Om att förstå ett hus : den dynamiska modellen : dokumentationsmetoder, vårdplan och restaureringsideologi

Sammanfattning: The principal aim of the thesis is to evaluate the significance of the documentation of a building’s history for the work of restoring it and caring for it. Thus it may be said to address restoration as a hermeneutical problem, besides considering the relationships between the work of documentation; analyses of the resulting data; and the creative process in which the ideology of restoration is important. Its second part includes case studies of the forms of documental work that permits whoever surveys a building and looks into its colouring, paints, archaeology and history most profoundly to experience it. In studying maintenance plans for the Swedish military fortifications, lapses were found both in how their results were used in maintenance and administrative work and in understanding how a historical record can speak of the past to the present. Then, by making an interview investigation into this documentation to identify related problems and conditions, it was found that some architects’ offices had delegated the documental work to third parties who had taken no further part in the creative process. It is argued in the thesis that an architect ought to do some of this work for the reason that it can be a catalyst when he or she has to mediate between various relationships and values, those of construction, function, aesthetics and history, at the point where answers are needed to the questions of what to preserve, and how. It is suggested, too, that restoring a building has to do with how it is experienced and made comprehensible. As interpreted and re-interpreted at intervals the building is a dynamic narrative. This historical way of working and thinking about restoration has been inspired and strengthened by Michael Polyani’s thinking about structures of knowledge, and by Paul Ricœur’s explanation and interpretation model. Because sensitivity is one of the most important qualities of an architect, it may be said, following Polyani, that the presence of the body in the documentation is of great importance, for, in his view, a person interiorizes or integrates his or her lifeworld through his or her body. This, too, ought to have consequences for the priorities accorded to techniques and methods used in the documentation and presentation process. A starting point for developing their use should be an understanding of how something is experienced and transformed to a new reality, and how its physicality differs from a virtual representation. Knowledge of the building in restoration and maintenance work should be accumulated in a structure that facilitates its visualisation and communication to contractors, users and others in the project. Its structure, and that of the project itself, should be capable of rapid adaptation to changes in a changing society. One such means would be a digital maintenance plan. A digital or dynamic maintenance plan comprises three modules: one of description, one of interpretation and simulation, and one that derives from the documentation for doing the work of restoration and maintenance. The model presented in the thesis is as yet only theoretical.