AVS. Arkitektúr verktækni skipulag - 01.06.2003, Qupperneq 25

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Tjarnargatan hefur heildrænan svip og einstök hús fallega uppgerö. Á fjórða áratug 20. aldar voru
uppi hugmyndir um að rífa hér öll hús. Skipuleggjendum nútímans verður að segja: „Til þess eru
vítin að varast þau.“
Buildings along the street Tjarnargata form a cohesive whole and individual buildings are beauti-
fully renovated. In the 1940's, proposals for a complete demolition were disoussed. This should
be a warning to planners of today.
Why should Old
Buildings be
Preserved?
For us who work with valuables
of cultural history there is no
question, old buildings should be
preserved. Flowever, not all old
buildings should be preserved.
Let us first look at two definitions:
building preservation and building
conservation. Building preserva-
tion is the legal preservation of
old buildings, or new buildings for
that matter. Old buildings, built
before 1850, are automatically
preserved by law (104/2001),
including churches built before
1918. Building conservation is a
wider definition and applies to
other buildings worthy of protec-
tion: streetscapes, districts or
parts of towns. Through conser-
vation, an attempt is made to
look for characters from the past
worth keeping; groups of build-
ings are more important than
individual buildings. The buildings
are usually not preserved and
alterations are permitted, but
change in form and appearance
is limited to conditions laid down
in building conditions that form
part of detailed plans.
Conservation is also the register-
ing of so-called building „surveys1'
that local authorities have carried
out and the Preservation Fund
supported. Building surveys form
the foundation of detailed plan-
ning of urban areas and are a
requirement according to the
Planning Law.
Our preserved buildings have
been built relatively recently com-
pared to neighbouring countries,
but our building history and the
history of the nation is also rela-
tively short. According to the
above law, it is possible to pre-
serve contemporary buildings
worth protecting. An example of
such preservation is the buildings
by Guðjón Samuelsson.
Everything, however, should not
be preserved. The emphasis
should be put on preserving good
buildings; buildings that are good
examples of the architecture and
craft of their time and are in their
originally-planned context. In this
way, time has come to do away
with the preservation of buildings
that contribute little or nothing to
the building heritage of the
nation. Then it would be possible
to use resources to preserve bet-
ter the buildings considered more
worthy.
„Errare humanum est“
lt is human to make mistakes and
people have also made many
mistakes through time.
Stockholm has been degutted
over the years. With the
Development Plan of 1963,
Reykjavík became a car-city
almost overnight.
Often, mistakes have almost
been made here by us near the
end of the world. The
„Bemhöftstorfa" buildings should
give way for functional boxes
(which would probably already
have had a facelift) and with the
same ideology, the street
Tjarnargata was almost
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