Transformation of historic buildings : a study of architectural details as representations of construction and meaning

Abstract

Generally, building details are understood as constructional representations, thus referring to their materials, joints and systems. But clever architectural detailing is often embedded with semantic meanings - in addition to constructional objectives - especially with respect to the building‘s ‗part to whole‘ inter-relationship between its systems of construction, its compositional vocabulary, and its thematic investigations. Therefore details - as both ‗representations of meaning‘ and as ‗representations of construction‘ - hold a greater responsibility in transmitting the building‘s character, value and performance. This research is a critical examination on subversive changes that regularly happens to original detail representations when historic buildings are transformed into modern programs. Both the notion and tectonics of ‗architectural details‘ are re-read through the research, framing its inquiry on the hypothesis that the conservation – and the subsequent transformation – of a building may consist neither the original nor the modern detail: it is often a hybridization of both historical and modern ideas. To evaluate this hypothesis - and to verify subsequent representational changes of architectural details - a research framework is outlined, a theoretical position is arrived at, and three recent Sri Lankan experiences of the conservation and re-use of historical buildings are assessed. The study concludes that the building detail transformation in the selected case study scenarios is a failure from an architectural point of view, as there is very little intellectual understanding behind the process. Subsequently, the research brings out the poor architectural intervention within such building transformation processes, and argues that more desirable techniques were not adequately explored, either by design or by default. This research therefore, is an effort to reverse the current approach to re-designing the re-use of historic buildings, and aims to project an alternative discourse on architectural details and detailing in such context.