends on the quality of those who carry it out.

Identity, memory and continuity

If heritage is born through the attribution of value, we need to understand the reasons that lead a community to recognize value in certain places. In my view one of the most significant answers concerns the theme of identity.

Cities are not simply aggregates of buildings. They are environments in which experiences, social relations, everyday practices, and collective memories settle. It is also through these elements that a community builds its sense of belonging.

Over the course of the twentieth century numerous scholars addressed this question from different perspectives. Gustavo Giovannoni's reflections on the historic city(6), Kevin Lynch's considerations on the urban image(7), and Christian Norberg-Schulz's contributions on the concept of place(8) share a conviction that remains highly relevant today: the value of places does not depend solely on the physical characteristics of buildings, but also on the cultural and symbolic relationships they establish with the communities that inhabit them.

In professional practice this dimension emerges very clearly. Often the places most significant to a community do not necessarily coincide with those of greatest monumental value. Sometimes it is ordinary spaces, common buildings, or parts of the city apparently without exceptional qualities that play a decisive role in the construction of collective identity.

Yet urban identity is not an immutable given that heritage merely preserves. It is also the fragile and reversible result of successive layers of design intervention. Every intervention on the historic fabric contributes to building it or eroding it. A well-calibrated contemporary insertion, capable of engaging in dialogue with the context without imitating it and without ignoring it, can strengthen a place's recognizability. An intervention formally indifferent to context, even if technically compliant with the rules, can compromise it irreversibly. Identity, in other words, is not preserved only by protecting what exists. It is also preserved through the quality of what is added.

For this reason the concept of architectural heritage must be extended beyond the single monument. From the 1970s onward, growing attention to diffuse heritage and cultural landscapes represented an important development in the culture of conservation, making it possible to recognize the value of urban and territorial contexts that cannot be understood through the category of the monument alone.

The identity of a city does not derive from the homogeneity of its forms. It derives from the ability to keep a cultural continuity recognizable while undergoing often profound transformations. But this continuity does not produce itself. It requires sensitivity and competence able to read it, interpret it, and, when necessary, reinforce it through design.

6. Gustavo Giovannoni develops the concept of the historic city in works such as “Vecchie città ed edilizia nuova” (1931), arguing for the need to consider the urban fabric as a whole and not only individual monuments. His reflection introduces the idea that the value of places also derives from the cultural, environmental, and social relationships that structure them.

7. Kevin Lynch, in “The Image of the City” (1960; italian ed. 1964), analyzes urban perception through categories such as paths, edges, nodes, districts, and landmarks. His contribution shows how the identity of places depends on their legibility and on their capacity to be recognized and internalized by inhabitants.

8. Christian Norberg-Schulz, in “Genius Loci” (1979), develops a phenomenology of place that centers on the relationship between built space and existential meaning. The value of places, in his view, arises from the interaction between architectural form, memory, and lived experience.

Conserve or transform?

From the Venice Charter(9) to the Nara Document(10) to the more recent approaches promoted by UNESCO(11), the concept of heritage has progressively expanded to include material, immaterial, social, and identity-related aspects. But the broadening of the concept has not automatically produced a refinement of judgment. In some cases, indeed, it has made it harder to establish shared criteria of quality.

The historic cities we admire today are not the result of immobility. They are the product of a long succession of transformations. Every era has left material traces, altered existing buildings, introduced new functions, and reinterpreted earlier structures.

If we add that architectural heritage is a cultural construction, and that its value depends on the meaning a community attributes to places, an operational question inevitably arises: how can it be preserved?

For a long time the debate over protection was marked by an opposition between conservation and transformation. On one side there was the fear that any modification might compromise the authenticity of the asset; on the other, the awareness that no building can survive without adapting to the needs of its time. I believe this opposition is not only misleading but, to some extent, convenient. It allows one to take sides without having to answer the harder question: with what competence is judgment exercised in either case?

The real problem, then, is not choosing between conservation and transformation, but understanding which transformations are compatible with the persistence of the values that make a place significant. In this sense the thought of Cesare Brandi retains extraordinary relevance today(12). The most important contribution of his theory does not lie only in the formulation of criteria for restoration, but in the recognition of the critical character of any intervention on heritage. Every project implies an interpretive choice.

Every intervention requires establishing which aspects of an asset must be preserved and which may be modified. There are no purely technical solutions. There are cultural decisions grounded in a given interpretation of value.

But here we must add something Brandi did not state explicitly and that contemporary debate still tends to avoid: a well-grounded cultural decision requires a solid culture. A well-grounded interpretation presupposes deep knowledge of the history of architecture, an ability to read context, mastery of design tools, and, not least, a sense of formal quality that cannot be replaced by mere regulatory compliance.

In professional practice this requirement collides with a reality that is hard to ignore: not every intervention on heritage is conceived with the necessary preparation. The reflexive “no” of bureaucratic protection and the indifferent “yes” to design quality are two faces of the same problem.

Every transformation of heritage is a cultural decision. And a cultural decision cannot be worth more than the culture that sustains it.

9. “The International Charter for the Conservation and Restoration of Monuments and Sites” (Venice Charter), adopted by ICOMOS in 1964, represents one of the founding texts of modern conservation theory. It extends the concept of the monument to the urban and landscape context, emphasizing the importance of historical stratification and material authenticity.

10. The “Nara Document on authenticity”, drafted in 1994 during the Nara Conference (Japan), broadens the concept of authenticity by introducing cultural, social, and immaterial dimensions. The text recognizes that criteria of authenticity vary according to cultural context, overcoming the Eurocentric approach of traditional conservation.

11. “UNESCO's Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape” (2011) proposes an integrated approach to urban protection, including material and immaterial values as well as social, economic, and environmental aspects. The recommendation extends the concept of heritage to the dynamic dimension of contemporary urban processes.

12. Cesare Brandi defines restoration as “the methodological moment of the recognition of the work of art” (“Teoria del restauro”, 1977), emphasizing that every intervention implies a critical choice grounded in an interpretation of value. For Brandi, there are no purely technical operations: the restorer must distinguish what constitutes the “potential unity” of the work,  and must therefore be preserved, from what can be integrated or transformed without compromising its meaning.

Castelvecchio: interpreting the past

Among the many examples that could be cited, the restoration of Castelvecchio in Verona represents one of the most significant cases for understanding the relationship between heritage and interpretation.

Carlo Scarpa's intervention, carried out between the 1950s and 1960s, is frequently cited as one of the masterpieces of Italian restoration. Its importance, however, lies above all in an aspect that goes beyond the formal quality of the intervention. Scarpa does not merely preserve a medieval building. He constructs a new reading of the monument. Through contemporary insertions, exhibition solutions, and design choices of great refinement, the castle is reinterpreted in light of twentieth-century cultural sensibility, without its historical stratification being either erased or frozen.

What emerges with particular clarity is that heritage is not simply transmitted from one era to another. Every generation rereads it and attributes new meanings to it. In this sense Castelvecchio is an emblematic example of how conservation is inseparable from interpretation.

But it is worth pausing on an aspect that celebrations of this intervention tend to leave in the background. Scarpa's operation is possible because it is grounded in an architectural and historical culture of extraordinary depth, in a capacity for dialogue with existing material that presupposes years of study and practice, in a formal sensibility that cannot be reduced to technique. Scarpa's intervention does not erase the building's history; it makes it legible through a new design narrative. But this narrative is the result of exceptional competence, not of a replicable procedure.

The project of working on heritage does not consist only in protecting a material testimony. It implies constructing a relationship between past and present. And constructing this relationship requires exactly the kind of preparation that Castelvecchio, in its exceptionality, makes visible by contrast.

The Reichstag: heritage and the construction of memory

A second particularly significant case is the Reichstag in Berlin.

The building, severely damaged during the twentieth century and transformed through Norman Foster's project, is an eloquent example of how heritage can take on new meanings in relation to political and cultural change.

The value of the intervention lies not only in the architectural quality of the contemporary dome. Its deeper significance concerns the construction of a new collective memory. After German reunification, the Reichstag could not simply be restored as if nothing had happened. Its history was too complex and too marked by the events of the twentieth century. Foster's intervention confronts this complexity without erasing it. The building retains its historical identity while simultaneously being reinterpreted as a symbol of a new phase in German history.

Here too, however, what makes the intervention successful is not only the conceptual choice — confronting complexity rather than erasing it — but the ability to translate that choice into architecture with formal quality equal to the task. The dome is not an arbitrary gesture superimposed on a historic building. It is the result of thorough reflection on the meaning of the place, its history, and the relationship between transparency and memory, between the new and the pre-existing.

Castelvecchio and the Reichstag are celebrated cases precisely because they are exceptional. Their exceptionality lies not only in the quality of the designers involved, but in the rare coincidence of a culturally prepared client, a decision-making process grounded in solid criteria, and a design capacity equal to the complexity of the context. It is this coincidence, not mere good will, that produces interventions that time confirms as significant.

Conclusions

Heritage is neither a natural given nor an inheritance transmitted automatically. It is the result of a cultural process through which a community decides which parts of its own history deserve to be recognized, interpreted, and handed down to the future. This awareness, now widely shared, is not enough on its own to guarantee the quality of the choices made. On the contrary, it makes the matter more demanding: if every intervention on heritage is an interpretive act, then the decisive question becomes the quality of the interpreter.

Beauty, memory, identity, and historical value are not neutral categories. They are critical tools that require competence, knowledge, and responsibility. Without a solid culture, the risk is twofold: on one hand a protection reduced to a veto, incapable of articulating positive criteria; on the other a transformation lacking depth, which confuses innovation with indifference to context. In both cases heritage is impoverished, not protected.

The examples of Castelvecchio and the Reichstag show that quality does not arise from the simple will to “do well”, but from the rare coincidence of an aware client, a decision-making process grounded in clear criteria, and a design competence capable of translating interpretation into form. They are exceptional cases precisely because they reveal what is often missing: the ability to read the past without fetishizing it, and to transform it without trivializing it.

Conserving does not mean freezing. Transforming does not mean erasing. It means taking responsibility for deciding which values a community still considers vital and which forms are able to express them in the present. This responsibility cannot be delegated to rules alone, nor reduced to a mere exercise in style. It requires a culture of design able to recognize the complexity of places, interpret their history, and render it in forms capable of lasting.

Heritage survives when it is understood, not merely protected. And its future quality depends on the quality of the judgment we exercise today. It is in this critical capacity, more than in the number of constraints or the rhetoric of conservation, that the cultural maturity of a community is measured, along with the possibility of a contemporary project equal to its history.

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June 2026

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