Impact on Cultural Significance: a values-based approach to architectural heritage conservation

The presence of the term ‘cultural significance’ in heritage conservation guidelines issued by ICOMOS, UNESCO and more recently the Council of Europe (CoE) has shifted the origin of evaluation of historic environments from experts to users. The social impact of architectural conservation is, therefore, a topic in need of research, so that cultural heritage values can be enhanced and not mitigated by inattentive interventions. In this presentation the values of a specific building typology of our common cultural heritage will be discussed, and a methodology developed to evaluate the impact of architectural conservation practices will be presented, using historic schools in Portugal as case studies. The presentation will conclude on the value of the use of research and evaluation methods in the built environment stakeholders when addressing the case of architectural conservation of historic schools.